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."

Comments

Light and Matter

[VincenzoRomano]

Why reinventing warm water?
Go to Light and Matter for a high quality book set about physics.
By the way, CK-12,org already has one.

Umm, yeah

[edremy]

Laugh while you can, but I weep for the future of textbooks. They're approved by committees that know little to nothing about the topic and are happy to grind an axe for their point of view. See Dover v. Kitzmiller for a detailed example- the leading "Intelligent Design" textbook they wanted to use is quite literally an older creationism textbook with a search and replace s/creationism/intelligent design/

Having lived in Lynchburg for a number of years, there are plenty of folks there who would demand removal of all sorts of things such as the true age of the universe if they had any input at all into the process. If instead it was written by experts, they'd be complaining to their representative about the state spending money on teaching atheism.

Re:others already exist

[Red Flayer]

The advantage of the book over wikipedia is a cohesive structure, consistency, and progression of complexity. You'll lose a lot of that by having different people write different chapters.

A lot of high-level college textbooks have chapters written by different people. Typically by experts in the subjects covered in those chapters. This is why high-level textbooks are referred to by the names of their editors, not so much the authors.

So, I'm not sure if there is any particular drawback to distributing authorsip for an "open" textbook.

What I do like (other than the creative commons-style licensing) is that it seems there will be much greater oppportunity for community editing. This, if done properly, could result in greater readability and usefulness of the text.

Re:OSS Textbooks kick serious...

[jbeaupre]

In the state my wife teaches in (un-named to avoid literacy jokes), there is the approved book list. Schools can buy off-list, but have to forgo state funds. Which is what her school did.