[WikiEN-l] Textbooks (was: Announcing Wikimedia Foundation)

[Daniel Ehrenberg]

--- Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Anthere wrote:
> >> The reason why our encyclopedias have to be 
> >>NPOV is because our audience is a  general one. 
> >>The reason why our textbooks have to be DPOV 
> >>is because our audience is very focused (the
> biology 
> >>student, for example) and we need to  bring that 
> >>student through the material in a logical and
> efficient 
> >>way. 
> >
> >No. Wrong. One do not have to throw away 
> >NPOV just for the reason the audience is more 
> >focused. That has nothing to do.
> 
> No - you are totally wrong (stings a bit doesn't it?
> In the future it would be 
> nice if you showed some respect to the opinions of
> others. OK?)
> 
> >Logical and efficient is totally compatible with 
> >NPOV. What you suggest is "cutting" very 
> >important information, that students will later 
> >need to make informed decisions. Removing 
> >infos is neither logical nor efficient in the long 
> >term.
> 
> You are confusing a completely liberal education
> with the very real fact that 
> most courses are designed to get students through a
> certain /limited/ set of 
> material as efficiently as possible. In none, not
> one, of my college 
> textbooks on biology is there any serious mention of
> Creationist viewpoints. 
> That is /irrelevant/ information to have in a
> college-level biology textbook.  
> In short; there are /separate/ classes that deal
> with that subject.
> 
> >> Same thing is true for a section of a medical
> >> textbook on abortion ; we leave out most of the 
> >> history and the different political views on the 
> >> subject and just talk about the procedure itself 
> >> and maybe have a single paragraph at the 
> >> end sating something about access to the 
> >> procedure and that risks doctors  face when 
> >> they choose to specialize in this area. 
> 
> >I disagree with you Mav.
> 
> Now that is a nicer way to disagree. Was that hard?
> 
> >By thus doing, we will only propose technical 
> >books, cold and disincarnated. That is against 
> >what some people consider education is.
> 
> Maybe what /you/ consider to be what education is. 
> You are more than welcome 
> to write liberal education textbooks that treat each
> area taught in a 
> comprehensive, inter-disciplinary way. But don't
> stop other people from 
> making more technically-focused works since that is
> what actually gets used 
> in most college classrooms (at least in the US).  
> 
> Also, most people take /separate/ classes in
> history, science and ethics. So 
> the history of the how an element has been used is
> irrelevant to the 
> chemistry student taking inorganic chemistry; ALL
> that is relevant to that 
> student is is the chemical reactions of the element,
> and its properties and 
> placement in the periodic table (of course a nice
> and short intro on why the 
> element is important would be a good thing to have
> but not vital to the 
> subject matter). The other stuff is optional
> background information that is 
> easily found in the element's encyclopedia article.
> 
> The goal of an encyclopedia is to present a summary
> of the sum total of all 
> human knowledge known about a particular subject.
> The goal of a textbook is 
> to focus on one particular part of that knowledge so
> that students can learn 
> about that aspect in detail. 
> 
> We /already/ have a comprehensive resource in the
> encyclopedia for all the 
> info about a certain element. Let's not confuse
> encyclopedia articles  with 
> textbook entries or otherwise a textbook project
> will not be differentiated 
> enough to exist for long if at all.
> 
> -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

The goal of this textbook certainly isn't to be used.
It is to be a good textbook. Which idea would make a
better textbook, I think, would be the off-topic
mentionings.
LDan

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