Global Text Project – Wiki Textbooks

Grooves writes, "A new initiative spearheaded by a University of Georgia professor aims to produce a library of 1,000 wiki textbooks by tapping the collaborative power of wiki. Inspiration for the project came from a computer science course that wrote its own textbook on XML when no suitable commercial offerings were available. From the article: 'The Global Text Project will work a bit differently from most wikis. Each chapter of each book will be overseen by an academic with knowledge of that field. Although the site will allow anyone to make changes, these will not become "official" until an editor signs off on them.' Textbooks free as in speech, and beer? Sign me up."

Comments

Good

[PrinceAshitaka]

I am looing forward to this. While MIT's attempts to open up thier classes on the internet seemed novel, it was not the resource I was hoping it would be. I was hoping it would be a good reference place when I needed to remember something from my college days as all my textbooks from college are buried in storage. This shows promise but I will reserve my judgement for it's usefullness for now.

Re:Its been done

[legoburner]

The reason nobody has heard of it is probably the evil college bookstore cartel. They will break your hands with hammers if they find out you have been using free textbooks instead of the ones they sell. Not to mention what happens to professors that dont require a textbook which costs at least $50 for a course... let's just say they are not usually teaching by the summer semester.

Teacher-specific Version Control

[G4from128k]

I would hope that this wiki would have tools to let a teacher "lock-in" a version of the text for use during the term. It would be frustrating to discover that midway through the term that the wiki changed material in some chapter -- adding material the teacher had not plan to cover or removing material that they had. I could even see some teachers preferring to retain a particular version of the text for a couple of years if they had invested heavily in teaching plans that were specific to that version.

The ultimate tool would let teachers mix and match chapters -- picking different versions from different years to suit their tastes.

The point is that once a wiki transitions from casual/random access (e.g. wikipedia) to one of methodical use, then the user needs more say in versions or some way to retain their favored version.

Finished Goods.

[twitter]

how would you reference the texts? Would the editors have finalized 'editions' that go into an uneditable archive mode, and only the 'latest' editions are wiki-able?

Yes. Wikibooks makes PDFs for "completed" texts.

That would at least be managable from a referencing point of view, but would detract a bit of the credibility from the 'work in progress' copies.

If only dead tree publishers had that kind of credibility for text books. The rate of minor and meaningless changes to create new "editions" is outrageous. I'm looking forward to wikibooks being an island of stability in the academic publishing world.

Re:Its been done

[The Spoonman]

As others have pointed out, you are the exception, rather than the norm. I believe you might even find you're the exception at RIT, too. While I attended UR, I had many friends at RIT who shared similar circumstances. Specifically, we had professors who insisted on specific versions of books only. The next to worst were those who didn't let you know what the requirements were until the first class, so in most cases you had to RUN to the bookstore after class in hopes of catching one of the few used books that were available. The worst, for whom I reserve a special place in hell, are those who insisted you purchase THEIR book....and then it wasn't used in the class.