A little revolution is getting underway. The state of Virginia has published a new open source physics textbook under a Creative Commons license. As detailed in this piece from ZDNet, this peer-reviewed textbook was produced in less than six months by a team of authors, which included “active researchers, high school teachers, and college professors, as well as some retirees.” And it was launched on CK-12’s technology platform. Here comes the new world of textbook publishing. Quick to press, vetted, easy to revise, produced at a low cost by publishers, free for students. What’s not to like … except if you’re in the traditional textbook publishing business?
As a quick aside, you can find another free physics textbook (in e-book format) at motionmountain.net.
via ccLearn Twitter Feed (Open Culture Twitter feed here)
Wow! We were just talking a few weeks ago in my education technology class about Open Source software and it’s application towards a classroom/educational setting. We had discussed little things that could be done, but having a whole textbook that has several different people merging together to write it is beyond what I thought possible for this stage in Open Source. I think that if more textbooks and resources were produced this way, it would greatly improve many school systems, especially the ones who are still using textbooks from the eighties simply because they cant afford new books, as well as college students who go entire semesters without their classes books because theyre so expensive. Very neat.
Wikibooks, has textbooks that have been created through collaborative effort. I believe there is a lot that can be done in this area that will help education.
I feel that this audio book can serve my B. Ed students a lot