Chronology Current Month Current Thread Current Date
[Year List] [Month List (current year)] [Date Index] [Thread Index] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Prev] [Date Next]

Borrowing bandwith?



I was wondering if I could impose on the collective wisdom of you folks on
the Phys-L and PhysLrnr lists. I just signed a contract with Addison-Wesley
to write a new physics textbook. (I wasn¹t invited back to work on the next
edition of Serway/Beichner. It¹s a long storyŠ) I¹m still trying to walk the
line between a fully reformed approach and a traditional text. My goal is to
write a book that looks ³normal² but ends up supporting PER-based ideas.

Anyway, having been a long-time lurker and occasional participant on these
two lists I know that there are lots of great ideas. I'm sure that you have
favorite problems, examples, applications, and even pedagogies. If you are
interested, I¹d like to put some of them into this book. Obviously, I can¹t
use them all. I¹d have to put my own spin on them or the text would end up
reading like a committee wrote it. But I¹d be very happy to acknowledge your
contributions in the preface.

As a concrete example, John Mallinckrodt has commented several times in
these lists on his approach to teaching kinematics using just a few
definitions rather than focusing on a special set of equations. I liked that
idea and have modified my own classes along those lines. I tried to
incorporate some of the approach in Serway/Beichner, but faced some
constraints. (You¹ll notice that was allowed to cut the number of special
kinematics equations down from 8 to 4, but that was it.) In the new text I
will only include the constant acceleration equations as a special case and
put them in an example. (In fact, a lot of the ³teaching² will be done in
examples since that is all many students read.)

There are two ways to do this sort of ³community book building² task. The
first would be for me to set up my own listserv and handle everything
privately. But it seems to me that this could provide fodder for lots of
interesting discussions over the existing lists. (Perhaps the PhysLrnr folks
would rather not participate in the discussion since it is not research,
although I would hope that the book will clearly be seen as research-based.)
So what do you think, is this better done privately or publicly? Keep in
mind that this is a 3 year project, so the discussions would be part of the
lists for a long time.

Bob Beichner
NC State Physics