On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 12:22 PM, Justin Riddiough
<jriddiough@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Maybe there is something SchoolForge could do that could help unite or bring resources to each of these different groups that are working to deliver open text books. Looking at options, could start a project of our own.. could volunteer to another project that we agree with on vision, or try to find an initiative that would benefit the various efforts.
I'd like to see SchoolForge put together something like the software list but for different Open Source subjects such as Open Textbooks. One starting point would be to have a place educators could go to see what's already out there so they don't start reinventing the wheel. SchoolForge could supply that information by listing what projects already offer Open Textbooks.
Might also be useful to survey what Open Source technology would be helpful in creating Open Textbooks. I was looking into online ebooks at one point and turned up a couple of Open Source projects related to creating them:
There are also Open Source projects like wkhtmltopdf and pdfcreator to turn HTML or documents into PDF files for distribution. I use wkhtmltopdf a great deal in my own document creation when I need something in PDF format. Even used it to create a PDF from Schoolforge's HTML software listings. There are lots of Open Source software tools that might be helpful in writing textbooks including any of the word processing/text editing programs, spelling/grammar checkers and dictionaries, etc. Some writers even use source control to track their writing changes. Open Source collaboration tools could be useful for projects written by more than one author. We could help highlight some of the best Open Source tools for creating ebooks/documents.
Also wanted to mention that there are some similar Open Source projects already in the works but not related to textbooks. There are projects like Open Scripture and
http://www.opensourcehaggadah.com/ that let you share resources and create your own documents based on a combination of common resources and your own works. Of course, there are also projects like Wikipedia for creating a shared encyclopedia. Maybe there's a way to share techniques with projects like these. It would be nice if every project didn't have to reinvent the wheel to come up with its own way to create and share documents/ebooks. Most of these projects typically have their own formats for sharing texts. Having some way to interchange more easily between different formats would be useful as well so that existing projects could share resources more easily.
Sincerely,
Laura