The blurb description on the back page still says 'assistant professor', although that is only accurate for the moment. My tenure is waiting only on the signature of the university president, which I'm told is a formality. I have even signed the relevant employment paperwork for the change to associate.
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I uploaded the first new version of forall x in over a year. There are plenty of corrections, but no substantive changes. For uninteresting reasons, this new version is 1.27 - three increments later than the previous version 1.24.
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I wrote forall x primarily for use in my own logic course, to fit my syllabus in a way that was affordable for students. I made it available under a Creative Commons license primarily in hopes that other instructors might adopt it.
I get occasional e-mails from people who are using forall x to teach themselves logic, and that's cool too. Since it's designed to be accompany lectures and office hours, it's not perfect for self-directed study - but people say they find it useful.
Dave Morris at the University of Lethbridge was one of the first people to adopt it up as a course text. He was teaching abstract math, rather than philosophical logic, so it wasn't a perfect fit. Later, the CC license allowed Morris to use it as a starting point in writing his own textbook. He and his wife have written an abstract mathematics textbook called Proofs and Concepts which incorporates a lot of material from my book. They acknowledge this and provide a full citation in the front matter of their book.
This is not something that I had really thought through when I released forall x, but it is one of the great features of CC licenses. Once I have made something available, people find uses for it that I hadn't anticipated.
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Today I got the student comment forms from my teaching last Fall. Again I asked students about the textbook I wrote for intro logic.*
The raw data looks like this:
Did the textbook explain matters clearly?
yes 69
meh 6
no 3
Did the textbook explain matters in sufficient depth?
yes 67
meh 5
no 3
Did the book provide enough practice problems of varying kind and difficulty?
yes 59
meh 8
no 5
5 students said that they couldn't say, because they really didn't use the book.
I've thrown out non-answers. 'Meh' indicates answers which are equivocal or guarded.
Some students found the textbook to be a substitute for lecture; a student can "use the text for classes missed & learn everything." For one, this made lecture entirely redundant: "I honestly found that there were a good amount of days I could skip, because all information was in the text." Others thought that the material could be "learned better in class." For at least one student, the lecture was essential: "It's all about the lectures. If I miss[ed] one I would have felt behind." This seems entirely natural to me, since some people are more careful readers than listeners and v.v.
15 students wished there were more solutions in the back of the book. Some insisted that every practice problem should have a solution in the back. That will not happen, because printed solutions can be used to short circuit the possibility of learning. More than one student has come into my office hours with no idea how to do the practice problems but having copied down all of the answers into their notebook. So perhaps I should add more practice problems altogether, along with more solutions.
Some fragments:
One student complained that the material was "arbitrary" and "hard to understand", but said that they'd never opened the textbook or visited the TAs office hours. Well, duh.
One student commented that the "Textbook was a 2D P.D. Magnus." I think that this was supposed to be a positive thing, but for me the idea falls flat.
* Results from earlier semesters are here and here
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Free textbooks have gotten media attention recently. Mostly, they are offered as a solution to the rising cost of higher education. See, for example, this USA Today story. Academic fashion plate that I am, I was ahead of this trend. I wrote an open access logic textbook back before free textbooks were cool.*
Kevin Smith has a nice discussion of how universities might encourage this sort of thing (which I found via via Peter Suber's blog). He points out that an advantage of digital resources is that they can be adapted and incorporated by people who have similar but not quite the same needs. With my book, for example, people can change the logical notation to match their preferences and other texts used in their curriculum. They can use parts of the text, possibly in combination with other open access material or their their own additions. People using the text in these ways (Smith suggests) "provide an effective 'peer-review' to measure the quality of the faculty author’s contribution." (I will probably mention this in the context of my upcoming tenure case.)
Unfortunately, these discussions typically conflate online and open access. The USA Today headline reads: Online 'open textbooks' save students cash
I distribute forall x via my website, as well as via the SUNY digital repository, but I don't see the PDF as a product for student consumption. If it were, students would be stuck in a dilemma: Either they print it off or they don't.
A. If they don't print it off, then they just end up reading it at their computer. PDFs aren't optimized for reading on-screen, because the shape of page is different than the shape of a screen. Moreover, most students aren't very good at reading PDFs. Most of them would comprehend the text better if they marked it up as they read: underlining bits, making marginal notes, and so on. Yet most of them are not using PDF readers that allow for commenting.
For books that serve as workbooks and have exercises at the end of chapters, the problem is even worse. Students working through problems need paper in front of them and they need to be flipping between the material, the problem set, and the references in the back of the book. All of this is slightly less convenient on the computer, so learning the material is harder than it needs to be.
Perhaps in the next generation students will be better at digesting documents on screen. Perhaps physical textbooks will actually be harder for them. But my students today are not the students of the future.**
B. If they do print it off, then they probably aren't doing so efficiently. I am not sure of the environmental impact of individual laser printing, as compared to copies by way of a printing service. But most students don't have their own laser printer, and so will probably pay more per page than if the whole book were printed by a copy service. And they will probably print single-sided, using more paper.
Students who have ink jet printers pay more and are indubitably worse for the Earth if they print the book.
The horns of the dilemma strike different students in different ways. The hassle involved in printing discourages some students from having a hard copy. So they end up accessing the book on screen, which is less conducive to learning, which leaves them struggling in the course.
The natural resolution of this dilemma is to separate 'online' and 'open access'. I make forall x available as a printed course packet for my students. I make it available electronically, but primarily for people in distant places who would like to use it for their own courses or for their own purposes. Of course, some of my students refrain from buying a copy and just look at the text online. This is no different from traditional textbooks, though, which some students refrain from buying in favor of using the library's copy on reserve or using a friend's copy.
* Given the template for this kind of rant, the next sentence should be: All the people writing free textbooks now are just sellouts.
** Note also that many students keep textbooks and refer to them years after having taken a course. Most students don't, but many do. You, as a reader of this blog, were probably one of them. How many old textbooks do you have on your shelves? Hardcopies are fine for this, because they live on a shelf and age gracefully. Digital copies, not so much. Just because a file is archived doesn't actually mean it will be readily available a decade later or that the former student could remember enough about it to turn it up in a search.
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