Hi Krzysztof,

Textbooks can be written in many ways. Some books are created by committee, others by a single author. The primary difference for textbooks (just K-12, not university textbooks) is that one must pay attention to the frameworks.

Really, this makes the author's job (whether solo, or as part of a committee) a lot easier, as there is little guesswork involved as regards what "has" to be in the book. The creative part is then free to innovate on the 'framework theme'.

Of course, if an author is determined to do a book solo, there should be no problem in that. He/she just says so.

One real advantage in this is that there can be many open source approaches to the same frameworks. For instance, it would be interesting (eventually) to see multiple open source treatments of world History, Algebra, Home Economics, English, German, Chemistry, Language Development, etc. This is a real opportunity to get very creative pedagogical approaches intoduced to K-12 curriculum materials, because the current commercial approach is very, very conservative; it goes for the lowest common denominator, attempting to please everyone.

Note that there's no reason why open source publishing couldn't create one of those "lowest common denominator" classics - one that gets widely adopted by states and districts that want to "play it safe" (in fact, this will probably be the way that open source texts initially "prove themselves", by showing that they can be better, at a 'middle-of-the-road' approach to content than the commercial publishers). However, the real opportunity going forward is the insinuation of creative approaches to content that open the eyes of curriculum people at the state and district level. There is a fantastic renaissance possible here.

Eventually, open source will be *the* way that the bulk of educational materials are created; I'm convinced of this.

Sanford ----- Original Message ----- From: "Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz" kpjas@wikipedia.pl To: textbook-l@wikipedia.org Sent: Tuesday, July 15, 2003 12:11 AM Subject: [Textbook-l] Textbook.wikipedia.org and authorship paradigm

Hi all,

Wikipedia is a great success and its editorial process proved to be

capable

of producing collaboratively content of good quality.

I wonder if the same paradigm can be extended to writing open source textbooks. There are textbooks that were released into open source by

their

authors/publishers but as far as I know there have never been any attempt to write a textbook the wiki way.

Textbooks are mostly written by academics and academics are not very fond of Wikipedia. Textbooks are written by one author or one author writes one or a few chapters. I don't know if people like Karl Wick would be pleased with a crowd of random editors to the text he has already written. It

might

be counter-productive, time consuming and ineffective for him to discuss, explain, or somtimes fight to defend his vision. He probably would be grateful for comments and ideas but I'm not so sure about re-writing his text and putting in incompatible ideas and frameworks.

I think a cookbook or howto type of books might succeed.

I am not trying to be a critic of the whole idea I would like to discuss some of my concerns in the early phase of the project.

Regards, Kpjas _______________________________________________ Textbook-l mailing list Textbook-l@wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/textbook-l

On Tue, Jul 15, 2003 at 09:11:31AM +0200, Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz wrote:

Hi all,

Wikipedia is a great success and its editorial process proved to be capable of producing collaboratively content of good quality.

I wonder if the same paradigm can be extended to writing open source textbooks. There are textbooks that were released into open source by their authors/publishers but as far as I know there have never been any attempt to write a textbook the wiki way.

Textbooks are mostly written by academics and academics are not very fond of Wikipedia. Textbooks are written by one author or one author writes one or a few chapters. I don't know if people like Karl Wick would be pleased with a crowd of random editors to the text he has already written. It might be counter-productive, time consuming and ineffective for him to discuss, explain, or somtimes fight to defend his vision. He probably would be grateful for comments and ideas but I'm not so sure about re-writing his text and putting in incompatible ideas and frameworks.

I think a cookbook or howto type of books might succeed.

I am not trying to be a critic of the whole idea I would like to discuss some of my concerns in the early phase of the project.

It may be hard to make good university-level textbooks the wiki way, but I think we can do things like: * language courses * computer-related books * elementary and high school level textbooks for almost everything