From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,83242c369c5dc9b0 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: ok@goanna.cs.rmit.EDU.AU (Richard A. O'Keefe) Subject: Re: Book REview Date: 1996/05/10 Message-ID: <4muo9j$4hp@goanna.cs.rmit.EDU.AU> X-Deja-AN: 154070161 references: <4mk0vc$opp@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au> <3190CEC1.5799@io.com> organization: Comp Sci, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia nntp-posting-user: ok newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1996-05-10T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: This is no longer about Mike Feldman's book. It is about textbooks in general. Richard A. O'Keefe wrote: > Last Friday I received several textbooks for review. > The book is apparently being sold in an international market (I'm posting > from Australia), but it appears to have been _written_ for the US market. Dave Jones writes: >Personally, I think that it is wise to make a textbook culturally specific. Perhaps so, but (a) there is a big difference between INTENTIONALLY localising a book and UNINTENTIONALLY localising it. (b) if a textbook is deliberately made culturally specific, then why sell it to other cultures?> >The use of culturally specific examples helps to hold student attention >and makes for a superior textbook. This may be so. Can you point me to any studies which provide _evidence_ for this claim? Certainly in the specific case at issue *none* of the cultural specificity is of the kind that would grab the attention of a US student. They are things that a US student, just like a US author, simply takes for granted. I find it difficult to imagine a US student being excited by "GPA" or "Sophomore" or the assumption that there are only 26 letters. Or, to take another example, look at the history of computing on p5. It's not really surprising that there is no mention of the CSIR Mk 1, which was the first electronic stored program computer in Australia, and was among the first five _anywhere_ in the world, running its first program during 1949. But it was rather a shock to find no mention of Zuse or Turing. Does this focus on US contributions to computing "hold student attention"? Like fun it does, they don't _KNOW_ the bias is there. Does it "make for a superior textbook"? I really don't see how leaving Algol out of Ada's history makes the textbook any better. If you are concerned with women in history, how does including Christine Anderson but excluding the first programmer, the Countess of Lovelace, "hold student attention" or "make for a superior textbook"? (This is _not_ an argument for omitting Christine Anderson; but I think Grace Hopper has more claim to be included in a table of Milestones.) >Perhaps, Mr. O'Keefe should contact Addison-Wesley about >creating an Australian edition. For that matter, I would think that the >Australians are perfectly capable of writing their own textbook. >Mr. O'Keefe also needs to realize the economics of the situation. >Australia has a tiny population (about 18 million) and a trivial GDP >(about US$340 billion). Mr Jones needs to read what he just wrote. If Australia has a tiny population (and it's about 6 times the population of my own country) and a trivial GDP, then why would Addison-Wesley be interested in creating an Australian edition? In any case, Dr O'Keefe is not an Australian, so would not be able to produce an Australian edition, and as about half of the students he is worried about aren't Australians either, he wouldn't _want_ an Australian edition. About half of our first year students are not native speakers of English. >It would be very very unwise for Addison-Wesley to risk a position in the US >market in order to increase their position in the Australian market. I >would not expect there to be any changes in the book until people in >larger countries start complaining. Perhaps Mr Jones should think a little bit more about the politico-economic situation himself. Of the countries in the Asia-Pacific region, Australia is the *most* Americanised. Australia and New Zealand (which is where I come from) _do_ have a tradition of free speech and dissent; many of the more populous cultures of the region have a tradition of teacher authority and student submission; if the Big Teacher dishes something out, the student dutifully memorises it, whether it makes sense or not. Don't think of And in the case of the Feldman/Koffman book, internationalising it would pose absolutely no risk to its position in the US market. *None* of the issues I have identified is central to its educational aims or methods. For example, the continuing project which is one of many excellent features of the book, the "spider graphics" stuff, is about as culture-neutral as one could reasonably hope for. -- Fifty years of programming language research, and we end up with C++ ??? Richard A. O'Keefe; http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/~ok; RMIT Comp.Sci.