Annie Keeghan, in an exhaustive look at how the meat gets made in math education publishing:

The root of problem begins with this key fact: There are only a small number of educational publishers left after rabid buyouts and mergers in the 90s, publishers that all vie for a piece of a four-billion dollar (forbes.com) pie. In recent years, math has become the subject du jour due to government initiatives and efforts to raise the rankings of U.S. students who lag behind in math compared to 30 other industrialized nations. With state and local budgets constrained to unprecedented levels, publishers must compete for fewer available dollars. As a result, many are rushing their products (especially in math) to market to before their competitors, product that in many instances is inherently, tragically flawed.

[via Tom Hoffman]

Related: Thanks, Textbooks, my new favorite Tumblr.

Featured Comment

Jeanette Stein:

I have been able to look at the differences between the textbooks that our district bought and the CCSS textbooks by the same publisher. The only difference, other than Common Core stamped all over the cover, is that every time it used to say application it now says Common Core. They did not even fix some of the typos that were there from five years ago.

Larry Cuban, in the third installment of a review of Rocketship charter schools:

Finally, there is no evidence that Rocketship graduates do well in secondary schools since no cohort of fifth graders has yet been followed into high school. Separating customized instruction in basic skills from higher level skills and socio-emotional learning, creative and critical thinking in regular classrooms is an IOU to children and parents that such a split will lead to lower rates of high school dropouts, higher rates of graduation, and college admissions for Rocketship students. Thus, absent such evaluations, it is a promissory note, not a fact.

Great, informative review of one of Silicon Valley’s most interesting charter schools. (See part one and two.)

I was sitting in a morning session with six other people at the Greater San Diego Math Council’s annual conference when I saw a slide that looked familiar.

At first I figured I had read that language in some paper or another in grad school. (“Aversion” seems like the sort of language an academic might use to paper over a lack of insight.) Then I remembered I had used that language. When I wrote it in a presentation I gave two years ago.

The presenter went on to describe each of those bullet points using exactly the same words I did in that presentation, in exactly the same tone of voice. Fella had rehearsed.

Four things:

1. The good news is that we’ve apparently solved the “perseverance” problem in the last two years.
2. Don Whiteside storified my livetweeting and added his commentary.
3. I edited his slide next to mine and described the rest of his plagiarism under the heading “This is not okay.” I’ll send that e-mail off to him, the president of his council, and the conference head later today.
4. How should this have gone? Against the judgement of some folk on Twitter, I’m choosing not to name his name. I figure it isn’t sporting to slug someone beneath your weight class. (Define “weight class” however you want, okay.) I figure he’ll have to explain himself the next time he wants to give a talk in San Diego (or he should, if GSDMC has any self-respect) and that’s enough. I’m open to counter-proposals.

2011 Feb 3. Since you’re all no doubt dying for updates, my plagiarist attended my session this afternoon. (I don’t know why that surprised me. Of course he attended my session. Where else is he going to get fresh material?) This was before I e-mailed him. He came up to introduce himself as I was setting up. Before he got too far into his introduction, I said, “Yeah, I know who you are. I was in your session this morning.”

“You were?” he said, and very obviously winced. “I may have borrowed some of your material.”

“‘Borrowed’ isn’t the word I’d use,” I said.

He apologized several times. I thanked him. He left. I sent the e-mail. We’re square.

Featured Comment:

Dave:

I’m seeing many commenters who think that frowning upon plagiarism is all about credit, but that’s a very shallow view. In this case, the plagiarist completely disconnected the audience from Dan Meyer’s extensive work in this area. That means they can’t read the extended discussions, they can’t draw on other related resources, they can’t contact the real author and ask their own questions. They can’t connect to the author to follow future developments.

The plagiarist is standing at the top of a well, with the audience at the bottom. He throws down a loaf of bread and a few pages from a book, and leads the audience to believe that basically that’s all that exists outside the hole, and he’s the only one who can provide it to them.

I really want to give the plagiarist the benefit of the doubt, that it was a stupid mistake that hasn’t happened before or since. But I can’t get past the idea that some of us spend 40 hours or more putting together the best 1 hour presentation we can. The plagiarist took the easy way out. It’s disrespectful to the original author, to the subject, and to the audience. I tend to think that disrespect like that doesn’t just randomly rear its head once.

I’ve now spent enough time with both McGraw-Hill’s Algebra iBook and iBooks Author to know two things:

1. I have no idea what iBooks Author will do to the publishing industry writ large or textbook publishing writ small. My hopes are high we’ll see a lot of productive chaos as well-heeled districts and non-profits finance mid- to high-quality textbooks that are then dumped at no cost on the market.
2. The McGraw-Hill Algebra iBook doesn’t change any of these relationships in any ways that interest me:

No new technology is so novel we can’t subject it to the question, “How does it change the relationship between student and teacher, student and discipline, one student to another?”

Algebra, as designed by McGraw-Hill for iBooks 2, is lighter by pounds. It’s indexed for search. It’s quick. You can highlight the text and insert notes. It removes one layer of abstraction between students and tools that already existed. Rather than accessing quizzes, tutorials, and enrichment videos by loading a CD-ROM into a computer or entering a password into a website, they’re a tap away.

That’s where the differences end. Students still interact with mathematics as they always have. In a typical McGraw-Hill unit, students encounter expositional text that leads into skill practice that leads into application problems, the kind of which I’ve been a noisy opponent. Apple promotes the interactivity of these textbooks but that interaction is rare and heavily prescribed. At one point, you can modify the parameters of a linear equation and watch it change on the screen. On another page, I found a 3D model of a building that illustrated some algebraic property. I could rotate it with my finger.

The textbook is now digital but students still encounter it as they always have: wisdom to be received, perhaps highlighted, annotated, and memorized, but not created, constructed, or made sense of. Teachers still interact with students as they always have. The platform doesn’t offer them any new insights into the ways their students think about mathematics. As far as I can tell, the iBook doesn’t establish any new link between the student and teacher, or strengthen any old ones.

What I’m saying, basically, is that I’d have to modify, adapt, and extend the McGraw-Hill iBook in all the same ways that I modified, adapted, and extended the McGraw-Hill print textbook. We’d pull out the iBook just as infrequently as its printed sibling.

The McGraw-Hill authors may not have had much imagination for the possibilities of digital math curricula. Their iBook feels like a print product, through and through. On the other hand, they may have had plenty of imagination but insufficient support from Apple’s authoring tool. I’d like to examine that question – what is possible with digital math curricula and can iBooks Author realize those possibilities? – in another post.

[Full disclosure: I’m a consultant for the Pearson Foundation on a different iPad project that’s still in production. Pearson has an Algebra 1 iBook that I haven’t reviewed here, only because I’m having a miserable time downloading these iBooks. The fact that its digital cover is the same as its print cover doesn’t exactly flood me with confidence, though. What they say about books and their covers, of course.]

First Vi Hart. Now Brit Cruise, whose exemplary work with videos and math instruction was featured in these pages a couple of weeks ago. For me, this has all the drama of some kind of skin graft or organ transplant where no one has any idea if the host body is going to accept or reject any of it. In both its videos and its exercises, Khan Academy has a distinctive house style. So does Hart’s work and Cruise’s to a lesser extent. It isn’t remotely clear to me how any of those competing styles will interact with each other.

In news that’s much less exciting, though still related to Khan Academy, I’m working with my advisor and two other graduate students at a charter school in San Jose. We’re working with their teachers and Khan Academy to develop a blended unit on similarity, congruence, and trigonometry. (“Blended” is defined, in this instance, as a 1:1 environment that includes regular in-class use of Khan Academy.) It’s my first in-the-classroom experience with either blended learning or Khan Academy. There’s probably a lot that should be said about the experience but I’m still learning.