RE: United States Education Technology Policy

Web Philosophy Community Group,

In addition to the aforementioned discussion of an app store model for digital textbook sales to schoolboards, and another approach, technologies for state and local schoolboards to each review each digital textbook from an arbitrarily large set of digital textbooks (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-argumentation/2012Oct/0002.html), there is also an interesting observation about the history of textbook manufacturing processes, economic models, state and local textbook selection processes, the number of major textbook publishers in the United States, and the behaviors of and news coverage of the states of California, Texas, and Virginia.

Often, when textbooks have been been topical in the news, the states of California, Texas and Virginia have appeared in the news. Each of those states has a state-level textbook selection process. Those states' schoolboards have, in the past, attempted to influence curriculum topics for the remainder of the nation. Today, however, any person or team can author and distribute digital textbooks for consideration by state and local school district decision makers.

There has been an observed lack of coverage about some related topics, including discussions, from within the other forty-seven states, as well as discussions from within organizations such as the CCSSO, and opinions from various other education-related organizations. While there have been an observed large number of online news stories mentioning California, Texas and Virginia, some online news analysis has indicated a startlingly low number of articles mentioning the remainder of the forty-seven states, for example the entirety of those in the Midwest region of the United States.

That is, the number of articles discussing the opinions of California, Texas, and Virginia, with regard to textbook topics, proportional to the summation of articles discussing the opinions of those in the entire Midwest region, indicates a systemic problem with regard to textbooks, the concepts of state and local textbook selection processes, and the national news media.

Furthermore, California's position about free and open source digital textbooks is neither economically sound nor advantageous to students with regard to their educational goals being met by short-, medium- and long-term digital textbook business, organizational, and manufacturing processes. California's stance, which can be described as a state policy including uncompensated labor, indicates that the software industry does not yet have sufficiently consolidated or visible lobbying, pro-labor or pro-industry organizations or representation, available in either Sacramento or Washington D.C.

It is my opinion that local decision-making processes empower parents and teachers. Parents and teachers are empowered by being or having their decision makers in their own communities, their own towns and cities, reviewing abundant options produced by scholars, scientists and other experts.  It is my opinion that digital textbook economic models should advantage the quality of, editioning of, and versioning of digital textbooks and digital textbook technologies.

The behaviors of the federal government, policy such as Congressionally-funded quasi-government organizations including Digital Promise, app store models, the aforementioned behaviors of the states of California, Texas and Virginia, the news coverage of those states and the other forty-seven, have arguably infringed upon the processes of, systems available to, and options available to state and local schoolboards and decision makers in the remainder of states, in particular: Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.



Kind regards,

Adam Sobieski