Wikiebooks! This is the new idea coming from the creator of Wikis, Jimmy Wales which is still in its infancy stages. It is his attempt at making curriculum textbooks available online and free from kindergarten up to college level. "The prupose is really contained in the word "freely licensed," which is to make available to anyone in the world, in any language, a curriuclum that they can copy, redistrubte and modify, for whatever prupose they may have, for free," Wales said. It sounds similar to the idea behind the International Children's Digital Library that I have been reading about this week for another class. This organization makes available children's books in different languages to anyone who signs up for free. While I think the idea of digital books are good and can be used for research purposes, I think people will always want to hold a book, so I don't think they will ever replace the "original book". This idea of making textbooks available for free will certainly make students happy, but I'm sure the publishers of this multi-million dollar business can't be very happy with this development! To read the entire article and more information on this concept go to: http://news.com.com/2102-1025_3-5884291.html?tag=st.util.print After reading it let me know your thoughts about this new idea.
posted by Cyn at 9:49 AM
2 Comments:
Well, I think the idea is novel, but I'm not sure about a few of the points that the author makes. Firstly, he suggests that new research will be published in Wikibooks because the peer review process is slow. That process helps catch errors and fallacies of logic; maybe a research study was very poorly conducted and should be refused publication, but the author could put it up on Wikibooks. He or she has now done a disservice to the academic community that the 'slower' traditional publication process may have prevented.
Secondly, he states that teachers will be able to send students in to assess the content of Wikibooks. If the author feels that the content will be moving away from peer-reviewed, published works, what are the students going to use as references?
Like I said, the concept is novel, but I question the theory supporting it.
I definitely see potential in WikiBooks - knowing some of the politics behind how textbooks actually get published. New York and California are the two states who usually control the publishing industry when it comes to textbooks because of sheer volume. What that means is that the textbooks that are not accepted by one of these two states, often don't have a chance to get published. Here is some senate testimony that speaks to this: American Textbook Council - Senate Testimony
So do I see myself throwing away my textbooks - no! I do see myself supplementing the textbooks - as I have always done. And I think WikiBooks is definitely a site I will look into further as a supplementary material. I did a short review of the Civil War topic and was pleasantly surprised that the states rights issues were indeed mentioned:)
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