[Textbook-l] distinct books

Wed Aug 13 00:45:19 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.

>Daniel Mayer wrote:
> 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).
-------------

This is all good stuff. The way it works in California is as follows (I
would assume it's similar in most of the other large states):

1) after a publisher readies a book, it has to pass a textbook committee
review to make sure that it conforms to the frameworks.

2) Once a book has been approved, it's available for any district to adopt.
The districts have their various curriculum experts, teachers, interested
parents, etc. determine what's the best fit for the district. btw, it's more
complex at K-5 [elementary school], where amorphous 'topics' like 'language
development' take on the flavor of entire integrated programs, and are more
complex, (but ideally suited to open content development).

So, this is one way it gets interesting is with open content developed in
modular format via Wikipedia. It turns out that many, many excellent
teachers have developed very good materials on their own over the years.
Often, this material is published by a district, and distributed to all the
schools in that district.

If a specific book is published via Wikipedia to adhere to standards, once
the content is approved at state level, various districts could either
self-publish, or request that a commercial publisher include those teacher
materials specific to the district that had been published by Wikipedia.
This would save time, money, and other resources - not to mention the
benefit that(again, I would start with one (recommending California), and
migrate to many...in fact, eventually, one could tag various modules within
a 'book' as specific to one or another state, and go from there).

This is just one advantage of the modular approach, from a practical
'on-the-ground' approach. There are many others.

Sanford