Paper+-+My+Opinions+about+the+'Big+Shift''

What I think about the Big Shift #1: open contend textbooks__** Open contend textbooks are simply online books that are viewable by anyone.
 * __[[image:http://farm1.static.flickr.com/38/79430221_7c44dd687f.jpg align="right" caption="1"]]
 * What is open contend textbooks?**

1)I think that open contend textbooks means that more people will access it. I believe that human beings are curious creatures. As I had learned from psychology classes, babies tends to explorer new things and look at new faces. Therefore, I think curiosity is just a human nature. All of us want to learn, it is because of the lack of money and time that we prevent us from doing it.
 * What I think about this shift from a global perspective.**

2)I think that future textbooks contents will be more objective. I remember learning about a particular government censoring textbooks. Since I cannot remember the details, I found an example online at “[|http://www.gwu.edu/~memory/issues/index.html]”. This webpage is basically a story about how the Japan government gradually stop manipulating education contends due to pressure from its citizens as well as other countries. A specific case has to do with a professor Ienaga Saburo, who was told by the Japanese Ministry of Education to change the word “aggression” to “advance” in one of his textbooks in 1965. I think the distortions of the contents of the textbooks were possible only because the government has authority over anything within its boundaries. However, a single government cannot do this because open contend textbooks can be written by authors of another country or authors from different countries.

1)I think that eventually all students can have free textbooks. Open content textbooks are free and anyone can view any of the books at any place with internet and a computer. The incentives make it likely for schools and universities to switch over to using only open content textbooks. If people switch, it will make possible the full collection of textbooks for all subjects for all grade levels because at least some of the students and professors who use them will have to contribute to use the books themselves. Therefore, the collection grows because when one starts a book, another can use it and contribute to it, which lead to another person using it.
 * What I think about this shift from a personal perspective.**

Increase access to any electronic contents requires more computers and internet bandwidth. Since computers are fixed costs and bandwidths are variable costs, I think it is sufficient to say what I think about the bandwidth. Africa, a Third world country, already has internet access and computers, so they can get the benefits of open content textbooks. Though there is the question with bandwidth, I do not think it is an issue anymore because they now have three fiber optics cables. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7987812.stm) Now they just need some computers or some money to print the books and eventually all the students there can have free textbooks. In short, I think students from around the world will eventually have access to all the textbooks they need via internet or via paper.

2)I think that we are closer to the truth with free content textbooks. I think open-content textbooks allow everyone to have access to closer truths. We can never know the truths in History because we cannot go back in time to experience it firsthand. However, we can learn about what happen through the writings of people who were there. Although this is better than nothing, I think it is too subjective to hear a story from just a person or from a group of people. With open-content textbooks, one can read History books written by experts from around the world, and for free too! I do not think the differences in history books of the same event indicate that any one of them is invalid. After all, history books authors record stories according to their own understanding. Sometimes different versions of the same story can provide extra information that is not contradictive to the other versions. Nevertheless, I think we are closer to the truth when we have more puzzle pieces to play with. It allows us to make our own judgment.

1) Photo: Ferran Monreno Lanza. (2005, Dec 30). La Pila, 03. Ferran Moreno Lanza's photostream. Retrievied December 11, 2009, from http://www.flickr.com/photos/unquepassava/79430221/ [] / [|CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]