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.
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?
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.
Well wikipedia seem to be quite good at countering those sort of trolls since the number of sane contributers outweigh the trolls so much so that the trolls end up not bothering. BTW, whoever modded the parent 'troll' obviously didn't read it very carefully.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
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.
I couldn't agree more. As an English major, reading much of the documentation out there is hard enough. I can't imagine what will happen when people try to form a cohesive book. I guess I will just have to, instead of sitting in fear and bitching, actually contribute the skills I have learned in school. Hopefully there are other writers/editors out there who will do the same.
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.
Hell, how about the differing requirements of (let's say) Texas and New York educators. Both states have very stringent (believe it or not) well-defined standards, such that textbook companies cater and fawn over them, making special Texas-only editions of their textbooks and the like. The same holds true for any other reasonably wealthy, populous state (CA, anyone?).
/educator in Texas.
On the otherhand, this kind of project could be great for states without much political, economic, social, etc. clout (MT, WY, WV, etc.) to get text books that weren't made with other state curricula in mind.
my pet machine
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.
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.
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.
Before someone can submit, they must 'digitally sign' (read: click an [I Agree] button) a statement stating that what they are posting is their own original material, fully licensed under the CPL, etc. etc. That's how you prevent lawsuits: put the liablility in the poster's hands. That also shows any judge that you made an effort to prevent copyright infringement.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
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
"Good point. How is this going to be useful to educators who frequently have to follow a specific strict syllabus? And as for teaching English, how are they going to handle the differing requirements of British and American teachers? It'll be an interesting one to watch."
Many years ago I worked for a textbook company. No textbook, save one written by the professor, follows the syllabus exactly, nor does it meet the requirements of every state and local government. For example, a social sciences textbook that would sell in California would be rejected by Texas--and there are the two biggest states!
One of the goals is not to replace the textbook model of today, but to provide excellent, low-cost or no-cost books in places where textbooks are mindbogglingly expensive--and I don't mean at the student union bookstore as much as I mean Third World nations, where the average income is much lower.
A factor many posters overlook is that there need not be one textbook for any subject. For example, an English grammar could be published in English dialect or American dialect (or Indian English, or Strine...) Currently, I see there are several different levels of physics textbook in the Wikibooks project.
In addition to textbooks to meet different audiences, textbooks can be aimed at different grade levels, such as middle school (Just ignore this book and concentrate on the boy/girl in the row in front of you...), high school, introductory college course, and up.
I haven't contributed yet to Wikibooks--but I will.
Nyekulturniy... Proudly confusing readers and editors since 1981!
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 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.
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.
They put it under the non-commerical varient? That strikes me as a bit boneheaded. They should have used the by-sa which allows commerical use. There's quite a bit of money to be made selling hard copys of the text- not many people want to read hundreds of pages of text of a computer screen. Those interested in this project might be better off looking at the California Open Source Textbook Project. http://www.opensourcetext.org However, last I checked, the site was down, and it didn't look like much had been done. Maybe someone should do Yet Another Open Source Textbook?
I think it's too restrictive as well. I've read some 40 pages of the German WikiReader Internet by now, and, while it's certainly not perfect yet, it's definitely a fine thing, and I hope it's going to be a success. Many people prefer printed books over Internet content, and a non-commercial license pretty much prohibits printing - unless you would give the books away for free (think about the costs). What matters IMO is that the content is free-as-in-speech, and not the idea that nobody can make any profit based on it. You even have to publish the GNU FDL in any book that uses this content, so if you would overcharge people for free content, they would easily find out.
I love C++