From Analog Textbooks to Wikibooks

The textbook industry holds a strangling monopoly on public education in the US. A handful of huge publishers produce a very large majority of the textbooks in this country. That is a huge chunk of money. With large amounts of money comes large amounts of lobbying to hold on to the large amounts of money. The lobbying money buys influence to maintain the status quo of buying textbooks. Web Fryer addresses textbooks in his blog post

Moving at the Speed of Creativity
Sorry honey, you can’t believe everything you read in your printed science textbook

WE ARE WASTING MILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN OUR COUNTRY PURCHASING PAPER-BASED, ANALOG TEXTBOOKS WHICH ARE OUT OF DATE AND OBSOLETE, IN MANY CASES, THE MOMENT THEY ARE PRINTED. We do NOT need to purchase ANY more paper-based textbooks in our schools. Instead, our school districts should be purchasing laptop computers for EVERY student which permit them to access up to date, multimedia and multi-sensory information online: Holding the OLPC! Unfortunately, the textbook lobby and textbook industry continues to maintain a virtual stranglehold on VAST quantities of public funding for education in the United States.

Spending the textbook money on laptops and then using online textbooks would be a step in the right direction toward School 2.0.

I just started an online textbook with my 3rd grade class. We are doing a research project on famous inventors. We will then take the research an put it into a Wikijunior page. Wikijunior is a children’s book division of Wikibooks. Wikibooks is a community dedicated to collaboratively creating a free library of educational textbooks. It is a sister project of Wikipedia, the largest encyclopedia in the world seeking to become the sum of all human knowledge.

You can find our Famous Inventors book in the “under development” part of wikijunior. It was easier to set up than I had expected, but I had to spend some time reading the help sections to make sure I was following their standards and for help with the wiki code. The day after I had set it up, I noticed that someone else has already added a couple inventors to the Table of Contents. We had previously produced these projects as powerpoint presentations. However, I wanted my students to make a more permanent contribution to the wikipedian community. We are creating free online textbooks that will be open and accessible to other children all around the world. I just introduced it to my students today, but they were excited about the idea. I think they will also be proud that by making a wikijunior book, they have made a contribution to the world at large.

There are not nearly enough Wikijunior books. I encourage you to make your contribution. Add to an existing wikijunior book that is in development or start your own.

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