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The Muddle Machine: Confessions of a Textbook Editor (2004) (archive.org)
38 points by apsec112 on June 29, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 8 comments



I immediately thought about Richard Feynman's account of being part of the textbook selection committee in California: https://web.archive.org/web/20020617183211/http://www.textbo...


Yeah me too. "Judging Books by Their Covers" = story about how committees sometimes select book that haven't even been written yet (just based on the book cover images)!


This article, or perhaps an update of it, is still up. https://www.edutopia.org/textbook-publishing-controversy


I love it when the problem solving approaches found in software engineering are applied to other domains. The suggestions at the end are basically UNIX principles applied to education.


I've found the reverse to be similarly gratifying: when some knowledge from another domain turns out to be applicable to some software engineering problem.

Oftentimes when this has happened for me, it's some knowledge that I'd absorbed in a Wikipedia rabbit hole (or some such) and thought was trivia that would be useless to me. Then suddenly I noticed some sort of congruence with a problem I was working on, and that knowledge proved not so useless after all.

This sort of cross-domain application has lead me to an intuitive and elegant solution on more than one occasion. Biology and linguistics have been especially fruitful in this regard, but perhaps that's only because those are fields I'm better acquainted with.


You sparked my curiosity, do you have examples you can share?


FWIW, you can get a copy of "Deschooling Society" by Ivan Illich here: http://www.ecotopia.com/webpress/deschooling.htm


Wow, it's amazing how close this article comes to describing the present day situation of the big 3 textbook companies!




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