A number of state public interest research groups have created a report entitled "Rip-off 101: Second Edition - How the Publishing Industry's Practices Needlessly Drive Up Textbook Costs". If you haven't spent much time in college classes recently you may not be aware that it's not unusual for students to spend $900 a year on textbooks. Many students now recoup some of that cost by selling their used textbooks back to the bookstore (let's not even get into that scandel), but as publishers move towards electronic textbooks that is not going to be a possibility any longer. Of course publishers could drastically reduce the price of electronic textbooks and end up making about the same amount of money but they see this as just another way to profit on the backs of debt-ridden students.

Luckily there has been slow bust steady progress towards free and open "textbooks" and curriculum. This really started with the MIT OpenCourseWare project and has since expanded to numerous other offerings. Of course I've already written about Schiller's free physics textbook, the All About Circuits electronics curriculum and the Learning by Doing CCNA textbooks but now there are even more.

The Textbook Revolution, Free Tech Books and Assayer websites all have lists of different free e-textbooks availible on a variety of subjects. If you're in the position of influencing textbook purcahsing I would urge you to look and see if any of these free offerings could meet your needs. Perhaps you'll even blend a few of them to create a free textbook unique to your class. In any event I'm certian students would appreciate the thought.

Christoph Schiller has written a free physics textbook and made it availible online for non-commercial use. I took a look at it and have a few ideas. First, he should make a printed copy availible via the fantastic Lulu publishing company. Secondly, I think he should make it officially availible under the Creative Commons Non-Commercial Share Alike licence. It's essentially that anyway and it would provide a better understanding and probably better legal grounds to the same end.

Finally, this book is overly technical and not user friendly for the introductory college physics student or advanced high school student in the United States. I would love to see a more traditional US physics text be made availible under a free license like this. I found it difficult to locate common US physics units in this book (eg. 2D kinematics, 3D kinematics, springs, waves, light (wave, not particle) and lenses, magenets and electricity). It would be great if someone could put together a book that looked this professional but which was shorter and designed for a more introductory college / advanced high school course. If someone wanted to work collaboratively on a project such as this I would be thrilled to be a part of it.

One example of a free license textbook is "All About Circuits" which was originally a PDF document but has been updated and become an online reference. I do wish they would come out with a PDF formatted book again though, it looks much more professional when printed. This electronics textbook was licensed under the Design Science License which seems to be even less restrictive than the Creative Commons NCSA license.

There's always something going on at the University of Minnesota. Two of the calendars that will help you find events including concerts, plays, lectures, movies, workshops, meetings and more are the Campus Events calendar and the TCSU & SAO calendar. There's usually more listed on the campus events calendar which is farily comprehensive but the Student Activities Office calendar might be a little more student friendly for those just looking for something fun to do after class.

First of all, if you're not a regular PC Magazine reader (why not???) you may find it interesting to see I was mentioned in the Nov. 30, 2004 issue. The online version is finally availible so you can see it there. See, it does pay to write and to know people...

Additionally, if you are or know college students encourage them to check out the Facebook. It's a great idea started by a few college kids who ran it out of a dorm room for sometime. A pictoral directory of college students sorted by school. You can search and find people you have something in common with (HS graduation, same dorm, same school, same major, etc) it's a killer idea and is taking off really quickly! This can be seen in the fact that site response times are steadily getting worse. Here's hoping that the internet pipe to the site gets bigger soon! This is social networking working the way orkut should be but isn't. Check it out!

I've been really, really busy getting settled in back home for the summer and working on my internship, mode updates on all that at a later time. Because of my internship I was able to get a 3Com HomeConnect webcam that is compatible with my current OS so my webcam is back up. Click this link to check it out!