Collaborative Online Textbook Project 192
rocketjam writes "OpenTextBook.org is a new project to create a free, open text book 'collaboratively written by anyone on the internet', using a Creative Commons license. Citing the free software development model and the philosophy that underlies much of that effort, OpenTextBook.org's introduction says this philosophy should apply 'at its most basic to the learning of science.' They hope the project will help to counter the current governmental trend of strengthening the scope, duration and rights of intellectual property owners while cutting back on the fair use rights of individuals. The current state of the project is available as a daily snapshot pdf file which contains the introduction to the project and 9 chapters mostly covering math at this time."
WikkiBooks (Score:5, Interesting)
Are the two licenses incompatable, or are they just trying to start a competing product? This is a serious question, I've not read the details of either license, and I think competition is good for all involved.
On the other hand, if the licenses are compatable, why not borrow (attributed of course) material back and forth between the two.
It certainly seems (by looking at the two sites) that WikiBooks are quite a bit further along in the game.
Re:WikkiBooks (Score:3, Informative)
Re:WikkiBooks (Score:5, Interesting)
The thought of doing something worthwile is a bigger motivator than money for a lot of people.
Re:WikkiBooks (Score:2, Insightful)
Pity.
Re:WikkiBooks (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:WikkiBooks (Score:3, Insightful)
Not every project can be improved by increasing the budget and the manpower.
Some of them are distinctly degrades by it.
When it comes to textbooks only the quality of minds is an issue, not their quantity.
KFG
Re:WikkiBooks (Score:2)
Re:WikkiBooks (Score:2, Interesting)
It has been going for nearly a year now, plus it has the link with wikipedia which means a plentiful supply of editors, so it's bound to be further along in the game
Re:WikkiBooks (Score:3, Informative)
If OTB.org is usi
Licenses are incompatible (Score:5, Informative)
The given Creative Commons license prohibits commercial usage of the material. The GNU FDL permits it - for example, the German Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] is now selling printed copies of its first WikiReader [wikipedia.org] book. This makes it impossible to import OpenTextBook content into Wikipedia.
The other way round, the GNU FDL requires that all derivative works permit commercial usage as well, which makes it impossible to put WikiBooks content into OpenTextBook (copyleft [wikipedia.org]). Fair use would be an exception.
Re:Licenses are incompatible (Score:3, Interesting)
I think it's too restrictive as well. I've read some 40 pages of the German WikiReader Internet by now, and, while it's certainly not perfect yet, it's definitely a fine thing, and I hope it's going to be a success. Ma
Re:WikkiBooks (Score:3, Informative)
That particular Creative Commons license totally bites. If I contribute to one of the books, I can't sell a copy of it when I'm done. Huh?
Re:WikkiBooks (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:WikkiBooks (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:WikkiBooks (Score:3, Informative)
First Page! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:First Page! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:First Page! (Score:2)
Or she has a sense of irony.
Re:First Page! (Score:3, Insightful)
The same constant editorial process that has improved Wikipedia will improve Wikibooks.
However, one needs a critical mass after which the editorial process becomes constant and from diversified views. As of now, the other Wikimedia projects haven't hit them. I'm still defining basic entries in the Wiktionary, for example.
Re:First Page! (Score:2)
The real problem with Wikipedia (and Wikibooks) is not dealing with petty vandalism
Re:First Page! (Score:5, Insightful)
The parent post isn't off-topic; if you open a project up to public input and contribution, you'll also be open to those that want to contribute worthlessness.
The most dangerous thing I can think of is a user contributing materials that they don't have the right to use. A solid lawsuit might knock the entire project off its feet.
Most trolls or crapfloods can be easily found and deleted, but someone who contributes useful (but illegally used) information might never be detected. How do you account for such users and posts?
Re:First Page! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:First Page! (Score:2)
i can see it now (Score:4, Funny)
Wikimedia's Wikibooks (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wikimedia's Wikibooks are already doing this! (Score:3, Informative)
- - http://www.opensourcetext.org - -
has been collaborating with Wikipedia on a K-12 (public high school) World History project. The project is based on California State Board of Education Framework standards.
The idea is to create a pilot basd on strict curriculum framework adherence, as this is the **only** way to get **any** state board of education to approve the end product for local school district use.
I would encourage anyone who is expert
A little vague? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:A little vague? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:A little vague? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:A little vague? (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't even see how to turn what they have into a coherent book; I'd start from scratch sooner than I would build upon what's there.
Re:A little vague? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A little vague? (Score:2)
Your project is to write chapter 10. It should be about Philosophy.
The books should have some focus (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The books should have some focus (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The books should have some focus (Score:2)
Re:The books should have some focus (Score:3, Interesting)
On the otherhand, this kind of project could be great for states without much political, economic, social, etc. clout (MT, WY, WV, etc.) to
Re:The books should have some focus (Score:2)
Biology and anthropology section (Score:2)
Re:Biology and anthropology section (Score:2)
-Erwos
Re:Biology and anthropology section (Score:2)
Re:The books should have some focus (Score:2, Interesting)
Many years ago I worked for a textbook company. No textbook, save one written by the professor, follows the syllabus exactly, nor does it meet the requirements of every state and local government. For example, a social sciences textbook
Re:The books should have some focus (Score:2)
As it stands now, it seems to be wandering inefficie
At the end of the semester ... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:At the end of the semester ... (Score:3, Funny)
Oh no... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Oh no... (Score:5, Interesting)
We used a lot of course packets, too. They get expensive when they're hundreds of pages, so many profs began just giving us links to the articles and letting us print them ourselves if we wanted them on paper.
Our University Bookstore was outrageous; if you can buy elsewhere, do it!
Re:Oh no... (Score:2, Informative)
This is the student-owned-and-non-profit-organization-run bookstore at Queen's. Originally formed by the Engineering Society some 80-odd years ago to sell supplies to eng students, it is now the source of all textbooks sold NEW on campus.
Their prices are basically as low as they can go and still break even (non-profit). However, if you check out Amazon.com.uk and compare some prices there, you'll soon find that textbooks there are cheaper in some cases.
Why?
Because publishing compa
Re:Oh no... (Score:3, Informative)
Our University Bookstore was outrageous; if you can buy elsewhere, do it!
After spending nearly $400 on two semesters' worth of books at a community college, I got fed up and went online to see what I could find. I found that buying used books online almost *always* saved you money as compared to the exame same books (even used) at a college bookstore.
Although I hate to promote eBay and its ilk, sellers on half.com came in as the best bargain. You just have to order the books well in advance and well bef
Re:Oh no... (Score:2)
Re:Oh no... (Score:2, Offtopic)
Of course, my book isn't expensive. In fact, it's the least-expensive book on assembly language that is available (see my sig).
I doubt many professors would switch (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Oh no... (Score:3, Interesting)
Out of every dollar of a textbook sold, only about 13 cents goes to the author. The rest is distributed amongst printing/shipping/editing costs, profit to publisher, a cut to the retailer (often a college bookstore with high overhead), and so on.
If you do want to see change, let your prof know. Two of the math profs I've had at Berkeley are on board; one will write an open-source calculus text and the other is on public record in a local campaign for affordable textbooks.
Might be tricky... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Might be tricky... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Might be tricky... (Score:2)
Finally (Score:5, Funny)
Soviet Textbooks (Score:5, Interesting)
These texts can still be found occasionally in used-book stores. They would make an excellent basis for a library of Free texts, if they could be liberated.
I have one! (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know if there was such a thing as a copyright in Soviet Russia (can somebody shed some light on this?), but I agree with the parent poster: it would be a really Good Thing(TM) to have these books around again: maybe reedited in dead-tree form by some editor, maybe an online version...
Cohesion = 1/Authors (Score:4, Interesting)
At the same time, every truly great text book that I've read has come from a great author. That author has made each chapter build on the one before, and follow a similar form. In other words, buy the second or third chapter, you're starting to understand how the author thinks and writes, which helps you pick up the material faster. It will be more difficult to acheive the same flow - not impossible mind you (there are many good collaboratively written books) - but difficult.
Re:Cohesion = 1/Authors (Score:2, Insightful)
Good point. Seems that some of the 'purer' subjects wouldn't suffer so much from this effect - and I noted that they've started with math, which seems appropriate.
Suppose they move on to physics, mechanics, earth science, biology, physiology, psychology, philosophy, comparative religion, etc., - will every successively more 'debatable' subject be more fractious and harder to edit?
My other big question, that ties into this somewh
Re:Cohesion = 1/Authors (Score:2)
Textbook? (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems to me that the authors (or "project leaders," or whatever you want to call them) thought that an "open textbook" would be really cool, but failed to realize that just declaring something open doesn't make it write itself. They haven't even settled on a topic for the book!
Textbooks are a recompilation of research papers (Score:5, Insightful)
The best books are written (IMHO) by professors/instructors (AS Tanenbaum comes to mind) with ample experience in understanding the subject matter and explaining it effectively to potentially ignorant readers.
Writing a book is an art - just like technical writing is. That's one reason the documentation in OSS projects is seldom at par with documentation written by professional technical/document writers.
Anybody working towards contributed/open work is doing a Good (TM) thing, but I'm not sure the quality of books will be upto par with published books written by established authors. Note that I'm *not* questioning the intentions/knowledge/experience of the contributors - they may be the best in the field - but putting the knowledge down into words requires a certain amount of skill which I'm not sure many of them (us) possess.
Note that an encyclopedia (wikipedia) is different in this respect because it is essentially just a statement/collection of facts. Textbooks IMHO require more than a mere statement of facts.
Re:Textbooks are a recompilation of research paper (Score:2)
On the nature of books (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:On the nature of books (Score:4, Informative)
Not much. You can get a book published and on Amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, and the other internet bookstores for under $500, assuming you have all of the talent to produce the content. Basically, all you _have_ to have are ISBN's ($350 for 10, I think) and a lightningsource.com account ($150 per ISBN), and everything is taken care of. Well, you need to promote it
Actually, if you don't care about which distribution channels you go through, you can do it through CafePress.com for free (they don't care if you don't have an ISBN).
Credentials? (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm a college student and would probably just get the info from one of my own textbooks...
Anyone know.. (Score:2)
Re:Anyone know.. (Score:4, Informative)
Great if educators use them (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Overpriced and worthless
2. Overpriced
My first Fortran textbook, in 1975, read like a PhD dissertation and taught nothing about coding but cost a bundle. (I'm sure the author felt great pride that his book had been assigned.) The same trend has followed in almost every tech course I've taken, until recently--books seem to be getting better, more practical.
I've learned more from two weeks of Googling on some subjects than in entire college courses. Education has to change to accommodate new modes of learning, and open textbooks make sense. At least they introduce into the diploma-mill sensibility of college accreditation the egalitarian notion that ideas are what matter, not who wrote what.
Re:Great if educators use them (Score:3, Interesting)
They also change editions often to discourage re-using books. Often the new editions are slight changes to the actual text, and drastically revised problem sets so you have to have the book or access to them to get the correct problems.
Its hard enough... (Score:2)
This is not to say that i hope they stop, on the contrary, I hope they continue this work but that they start to focus on the details, rather t
I just read the first chapter (Score:2)
If I wanted another courier-font algebra book I's look in my granddad's attic (which is free too).
Target audience ? (Score:3, Insightful)
For example:
To make it useful for students new to calculus, it would be helpful to discuss limits _before_ defining the derivative.
To make it useful for students comfortable with calculus, there is less need for motivating the derivative, but there should be lots of easily referenced results.
Online dictionaries are very different since the target audience is more or less defined as the people who would need to look up the term
Shameless Plug (Score:5, Informative)
Both of these projects use the FDL.
-Peter
A couple of ideas: (Score:4, Interesting)
The reputation system should be based on PGP technology, so that the poster's claim to authorship is based on something of value, their pgp signature.
textbooks I've liked / learned from (Score:2, Interesting)
1) Math textbooks by John Saxon [saxonpublishers.com]. Few illustrations, but well written and helpful. As a genuine mathophobe, for me to like any math textbook is high praise. These are often used in home-schooling, while public schools get the books with more pictures and worse grammar
Free of textbook politics?! (Score:3, Insightful)
Currently, textbooks are written by commitee and have to be "acceptable to community standards".. IN EVERY COMMUNITY IN THE COUNTRY (being ethnocentric today, sorry folks.)
This causes textbooks to be written so incredibly bland and/or biased, that it makes them near-worthless.
I had a professor in college who was/is a fairly renowned individual on the "educational circuit." She would get invited to exorbatantly expensive and lavish dinner parties, by TEXTBOOK makers. Why? Because they wanted her to "support." The books. All they needed was her to say a single line of support, and they could put it on their textbook.
To her credit, she didnt cave, and watched what she said the entire night.
But it makes you think. The people who write these textbooks are not in it for the education of our youth, but for the high profit margins.
(Mostly middle/highschool textbooks, but still applicable.)
Free education? (Score:2)
Ugh. (Score:4, Insightful)
I appreciate the open-ness, but good god, it needs a writer who explains terms, gives real world examples, and doesn't assume that the reader is of a certain education.
I could see this being far more useful if you could choose skill levels, or progressively longer intros to the subject at hand. Maybe a drooling idiot mode just for me.
Entertain as you educate! Get people engrossed in what you are showing (not telling) them and they'll find themselves learning in spite of themselves.
Hell, this makes MAN pages seem like Neal Stephenson wrote them.
Re:Ugh. (Score:2)
I agree. The book is horrible. It's dry, clumsily organized, and seems to take a lot for granted.
I'm okay with the idea of assuming a certain level of understanding, so long as it's consistent. In fact, a book that tries to cover anything high-level without taking anything for granted quickly becomes useless. There's also weird advice, like the insistence that the student avoid memorizing the quadratic equation.
Th
maths (Score:2)
Is use of the plural term "maths" a Britishism? I have never heard it in America but see it all the time on the Internet.
The only time we would use the plural, maths, is in reference to several types of math: "Geometry, Algebra, and Calculus are all maths," or something like that. But everyone from anywhere else seems to speak as if the word must be plural when it refers to the general educational subject of math. Can anyone explain this for me?
Re:maths (Score:2)
Never mind; I got my own answer.
In case anyone was wondering, from Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]: Mathematics is often abbreviated to math (in American English) or maths (in British English).
It makes sense if you see it as an abbreviation of mathematics.
Too open, in my "book" (Score:2)
From what I can see, this is intended to be more of a textbook style as opposed to a comprehensive dictionary/encyclopedia style. A textbook is far more focused on a progressive curve of in
this will never happen (Score:2, Insightful)
This is the wrong aproach... (Score:3, Interesting)
First, I took the time to develop a format and methodology that would both work for any of the skills involved, and that could be implimented by ANYONE with a little learning.
Second, I wrote the first textbook using this method. After all, how could I expect others to use the system if I could not?
Third, I outlined and otherwise documented my system in a way others could use. This includes writing a new liceance, AND requiering that derivitives be signed back over to the project.
Forth, I taught the system to a few others. We are now meeting weekly, with each author working on writing for their individual strengths, and the classes they teach. We will be in this step at least over the summer, perhaps for a full year.
The next steps we forsee in our very long process are (in no particular order):
- teaching the methods to more textbook developers
- Training editors to help keep a consistiant feel throughout the various skills, and books
- Teaching textbook developers to reuse other skills where appropreate (aka reuse code from another textbook)
- Teaching developers to expand there own art by incorperating simmilar skills from other arts.
- Finish developing the new database system that will move the entire thing online.
- Turn the resulting textbooks into industry standards
(if you want more information on this project, please feel free to contact me off list.)
It's a lot of work to make such a project a sucess. Much more than I think most people understand. I wish them luck, but I also hope they find a better methodology than they are using.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:A bit misguided (Score:2, Informative)
If they want to toss together a bunch of math definitions, they should be more honest that they are just creating a reference. Yet PlanetMath is already doing this, with the Free Encyclopedia of [planetmath.org]
Sean Mauch's Applied Math Book (Score:3, Informative)
Noncommercial? (Score:2)
I'm guessing a wide variety of printers would converge around a set of quality books. Some might target readers who will pay a premium for a hardbound book, w
theassayer.org (Score:2)
Re:theassayer.org (Score:3, Informative)
There is an extensive listing (with ratings) of free books at http://www.theassayer.org/. This listing is administered by Ben Crowell a physics prof out in California who has some physics texts available at http://www.lightandmatter.com/ with an open source license. Some of the other listed books are free of cost but not open source.
His "Light and Matter" physics series is "an introductory physics textbook for life-science students" available in PDF as well as some sections in
Re:What's the exact difference.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What's the exact difference.. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What's the exact difference.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What's the exact difference.. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:What's the exact difference.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What's the exact difference.. (Score:2)
Re:An age old question (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Wrong way (Score:2)