Slashdot Mirror
Collaborative Online Textbook Project
rocketjam writes "OpenTextBook.org is a new project to create a free, open text book 'collaboratively written by anyone on the internet', using a Creative Commons license. Citing the free software development model and the philosophy that underlies much of that effort, OpenTextBook.org's introduction says this philosophy should apply 'at its most basic to the learning of science.' They hope the project will help to counter the current governmental trend of strengthening the scope, duration and rights of intellectual property owners while cutting back on the fair use rights of individuals. The current state of the project is available as a daily snapshot pdf file which contains the introduction to the project and 9 chapters mostly covering math at this time."
Are the two licenses incompatable, or are they just trying to start a competing product? This is a serious question, I've not read the details of either license, and I think competition is good for all involved.
On the other hand, if the licenses are compatable, why not borrow (attributed of course) material back and forth between the two.
It certainly seems (by looking at the two sites) that WikiBooks are quite a bit further along in the game.
And other posts, trolls, and crapfloods will make the editing of such a text a continual headache.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Ok kids, grab the latest CVS textbook binaries off the server and go compile your shell scripts, once or twice...then uhh edit your config scripts...check your dependencies...and then DO YOUR HOMEWORK!
Wikimedia Foundation, the one that also hosts Wikipedia, has a similar project called Wikibooks. It also runs on the same MediaWiki software as Wikipedia, and the contents are licensed under the GFDL.
I have to admit I'm not quite clear on what this is about. A textbook, huh? About what? Math? The first 9 chapters are "mostly" about Math?
Good for them. But they should have someone experienced in professional writing to lead each textbook project. I would worry about bloat and lack of focus in the books. Some people might try to include to much, etc. Or each chapter that is written by a different person have different philosophical ideas.
It all depends on the level of the math! For those who are struggling to learn a subject, often a great deal of explanitory material helps get the concept down. An encyclopedia doesn't have the problems to solve. For people like me, the only way to learn math is to do math.
Nyekulturniy... Proudly confusing readers and editors since 1981!
Where do I turn in my Open textbook for some much needed beach week money?
Expect to see a fight. Do you have any idea how much money is made from the sale of outrageously over-priced textbooks? I fully expect to see our publishing corporate taskmasters to fight this. I would love to see universities and colleges actually start using these online books as the required texts for their classes.
The thing about OSS vs. OS Books is that software requires individuals who have a knowledge of coding and developing software to write it, there-by limiting the number of yokels who attempt to contribute. With text-books, especially interperative subjects such as History or English, much of the material may end up weighted unfairly. Now the same could be said of traditional books, but with only one or a few authors, accountability is fairly easy. Perhaps this effort would be better served towards checking existing books' material for accuracy. But most of this arguement is nil when applied to this particular book, since in Math there are generally only right and wrong answers (the lower math that this covers at least).
in bed.
Books with just a few authors appear out of order and harder to read. With many authors, it will be worse.
If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound? If a book is posted on the internet and it's longer than one page, will anyone read it?
Finally, I can cut out that bothersome part where I actually have to type what I plagiarize....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
These texts can still be found occasionally in used-book stores. They would make an excellent basis for a library of Free texts, if they could be liberated.
Wikipedia is not what you're looking before. Wikibooks is. Both are projects of the Wikimedia foundation (which uses the MediaWiki software).
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I wonder which story will make it into this textbook first:
1. The gas chambers in Nazi Germany were designed by Microsoft. Bill Gates personally enjoyed taking vacations at Auschwitz.
2. The black panthers were a group of law abiding, fun loving people that were mercilessly harassed by the establishment.
3. The Berlin wall was torn down because it divided the German Parliament meeting rooms from the bathrooms.
4. Canada is the northernmost state in the United States.
I just hope they can maintain a strong cohesion with disparate authors. They have the potential to gather many viewpoints (a wonderful tool in teaching) of the same topic so that there are high odds of a reader understanding at least one of them.
At the same time, every truly great text book that I've read has come from a great author. That author has made each chapter build on the one before, and follow a similar form. In other words, buy the second or third chapter, you're starting to understand how the author thinks and writes, which helps you pick up the material faster. It will be more difficult to acheive the same flow - not impossible mind you (there are many good collaboratively written books) - but difficult.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
I noticed that this seems to be just Math textbooks for now, but what about history? Right now, history is re-written with every new textbook. More "facts" are discovered, a new slant is proposed, or it is presented with a different perspective.
Will this make it easier to re-write history? or will it become harder because any changes will have to be submitted to a committee?
Maybe we should stick to Math and not put History Textbooks on the web right now?
Great civilizations have lived and died on false theories. Don't mess up mine with a few facts.
It seems to me that the authors (or "project leaders," or whatever you want to call them) thought that an "open textbook" would be really cool, but failed to realize that just declaring something open doesn't make it write itself. They haven't even settled on a topic for the book!
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
The best books are written (IMHO) by professors/instructors (AS Tanenbaum comes to mind) with ample experience in understanding the subject matter and explaining it effectively to potentially ignorant readers.
Writing a book is an art - just like technical writing is. That's one reason the documentation in OSS projects is seldom at par with documentation written by professional technical/document writers.
Anybody working towards contributed/open work is doing a Good (TM) thing, but I'm not sure the quality of books will be upto par with published books written by established authors. Note that I'm *not* questioning the intentions/knowledge/experience of the contributors - they may be the best in the field - but putting the knowledge down into words requires a certain amount of skill which I'm not sure many of them (us) possess.
Note that an encyclopedia (wikipedia) is different in this respect because it is essentially just a statement/collection of facts. Textbooks IMHO require more than a mere statement of facts.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Drill baby drill - on Mars
What struck me most on their page (apart from the subject being mostly maths - why?) was the statement that they were "going for a book". What's a book, then? Apparently, they intend to publish something on paper. That costs money. How to get that in a F/OSS setting? Also, why should a book be on paper? They could be really innovative here, reinvent the textbook and have it available as an online, CVS-updated resource (i believe some other group does that already, I forget which one). How do we choose to define a book? If we really want this kind of endeavor to take off, methinks we need to rethink the definition of "book" and maybe also include web-based knowledge repositories as such. What's your take?
----- One learns to itch where one can scratch.
The given Creative Commons license prohibits commercial usage of the material. The GNU FDL permits it - for example, the German Wikipedia is now selling printed copies of its first WikiReader book. This makes it impossible to import OpenTextBook content into Wikipedia.
The other way round, the GNU FDL requires that all derivative works permit commercial usage as well, which makes it impossible to put WikiBooks content into OpenTextBook (copyleft). Fair use would be an exception.
I love C++
I always thought it was math's ( you know, like a contraction)
Surely there has to be some sort of standard to measure each contribution (or contributor).
I'm a college student and would probably just get the info from one of my own textbooks...
...and you run and you run and you can't stop what's been done...
Of course, there is the occasional janitor who just intuitively knows very complex math. Geez... Haven't you seen Good Will Hunting?
what kind of software they're using to generate these equations? The fact that it's going into pdf format (a format that I happen to have an aversion to) and contributions are by email would suggest that this is going to be a lot harder to contribute to than a straightforward wiki.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Creating "linear" textbooks isn't the way to unleash the power of massively collaborative work. Wikipedia is it. We should instead extend Wikipedia.
With an appropriately extended Wikipedia system, we could do all that usual (in my terms called "linear") textbooks can't. Examples: give the reader the choice to read about the same topic in many, many different fashions, eg. one fashion for each experience level of the reader etc.
We could allow to append comments to chapters, we could use appended discussion forums to enhance each chapter by taking care of reader feedback, we could even make hyperlinked eBooks that are going more in-depth than any book physically available, but still much more browsable and understandable.
Calculus in four pages? I hope they intend to expand on the areas they already have written as well as adding new material.
Well, it has never been successfully tested.
Ok, here's one... in 10 years, when this is actually in use in a fair amount of schools, SCO's publishing arm will find paragraphs in it that some well intentioned moron decided to copy verbatim from his textbook he bought at the used book store or on eBay (he is heard saying while typing, "well, I paid for it, didn't I?"). SCO Books(TM) will then proceed to charge college students a $69.90 (they're college students, after all) "licencing" fee to avoid being sued.
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
Or better still, what about when we get to biology and the creationist contributers start having a ding-dong with the more empirical thinkers? I hate to sound so negative though, this is a nice idea.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
My bad experiences with college textbooks fall into two categories:
1. Overpriced and worthless
2. Overpriced
My first Fortran textbook, in 1975, read like a PhD dissertation and taught nothing about coding but cost a bundle. (I'm sure the author felt great pride that his book had been assigned.) The same trend has followed in almost every tech course I've taken, until recently--books seem to be getting better, more practical.
I've learned more from two weeks of Googling on some subjects than in entire college courses. Education has to change to accommodate new modes of learning, and open textbooks make sense. At least they introduce into the diploma-mill sensibility of college accreditation the egalitarian notion that ideas are what matter, not who wrote what.
to find text books at a book store that are of acceptable quality. From what I've seen, these "open source" books have a long, long way to go before anyone can even consider using them for their studies. For now, a few make decent desk references. However, most of the material, as of now, appears half-ass written, with very little content and poor explanations.
This is not to say that i hope they stop, on the contrary, I hope they continue this work but that they start to focus on the details, rather than just filling chapters and adding sections that don't get written for months on end.
One thing this project and Wikibooks could benefit from is to develop open-source learning programs to go along with the text. "Learning by doing" is an important part of the education process, and fun little games, quizzes, and tests to go along with chapters in the open textbook would help students learn better.
The reason I am thinking of this is the book for the Logic class I took a couple semesters ago came with an absolutely fantastic CD-ROM. It taught the material, reinforced it, and tested you on it. It did such a good job I really feel I learned as much (or more) from that computer program than I did from going to class.
Well done learning aides like this for OpenTextBook could help give them the leg up they are hoping for on a lot of commercially done projects.
For one, at least at my school which is fairly well rated (top 50 but not top 10), many of my courses the required texts are by the professors themselves -- being a cashcow for the professors. Do you really think those professors would want to lose the money they get (and intellectual control) from teaching from their own book? And on top of that, even if they use another professors book, wouldn't many consider it a backstab on their profession to edge away from their colleagues books and towards online books? I doubt professors will latch onto this very hard... And for anybody that doesn't know how expensive they currently are, I take a slightly overloaded course load every semester and pay approx $550 a semester for books. I'd be lucky to get 1/5 of that back when I sold them, which I never do.
And I have to say that I expected so much more. The snapshot is a basic introduction to algebra. Dry material, so enliven it a little. Make the book different. Make it count for chrissakes.
If I wanted another courier-font algebra book I's look in my granddad's attic (which is free too).
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
Are they shooting to get the whole of human knowledge down in a free textbook? How about they call it OpenTextBooks and have multiple bokos on multiple topics? And what are they shooting for as far as readability? Do they want 5th graders to pick up the math section and learn their multiplication tables or are we looking towards PhDs and such?
What is your penile percentile?
I think the big issue is that just like code, books need to undergo several rewrites because the first version usually doesn't cut it. I wrote my book over a period of three years. I would put it down for a few months and come back to it, and find all the ways in which it needed to be improved. That was followed by a rewriting of that section, much the same way we refactor and replace code to make it more beneficial within the system.
Engineering and the Ultimate
The authors need to spend more time thinking about what the intended target audience is. In the current state of the book, I can't really think of any audience that could benefit from it. .. you don't expect too many precalculus students to look up the definitions in differential geometry.
For example:
To make it useful for students new to calculus, it would be helpful to discuss limits _before_ defining the derivative.
To make it useful for students comfortable with calculus, there is less need for motivating the derivative, but there should be lots of easily referenced results.
Online dictionaries are very different since the target audience is more or less defined as the people who would need to look up the term
If you find this interesting, check out my Free Curriculum Project and the Free High School Science Texts project (to which I am a very minor contributor).
Both of these projects use the FDL.
-Peter
All I ever drew in textbooks were naked ladies and crude phrases. :/
Or Dilbert's garbage man? He has lasers for Dogbert to borrow and use. :)
I think these guys/girls are to geeky for my liking. I mean, they don't even manage to state on their web page which kind of text book(s) they want to write. Economics? Biology? Comperative International Politics? No, wait, they of course do math. Oh well, you can only find this out if you download their pdf (pdf? So much for not using propritary formats).
Ok, they use TeX as input. Great - not. How do you turn most non-geeks off? Yep, you use TeX. Scientists might know TeX well, students (fewer and fewer) might know it, but what about the people maybe most qualified to contribute to such a text book, what about teachers? Have you ever compared the lectures created by a professor with that prepared by a teacher? If you did, you know why it is maybe not the best idea to rely on the scientific community and TeX geeks to write a text book.
The reputation system should be based on PGP technology, so that the poster's claim to authorship is based on something of value, their pgp signature.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Two in particular I'd like to mention. There are probably a lot of great ones I'm forgetting and terrible ones which deserve to be well raked over the coals, but ... life is short.
;) Of the few Eureka moments I've ever had wrt math beyond arithmetic, most have come from reading one or another of the Saxon books.
...
1) Math textbooks by John Saxon. Few illustrations, but well written and helpful. As a genuine mathophobe, for me to like any math textbook is high praise. These are often used in home-schooling, while public schools get the books with more pictures and worse grammar
2) The Horance Mann Reader. Since the contents of the Horace Mann Reader are so old, I assume that the contents could be re-assembled via Project Gutenberg or similar
(No relation to this strange thing in which books are given to-the-decimal "reading level" ratings. What a crock of bovine excrement.)
I'm not terribly familiar with the HMR other than that I used to own a particular and quite old copy; maybe there are hundreds of different compilations by that title. However, the one I had and loved to read as a kid had all kinds of stories, some with a punchy moral, some simply adventure stories, some with endings I consider bafflingly ambiguous. (Like the one where a maurading giant caterpillar is killed with a spit-wet arrow, and the upshot is something like "There is power is a brave man's spit.")
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Wikipedia and the like have shown that people are willing to give up their time for free to help other people. Rather than spend that time writing something that may or may not be read, why not spend that time actually helping someone one-to-one in a live chat?
For example, everyone who wants to be involved registers with their area of expertise, be that IT, cooking, or car mechanics, quantum mechanics etc and gets 5 credits, entitling them to ask five questions. For every 1/2 hour you spend as an 'expert' answering questions you get a credit. If you need to ask a question you get routed to the people who are online covering that area. Hey presto, instant online help without having to trawl through pages of Google results to find the answer. Just an idea, but if it existed I would certainly use it.
If we could just get textbooks that are written on a competent level, many educators would be happy.
Currently, textbooks are written by commitee and have to be "acceptable to community standards".. IN EVERY COMMUNITY IN THE COUNTRY (being ethnocentric today, sorry folks.)
This causes textbooks to be written so incredibly bland and/or biased, that it makes them near-worthless.
I had a professor in college who was/is a fairly renowned individual on the "educational circuit." She would get invited to exorbatantly expensive and lavish dinner parties, by TEXTBOOK makers. Why? Because they wanted her to "support." The books. All they needed was her to say a single line of support, and they could put it on their textbook.
To her credit, she didnt cave, and watched what she said the entire night.
But it makes you think. The people who write these textbooks are not in it for the education of our youth, but for the high profit margins.
(Mostly middle/highschool textbooks, but still applicable.)
no
You know, with MIT offering their classes online for free, and this service providing the textbooks for free, what's stopping us from getting a free diploma? The greed of the universities forces us to pay tens of thousands for simple proof. Ugh.
I appreciate the open-ness, but good god, it needs a writer who explains terms, gives real world examples, and doesn't assume that the reader is of a certain education.
I could see this being far more useful if you could choose skill levels, or progressively longer intros to the subject at hand. Maybe a drooling idiot mode just for me.
Entertain as you educate! Get people engrossed in what you are showing (not telling) them and they'll find themselves learning in spite of themselves.
Hell, this makes MAN pages seem like Neal Stephenson wrote them.
It's called 'Physics Handbook' (well, in spanish :P), from MIR Editors. The notation was a little different than the usual, but if you have one of Landau's books, you should have no problem. The funny thing is that the books were available to us under the right-wing dictatorship we lived at that time ("they're SOVIET books, it's just communist propaganda"), and they were unbelieveably cheap (it is more expensive to photocopy the book). Dover books seem expensive in comparison.
I don't know if there was such a thing as a copyright in Soviet Russia (can somebody shed some light on this?), but I agree with the parent poster: it would be a really Good Thing(TM) to have these books around again: maybe reedited in dead-tree form by some editor, maybe an online version...
In American English, it's "math."
In British English, it's "maths."
Does this help?
Nyekulturniy... Proudly confusing readers and editors since 1981!
I'm your average college kid. When I go to the Wikipedia website, I type in what I want to search for. When I follow the link for this, I have no idea what the hell I'm supposed to do. I don't know what CVS is.
This needs to get more useful.
Is use of the plural term "maths" a Britishism? I have never heard it in America but see it all the time on the Internet.
The only time we would use the plural, maths, is in reference to several types of math: "Geometry, Algebra, and Calculus are all maths," or something like that. But everyone from anywhere else seems to speak as if the word must be plural when it refers to the general educational subject of math. Can anyone explain this for me?
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
In my mind, there's no such thing as a "learning subject". Learning a subject (to me), is learning the methods to solve problems in that subject. History (in high school) which was pure memorization and rehashing of stuff, wasn't learning. Math was learning (inductive proofs, indirect proofs (proof by contradiction aka reductio ad absurdum), proof by infinite descent, etc.) b/c I learned techniques. To me, too much of school has become preparation for exams. I asked a question in an optimization course at Princeton and the response I got was (you don't have to know that for the final, so don't worry about it). REFORM SCHOOL TO ACTUALLY TEACH US WAYS TO THINK AND APPROACH PROBLEMS not to memorize facts/methods.
While it does mention that most of the entries so far are mathematical, it doesn't seem to specify what other subjects it will eventually seek to encompass. Based on the current style and layout, I would guess it is leaning toward the sciences. Some subjects that might be worth adding: chemistry, physics and biology.
From what I can see, this is intended to be more of a textbook style as opposed to a comprehensive dictionary/encyclopedia style. A textbook is far more focused on a progressive curve of information used to teach someone a subject. Wikipedia is an excellent resource for getting a broad view of a topic, but does not necessarily render it in an instructive form. To make that clearer, looking up Algebra in wikipedia will define what algebra is, what several fields of algebra encompass and give some broad examples of each. However, it does not provide sections to learn from - one building on the next. Meanwhile, this textbook doesn't bother telling us what algebra is, but jumps right into an algebraic equation. It is too incomplete as of yet to say whether it will accomplish the goal of being a textbook. But it is not a direct competitor to wikipedia -- at most, it would make a fine complement.
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
Last semester I was really strapped for cash and decided not to buy any textbooks. I found out that I dident really need them anyway. When I did I borrowed from people in my dorm. Thats a little piece of info "they" dont want you to know about. Hurray for saving like 400$.
Geek Code Version 3.0 GSS d? s++
Why not assume that experts in the field are or will eventually become part of the contributors group?
Also, the hard part of writing a technical book is the research involved. It's unlikely you can find a professor who can write a book without consulting other sources.
Contributors could include experts in particular areas - those would do the research part.
Other contributors could include professors and since the research part would be over with then they could take care of the putting the stuff together part.
"Hey! I can't get this to work!"
"What does this error message mean??"
"Ah! Finally!! It works. Now I just have to print out the--what the?!? Wait a minute! What's CUPS?!?"
testing out my trending skills
It's a shame too, because history is a fascinating subject, especially when you get a bit of a debate going about it.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
testing out my trending skills
There is a serious flaw in this concept. Textbooks are a very big industry. They are expensive for a reason: a captive audience can't dictate prices. For anyone who has done undergrad, just look at the way students are fleeced for textbooks. Sure most universities have a used text book store/system to help recoop the cost of that book you will only use once. However the text book manufacturers also have a system to deal with this. Every couple of years (shorter in some cases) there is a "major revision" But if you look closely, there is really not very much new info on shakespeare, or stress strain curves, or the various branches of math, humanities, etc. What is different is that all the chapters are routinely scrambled, and much effort is made into putting the same info on very different pages. This does not make used texts obsolete, but it makes them unuseable. Another growing trend is professors self publishing (usually kinko's) what can be called "course kits". In these kits anything goes, public domain material, licenced material (usually obscure, and cheap to get), to the profs actually writing some thing themselves. At that level students are relatively helpless against these practices, and it is unlikeley that any institutions will give up such a cash cow and embrace public domain work. In fact there is often resistance to the use of works already in the public domain, by using the revision method for textbooks. On the other side of the tracks are elementary and secondary institutions. These are usually govt run, and can hire someone to write their books, or buy them on a large enough scale as to have fair prices with publishers. It is really too bad, since free, and public domain creativity will always benefit and strengthen any culture that allows it.
I am, (and have been for almost a year now) leading a small project that is creating a whole series of open textbooks. The topic of our textbooks is circus arts, but it seems that the same principals that are making my project sucessful would apply to most other topics as well.
First, I took the time to develop a format and methodology that would both work for any of the skills involved, and that could be implimented by ANYONE with a little learning.
Second, I wrote the first textbook using this method. After all, how could I expect others to use the system if I could not?
Third, I outlined and otherwise documented my system in a way others could use. This includes writing a new liceance, AND requiering that derivitives be signed back over to the project.
Forth, I taught the system to a few others. We are now meeting weekly, with each author working on writing for their individual strengths, and the classes they teach. We will be in this step at least over the summer, perhaps for a full year.
The next steps we forsee in our very long process are (in no particular order):
- teaching the methods to more textbook developers
- Training editors to help keep a consistiant feel throughout the various skills, and books
- Teaching textbook developers to reuse other skills where appropreate (aka reuse code from another textbook)
- Teaching developers to expand there own art by incorperating simmilar skills from other arts.
- Finish developing the new database system that will move the entire thing online.
- Turn the resulting textbooks into industry standards
(if you want more information on this project, please feel free to contact me off list.)
It's a lot of work to make such a project a sucess. Much more than I think most people understand. I wish them luck, but I also hope they find a better methodology than they are using.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
A good open source Applied Math text.
I had a looka t this and being a maths graduate as of 2 weeks on wednesday I can say it looks pretty useless. A list of definitions isn't what makes a good textbook, what is needed is good worked examples and a sensible set of excercises which can demonstrate how to use the definitions in various contexts. Devoting 4 pages to calculus just really won't cut it, even first year maths undergrads generally buy a copy of Adams which is a book on calculus which is A4 sized and some 600-700 pages in length. That doesnt really go into multivariate calculus either.
:)
Making a textbook i imagine must be hard work, putting together the necesary set of examples and excercises as well as adding a little verbosity to make the definitions, theorems and proofs a little more understandable will probably take months or even years even for an experienced maths graduate.
I guess thats why only maths professors find the time to do it
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this post is too small to contain.
If they want to toss together a bunch of math definitions, they should be more honest that they are just creating a reference. Yet PlanetMath is already doing this, with the Free Encyclopedia of Mathematics.
In general a textbook requires a high degree of cohesion and singular vision; this may not be compatible with a commons-based project style at all.
I'm of the opinion that invoking the Creative Commons' "noncommercial" clause is a bad idea. If you really want to get this book into the hands of the widest audience, why not allow third parties to print them out, market them, and sell them for money? So long as the sharealike clause exists, there's no danger of the material getting hijacked.
I'm guessing a wide variety of printers would converge around a set of quality books. Some might target readers who will pay a premium for a hardbound book, with color, on good paper. Others will print crappy, disposable versions of the same books. By requiring non-commerciality, it seems a lot of effort would be wasted, as teachers all go to Kinkos to make batches of thirty books at a time.
Revoking the non-commercial clause would just make things more convenient for the users. Is there some advantage that I'm missing?
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
There is an extensive listing (with ratings) of free books at . This listing is administered by Ben Crowell a physics prof out in California who has some texts available at with an open source license. Some of the other listed books are free of cost but not open source. His "Light and Matter" physics series is "an introductory physics textbook for life-science students" available in PDF as well as some sections in LaTeX format. His "Simple Nature" text is "a physics textbook intended for students in a three-semester introductory calculus-based course. It's free in digital form, but is not yet available in print." This complete text is available in PDF as well as LaTeX format. There is also "Discover Physics" which is "a conceptual physics textbook intended for students in a nonmathematical one-semester general-education course." There is also a text by Raymond (also free as in speech) called "A Radically Modern Approach to Introductory Physics" from in LaTeX format.
- - http://www.opensourcetext.org - -
has been collaborating with Wikipedia on a K-12 (public high school) World History project. The project is based on California State Board of Education Framework standards.
The idea is to create a pilot basd on strict curriculum framework adherence, as this is the **only** way to get **any** state board of education to approve the end product for local school district use.
I would encourage anyone who is expert in World History to contribute to this project here
- - http://wikibooks.org/wiki/World_History_Project_-_ Contents - -
The goal of this project is to prove the concept. Once that's done, may other curriculum areas can be constructed - including those that deviate from curriculum frameworks.
A further goal is to have the resulting files generate a 'print-on-demand' file because the end product should be a printed text.
COSTP has shown that the cost of an open source K-12 (printed)textbook (hardcover)is 40-50% cheaper than K-12 textbooks published and distributed by commercial publishers.
Lastly, if you want to contribute content to the project, please contribute *only* your own (original)work. Content that is already copyrighted is not welcome/ We want to show State Boards of Education that open source textbook publishing can save the states - collectively - *billions* of dollars. e.g. California spends $400M+ every year on K-12 textbooks, with prices having risen at three times the rate of inflation since 1992.
COSTP is an official collaborator with Creative Commons, and was a recent participant in forging the Creative Commons educationsal license.
Also, we hope n the future to work with the Connexions Project
http://cnx.rice.edu/
at Rice University, to get further tests piloted.
"However, most of the material, as of now, appears half-ass written, with very little content and poor explanations."
I recommend lots and lots of copy and pasting from all those "expensive" textbooks. They come with everything checked, and rechecked. Examples, and diagrams. Even people who's credentials you can check. I'm certain no one will mind.
(COSTP) - The California Open Source Textbook Project has been collaborating with Wikipedia on a K-12 (public high school) World History project. The project is based on California State Board of Education Framework standards.
The idea is to create a pilot basd on strict curriculum framework adherence, as this is the **only** way to get **any** state board of education to approve the end product for local school district use.
I would encourage anyone who is expert in World History to contribute to this project here Wikipedia World History Project
The goal of this project is to prove the concept. Once that's done, may other curriculum areas can be constructed - including those that deviate from curriculum frameworks.
A further goal is to have the resulting files generate a 'print-on-demand' file because the end product should be a printed text.
COSTP has shown that the cost of an open source K-12 (printed)textbook (hardcover)is 40-50% cheaper than K-12 textbooks published and distributed by commercial publishers.
Lastly, if you want to contribute content to the project, please contribute *only* your own (original)work. Content that is already copyrighted is not welcome/ We want to show State Boards of Education that open source textbook publishing can save the states - collectively - *billions* of dollars. e.g. California spends $400M+ every year on K-12 textbooks, with prices having risen at three times the rate of inflation since 1992.
COSTP is an official collaborator with Creative Commons, and was a recent participant in forging the Creative Commons educational license. Also, we hope in the future to work with the Connexions Project at Rice University, to get further tests piloted.
"The thought of doing something worthwile is a bigger motivator than money for a lot of people."
I'm donating all my organs to the Open Source cause.
Tanenbaum's books are arduous journeys of beating around the bush. I know the guy is intelligent, but his writing style is too long-winded. See the most recent edition of his networking book as an example. However, when tempered by a coauthor, it seems to not get too out of hand -- see the distributed systems book.
Can't we just set up a foundation to buy the rights to existing books, and then release them into the public domain?
.sig
Or if we really need a new book, why not create them using the same methods we use now, but paid for by that textbooks-to-public-domain foundation?
-- not a
A fundamental problem with the idea is that one of the virtues of a traditional text book is that is fixed and static. The teacher becomes familiar with the content of "Smart and Barmey, Advanced Calculus, Second Edition" and uses it to support their teaching strategy.
The open textbook, being a continually developing resource, is going to be much harder to use as a teaching aid. How do you choose which day's edition to focus on? How much confusion will be caused when students print their own copies with different versions of the content?
And, if you produce one official version each year, how many people are going to take time to contribute information that may not even make the next cut when they could drop it straight into the flowing stream of knowledge on the wikipedia site instead?
It's a nice idea but I'm not sure it pays enough attention to the paradigms it rides roughshod across!
Wulf
Soundcheck Poem: 1 2 was a racehorse and 1 1 was 1 2. 1 2 1 1 race and 1 1 1 1 2.
Everyone knows Math ith a Roman Catholic Thervith.
> Writing a book is an art - just like technical writing is. That's one reason the documentation in OSS projects is seldom at par with documentation written by professional technical/document writers.
PROVE IT! I think you've severely overestimated the quality of professionally written technical documentation. For example, why are there supplemental books for software that already comes with manuals and on-line help?
If you had said "OSS projects are seldom at par with source code written by professional programmers", you would have been flamed to a crisp. What does receiving money for something have to do with the quality of one's work anyway? Someone needs to stand up for hard-working, unpaid documentation volunteers!
I just looked at the patent and (actually my first time reading over a patent)..Man!! thats IT!!??
It's just an idea written out in long form. I get dozens of those "ideas" in a day..I had no idea that you could patent an idea without actually building something. To think that an initial investment in some time and money for a patent could get me 15 mil, 15 years down the road... it almost seems worth it!
IANAL, but I will blab about this anyway.
It is not currently possible to move FDL text to any CC license. It is, however, possible to move text under some CC licenses to the FDL (such as the CC-by license which only requires attribution) but oddly not from CC's own copyleft license, the CC-by-sa (attribution share-alike). This has been a major issue at Wikibooks and its older sister project Wikipedia.
CC founder Larry Lessig has recently been elected to the FSF's board of directors. Lessig, RMS and Wikimedia Foundation chairmen Jimmy Wales have informally talked about making changes to the FDL and CC-by/sa in order to make them compatible (invariant section-hindered FDL text would not be compatible) and wish to extend the dialogue. So there seems to be at least some indication that future versions of CC's and FSF's copyleft documentation licenses will be made compatible for all invariant-section-free text under either the FDL or the CC-by/sa (all Wikipedia and Wikibooks content is invariant section free).
-- mav
.. if they could be liberated.
:-) )
Which is a mighty big 'if'.. Those books were copyrighted, even if ownership is now unclear. Given how the economic situation is in Russia at the moment, they are very unlikely to give anything away.
(Recently, a fight broke out over the rights to the classic Soviet childrens-show Cheburashka, which recently had become big in Japan (!))
Also, the best of these textbooks were republished in the west, such as Landau-Lifshitz "Course of Theoretical Physics", which is still in print.
(Not that Landau-Lifshitz is that good either.. Let's just say that translating it didn't do much.
"which contains the introduction to the project and 9 chapters mostly covering math at this time."
:) who would want to read a book about math other then geeks? :)
that said it all
My Gawd WTF...
> From the textbook: "It's not that hard to get started learning it [Tex], and we can snicker at DocBook."
Just wait until they grow more than 700 pages! The tetex package that comes with most Linux distros can't handle it. Trust me, I've hacked tetex to handle large documents.
Those of us who use DocBook reserve the right to snicker at their project... I want to point and laugh and say "I told you so." It's also humorous that their PDF lacks bookmarks.
``if they could be liberated.''
I've always thought materials produced in the USSR did not fall under copyright. Am I wrong?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.