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Teachers Write an Open Textbook In a Weekend Hackathon
linjaaho writes "A group of Finnish mathematics researchers, teachers and students write an upper secondary mathematics textbook in a three-day booksprint. The event started on Friday 28th September at 9:00 (GMT+3) and the book will be (hopefully) ready on Sunday evening. The book is written in Finnish. The result — LaTeX source code and the PDF — is published with open CC-BY-license. As far as the authors know, this is the first time a course textbook is written in three-day hackathon. The hackathon approach has been used earlier mainly for coding open source software and writing manuals for open source software. The progress can be followed by visiting the repository at GitHub or the project Facebook page."
I think the basis for his complaints were that the people writing the books didn't know the field they were writing about. In this case the people behind the project are graduate students in math, one professor, a few Ph.D's and some teachers. I would guess that the problems with quality will not be of the type Feynman was complaining about, rather problems might occur with explanations that aren't detailed enough or lack the polish that inevitably follows from a project like this. However, if they put up a mailing list for the project and start incrementally improving it, I'm sure it will surpass in quality the commercially available texts in Finland. Especially, if someone actually teaches a class based on the book, asks feeback from students (e.g. what should be explained better), and uses the experience to improve the presentation.
Since they want something open, the ideal thing would most probably be to have a discussion forum for the book, where students could ask questions. This would give tons of data that can be used for improvement. It would also make the data public, further encouraging contributions from the public. It would also benefit the students that have to live with the beta versions.
I hate reviewing LaTeX documents, as the software doesn't come with any revisioning/collaboration tools to speak of. Word, on the other hand, PITA though it may be, comes with very good tools via track changes and comments. Not revisioning in the sense of version control, but in the sense of what most people actually need for document editing. For an open textbook a VCS would work great, but it's overkill for smaller, article-length papers.