Karl wrote:
The advantage to reusing modules is that it saves a little bit of copying and pasting, right ? This is a shortcut that I think sets books up to be more on the generic side than tailored to suit. And when I use a textbook for myself Id rather have the whole thing tailored to suit.
Instructors do this already; they start a class on chapter 3, then go onto chapter 4.1, skip the rest of ch 4 and then do ch 2, then back to 5, then to 7.3-7.6, 9.1, 8.3-4 etc. The beauty of modules is that the same content can be reorganized in many different ways without having to fork content. There should, of course, be one reference edition for each book that the community maintains, but I would like to give instructors the ability to create index pages in their own userspace (in a user index:namespace perhaps). And having too many self references is bad anyway and should be avoided since things change. This will mean that some modules will have to be a bit more generic than they would otherwise, but I think that this will be a killer feature to have. Having this ability will also help to prevent book forks, since most forks would be organizational or content-based (that is, an instructor may want to have more or fewer modules in the textbook used in his/her class).
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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