Active Calculus – Print on Demand

Posted on August 18, 2014 by Matt Boelkins

I’m excited to announce that the print-on-demand version of Active Calculus has arrived at several online booksellers.  Via the comparison site Fetchbook, you can currently find options with Barnes & Noble and a couple of the non-US Amazon sites (for reasons unclear, the book isn’t yet showing up on Amazon’s US site, though it will soon). The best current price is $15.70 on Barnes & Noble, and with $3.99 for shipping, you can get a copy sent to you for under $20.  We have set the price so that David, Steve, and I receive no royalties whatsoever.  There is a small fee included to cover the ISBN and the modest expenses incurred by Orthogonal Publishing, and of course the printer (Ingram Books) also makes some money for their work.

As always, the .pdf of the text remains free and can be obtained via the GVSU ScholarWorks website.  Info on the activities workbooks can be found at my personal download page.

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Active Calculus – Print on Demand — almost here

Posted on August 14, 2014 by Matt Boelkins

In my mail today, I got a printed copy of the proof for the book.  It was incredibly fun to see the text go from its purely electronic format and the planned cover image

frontcover-JPG

and see it actually become the print copy, lying on my dining room table in 3D:

AC-POD

More details to follow as soon as the link for print-on-demand is live.  Particular thanks go out to Lon Mitchell and his company, Orthogonal Publishing, for all of his efforts to get the book from electronic .pdf to this printed form.  We have an ISBN, too: 978-0-9898975-3-2.

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Carroll College: Clicker Questions and Chapter Zero for Active Calculus

Posted on August 10, 2014 by Matt Boelkins

One of the most enjoyable aspects of this free and open textbook project has been all of the new friends I’ve made in the mathematics community.  I just got to see several of them in Portland at Mathfest, including Eric Sullivan of Carroll College in Helena, MT.

As we caught up in person, Eric shared some exciting updates from his department.  In addition to choosing to adopt Active Calculus as their calculus textbook at Carroll, they have developed several additions:  a 6-section “Chapter 0” that provides a review of key precalculus topics, several new sections on differential equations for use in their modeling course (in Chapter 7), and a concluding section (for Chapter 8) on the “Functional DNA” perspective on Taylor series that was coined by Travis Kowalski. (By the way, you can read Travis’s outstanding article in PRIMUS, a college math teaching journal for which I am associate editor.)

Besides these fine additions to the actual text itself, Eric and his colleagues have incorporated a full set of clicker questions along with the activities workbook, building a version of the activities workbook that has the clicker questions included in print.  These clicker questions were originally developed as part of two NSF-funded projects at Carroll (MathQuest and MathVote), which you can investigate further at http://mathquest.carroll.edu/.

In the not distant future I expect to have these additional resources posted in some form on the Active Calculus site I maintain; for now you can see them for yourself at the Carroll math department’s home page for the free texts they are using.  Be sure to check out the links to the first two .pdf files there, which are the expanded version of the text and the activities workbook with clicker questions, respectively.

When I started this project (initial planning in fall 2010), I had a fuzzy vision for the possibility of something like this:  building not just a free text, but one that others could take and modify/adjust/adapt to better serve their local purposed.  I’m grateful to Eric and his colleagues (Kelly Cline, Phil Rose, John Scharf, & Ted Wendt) for their work and contributions here, resulting in this fine example of how a department can customize the text.

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Updated version: Active Calculus 2014

Posted on August 7, 2014 by Matt Boelkins

Recently I shared news that I’ve been working on a print-on-demand version of the text.  Lon Miller of Orthogonal Publishing and I are in the final stages of that project, and expect by the end of the week of August 11 to be able share the link to order a copy and information about cost.  For now, I’m pleased to share information about the updated e-version and the new URL from which it can be downloaded.

The newest version has a cover image now (to accompany the full cover that will be part of print-on-demand), and I have also corrected all of the errors that were identified between January 1 and July 30.  As always, I welcome hearing from users directly who encounter mistakes in the text.

While you can still find information regarding the full book and the activities workbooks from my main page, it is now the case that the text itself is being hosted on GVSU’s ScholarWorks cite as part of their Open Education Materials; in particular, my web page will direct you to the book’s new home link at http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/books/10/.  My colleague Ted Sundstrom’s Mathematical Reasoning textbook has been hosted by ScholarWorks for more than a year now, and I’m delighted to join him there.

More to follow soon once the print-on-demand option is live.

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Coming soon: print-on-demand and AC3

Posted on June 17, 2014 by Matt Boelkins

Two updates for the near and not-so-near future:

– This summer, I’m working to establish a print-on-demand option for bound copies; I expect this to be available no later than early August, and will post here about the option once it’s available.  For the full 8 chapters printed and bound, the end cost to the user is projected to be around $15.  When the print-on-demand option becomes available, a newly-updated version of the text will be posted as well that reflects some recent minor edits.

– My GVSU colleague Steve Schlicker has begun developing a multivariable version of Active Calculus for use in the third semester of the calculus sequence.  David Austin and I are working on it with him, and we aspire to have a version ready to post publicly by late in 2014 in time for use in the winter 2015.  Further updates will follow in this space.

Recently, I sent a short survey to every instructor who has ever emailed me to inquire about using Active Calculus. If you are someone who has used the text in some way to support your work in teaching calculus, I’d very much appreciate your response to the survey.

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Unglue.it

Posted on May 27, 2014 by Matt Boelkins

[Insert profuse apologies here regarding my limited posting over the past four months.]

It is finally warm outside after an unusually brutal Michigan winter; warm weather brings the promise of many things, and one of those is more time to write and catch up on some projects.  Some updates to Active Calculus and some responses to various AC-related emails have been too long deferred.  Ditto posting here.

I recently got a kind email from Eric Hellman of Unglue.it telling me that Active Calculus was their “Creative Commons ebook of the day“.  In his words about their project,

Unglue.it is a website dedicated to the development of sustainable funding and distribution models for Creative Commons licensed books. We are compiling a comprehensive catalog of CC licensed books while offering authors and publishers new ways to make ends meet. Last week, we launched “Thanks for Ungluing” which lets creators ask readers for support on our download pages.

In an article about the goals of unglue.it, TechCrunch explains that unglue.it is trying to build a model where authors get paid first, and then their work becomes free to use by the public.  It’s the sort of “now-that-you’ve-made-your-money, please-give-your-book-away” model that Robert Talbert once advocated for a famous calculus text.  This approach also has some of the interesting options that folks in the music industry have employed:  letting users choose how much they want to pay for a text, setting a floor to be reached before work becomes free, and allowing donations to still be made to authors whose work has become free.

Active Calculus will always be available in electronic form for free.  I’ve started to work towards setting up a print-on-demand option that will enable users to easily acquire a printed copy for a small price that is essentially the cost of production.  More on that in the near future — by early August, for sure.

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openmathbook.org

Posted on March 29, 2014 by Matt Boelkins

As an outgrowth of the previously-mentioned session at the Baltimore Joint Meetings on open textbooks, Albert Schueller has started a new blog, Open Mathbook, to offer “a place to promote, discuss, and develop free and open source mathematics texts.”  There’s already a bunch of great posts there, including a trove of interesting developments from a range of people deeply involved with the free and open math text movement.

Ironically, while I haven’t had time to post here recently, I was honored to have Albert ask me for a contribution, and I have a new post over at OpenMathBook, based on the talk I gave at the JMM.

Soon I’ll follow up here with some exciting news we have regarding plans for a multivariable addition to Active Calculus.

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Joint Meetings 2014: free and open textbooks session

Posted on January 20, 2014 by Matt Boelkins

While it was certainly a good conference overall this year, last Friday at the Joint Meetings in Baltimore was particularly fantastic.  From 8-11 and 3-5, we had about 15 different presenters share interesting and exciting work and opportunities in the world of free and open-source mathematics texts.  Here are a few highlights:

– Richard Hammack of Virginia Commonwealth University gave a nice presentation on how to set up on-demand publishing.  I like Richard’s model:  give the text away for free in .pdf format, and establish a print-on-demand setup where folks can buy the book for an incredibly reasonable price (for his Book of Proof for a transitions course, a nearly 300-page book in softcover for under $15, with a modest profit to the author as well).  His book looks beautiful, too.  This spring, I plan to get Active Calculus set up for print-on-demand so that students can order a bound copy, if desired.  The .pdf (and other eventual formats — see the part on David Farmer below) will always be free.

– Nicole Allen of SPARC, the Scholarly Publication and Academic Resources Coalition, provided an overview of the free and open textbook movement.  Nicole began her interest in and advocacy for free and open textbooks as an undergraduate student, and now she’s working professionally for this cause.  Among the many interesting things she shared in her presentation to us:  the US textbook publishing business is an $8.8 billion dollar per year industry — nearly comparable to the NFL, which apparently reports in at approximately $10B per year.  Think about it.

– David Farmer of the American Institute of Mathematics gave us a peek at the amazing work he and others (including Rob Beezer and Tom Judson) are doing to enable authors to have their work translated to multiple electronic platforms (including ones that haven’t been invented yet).  For some samples, see http://aimath.org/jmm/, which shows how several different papers written in standard LaTeX code can be turned into gorgeous, easy to browse web pages.  As I understand it, the basic idea is that Rob Beezer and others have created an XML to TeX translator, while David is working on one that translates TeX to XML.  And if you have “good” LaTeX code, one of these brilliant programmer can run your TeX through their machine and produce other formats with nearly no additional effort.  Be sure to take some time to browse the link above, and be certain to click on a few of the links within each web page that appear.

Suffice it to say: I wish that I had seen David’s talk 24 months ago before I started my project.  But I’m optimistic that with a little bit of time and care on my (already decent) LaTeX code, I can eventually have my book translated into not just this great web page format, but also into forms suitable for eReaders and more.

There was, of course, more good publicity for AIM’s open textbook project.  Mostly, it was fun to be in the room with a bunch of creative, interesting, relatively like minded people who were all excited about developing free and open-source texts to make the mathematics learning community a better place.  I got some great ideas and made some new friends … which is exactly what a good conference is for.

I should have at least one more post upcoming soon on some cool people I met and resources that they are developing, particularly a couple of items related directly to calculus.

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Active Calculus v.12.30.13 – updates

Posted on December 30, 2013 by Matt Boelkins

This fall I was glad to have a much larger number of beta testers using Active Calculus; about 10 of my GVSU colleagues used it for either our calculus I or calculus II, and at least that many other people at other institutions employed the text in some fashion.  Several of these 20+ people provided regular and consistent editorial feedback, and I’ve just recently had the time to implement their corrections and suggestions.  My deep and sincere thanks to them for every single one of their emails.

The newly updated files are now available from my download page; as always, any person interested in the original source files may request them from me directly, and I will share them via Dropbox.

As has been noted previously at this site, thanks to my colleagues Robert Talbert and Marcia Frobish there is now a full set of screencasts to go with the first four chapters of the text: see the GVSU Math 201 YouTube Channel.  My students in the fall semester of 2013 raved about the helpfulness of these videos.

I also now have full sets of .def files for WeBWorK exercises for the text, available upon request.

As winter semester begins soon, I wish everyone well in preparing for and starting their classes, especially those in calculus.  If you choose to use AC, I welcome hearing from you at anytime with corrections, suggestions, questions, or reactions.

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Three months later, …

Posted on December 21, 2013 by Matt Boelkins

My last post was September 4, 2013.  Oops.

In the first week of October, I got a new (additional) job at GVSU:  director of faculty advisors for freshman orientation.  Given that we welcome over 4000 new first-year students each summer, for the past two+ months I’ve had considerable work to do in learning my new job and planning for summer 2014.  With that added to my normal workload, a few things had to be put off.  Blogging and tweeting got set aside.

With apologies for being gone, I’m glad to be back.  Here’s an overview of some upcoming posts that I’m working on:

  • updates to the text:  during the fall semester, I got a bunch of great feedback from colleagues near and far who were using the text, plus from my own students.  I carefully collected all of that, and over the next couple of days, I will be implementing the needed corrections and changes.  New versions of the .pdf files will post on the text’s download page no later than December 30, 2013.
  • reflections on fall 2013:  this past term was the first time I’d gotten to use the text myself, and I’m keen to share my and my students’ reactions.  Plus I still owe the post “part 3 of 3”, tied to how my fall 2013 differential calculus class looks (looked!).
  • talk at the Joint Meetings:  there’s an exciting paper session at the Joint Math Meetings in Baltimore in early January that is devoted to free and open texts.  I’m giving a talk there, so I’ll post a short preview of the talk, plus put in some publicity for others on the schedule.

Now, back to editing …

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