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.
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.
Is by "book" you mean "Playboy scans", then yes, yes, they will.
"An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program."
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.
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++
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...
Of course, there is the occasional janitor who just intuitively knows very complex math. Geez... Haven't you seen Good Will Hunting?
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.
The introduction to the text explains all of this; it's written in TeX (PDF is just used as a common publishing format) with the graphics rendered via gnuplot or as an .eps file; it sounds like they're making it a priority to stick to free, open, commonly available formats and protocols (no Mathematica plots for instance).
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.
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
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
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
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 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.
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.
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.
There is an extensive listing (with ratings) of free books at http://www.theassayer.org/. This listing is administered by Ben Crowell a physics prof out in California who has some physics texts available at http://www.lightandmatter.com/ 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 http://kestrel.nmt.edu/~raymond/teaching.html 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.