[Textbook-l] distinct books

Tue Aug 12 19:54:38 UTC 2003

Karl wrote:
>The advantage to reusing modules is that 
>it saves a little bit of copying and pasting, 
>right ? This is a shortcut that I think sets 
>books up to be more on the generic side than
>tailored to suit. And when I use a textbook 
>for myself Id rather have the whole thing 
>tailored to suit.

Instructors do this already; they start a class on
chapter 3, then go onto chapter 4.1, skip the rest of
ch 4 and then do ch 2, then back to 5, then to
7.3-7.6, 9.1, 8.3-4 etc. The beauty of modules is that
the same content can be reorganized in many different
ways without having to fork content. There should, of
course, be one reference edition for each book that
the community maintains, but I would like to give
instructors the ability to create index pages in their
own userspace (in a user index:namespace perhaps). And
having too many self references is bad anyway and
should be avoided since things change. This will mean
that some modules will have to be a bit more generic
than they would otherwise, but I think that this will
be a killer feature to have. Having this ability will
also help to prevent book forks, since most forks
would be organizational or content-based (that is, an
instructor may want to have more or fewer modules in
the textbook used in his/her class). 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com