Daniel Mayer wrote:
Karl Wick 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).
I don't see any conflict here -- I agree with both of you!
Notice that mav's instructor already uses a single book, moving around within it, so each section should be modular. They often aren't, but in /our/ book, they can indeed be.
However, this doesn't mean that Karl's OChem modules are going to be the same as what appears in PChem texts. I don't know enough chemistry to predict that, actually -- whether the goals and needs of the disciplines are similar enough. So these could still be separated -- and if /not/ these, then certainly the Chem modules from the French cooking.
More interesting to me, however, is that 2 OChem books may appear that take differing pedagogical approaches and don't share modules! The second book might start by copying the first but fork -- a legitimate fork if it represents differing approaches to the subject. Again, I don't know enough chemistry to know if this happens in OChem, but it would certainly happen with calculus vs graduate analysis.
-- Toby