Are Used Texts Really the Answer?

  At the beginning of the semester, textbooks are a common topic of conversation.  In my classes,  promote buying used books and often tell students to look online to find good deals.  As I read the article Why are Textbooks so Expensive?, by Henry L. Roediger III,  I wondered if I was, in fact, contributing to the problem of high textbooks. 

Photo from blog.georgetownvoice.com

Roediger says that the used textbook companies are to blame for the problem.  The publisher has to spend money on the production and marketing of the textbook, which can be quite expensive.  Students sell their books back to the bookstore or to a used textbook company for a small price.  Those books are marked up and sold again.  When the books are resold again and again, the publisher nor the author makes no additional profit on the books. 

Richard Hull and Michael Lennie in their article Why E-Textbooks Just Make Sense agree with the thought that the high price of books is directly related to the used textbook stores.  They say "perceived student savings from buying lower-priced used books is deceptive, because the used-book industry essentially forces publishers to prematurely publish expensive 'revised editions' for the primary purpose of reducing their losses from used-book sales."  Hull and Lennie say that few course texts need to revised every three years. 

Online texts, or etexts, may be the answer.  Publishers often offer online texts, which can save the student quite a bit of money. Purchasing a text this way would give the authors and publishers some profit,  and may stop some of the used textbook sales.  The students, however, wouldn't be able to recoup any of the money at the end of the semester.

What are your thoughts?  Do you feel that texts would become less expensive if students purchased more new texts?  Should students purchase etexts?  Would this require them to print out their texts if they are to be used in class?  Many questions to ponder at the beginning of the semester!

Note:  Thanks to Cheryl Bowman for today's blog information. 

Online Lectures

I never get tired of web surfing. Some sites are time wasters, some give you new ideas, and some teach. I’d like to share some of the sites that provide lectures and instruction for different topics.

Many universities across the country have free online courses or lectures. These are usually licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution, which allows you to share and adapt the content if you attribute it the way the author has specified. The topics are varied. Do you want to learn French? You might want to sign up for an open course through the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon. Need a little extra money? Why not design an application for the iPhone? The course from Stanford includes the video lectures, PowerPoint slides, and PDFs. It, as well as many other courses can be found on iTunes. (C-language and programming experience are prerequisites for the iPhone Apps class, but there isn’t a shortage of other, less technology-related courses!) Other universities providing entire courses or lectures include Yale, MIT (1900 courses from which to choose), UC Berkeley, and many more. Most of the videos for these courses or lectures can be downloaded from YouTube.

Another interesting source for lectures is TED, which is a nonprofit organization which focuses on Ideas Worth Spreading. Their annual conference is a bit pricey ($6,000), but you can watch many of the lectures that are inspiring, funny, informative, and worth watching. You can also subscribe to TED Talks. For those of you unfamiliar with subscribing, keep watching this blog for more information!
If you want your students to review their calculus, be inspired by a lecture, or just see what it’s like to go to MIT, you might want to guide them to one of these online lectures or courses. For those of us who never tire of learning, these courses and lectures are just what we need.

Bibliography Resources

When having students write a bibliography for their speeches, I often get bibliographic entries such as “google.com,” or “the Internet.” These, my friends, are not bibliographic entries. Even when more information is given, it is often incorrect.

Although some could argue that students need to know the bibliographic form, I am under the belief that our generation of students needs to know how to get the end result rather than emphasizing the process. There are two easy ways for students to write bibliographies. One way is through the use of online resources and the other is through Microsoft Word.

Two of the more popular online bibliographic sources are http://www.bibme.org/ and http://www.citefast.com/. Both sites allow students to enter the information needed to create a bibliography. (Of course, the students need to know the correct information in order to fill out the form!) Bibme has a citation guide so that students can actually learn how to create bibliographic entry as well as enter the information. Students can also create a free account so that their information is saved on the site. Citefast allows students to save their bibliographic entries, but there is no guide to teach them the rules.

Microsoft Word 2007 offers a plethora of reference assistance. By clicking on the “References” tab, information about all types of references can be seen. Students will be best-served by adding the information for their references when they “insert citation.” Then, when they’re finished with their papers or outlines, they can add the bibliography, which has been created using information from the forms. Here is a brief video showing how to use the citation and bibliography features of Word 2007: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DYuUGP7vLg&feature=related. While this doesn’t give a lot of detailed information, it’s enough to get students started.

Students do need to have bibliographies for their work, and having them use these resources could prevent the dreaded “www.wikipedia.com: entries. If these are familiar to you, please pass along the information to someone who is less familiar with them.

Next week: Learning Styles