Use of CD-ROMs in Higher Education? 20
MooseMcMad asks: "I am a 16-year old in England + have just started a new school year working towards my AS-Level exams at the end of the year. I was surprised to receive a CD-ROM at the start of my Physics lesson and told that this contained the syllabus + relevant reading material for my course. Where does this leave many schools (particularly state schools), where the pupils may not have access to a computer? I don't know anything about any precedents for this but it was certainly amusing watching the teacher try and fumble about with the software." Cool idea! This makes a lot of sense for college students as it cuts down on the paperwork they have to keep track of (and possibly lose) and keeps everything in one easy to access place. Of course, if you don't have a computer, you are still stuck with the reams of notes and loose paper and the 20 pound text book. When they can put text books on CDs, I'll really be impressed.
About the DMCA and textbooks (Score:1)
Re:CD? How 80's (Score:1)
Re:Schools May Suffer :-) (Score:1)
Textbooks (Score:1)
I think text books on CD would be a good idea though because it would allow for more interactivity, linking to websites that are relavent to the topic, I guess all the info could be on the net instead of CD but they wont make the money that way.
I know I'd much rather lug around may laptop than all of those big text books! Maybe someday that will be the norm.
Re:CDs are not recordable. Problem (Score:1)
There are CD-ROM mount utilities for the Mac (and probably windows) which essentially do the same as a UNIX-style "union" mount; Your changes are made to local copies of the files. If you have changed a file, then the updated copy is stored on disc. Unchanged data is read from the CD.
Likewise, an electronic textbook will frequently have an installer so that the book software runs from hard disk, not from the (slower) cd-rom. The installer will frequently store bookmarks and such on your hard disk.
If your coursework is on the web, you should be saving it to local disk. Failure to do so is irresponsibility on your part.
Re:About the DMCA and textbooks (Score:1)
Sure they can. They can OWN the textbook, and make you lease it.
Sure, you can copy the book, but that's expensive and difficult (Or at least annoying) and you don't end up with the same quality out that went in. Likewise, it should be possible to copy the content of a digital textbook, but unless you crack it, you will have the same problems with a paper copy. But you can always screenshot everything and make the resulting series of images into a PDF. Sure, it'll be huge, but then you can just put it on another CDROM. The only problem with that is that it will be all images - IE, not searchable. But then, that's the same as a paper publication.
Re:Who owns the CD? (Score:1)
More New book sales == More money for the publishers
platforms and formats (Score:1)
I have no strong objections to this, as long as the classes associated do not assume that the stuff is accessible-- I had a class where I was expected to run a dos-based curve fitting program, so I had to build a machine specially for the class. I was pretty irritated (especially since the machine was a 16 MHz 386-- and the coprocessor went out). I've also received homework assignments through email, in unhandy to use Microsoft Office format.
It's a bad idea to assume that students have anything that isn't required!
Of Education and CDs... (Score:1)
But I'd still take a school book over a CD-Rom, if only because you can always tell a girl "let me carry your books for you". How geeky would "let me carry your CDs for you" sound?
Re:CD? How 80's (Score:1)
It's definitely a better idea to have the CD. I'm sure it works fine having it on CD-ROM. Here are some reasons.
I see it like the MP3 player / minidisc scenario. The minidiscs are far superior in storage and quality, but people like me use the MP3 players because they are newer and use newer techonology.
Re:Textbooks (Score:1)
1. I had to purchase my share of bulky textbooks in college, but I rarely needed to "lug them around". I didn't need to bring them to classes, usually--there were exceptions of course. My books stayed at home, in my room, where I got most of my studying done.
2. One thing I did choose to "lug around", for a while anyway, was a laptop. Mind you, this was 1993, and the state of the art in laptops has advanced considerably since then. But, for a time, I attempted to use a PowerBook for classwork. It weighed nearly seven pounds. (By comparison, the Dell Inspiron 7500 laptop I was issued for work weighs more than nine pounds. It stays on the desk in my office--I never take it anywhere.) It was nearly useless for most note-taking work and it didn't take me long to get thoroughly sick of carrying it around. Occasionally I get to thinking that some new device might do the trick--make no mistake, as skeptical as I am, I'm still somewhat attracted to the idea of carrying around a portable computer. I liked the look of the "Clio", for example (until I got a chance to practice the thing's handwriting recognition.)
3. Nobody likes reading online documentation _now_. What's the first thing anyone does when confronted with a hundred-page online manual in PostScript or PDF format? Print the damn thing out.
4. Books are also suited for quick searching in a way that electronic documents, even those with a table of contents and a good keyword search engine, aren't. It is possible, for example, rapidly to flip through a book and narrow down on a particular page (watch someone flip through the White Pages, for example, looking for a name.)
5. Books in machine-readable format introduce a number of troublesome dependencies--upon the medium of storage, upon the application required to read the format, possibly upon the platform in which that application is written. Paper books do not suffer from these dependencies.
hyacinthus
CD-ROMs, great idea, horribly implemented... (Score:2)
The latter is a real problem for those of us who have to administer computer labs. We lock down lab stations with restrictive NT workstation settings that prevent program installs, so when students get CD-ROMs they must use in labs, they don't work unless we go through and pre-install the stupid software for them.
These days, it's stupid to not have autoplay run the program from the CD without the need for an install anyway. If they just did that, people could just insert and run. No hassle.
But, as another poster said, why even bother in the first place? This stuff should be on a web page somewhere anyway.
Schools May Suffer :-) (Score:2)
CD's in a UK University (Score:2)
I work in a UK Computer Science department as system programmer / help desk contact point. At the uni, this october every undergraduate will be given a DVD rom which contains a "snapshot" of all the on-line notes for all the course the department offers (and most of the notes / slides are available on-line).
In addition to this, the CD contains course related software (subject to licences), redhat linux 6.2 (as it is used on about 50% of the departmental computers, and various useful programs that are freely available eg. Netscape, realplayer, flash plugins, IE, ftp, ssh etc.
The biggest problem this year is the amount of data, when the concept was run originally the department struggled to fill a CD-Rom, this year it will probably be a DVD-Rom with a Multiple CD option!
The department finds this invaluable as it can ensure that everybody has access to the software at home (provided they have a computer) as well as on the departmental computers. It also allows the students to look up notes etc. without having to make a trip from digs / halls to uni (and without spending what little money they have on modem phone bills ;). But most of all there is the "coolness" factor - you get a free departmental DVD, no other department at our uni offers anything like it :)
I think that this wil be "the way of the future" as the data / software needed to get the most out of the course increases, there has to be CD / DVD's given out for free otherwise people can never go home or have to spend all their cash on modem bills / CD-R's to take thier downloads home on. Plus with a electronic media animated examples / complete code listings can be provided to give the students a better idea of the material being taught (particularly relvant for computer graphics courses).
Manic.
Who owns the CD? (Score:2)
CD? How 80's (Score:2)
Now hiring experienced client- & server-side developers
Access to technology (Score:2)
CDs are not recordable. Problem (Score:3)
Now, I have to admit that it's been almost 25 years since I stepped into a college classroom as a student, but I do recall that every semester I would buy a whole fresh set of hi-lighters so that I could mark the things I found tough to crack. Study time was spent concentrating on the highlighted phrases until I understood or were forced to find help.
Now, unless the "CD-ROM" you were referring to was in reality a CD-RW and you have a suitable recorder, you end up with a net loss.
Every single text book I owned had notes in the margin from the lectures, from the Q&A with the prof and the TA, and from peer-to-peer bull sessions. Indeed, some of the older computer texts I use regularly all these years later are most useful because of the margin notes I wrote while listening to others.
Sometimes newer is not better. CDs in school are a case in point.
(But then again, you have a similar problem with web sites unless you get a copy at the end of the course, and that copy has all your "margin notes" that you of course added during the sessions.)
Computers and school (Score:3)
Most of my classes already post the sylibi online, and a lot of the homework assignments are given out this way as well. You can get textbooks on CD very easy though. Last year, I obtained two of my texts on CD rom. This year, I got a demo CD on campus that had a huge listing of books available.
Am I missing something? (Score:3)
When they can put text books on CDs, I'll really be impressed.
I could have sworn I just saw this [slashdot.org] . . .