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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.
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
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.