Global Text Project – Wiki Textbooks 108
Grooves writes, "A new initiative spearheaded by a University of Georgia professor aims to produce a library of 1,000 wiki textbooks by tapping the collaborative power of wiki. Inspiration for the project came from a computer science course that wrote its own textbook on XML when no suitable commercial offerings were available. From the article: 'The Global Text Project will work a bit differently from most wikis. Each chapter of each book will be overseen by an academic with knowledge of that field. Although the site will allow anyone to make changes, these will not become "official" until an editor signs off on them.' Textbooks free as in speech, and beer? Sign me up."
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Now, from an academic validity standpoint, how would you reference the texts? Would the editors have finalized 'editions' that go into an uneditable archive mode, and only the 'latest' editions are wiki-able? That would at least be managable from a referencing point of view, but would detract a bit of t
Finished Goods. (Score:4, Insightful)
how would you reference the texts? Would the editors have finalized 'editions' that go into an uneditable archive mode, and only the 'latest' editions are wiki-able?
Yes. Wikibooks makes PDFs for "completed" texts. [wikibooks.org]
That would at least be managable from a referencing point of view, but would detract a bit of the credibility from the 'work in progress' copies.
If only dead tree publishers had that kind of credibility for text books. The rate of minor and meaningless changes to create new "editions" is outrageous. I'm looking forward to wikibooks being an island of stability in the academic publishing world.
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Wicked! (Score:4, Funny)
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!Wicked (Score:2)
With OLPC/CM1 (Score:5, Interesting)
Its been done (Score:3, Informative)
http://cnx.org/ [cnx.org]
And the Google Techtalk:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=685228709
Re:Its been done (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Its been done (Score:5, Informative)
I am a university professor. I don't require my students to purchase textbooks for the introductory physics courses I teach. I provide my complete lecture notes online [rit.edu], and permit students to use older textbooks if they wish; after all, the material we're covering hasn't changed in the past few hundred years, so _any_ textbook they can find will serve as a useful reference.
I write my own homework problems so that my students won't have to purchase a textbook simply for that purpose.
The bookstore hasn't broken my hands, nor has the university reprimanded me. We've just started a new fall quarter this week, and I'm still teaching.
So, in brief, your statement is not correct.
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My only beef with the university bookstore was that they only offered a small discount for used books regardless of the physical condition of the book. At the end of the semester when you went to sell your books back you got such a small amount back that one wonders where the money goes. Supposedly the book store was not for profit. Since most of the employees were students themselves you wouldn't think ther
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Some books dramatically change the homework problems, or reorder them, or simply change the value of the variables involved so the method to solve it is the same, but the answer will be different. The changelog allows the
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Publishers are constantly changing the web sites which are associated with their introductory physics textbooks. If a professor chooses to use the material on the web site -- often homework prob
That was a bad joke. (Score:3, Insightful)
"Broken hands" and "fired teachers" comments are joke comments made to disrupt useful conversation about the real failings of paper texts and the academic publishers. While some greed heads at my University might have a cow at the thought of anyone giving away their precious "intellectual property", the vast majority of professors remember that part of their mission is education. Collaborative, electronic textbooks are sure to overtake traditional publications in the same way free software has overtaken n
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When you put it that way, it sounds like electronic textbooks WON'T overtake traditional publications, in the exact way that free software hasn't even begun to overtake non-free.
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My biggest fan [slashdot.org] mindlessly taunts:
When you put it that way, it sounds like electronic textbooks WON'T overtake traditional publications, in the exact way that free software hasn't even begun to overtake non-free.
I'm talking about features, performance, quality and price, not market share but that shall come to both. The advance of free software is based on those advantages and is remarkable given the intense efforts by a few convicted monopolists to stop it. As the rise of Google and Wikipedia show, the
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Let's play a little comparison between free software and non-free software. This is based on my own personal experience.
Ubuntu takes about 40 seconds to a minute to boot. Windows takes about 25 to 30 seconds.
Ubuntu doesn't support WPA-PSK out of the box. Windows does.
Ubuntu doesn't support my USB wireless stick, my webcam or any of my games. Windows does.
The Ubuntu desktop has window tearing and visible redrawing, with windows caught mid-redraw, the order of the day. Windows does.
With Ubuntu, nume
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Really though, I'm actually excited about what you're going to say.
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Re:Its been done (Score:4, Insightful)
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I've been burned by professors trying to profit off their own books before. What I tend to do before buying books now is check the syllabus to see when it's required. If a book makes no appearance in the syllabus except in the books to buy section (as has happened before), I hold off buying it until the professor announces in class that we're going to need that book. Which has sometimes never happened. (And, of course, sometimes it does and I need to make an emergency trip to the bookstore, but I can li
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The reason nobody has heard of it is probably the evil college bookstore cartel.
I think it's a bit of a stretch to blame college bookstores for this. They're mostly nonprofit. It's the publishers who are really being evil.
They will break your hands with hammers if they find out you have been using free textbooks instead of the ones they sell.
I'm currently typing this with two unbroken hands, after 9 years of using free textbooks [lightandmatter.com] in my physics classes.
There are already hundreds of free college text
wiki process (Score:3, Insightful)
the wikipedia encyclopedia is ok for science topics but for all the cultural/historical entries, it's like the worst of MySpace combined with the most boring blogs. half the admins there pound anyone who disagrees with them into the ground by using the "rules" and the senior staff arbitarily make secret decisions w/o any oversight. so i don't trust wikianything any more.
speak the wikitruth! http://www.wikitruth.info/ [wikitruth.info]
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Hell, they are a lot of people who will do it for free just to get their 15 minutes of fame.
The first thing I do to try a validate what is and is not the truth is search for vested interests (who paid whom and whether they are continuing to do so).
I have sadly found that the greater the am
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basically free tends to be a far better source of truthiness.
But since truthiness means "truthy not facty" truthiness != accuracy. sadly this appears to be indeed the case in free publications. People are more free to speak their "truth" but don't necessarily check their facts.
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wikipedia has no quality control. someone who has never heard of marine biology can edit the entry on the octopus because they feel like it.
i don't even see any basis for comparison.
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Really. And you personally have evidence that all sold textbooks are accurate? Ford sold the Pinto, a car which exploded if you looked at it wrong, the Mercedes E class has about 30% of them go wrong despite being a "quality" car, far behind much cheaper Hondas. Tell me again about the price of something and it's quality.
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Anyone can edit the marine biology to put random stuff in it, but chances are the main author(s) will notice and rectify it quickly. This gets old quickly for would-be defacers. At the same time quite a few people working in marine biology might contribute to the page and correct errors.
In the textbook industry, there is some kind of quality control but it's done by a tiny panel of about one or two people. Usually textbooks are written by between 1 an
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>
> Wikipedia works on the principle that sociopaths are few.
>
Few, yes, but very, very dedicated...
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A big deal is made of this but so far wikipedia has massive amounts of useful information and only a little deliberately misleading junk.
I'd say the evidence is on the side of the good guys, by a long shot.
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wikibooks - 2003 (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page [wikibooks.org]
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I think it's about time Wikipedia as well as Wikibooks implements that idea I heard a while ago, that there are t
Too early to say (Score:4, Informative)
Wikibooks [wikibooks.org] has progressed farther, but as TFA notes, this one operates on slightly stricter policies that might be useful for academic books.
Wikibooks? Wikiversity? (Score:4, Informative)
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The problem with this project is the requirement of total academic oversight to do even minor edits. It's gonna make a lot of work. It would be nice to have a method to have externally selected expert administrators to supervise the editing
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Why people insist on using GFDL? There are projects which are doing just fine with publishing the content under one of CC licenses (WikiTravel [wikitravel.org]) or even putting the content into public domain (Hikipedia [hikipedia.com]).
LukaszRe:Wikibooks? Wikiversity? - (Score:1)
Martin
License (Score:2, Informative)
The major difference between this project and wikibooks is the licensing. The Global Text Project looks like all the content will be given
Editorial POV (Score:3, Insightful)
Unless the WikiTexts are printed for use, or updated on a limited schedule, there is the possibility that students may study different versions, making assessment (based on assigned reading) more difficult. [I would hope the content would not change to such a degree as to invalidate previous versions, but it is a possibility.]
I will watch expectantly (and hopefully contribute) as this develops...
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Moo (Score:5, Funny)
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Very cute.
The book I can't wait for is... (Score:2)
Okay ... (Score:2, Funny)
Ah, the joys of making random inferences late at night
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Where do I sign up? (Score:5, Funny)
Teacher-specific Version Control (Score:4, Insightful)
The ultimate tool would let teachers mix and match chapters -- picking different versions from different years to suit their tastes.
The point is that once a wiki transitions from casual/random access (e.g. wikipedia) to one of methodical use, then the user needs more say in versions or some way to retain their favored version.
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Teacher's Edition? (Score:2)
Anyways, I hope this provides some good content for loading up on the "one laptop per child" project.
In the long run... (Score:3, Informative)
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"Likely to be resistance?" There is certain to be resistance.
Examining the Japanese History Textbook Controversies [indiana.edu], A textbook example of change in China [iht.com], US court upholds Hindu organisation's contention on textbooks [zeenews.com]
This ain't Wikipedia - this is real knowledge (Score:5, Interesting)
This is excellent.
Free knowledge written by experts. Sweet.
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Homework just got easy (Score:3, Funny)
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problem scaling from essays to book (Score:2)
Wiki edit on Green's Theorem (Score:3, Interesting)
--Rob
Yes (Score:2)
Once, I took an accounting course. All the students were angry that the textbook cost nearly $200. So the publisher actually sent a representative to our class to explain to us why it's ok that the book costs so much. He said that unlike New York Times bestsellers, which are printed in quantities of millions and
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I hope the other 999 are better (Score:1)
"A new initiative spearheaded by a University of Georgia professor aims to produce a library of 1,000 wiki textbooks by tapping the collaborative power of wiki. Inspiration for the project came from a computer science course that wrote its own textbook on XML"
A very cool idea in principle, but if the XML book they've done is typical, they should stop now. Just for grins, I opened to a subject I know quite well, which is XML and Schemas. There we find [wikibooks.org]:
"Entities are basically the objects a Schema is cr
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Some textbooks gain a reputation for being stunningly good, while others gain a reputation for being awful. I
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An Onerous Coward replied to me:
Good point.
GELC: Global Education Learning Community (Score:2)
Perhaps these two efforts coloborate.
Need basic High School texts, too (Score:1)
Textbooks are a scam (Score:2)
Um (Score:1)
Well, besides that, I think it will be interesting to see what hap
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In almost every class, some students have a vast knowledge in many areas, and excel at the subject, some with spare time too, and can probably explain it on a much more understandable level to fellow students.
An assignment for a group of 10 studnets to compile, edit, and submit a finished chapter to the professor as a final project in a class of 200+ calc students should produce a pretty quick, relatively readable, and usable book in one semester. A review
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I hope that they apply this method with music theory (like post-tonal analysis, orchestration, etc) and other complex musical subjects! That would be the biggest aid to any music faculty.
Calculus - definitely!
Start with the MIT OpenCourseWare project ... (Score:1)
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