Tuesday, May 12th, 2009

The California Open Source Textbook Project is an effort, created and supported by Governor Schwarzenegger and Secretary of Education Glenn Thomas, to create a set of standards based textbooks that can be distributed electronically and freely to California students.

The Project has started with a World History text based on Wikibooks.  But it has not been edited (or amended) for content in more than a year.  So it looks like the Project won't meet the Governor's goal of availability for classroom use in Fall 2009.

You can read more about it here.

This is a very interesting idea.  The advantages would be reduced cost to districts ($200,000,000 a year statewide according to arstechnica.com) and flexibility of editing for current data (physics and astroniomy textbooks that never go out of date). 

Somewhat disturbing was the ease with which I was able to access the editing panel.  If I can do it without even registering with Wikibooks, then anyone can.  Such access to textbooks while they are being used by high school students is unaccpetable because it makes the information untrustworthy.  So the process by which the texts are written, edited, and presented needs to be tightened considerably.

A welcome development would be the ability by the student user to download the book as a PDF, MOBI, or other uneditiable document format for use on home computers, PDAs, and electronic books.

On the whole, this is a great idea.  I am glad the state is developing it.  But we need to get it right before we open it for use in the classroom.

Daniel


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