A subset of that movement has been focused on getting openly licensed textbooks into classrooms. Flat World Knowledge is often cited as being a leader in the commercial distribution of open content, relying on supplemental materials for sustainability. But until just recently, the concept of open (not just “free” or “digital”) textbooks hadn’t begun to creep into education policy discussions. But now it has, and as usual those organizations in a position to embrace and benefit from change make it their business to oppose it. Just as the music and movie trade associations went after innovative technology, textbook publishers are fighting innovation and change in their industry.

The Association of American Publishers (and its School Division in particular) are quickly becoming one of the main barriers to the adoption of open educational content in K12 and higher education. When the U.S. Dept. of Education wanted to require that any educational materials developed with Race to the Top funding (a $4.35 billion dollar state education grant competition) be made “freely available”, the School Division submitted comments opposing the requirements saying it would “compromise the intellectual property rights of third-party providers.” Basically, the AAP didn’t like that public money would fund public, rather than proprietary, content. And at least according to the AAP, the rule has been changed to allow for Race to the Top funding to go towards proprietary content.

But the AAP doesn’t limit itself to influencing policy at a high-level. They’re movings towards co-opting a desire for textbook reform at the grassroots level.

Take a look at this flier for an upcoming AAP briefing at Southern Illinois University on “New Textbook Technologies”. From the flier:

The goal for the Cost Effective Solutions for Student Success program is to begin a broader and more informed discussion between members of the academy, policy makers and publishers about course materials and the benefits they offer for:

• Improving students’ grades, pass rates and retention;
• Lowering students’ costs for course materials;
• Providing flexibility and efficiencies for instructors; and
• Lowering the postsecondary institutions’ cost per pupil for instruction.

The AAP frames their briefing at Southern Illinois University as an attempt to begin a “broader and more informed discussion” about textbooks. Apparently members of the academy, policy makers, and publishers (students notably absent) had been having a less than optimally informed discussion about course materials. But what we don’t know based on this flier is what kinds of information they will be providing.

Luckily for us, on the AAP-operated site TextBookFacts.org, they have a handy FAQ which hopefully will start this more informed dialogue. From the FAQ:

The cost of developing a new textbook and the accompanying materials can exceed $1 million. Most of this cost is attributable to paying for the work and original ideas of authors, experts, editors, researchers, reviewers and designers. Many other factors also contribute to the final retail price of textbooks, such as:

• Inflation, which accounts for the lion’s share of most years’ annual increases in textbook prices.
• Freight and transportation, which are driven by rising fuel costs
• Bookstore mark-ups, which are determined by bookstores and affected by a number of factors – such as staff and operational costs – that vary from store to store
• Paper, which is driven by the cost of raw materials
• Layout, typesetting and printing, which are driven by time-intensive labor costs
• Taxes by federal, state and local governments

The AAP falsely claims that inflation is a main factor in the rise of textbook costs. In fact, according to the Government Accountability Office, the costs of textbooks have increased by twice the rate of inflation.

They also misrepresent the costs associated with textbook development. According to a 2007 University of Wisconsin budget review (citing a 2006 College Store Industry Financial Report by the National Association of College Stores), 77.8% of the cost of a textbook goes to the publisher. Of that 77.8%, the break down is roughly:

Only 33.5% of the cost is due to the physical production and shipment of the book. The rest is marketing, profit, overhead, and unnecessary expenses avoidable through different models of knowledge production and dissemination (but more on that in a bit).

They continue:

Student Monitor, an independent student research service, found that the average four-year undergraduate spends approximately $650 a year on textbooks. That’s less than five percent of an average student’s total direct higher education expenses.

Not true. Even back in 2007 the Congressional Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance found that “Annual per student expenditures on textbooks can easily approach $700 to $1,000 today.” (Source: Turn the Page: Making College Textbooks More Affordable, A Report of the Advisory Committee On Student Financial Assistance, 2007) Today the cost is likely to be higher.

And even $700-1000 a year seems inexpensive to you, “affordability cannot be assessed by examining the absolute level of total expenses alone. It depends on how much expenses have risen over time, what share of family income they represent, and whether they are typically covered by grant aid for students from low- and moderate income families.” (Same source as above) That is, it isn’t the number that’s important in evaluating costs, it’s the percentage of overall budget and income, taking financial and sociological contexts into account. And the AAP doesn’t really take into account the financial contexts of students… or at least not in the way you might expect. Continue reading their FAQ:

What do college students buy? LOTS! But only a small percentage of these expenditures go towards important learning tools such as textbooks. [...]

This semester (Spring 2009) the average student bought 5.3 textbooks (2.2 new and 3.1 used) spending an average of $333 for both new and used textbooks. (Source: Student Monitor 2009)

Retail spending on new college textbooks last year was about $4.7 billion — significantly less than what college students spend on clothes and accessories and less than half of what they spend on electronic products such as iPods, laptops, video games, stereos and televisions. (Source: Association of American Publishers and the National Retail Federation)

Yes, you read the AAP right! Students are too busy buying iPods, shoes, and concert tickets to notice the high cost of textbooks. Just another drop in the bucket, right?

The AAP implies that college students spend so much on electronics, clothes, and accessories that their textbooks should be considered cheap. So what exactly are students and faculty getting for that low low price of $1,000 a year (roughly the equivalent of buying a high-end laptop a year)?

What is the role publishers play with students and faculty? Publishers serve the needs of students and faculty

Publishers’ primary focus is on meeting the needs of students. Today, a wider range of instructional supplements enable faculty to teach more students and empower students to achieve better results.

Colleges are being asked to serve students with diverse learning styles and a wider range of preparedness and skills. At least 50 percent of students who enter 2- and 4-year colleges drop out in their first year and never return

Only 54 percent of students who remain in college graduate in 4 – 6 years, increasing costs and debts for students and straining campus assets.

So publishers serve needs, help schools to pack diverse groups of students into classrooms, annnnd… not sure what those last two mean. Publishers cause students to drop out and increase cost and debt and strain campus assets?

Maybe the AAP is struggling with this question because they have no good answer. Of course publishers should be responding to the needs of students and teachers. But when it comes to spelling out the details of what those needs are, big publishers in the AAP fail on all counts:

What are the demands that students and faculty place on textbooks?

Today’s students and faculty demand choices

Students and faculty have become smarter, more demanding consumers, who value options.

In today’s challenging environment publishers are offering a broader range of textbooks and instructional materials at a wide range of prices.

Options available today include low-cost editions, one- or two-color editions, loose-leaf editions, split editions, black-and-white editions, custom books, books by the chapter, abbreviated editions, and electronic books.

College instructors adopt the textbooks and supplemental instructional materials that they believe best meet their students’ needs. They want their students to succeed by having the latest information and the most up-to-date learning tools.

Students and faculty want choice, customizibility, low cost, up-to-date, and optionally digital textbooks. Sounds exactly like what OER provide! Not only do you have the legal right to modify and redistribute OER, they are usually digitally provided free of charge. And given the completely public availability of Creative Commons licenses, there is little barrier to any individual, academic, or organization developing and distributing their own textbook at a small fraction of the cost that the AAP claims is required to develop a textbook.

The high-level message the AAP tries to convey is “we spend a lot of money on producing textbooks, but they’re actually cheap and students buy so much crap anyways they can afford it”. And to top it all off, they argue for innovative digital solutions that their own IP-centric business models discourage.

In the end, the AAP gets its numbers wrong, implies students are materialistic spend-heavies who care more about iPods and concert tickets than education, and makes a compelling argument against their own product.

The conference itself was teeming with a variety of a different sort; the make-up of the audience (or perhaps the auditorium itself) strangely reminded me of a theater I attended back in Orange County. The crowd was a tad older, and certainly more formally dressed than the usual canvas sneaker and jean combo I am used to. And not entirely opposed to free culture folk, but certainly unlike, they were the paradigm of decorum.

WhippleHill services high schools in their online communication needs, and mainly because its founder, Travis Warren, went to one, it specifically targets private schools. WhippleHill is a for-profit, but like a lot of for-profits who offer services around next generation web technologies, pushing out open content and tools to their community only helps them. WhippleHill is a great example of the service model that is growing around open content and open tools, and I think it’s a model others should be taking note of, especially in this belly-up economy.

If anyone can work up a crowd, I should have guessed it would be Clay Shirky (or someone like him). Shirky elicited much laughter, and I definitely recognized anecdotes from his book whereupon I had LOL-ed. The one that got the crowd in particular was involving high school students’ myspace or blog postings, which usually revolved around such “banal” subjects (Shirky’s words not mine) like the thumb fishing app for the iPhone (personally, I did not know such an app existed and so found this post rather interesting). The title of the one student’s blog post was “Gone fishin’ ” and displayed an image of the iPhone with the app in the background. Underneath, it read, “I have been spending way too much time on this” or something akin to it. Now why would she (it was a she, and a fashion student in this case with a (not-so-curious to me anyway) fascination with Hello Kitty phone covers) post something so banal? Shirky asked. It’s simple; she’s not talking to you.

This, he continued, is what high school students discuss at the food court in the mall. If you’ve ever listened in on one of their conversations, it is filled with banal subjects like Hello Kitty phones. But you are obviously the weird one in this case, for what are you doing at the mall listening in?

Funny, and hilarious by some standards, but I had read it before. So what piqued my interest was his pizza-by-the-slice analogy (if it was in his book, I missed it). Maybe I’m just a foodie, but I found it a very apt example of what can happen when you get large groups of people together. Basically, Shirky grew up in the Midwest, where he worked at a pizza joint that only sold whole pies. (Myself having worked at a pizza chain in the OC recognized and sympathized with this situation.) Upon a visit when he was 16 to New York City, he was astonished that their pizza places not only sold pizza by the pie, but by the slice, and he wondered how this was sustainable. Well it turns out that NYC pizza joints have the pizza baked ahead of time, a novel concept, and simply reheat each slice when sold. From this he gleaned that the city has enough people willing to purchase pizza by the slice, which is what makes this type of marketing strategy sustainable. “When you get really large amounts of people involved, improbable events become certainties,” he concluded. “You can’t predict in advance how things will happen, so you have to provide tools to allow things to happen.” Baking the pizza prior to purchase was this sort of tool for pizza joints; it not only saved time but gave people more options. In turn, it allowed a kind of business (pizza-by-the-slice) to flourish that would not have otherwise done so.

Shirky is the master at anecdotes, and dropped a few more gems into the bucket before retiring to answer questions from the audience. I won’t go into detail about them here, for risk of running too long like my last post, but I would urge any and everyone to read his book, Here Comes Everybody. It puts the world into enlightening anecdotal perspective, and you are bound to catch yourself uttering a lot of “Mmmhmms” throughout. Anyway, now that I’ve done my part in promoting book sales, I wonder how long it will take before he decides to make it available online under a Creative Commons license…

“Loss of control is already in the past.”

This was the response Shirky gave to an audience member who asked how he should deal with parental and faculty concerns about the use of new media tools. It was also, coincidentally, the meme I went with for my own presentation, where I emphasized that it is up to us to educate our youth with a different approach to copyright law, because kids are going to keep doing what they are doing anyway—namely, what the Recording Industry Association of America calls “piracy”. The world is changing has already changed and we need to do our part in dealing with it rather than flogging a dead horse.

I presented to a full room, and even spied people lingering in the doorway while I was giving my talk. I thought my voice would give (I did croak a few times, and friends have told me I have an “adorable” little lisp…), or that my Macbook would suddenly shut down (as punishment for using proprietary software), but other than a little projector-laptop miscommunication in the beginning, things went pretty smoothly. Surprisingly, I ended with fifteen minutes to spare for questions, which were not all filled up. It’s always hard to gauge an audience who doesn’t respond with wild exclamations of support, so I wasn’t sure if they “got it” or not. But after the session, I had quite a few people come up to me, and there were general smiles and thank you’s all around. Jen, who deals with the WH communications end of things, told me it was all the rage on Twitter, and that one fellow had even mentioned how he was going to integrate Creative Commons education at his school. This made me happy. Teaching kids about CC is probably one of the best ideas in terms of copyright education. I only wish I was the one who came up with it. But as the sentiment goes, what does it matter, if you can build upon that idea and make it better. My favorite session member was one woman who sat smiling with attention at the very front. After I had finished packing up my things, she thanked me and remarked, “I have so much to learn!” I wanted to tell her—so do I!

In retrospect, I think Travis’ suggestion over a phone call some months prior is what helped with preparing for this crowd. By this crowd, I mean members of the majority of the education population who know almost nothing about copyright law, much less Creative Commons. He told me to “start at the beginning”, and I really took that advice to heart. Having started in the middle of things myself, when the open movement was already in full swing, I was really grasping at straws for a while. A lot of talks on CC will gloss over its origins and the history of copyright law—but WHUC 09 made me realize how important it is to linger on these details. Showing people the history behind Creative Commons, namely what led to its necessity, is pretty much identical to showing them the importance of “open”.