On Monday we hosted a virtual meeting on open textbooks. A transcript of the meeting is up on the wiki page. There is also a brief writeup on Wikibooks News.
Several things to come out of the meeting:
- There was general agreement that it would great if people interested in and working with open textbooks kept in closer contact, and found more ways to collaborate.
- We discussed using Pledgebank to encourage educators and others to create, review and use open textbooks. Judy Baker of the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources has subsequently started a pledge to find people interested in reviewing textbooks. Read her blog post here and find the pledge here.
- Some of us will start to contact existing online textbook authors to see if they’ve considered making their work available under an open license.
- There was discussion of keeping track of open textbook related developments. An aggregator was suggested. Since the meeting Mike Cheln has started an opentextbooks ‘room’ on FriendFeed.
- We will continue to host virtual meetings for those interested in open textbooks on the last Monday of every month. The next will be on Monday 27th October. Meetings will be listed on the opentextbooks wiki page and announced on opentextbook.org.
- Finally Joshua Gay let us know that there was a new launch of the Textbook Revolution site to coincide with the meeting. Though they do not focus exclusively on open textbooks, they have listings for books that are in the public domain, and under GFDL, CC-BY, and CC-BY-SA.
Dr. Jonathan Gray is Lecturer in Critical Infrastructure Studies at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, where he is currently writing a book on data worlds. He is also Cofounder of the Public Data Lab; and Research Associate at the Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam) and the médialab (Sciences Po, Paris). More about his work can be found at jonathangray.org and he tweets at @jwyg.
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