Textbooks

During my university days I bought somewhere between 4-7 textbooks per semester.  I rarely cracked the cover of these expensive tomes.  Usually only opening them if there were assigned problems and sometimes to clarify the muddy points of lectures.  The price for acquiring these under-utilized and often esoteric tomes?  Around $6000 for my undergrad and another $2000 for grad school.  From this collection, I have 5 textbooks that are excellent and that I consult and reference on a somewhat regular basis and the other 50 or so textbooks are stored in milk crates.  So I have approximately a $6000 educational investment sitting in milk crates.

Now that I am done my formal education I read textbooks, but not the textbooks from my formal education.  I know, or rather think I know, that material.  I read textbooks for interest -- books on programming, machine learning and startups/entrepreneurship.

I am a big fan of Allen Downey's Think Series.  Allen Downey is a professor of computer science at Olin College and his primary teaching philosophy is that if you know how to program/code you can learn all sorts of things e.g. Bayesian Statistics.  Prof. Downey has authored a great Textbook Manifesto that states:

"Publishers: I don't know what to tell you. Your role in developing and distributing textbooks is no longer required." 

"Professors: choose books your students can read and understand."   

"Students: You should go on strike. If your textbook costs more than $50, don't buy it. If it has more than 500 pages, don't read it."

Prof. Downey further suggests that professors should assign no more than 10 pages of reading per week -- a  realistic and attainable goal.  I fully endorse Prof. Downey's Manifesto.  However, I think the medium of the textbook can also be improved.  Instead of static, non-interactive pdf documents we can now use IPython Notebook. As shown here for Aeropython and here for Bayesian Methods for Hackers.  These books are great and can be forked from GitHub. 

Prof. Lorena Barba, the author of Aeropython, has also written an interesting blog post about "flipping-the-classsroom".  The idea behind flipping-the-classroom is to have the lecture portion covered during homework and the homework exercises performed while in a class room setting.  Prof. Barba also laments that the typical student only retains about 20% of the covered material from a classical "sage on a stage" lecture-based  course.  However, she thinks, as I do, that by doing computational work and by allowing the students to "discover" the knowledge the students will retain more.

All this innovation in the education field almost makes me wish I did follow my bygone dream of becoming a Professor.