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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."
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.
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!
I read the beginning of it, and it looks like the book will be divided into sections by subject (so I guess you can think of it as a set of books?). The style at the moment reads more like lecture notes than an instructional text (in fact, the formatting and writing style is almost exactly like lecture notes from the CS department at school ...). From reading the section on elementary algebra, I strongly doubt that I could have picked up how to do stuff simply by reading (I guess that's where your educational professional comes in). Its got a bit of a way to go before I would compare it to textbooks I've actually used for those topics.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
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.
How much money was behind Dr. Johnson's dictionary, and how many volunteers did it take to produce it?
Not every project can be improved by increasing the budget and the manpower.
Some of them are distinctly degrades by it.
When it comes to textbooks only the quality of minds is an issue, not their quantity.
KFG
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...
Unfortunately, thinking that one is doing something worthwhile does not mean that one is actually doing anything worthwhile.
Pity.
But I do find it bizarre that anyone would start a new project when wikibooks already exists. Really can't see how competition is good in this case. Maybe these guys don't like the wiki model. Good luck finding authors if they want everyone to use subversion. Not everyone is a programmer! Also notice they're using CC-BY-NC-SA where NC is non-commercial; definitely incompatible with GFDL. Even co-operation at a later stage with wikibooks would prove difficult.
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
Good point. Seems that some of the 'purer' subjects wouldn't suffer so much from this effect - and I noted that they've started with math, which seems appropriate.
Suppose they move on to physics, mechanics, earth science, biology, physiology, psychology, philosophy, comparative religion, etc., - will every successively more 'debatable' subject be more fractious and harder to edit?
My other big question, that ties into this somewhat, is, "So they've got a textbook. Who's gonna use it?" (*feverishly clicks and R's a bit of TFA, fails to see any mention of the aims of the project*)
If it's really a "textbook," I'd presume a goal would be to have schools adopt it. My reflexive response to this is, GOOD - this process has gotta produce a better textbook than many of the hobbled, dumbed-down, error-ridden, poorly-written, BORING, watered-down-to-not-offend-any-political-stance excuses for instruction I was subjected to in grade- and high-school.
Which brings me back to the first thoughts, on the subjects that might be covered. It seems that those subjects most, uh, subject to wildly varying, uh, subjective viewpoints/beliefs would be MOST instructive if actual proponents of each (or a representative sample) viewpoint were to do their best at writing their own material, and then an honest, objective group of editors take the results and hone them into something actually INFORMATIVE about each viewpoint, weeding out the hidden agendas and subtle biases along the way.
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 can sell a copy of your contribution, if you want. Since you're the copyright holder on your work, you can do whatever you want with it, and they don't seem to be requiring copyright assignment. Sure, you can't sell a book with everybody else's contributions in it as well, but that doesn't affect your use of your own work, and it means that nobody but you can sell a book with your contribution in it, either; you get the whole commercial market for your section, should you want to try to make money on it.
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.
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 think that the odds of actually doing something worthwhile is far far higher if you do something that you think is worthwhile.
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