Group items tagged

WHEN a college textbook, "Principles of Biology," comes out from the Nature Publishing Group in January, one place it won't be is on the shelves of school bookstores. Enlarge This Image An interactive graphic in "Principles of Biology," an electronic textbook from Nature Publishing, teaches students about the symptoms of a stroke. Enlarge This Image An interactive graphic from Wolfram Research lets readers change the display parameters of an oil spill. That's because the book was designed to be digital-only. Students will pay not for a printed edition at a bookstore, but for permanent access on the Internet ($49).

By sleslie on edtechpost (blog), Feb 14, 2012. In this post on authoring "open textbooks," the author looks at the process of book sprints, which were borrowed from coders in the open source and hacker communities. In a book sprint, a group of interested participants come together with the goal of creating a book (or book-like) project. In addition to a very general outline of the process, the post recommends some tools that a group might use, as well as a link to some sample books.

Both the tools and the process seem interesting. How might this process be applied to a KPI project...in lieu of a Jam? In conjunction with a Jam? As the Jam take-away?

By Sophia Lin in Wired Campus, The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 28 2010. An online textbook project at the University of Illinois that will also serve Illinois' community colleges. The comments are also of interest.

Website for the new textbook Key Concepts in Geomorphology by Paul Bierman and Dave Montgomery, published by W.H. Freeman. This text is, in effect, being "crowd-sourced," with members of the community invited to vet the work and to submit "vignettes," which are brief electronic supplements.