Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
We should still keep our focus on making good textbooks, even if that means deviating from the standards in some cases. We should not delete or summarize any existing content in accordance with the framework.
That is what optional modules are for! :) We could have base distributions of a book that are each in 100% compliance with different standards and then have optional, more in depth, modules that can be added on top of whatever base distribution an instructor chooses to use in the classroom. Of course that does require WikiBook software functionality (which will come - even if I have to learn PHP - do we have a textbook on that yet?).
----------- Exactly.
Let's be realistic: probably no wikibooks will be printed, and if one is printed, it will be a highly-edited and non-wikified, and this won't happen for a while. I think that the goal of Wikibooks shouldn't be centered around things like the High-school extentions book, the programming tutorials, and other things aimed at informal self-study.
Well it is a good thing that you are not the only person in the project then! ;) Go ahead and work on the self study guides and other people will be writting standards-compliant textbooks that will one day be "printed"
on
digital paper (many of our textbooks will be maturing by the time digital paper becomes popular, IMR - killing trees bad and transferring webpages
to
dead tree book form requires a great deal of formatting).
----------------- Good insight. One caveat. Digital paper is maturing, but probably not rapidly enough to see ubuquitous use within the next decade (I've spent some time in that sector, having had to look hard into Gyricon (Xerox PARC's spin-off) and eInk as part of an investment diligence a few years ago. This is wonderful technology, and someday it *will* largely replace paper, but that is some 1.5-3 decades away, maybe longer.
Printed books do use paper, but paper can be made to be a "cradle-to-cradle" resource http://www.mbdc.com/, rather than a "cradle-to-grave" resource. Also, intelligent environmental planning can eliminate the environmental threat caused by over-printing on paper. Much of the world will depend on paper, or "paper-like" products for decades. This is the reality. Another reality is that most schools - whether public or private - will not universally use a "textbook" that is available only in digital format. Not in the foreseeable future (see above).
Question: The Connexions Project at Rice http://cnx.rice.edu/ has the facility to be able to create printed pages quite easily, or so I've been led to be;ieve by several people who have participated in that project. Is there any possibility of hooking up this pilot project with Connexions, or learning from them, as regards the printing constraints in Wikipedia?
Sanford
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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