Bleg: Web hosting for my version of a logic textbook.

I want to create a simple webpage to promote a version of a free logic textbook that I have been working on. Basically, I want to have a dedicated website to host the .pdf file for the text, the LaTeX source file, some text promoting the virtues of the book and open access textbooks in general, supporting textbook materials, and maybe some tools for collaboration. And I should have an easy to remember URL.

I was thinking that Wordpress would be the easiest software to use. What should I do for hosting? Pick the cheapest host that partners with Wordpress? Will there be much of a learning curve with Wordpress?

The last time I created a website was almost 10 years ago, and I just wrote something in HTML and transferred it to some host using FTP software. Can you still build websites like that?

Hey math teachers!

My colleague in math and a friend at a nearby community college are producing free online math textbooks aimed mostly at the kind of students we teach. So far they have college algrebra and pre-calc. You can download the .pdf file for free or have the book printed by Lulu for $15. If you want your students to get hard copies through your bookstore, you can make courspacks or order in bulk from Lulu. These are books that ordinarily cost $100+ and all shared via a Creative Commons license.

NYT on textbook prices.

The New York Times money blog has a post about saving money on textbooks. Mostly it just covers the standard advice on finding cheaper books, but it does contain a couple interesting statistics.

"College textbook prices rose about 6 percent, on average, every year — that’s twice the rate of inflation — from 1986 to 2004."

...

“We are finding that 75 percent of students still prefer print to digital,” Ms. Allen added."

For my students the number is around 95%. Our population is a little older, but more importantly, they are a lot poorer.

Thankfully, federal rules that went into effect in July may help ease the pain. Publishers can no longer bundle their textbooks with accompanying materials like workbooks without offering the items separately, and they must reveal their prices to professors when making a sales pitch. Colleges, meanwhile, are now required to provide students with a list of assigned textbooks during course registration, which allows for more time for shopping before classes begin.

I heard people at the AAPT talking about the regulations and what a pain they are, but we have nothing at our institution regarding this. I'm pretty sure I could get in compliance quickly if I needed to, though.

Loftis, J. Robert: "Breaking the Back of Perverse Incentives: Ending High Textbook Prices for Good with Free Online Textbooks"

I gave a talk at the AAPT arguing three connected theses:

1. Textbook prices are an injustice
2. Philosophy teachers have a professional duty to create and use free online textbooks
3. This duty is best fulfilled using what I call the Open Office model

. The Open Office model simply means that you try to replicate functionality of the existing closed access product without innovating a lot. This contrasts with the Linux model, which tries to displace an expensive product by creating something that works better, but is unfamiliar and difficult for most users. Most existing free textbooks, I think, are written on the Linux model.

At the conference, a lot of people were talking up concept mapping software, xmind in particular. So the night before the talk I decided to give xmind a whirl by making a concept map for my talk. this is what I came up with. I think I made the whole thing too big. It is hard to figure out what the print area of these diagrams are.

This is the handout, which lists free textbooks and course materials databases along with little descriptions and recommendations.

My Holiday Writing Project: Smashing Perverse Insentives

My goal this break is to revise For All x, a logic textbook made available free under a Creative Commons license, so that it is appropriate for my community college students. Textbook prices are salt in the wounds of students who have trouble paying from college, but right now teachers have no pressing reason to assign cheap or free textbooks, since they don't have to pay for them. (The economists call this kind of situation a "perverse incentive.") Most free logic books are written for geeks by geeks and aren't useful for the sort of student who is hurt most by textbook prices, so I think my project will help more than just my students.

I'm already running into problems, though. The changes I want to make are fairly basic: I want to rearrange the order the material is presented in so that more of the basic stuff comes first, and then I want to create more exercises for that basic material. (I'm just calling my version of this text a "remix.") But simply moving around text is turning out to be difficult. Magnus wrote the whole thing in LaTeX, which I don't know, so I've been opening the files in MS Word, replacing the formatting tags with formatting in Word, and then making the alterations I want to make. I was then going to convert the whole thing to a .pdf and send it to Kinko's to create $3 coursepacks for my students. Getting all the formatting straight is a big pain, though. Which leads to questions

Should I just learn LaTeX? Can I do this over the break and get the text ready in time for my stduents? Is there a reader I should use to show how the marked up text will appear in print? How do I put this all in a form that Kinko's will accept?

If I don't learn LaTeX right now, how do I get my formatting to look like Magnus's? How can I figure out what fonts he is using given the LaTex files or a .pdf file? If I'm just approximating his formatting, what fonts should I use?

These are just my initial worries. I haven't even begun to do things like generate new exercises yet. I'm still hung up on the mechanics of producing a book. Anyone have advice?

Free Translation of Plato with Commentary

John Holbo and Belle Waring have produced a translation of Euthyphro, Meno, and Republic I, with extensive commentary and introductory material for students! And very pretty illustrations! The electronic version is free, and a paper version is coming out from Pearson Asia.

Open publication - Free publishing - More belle waring

Here is the books official site. You can click on the preview above to get the page for the book from the self-publishing site ISSUU, or click here.

Since I teach basic Plato once or twice a year, this is a natural textbook for me to adopt. Recently I've just been doing the death of Socrates sequence, but I've done Meno and Republic as well, so this would be no problem to fit in.

But there's an on the other hand. Cathal Woods and Ryan Pack have published the death of Socrates sequence (with only the final scene of the Phaedo) under the Creative Commons License. Both books have free e-versions, are written and translated by people I have met once in real life, and basically fit my course plan. Which to choose?

My goal for all my classes is to use only texts that have free electronic versions and paper versions that are cheap. I haven't really decided on a line for "cheap" but right now I'm thinking no more than $25 non-recoverable costs overall (that is, the cost of the book minus the amount the student can reasonable expect to get reselling it). John and Belle aren't releasing their book under the Creative Commons license, but the book's website says that I can make a free e-version available to students as long as I also stock the paper version in the book store. I can't find a price for the paper version, and I doubt my students could get much in resale for it. I'm not even sure if the LCCC bookstore can order from Pearson Asia. The Woods and Pack book doesn't have a paper version at all, but with the liberal CC license I can just take it to Kinkos. So far, my experience has been that LCCC students prefer a paper copy, if they can afford it. But both Chrysler and GM are shutting plants down around here as a part of their bankruptcies, so everyone is trying to save money. And most of the technological literacy here is at the cell phone/text messaging level, not the "I read all my books in my Kindle" level.

Well, at the very least John's illustrations are gorgeous, and I'm looking forward to reading his Plato commentary while I decide what book to use.

Online teaching materials from George McDonald Ross

George McDonald Ross has some very nice, but sadly incomplete electronic philosophy teaching materials online. The highlight are interactive reading tools for difficult philosophical texts. This is a sample of an interactive Kant reading. The reader is given a passage from Kant and then asked to select the best interpretation of it. Better yet, after that, she has to select the best reason to think that this is the best interpretation. After selecting both an interpretation and a reason, she gets a response. My only complaint is that the responses are too vague. Almost all of them boil down to "Yes, that is a reason."

George also has a very elaborate page for a Kant course which I have only poked around in a little. The nice thing about it is that you can get, in side-by-side frames, George's translation of the first critique and his commentary on it.

Also cool: lots of free online translations of historical texts in philosophy. He's got some Boethius in there, but not the Consolation. If there was a free student-friendly translations of the Consolation out there, I would be able to get through three-quarters of my intro class using free texts. (Right now I am using a nice translation of Plato for students by Cathal Woods and Ryan Pack made available under the creative commons license. I also use this nice free version of Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. which has been annotated for students by Jonathan Bennett.

Open Access Logic Textbooks

I've decided that my students should not have to pay for a logic textbook. Most textbooks are obscenely expensive., but logic textbooks in particular get in my craw. The formal systems that they teach have been a part of the human intellectual heritage for over a hundred years, and the textbooks don't do anything in particular to make more approachable for students. They survive on the laziness of instructors, not on any originality content or presentation

So logic is going to be the first class that I teach to use a free, open access textbook. But which one? Changing textbooks is hard. For a long time I used Hurley at SLU I switched to Barwise and Etchemendy, but I never quite adapted to it, and since it was too sophisticated for LCCC students, I've gone back to Hurley. But Hurley is crazy expensive at $155. So what to do?

Here is my first very quick survey

blogic, by David Velleman: Respected author, looks like a nice approach, but seems to be pitched at the same level as Barwise and Etchemendy. Also, there doesn't seem to be a download or print version available.

For All x: Covers all and only the standard topics with the standard approach. It looks like I could take this on without seriously changing the preps from my Hurley course. Available as .pdf or as a print-on-demand book from Lulu. The author says that when he teaches it, he simply takes the book to the copy shop and has it printed as a coursepack. very nice.

Introduction to Logic Online interactive textbook. Would be nice if I were teaching online, but would be an adjustment from what I currently do. Covers all and only the topics I want to cover, though.


Introduction to LogicA collection of modules from the Conections website of free course modules. Hard to adapt or for cc students to relate to. Tied to the Teachlogic website which looks mostly like it is about infusing logic into the computer science curriculum.

Formal Logic from wikibooks. Doesn't look approachable.

Heck, the Magnus book looks like just the item. That was quick. I wounder how quickly I can replace all my texts with open access books. There are some books, like Liszka's ethics text that I wouldn't want to replace, just because the book is so high quality. Munson's bioethics book is also very popular among students. My intro class right now relies on primary historical sources, which are generally available for free on line, but students have little problem shelling out $10 for the penguin version. I guess Critical Thinking should be next.

Other open access textbook resources

Make Textbooks Affordable

Connections

Wikibooks

Also useful:

Some free logic software from Hatzic. Not sure how to work this in pedagogically.