free as in textbooks
The guys who brought you the wikipedia, which in my opinion has recently reached a critical mass of actual usefulness, now turn their sights onto textbooks:
>The second thing that will be free is a complete curriculum (in all languages) from Kindergarten through the University level. There are several projects underway to make this a reality, including our own Wikibooks project, but of course this is a much bigger job than the encyclopedia, and it will take much longer.
In the long run, it will be very difficult for proprietary textbook publishers to compete with freely licensed alternatives. An open project with dozens of professors adapting and refining a textbook on a particular subject will be a very difficult thing for a proprietary publisher to compete with. The point is: there are a huge number of people who are qualified to write these books, and the tools are being created to leave them to do that.
…and this, I think, is quite seriously pretty wonderful. Textbooks are typically these hideously overpriced things, the prohibitive cost of which causes problems for both students and schools alike. A free and open alternative will be an incredible resource for the members of the proletariat all of society.
~jeff
August 8th, 2005 at 11:55 am
I think the lack of definitive source in such a thing could have some really interesting results. For one, there could wind up being splintering of wiki textbooks. This would be particularly true in science, where the cutting edge is always hotly debated. I’d like to see how a professor will be able to have a text that includes the parts sHe thinks are important, and without the parts sHe thinks are hooey.
Not that textbooks offer this as it stands. They offer the publisher’s favorite theories, which are formed by marketability rather than scientific rigor.
Diversity of opinion is the promise of distributed creation. That seems to me like a good thing to have in academic settings. I just hope the academics can handle it.