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."

Comments

First Page!

[Gothmolly]

And other posts, trolls, and crapfloods will make the editing of such a text a continual headache.

Re:First Page!

[lukewarmfusion]

Bad moderation alert!

The parent post isn't off-topic; if you open a project up to public input and contribution, you'll also be open to those that want to contribute worthlessness.

The most dangerous thing I can think of is a user contributing materials that they don't have the right to use. A solid lawsuit might knock the entire project off its feet.

Most trolls or crapfloods can be easily found and deleted, but someone who contributes useful (but illegally used) information might never be detected. How do you account for such users and posts?

The books should have some focus

[suso]

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.

Re:What's the exact difference..

[nyekulturniy]

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.

Re:A little vague?

[TheGavster]

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.

Textbooks are a recompilation of research papers

[GillBates0]

with added insight, examples, explanations and suitable dumbing down for the intended audience of the book.

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.

Re:What's the exact difference..

[fiannaFailMan]

For people like me, the only way to learn math is to do math.

That's the only way anyone can learn maths. It's not a 'learning' subject, it's a 'doing' subject.