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)
_______________________________________________
Textbook-l mailing list
Textbook-l(a)Wikipedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/textbook-l