[Textbook-l] Textbook.wikipedia.org and authorship paradigm

[Sanford Forte]

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 at wikipedia.pl>
To: <textbook-l at 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
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