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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."
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.
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
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++
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).
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
"Apparently, they intend to publish something on paper. That costs money."
:) But I'm just talking about getting a book into print. Not much to it.
Not much. You can get a book published and on Amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, and the other internet bookstores for under $500, assuming you have all of the talent to produce the content. Basically, all you _have_ to have are ISBN's ($350 for 10, I think) and a lightningsource.com account ($150 per ISBN), and everything is taken care of. Well, you need to promote it
Actually, if you don't care about which distribution channels you go through, you can do it through CafePress.com for free (they don't care if you don't have an ISBN).
Engineering and the Ultimate
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
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...
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