I'm excited about Crunchy Frog (or whatever Andre chooses to call it), because it signals a growing trend to switch away from dead tree text books, and move to dynamic content, i.e. the web.
Kay's big objection, that children have unequal rights as publishers, is still a concern. But more and more, young adults are coming to feel their own power, to make their documents world-readable (some squander this freedom, but that's their privilege). In contrast, the way the public schools were historically imprisoned is becoming more and more evident: a few big states, like California, would use their standards-making powers to serve the interests of big publishing, and steamroll the rest of us into docile compliance. I used to work for McGraw-Hill, which does many good works, but it was just too easy to fall into this "winner take all" mentality. Having California (or Texas) choose your textbook was like winning the lottery. All the smaller states would have to go along, as custom editions would be too unaffordable. A lot of us geeks don't think twice about firing up a projector, downloading Google Earth, or jumping through websites. But your average dark ages poor slob has to slave through chapter after chapter of antediluvean poopka, all in the name of serving some miserable state standards committee. Since when did politicians know better? This business of promulgating standards should be left to the *schools*. As it is, a few quisling academics see fit to collude with the big publishers, because it feeds their egos to dictate a "one size fits all" solution. But as soon as we're done winning the Math Wars (I'd say we've won already, but I'm probably in the minority), we'll be able to bring teachers new freedom: to roll their own, to make a name for themselves, to serve as creative people again, not just as brain-dead apparatchiks in some "hive mind" nomenclatura. Kirby _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
