infundibulum

The Wikibooks project is about doing for textbooks what Wikipedia has done for the encyclopedia.

A great idea. Hasn’t gotten quite as much press as Wikipedia, but it seems to be moving right along. I think what it really needs is an incensed and frightened textbook author to write a whiny editorial in USAToday.

I just found this one, it’s neat:

XML: Managing Data Exchange

A from-scratch intro to XML. It’s also interesting how this particular project started. From the preface:

Professors typically throw away their students’ projects at the end of the term. This is a massive waste of intellectual resources that can be harnessed for the betterment of many by creating an appropriate infrastructure. In our case, we use wiki technology as the infrastructure to create a free open content textbook.

University students are an immense untapped global resource. They can be engaged in creating open textbooks if the right infrastructure is in place to sustain renewable student projects. This book is an example of how waste can be avoided.

Excellent… maybe students wouldn’t think of their papers as such pointless chores if they knew they weren’t going to end up in a trashcan, but rather, on the net, where other people could learn from them.

How would one grade contributions to a wiki, anyway…