Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Wiki textbooks
"via SmartMobs
and originally NewScientist,
A professor at University of Georgia is planning on recruiting 80 academics, their students, and translators from around the world to work wiki-style on a free online textbook.
Students in developing countries are to get free textbooks written using "wiki" technology that lets anyone add to or edit an online document.
"The usual business model for textbooks just doesn't work for these countries," says Rick Watson, an expert on the development of opensource software at the University of Georgia, US. "Why not get groups of academics and their students to write them?"
Publishers typically halve their prices for the developing world, he explains, but a single book can still cost one-fifth of average yearly income in places like Uganda....As well as being freely available to view online they can be downloaded for printing. "We don't want to have to tie these into web access, which can be difficult," Watson says. A downloadable version could be used to print cheap copies locally for physical distribution. Starting in 2007, contributors from Peru, Egypt and China will translate textbooks into Spanish, Arabic and Chinese....He first experimented with wiki textbooks because he could not find the right book for a course on the web programming language XML. "I made the course assignment [for my students] to be to write a chapter of the textbook," he says. "It turned out to be very high quality." The other academics plan to use the same model for future books.