Erik Moeller wrote:
FYI - we need to talk to these people.
Global Text Project
- The goal is to create a free library of 1,000 electronic
textbooks for students in the developing world
For myself, I strongly suspect anything that starts with "students in the developing world" and doesn't acknowledge disadvantaged individuals even in supposedly "first world" countries to be more or less a scam and something to stay away from. If their overall goal is to bring benefits to people in specific countries but also benefit other people in the process, I'm much more likly to support such a general project.
Of course, that is why I also consider the OLPC project to be something of a scam as well, on the same grounds. They don't mind selling these laptops to kids in Nairobi, but have a real problem trying to sell the same thing to kids in New Orleans housing projects.
If instead the stated goal was simply "to create a free library of 1,000 electronic textbooks for students" I wouldn't have nearly the problem with what is obviously a group of extra-ordinarily condescending individuals.
BTW, Wikibooks has over 1000 different book titles currently. That is not a goal. That is a fact. While I will admit that effective textbooks that are useful for teaching a class are considerably fewer, this is a group that needs to work with Wikibooks if only to help coordinate and develop content that may be mutually useful, and the Wikibooks project already had a team of volunteers willing to get content developed and actual examples to show for its effort.
I wouldn't even call the XML book to be necessarily the best of Wikibooks either.