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June 15, 2004
OpenTextBook.org
Posted by Ernest Miller
OpenTextBook.org is an open source textbook project. Anyone can add to and edit the textbook (which seems to be solely dedicated to mathematics, currently), though you need to know how to use CVS to contribute. The book has a daily PDF snapshot available and an Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-Alike Creative Commons license.
Really, this is a pretty good idea. However, I seriously question whether professors and educators will support the use of such books in the classroom. Certainly the textbook publishers are going to lobby against it (it's big, big business!). It will also be interesting to see how happy professors are that students are taking notes from class and adding them to a collaborative book (I seem to remember a case along these lines, or maybe it was just a hypothetical - anyway, I don't have time to look it up).
via BoingBoing
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1. Branko Collin on June 19, 2004 9:05 AM writes...
There are, as far as I know, several such projects underway, amongst others http://wikibooks.org (a Wikipedia off-shoot). A thousand dullards indeed... The right formula for group-editing a work larger than an encyclopedia article still has to be discovered.
Still, the notion that a lot of stakeholders would be against this strikes me as odd. Perhaps things are different in the US, but here in the Netherlands most textbooks seem to have been written by educators. The new ways of cooperatively writing a textbook may not be their cup of tea, but a greater power for the publishers must have them looking for new ways too.
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