Slashdot Mirror
Virginia Begins Open-Source Physics Textbook
eldavojohn writes "The Commonwealth of Virginia has issued a request for contributions to an open source physics textbook (or 'flexbook' they termed it). They are partnering with CK-12 to make this educational textbook under the Creative Commons by Attribution Share-Alike license."
Ass, but www.textbooktorrents.com saved me a bunch of money.
Why pay for rev.2 and rev.3 when you bought rev.1 and are getting reamed by changed question numbers?
I saved my friends about 2k$ this semester from what I found there.
Open source? What could that possibly have to do with a textbook? Is it compiled? Why don't they just say: Virginia Begins Creative-Commons Physics Textbook
Indeed, there are a lot of similar efforts out there. Hopefully they will use some of the existing sources. Take a at The Assayer and other site like Open Textbook to get an idea of some of the great things already being done in this area.
Preventive War is like committing suicide for fear of death. - Otto Von Bismarck
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/about/about/index.htm
In the late 1960s, I was taught high-school physics from the PSSC (Physical Science Study Committee) Physics textbook. The curriculum and textbook were put together by an NSF-convened panel. All the curriculum materials (textbook, supplementary readings, teacher's guides, experimental equipment) were made freely available. I still have two copies of the textbook produced by different publishers and with different covers but identical inside.
Although it was demonstrably superior to other physics curricula, the PSSC program was ultimately a failure because publishers, who couldn't make much money selling the PSSC textbook due to competition, eventually dropped the book and pushed hard to get their proprietary, therefore more heavily marked-up, textbooks adopted by school boards.
-Tom Duff
Indeed. They should take advantage of the open-source textbooks that already exist... either by simply selecting one for their purposes, or putting together the best pieces from various sources into a coherent textbook that serves their purposes. Here are the open-source textbook (or related information) sites I'm aware of:
Pointers to Textbooks and Content:
http://textbookrevolution.org/
http://www.opentextbook.org/
http://www.theassayer.org/
http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/
http://globaltext.terry.uga.edu/
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Books
Some available lecture notes:
http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html
http://www.phys.uu.nl/~thooft/theorist.html#languages
http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/
You RIAA brain washed dupe.
Theft is "the illegal taking of another person's property without that person's freely-given consent." Your example is theft.
Copyright violation is "the unauthorized use of material that is covered by copyright law, in a manner that violates one of the copyright owner's exclusive rights, such as the right to reproduce or perform the copyrighted work, or to make derivative works." What CC suggests is most likely copyright violation, but that depends on the terms the book is released under.
THEY ARE NOT THE SAME.
Please stop modding idiocy like this as Insightful. It isn't. You're doing the RIAA's work for them when you allow their twisted definitions to gain mainstream acceptance.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Only this weekend I hear on NPR a professor in California wrote a Chemistry book and released it under CC license. He felt the chem books available were too expensive, generic, and with just pretty pictures.
Calculus gives you the power to forget special case solutions and derive as needed in a lot of cases, which is pretty damned awesome.
But it's beyond the scope of a basic physics class. You already know that the laws of physics are true, that the world can be explained by math. Kids in high school don't know that. This is the most important things kids learn in high school physics.
I found this article the other day, I think you should read it.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
No sir, Mel Brooks was originally slated to deliver 15 commandments.
Today is red jello day - all workers must eat all of their red jello. Failure to comply will result in five demerits.
Thanks for the plug for Light and Matter -- I'm the author :-)
Their licensing scheme (CC-BY-SA) is compatible with mine (dual license, GFDL and CC-BY-SA), so if they want to adapt some of my materials, they can do that. My books are aimed at college classes, but I do have quite a few high school users. The problem with public high schools is that they usually have highly bureaucratic processes dictated by the state for selecting textbooks. (E.g., they want a sales rep from a big publisher to hold their hand and show them that the state standards say to cover Newton's first, second, and third laws, and -- lo and behold! -- their book covers Newton's first, second, and third laws. Some states also have rules about physical quality, etc.) For this reason, almost all of my adoptions from high schools have been from non-public schools, mainly Catholic schools.
Find free books.