Open Everything

Part of the appeal of open textbooks to students is obviously no cost versus the ridiculously high cost of books for classes. Students can access open textbooks on the Internet for free. But what is the appeal of the open textbook for teachers and colleges?

Open textbook "authors" put their books online for public use. Since they are also open license, instructors can modify the text by deleting and adding content. Of course, you can still print them and some campuses even offer printed copies, color versions etc. at minimal cost.

But there aren't many available at this point.

What makes it a bit more interesting for me here at Passaic County Community College is that yesterday I read that the Community College Open Textbook Project begins this week. Professors from colleges will be meeting with representatives from nonprofit groups and for-profit companies that are in the digital textbook market to talk about ways of developing and promoting online content.

Not all reviews of open textbooks are glowing. Some students find them too short and lacking the depth of traditional books. For example, some professors typically cover a portion of the text in class/lectures, but would assign or expect students to read the additional textbook material. In a course like statistics, students might welcome extra practice problems from a full textbook. The quality of available OER materials is inconsistent at this point. These books may not meet Section 508 ADA accessibility requirements. Faculty will need to check for accuracy of content of open content more than commercial textbooks. (The Wikipedia versus Britannica battle again.)

Still, as with other Open Everything efforts, customization of content will ultimately be more flexible in open content than it currently is in commercially available content. And after a few classes where you pay $100+ for a book that gets used twice in the semester, student attitudes to open textbooks will change.

The first phase of the Community College Open Textbook Project is being funded by a one-year, $500,000-plus grant to the Foothill-De Anza Community College District from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

As part of the project, community college professors will receive training on how to find and customize material. Another goal is for participants to create online textbooks using existing resources. The meeting in California will have them reviewing open-textbook models for equality, usability, accessibility, and sustainability.

Here are the first four providers of free online educational resources that will be considered, and plenty of additional resources if you want to explore more deeply.

• Connexions run by Rice University


• Flat World Knowledge, a commercial digital-textbook publisher (FWK should be offering free textbooks online in 2009)


• University of California's College Prep Online (Advanced Placement and other courses online)


• Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources which was founded by the Foothill-De Anza Community College District and the League for Innovation in the Community College


• an article from Inside Higher Ed


• Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCOER)


• CCCOER Open Content


• Wikibooks, Wikiversity and Wikijunior


• No More Textbooks. What Would Gutenberg Say?


• Open Text Book is a registry of textbooks and text book material that is open in accordance with


• the Open Knowledge Definition (OKD) and is run by the Open Knowledge Foundation

UPDATED  May 1, 2008

I'm adding this comment to the main post because I know that readers don't always bother to click the comments link. Here's a take on this topic from a commercial publisher (mentioned above) who is working with the open textbook community.

Hi Kenneth,

Thanks for the thoughtful post.

I am the co-founder of Flat World Knowledge, the commercial open textbook publisher mentioned in the Wired Campus article. I agree with you that historically, the quality of open textbooks has been inconsistent. We are focused on changing that. My business partner and I come out of 30 years of publishing experience with McGraw-Hill, Thomson, and Prentice Hall. We have personally worked on some of the top selling textbooks in the market. It is our belief that there is no inherent reason why an open textbook should be of any lower quality that a traditional book.

I can't speak for open textbooks in general. I can only speak to our approach. We are building our textbooks just like we did at our former companies . We are being highly selective about which authors we sign (top academics, recognized in their fields). Our books are undergoing extensive peer review. They are professionally illustrated, and fully accuracy checked. They include everything a traditional book does, including problem sets. They even include more, like integrated audio and videos. We produce teaching supplements for instructors.

You get the point. These are complete, high quality books.

The difference is that we make them free online, and available forinstructors to modify to better fit the syllabus before assigning it to students.

We have a viable financial model behind this. Students can purchase inexpensive alternatives to the online book, including a print version, an audio version, a Kindle version, and .pdf printable versions.

We also work with our authors to create and sell high quality study aids tightly integrated with the book - audio study guides,mobile flash cards, web quizzes, animated problem walkthroughs, etc. Students can purchase these DRM free downloads as they need them, or in one digital package. Our authors receive a percentage of all revenue generated. The bottom line is that financial models demonstrate that our revenue, and the income generated by authors, will be more than competitive with what the traditional houses make, so we can continuously reinvest in our products. Sorry about the long post. I just wanted to be clear that it can be dangerous to lump all open textbooks together in the category of "a book somebody just put online". At Flatworld, we are a professional publisher. We just have a new and better business model, and we think that it can produce a win for students, faculty, authors, and us, the publisher. Thanks for the opportunity to clarify!

Eric Frank     eric[at]flatworldknowledge.com  flatworldknowledge.com

Part of the appeal of open textbooks to students is obviously no cost versus the ridiculously high cost of books for classes. Students can access open textbooks on the Internet for free. But what is the appeal of the open textbook for teachers and colleges?

Open textbook "authors" put their books online for public use. Since they are also open license, instructors can modify the text by deleting and adding content. Of course, you can still print them and some campuses even offer printed copies, color versions etc. at minimal cost.

But there aren't many available at this point.

What makes it a bit more interesting for me here at Passaic County Community College is that yesterday I read that the Community College Open Textbook Project begins this week. Professors from colleges will be meeting with representatives from nonprofit groups and for-profit companies that are in the digital textbook market to talk about ways of developing and promoting online content.

Not all reviews of open textbooks are glowing. Some students find them too short and lacking the depth of traditional books. For example, some professors typically cover a portion of the text in class/lectures, but would assign or expect students to read the additional textbook material. In a course like statistics, students might welcome extra practice problems from a full textbook. The quality of available OER materials is inconsistent at this point. These books may not meet Section 508 ADA accessibility requirements. Faculty will need to check for accuracy of content of open content more than commercial textbooks. (The Wikipedia versus Britannica battle again.)

Still, as with other Open Everything efforts, customization of content will ultimately be more flexible in open content than it currently is in commercially available content. And after a few classes where you pay $100+ for a book that gets used twice in the semester, student attitudes to open textbooks will change.

The first phase of the Community College Open Textbook Project is being funded by a one-year, $500,000-plus grant to the Foothill-De Anza Community College District from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

As part of the project, community college professors will receive training on how to find and customize material. Another goal is for participants to create online textbooks using existing resources. The meeting in California will have them reviewing open-textbook models for equality, usability, accessibility, and sustainability.

Here are the first four providers of free online educational resources that will be considered, and plenty of additional resources if you want to explore more deeply.

• Connexions run by Rice University
• Flat World Knowledge, a commercial digital-textbook publisher (FWK should be offering free textbooks online in 2009)
• University of California's College Prep Online (Advanced Placement and other courses online)
• Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources which was founded by the Foothill-De Anza Community College District and the League for Innovation in the Community College


• an article from Inside Higher Ed
• Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCOER)


• CCCOER Open Content
• Wikibooks, Wikiversity and Wikijunior


• No More Textbooks. What Would Gutenberg Say?


• Open Text Book is a registry of textbooks and text book material that is open in accordance with


• the Open Knowledge Definition (OKD) and is run by the Open Knowledge Foundation

UPDATED  May 1, 2008

I'm adding this comment to the main post because I know that readers don't always bother to click the comments link. Here's a take on this topic from a commercial publisher (mentioned above) who is working with the open textbook community.

Hi Kenneth,

Thanks for the thoughtful post.

I am the co-founder of Flat World Knowledge, the commercial open textbook publisher mentioned in the Wired Campus article. I agree with you that historically, the quality of open textbooks has been inconsistent. We are focused on changing that. My business partner and I come out of 30 years of publishing experience with McGraw-Hill, Thomson, and Prentice Hall. We have personally worked on some of the top selling textbooks in the market. It is our belief that there is no inherent reason why an open textbook should be of any lower quality that a traditional book.

I can't speak for open textbooks in general. I can only speak to our approach. We are building our textbooks just like we did at our former companies . We are being highly selective about which authors we sign (top academics, recognized in their fields). Our books are undergoing extensive peer review. They are professionally illustrated, and fully accuracy checked. They include everything a traditional book does, including problem sets. They even include more, like integrated audio and videos. We produce teaching supplements for instructors.

You get the point. These are complete, high quality books.

The difference is that we make them free online, and available forinstructors to modify to better fit the syllabus before assigning it to students.

We have a viable financial model behind this. Students can purchase inexpensive alternatives to the online book, including a print version, an audio version, a Kindle version, and .pdf printable versions.

We also work with our authors to create and sell high quality study aids tightly integrated with the book - audio study guides,mobile flash cards, web quizzes, animated problem walkthroughs, etc. Students can purchase these DRM free downloads as they need them, or in one digital package. Our authors receive a percentage of all revenue generated. The bottom line is that financial models demonstrate that our revenue, and the income generated by authors, will be more than competitive with what the traditional houses make, so we can continuously reinvest in our products. Sorry about the long post. I just wanted to be clear that it can be dangerous to lump all open textbooks together in the category of "a book somebody just put online". At Flatworld, we are a professional publisher. We just have a new and better business model, and we think that it can produce a win for students, faculty, authors, and us, the publisher. Thanks for the opportunity to clarify!

Eric Frank
eric[at]flatworldknowledge.com  flatworldknowledge.com

I discovered an interesting book while listening to a podcast of The Brian Lehrer Show. It's Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations written by Clay Shirky. I was happy to see that my library had a copy I could pick and and read.

At first look, the book seems to be about all the Web 2.0 goodness that many of us have been playing with the past few years - social networks, blogs, wikis et al. Read a bit further into the book and you see that Shirky is interested in what happens when the rest of the crowd gets to using these tools. He is theorizing that when everybody comes to that place it will transform the relationship between individuals and the big hierarchical institutions that dominated our pre-Internet society and are being flattened.

Shirky wears several hats (teacher, media critic, telecom consultant, art major, theatrical director) so it's not surprising that he looks at our digital networking age through filters that are philosophical, sociological, economic and statistical.

His view balances successes and failures. On the successful side are projects like the user-generated Wikipedia, balanced by duds like the L.A. Times Wikitorial for user-gen op-ed writing. In fact, print journalism takes it on the chin here.

A review/interview on Ars Technica points to a story Shirky tells from the real good old days of 1492. The printing press had some time to get established by then and there were critics. One was an Abbot named Johannes Trithemius who -

...wrote a treatise on the superiority of the scrivener's life to the vulgarity of movable type. But Trithemius had a problem: he wanted his book to reach a broad audience, and that would have been impossible if he had relied on his fellow scribes to reproduce the book by hand. So he had the book printed. As Shirky puts it, "The content of the Abbot's book praised the scribes, while its printed form damned them."

Shirky wrote more about this idea in a post on his publisher's blog (Penguin):

It's worth noting that most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient. Readily available translations of scripture did destroy the Church as a pan-European institution. Most of the material produced by the new class of publishers was flyweight. Scribes did lose their social function. And so on, through a battery of transformations including public scrutiny of elites, the international spread of political foment, and even literate women. (The book to read on these transitions is Elizabeth Eisenstein's two-volume work The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.)

 

All of which brings me to the internet. It too democratizes both production and consumption of media. It too is producing a staggering volume of new material, some good but most flyweight. It too is upending the role of traditional gatekeepers and destroying the older economics of scarcity. And it too is leading to a cottage industry of hand-wringing: "Why can't we just get a little bit of internet, but keep most things the way they were?"

Clay Shirky's personal website will also has a blog for this new book that updates the book with posts of related material like Newspapers and the Net and even posts and comments from readers correcting typos in the book's first edition.

In education, I see a small but growing number of teachers using these tools, but we have a ways to go before the change will be widespread. Students are important agents of change for educational technology both in what they bring to the classroom and their expectations for what teachers should be using.

Clay Shirky says that communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. He explains that by comparing it to the automobile.

"In a way, the kind of real transformation of the American landscape by the automobile—the rise of the suburbs, the change in work and living patterns, and so forth—could only happen after cars themselves—and in particular, the fact of the internal combustion engine—had become boring."

I'm curious to see how long it takes teachers to be comfortable (bored) enough with Web technologies to start doing really interesting things with them.

Here is a video of Shirky talking about the book

RESOURCES
There have been a few shelves worth of books the past few years about the transforming powers of these Internet-based movements. Here's ten that are a good starting list - enough to teach a course or two.

1. Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World


2. Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology


3. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier


4. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution


5. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised : Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything


6. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom


7. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything read a review


8. Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration


9. Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming


10. Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

When I wrote here asking readers if they would post their thoughts on the wiki page I set up about open source tools and how it has changed their writing or the teaching of writing, I got a good number of responses. I will post those responses next week. One person who responded was Virginia O'Connor from XAware, Inc. She also emailed me and said that she had done a small survey with a few her fellow tech writers about OS tools.

She posted her question on the Eclipse Technical Writer Yahoo group asking whether writers were open-sourcing their content. The discussion was limited in scope and more technical than I was first considering for my own presentation, but it opened up a new area for me to consider. I knew that my audience at the NJCEA conference was concerned with literature and essays. Still, I teach in the graduate program in Professional Technical Communications at NJIT, so technical writing is something for me to consider.

If you have an interest in this tech writer side of things, you can read their discussions on the Yahoo group site, but I have reproduced below Virginia's summary that she sent me for any of you that follow (as Tim does) this side of the discussion. Geek warning: this is more tech than usual for this blog, but at least take a look at Q&A #13 below. (Ken)

---

At XAware, our help is currently compiled using AuthorIT and delivered as output .html and .xml files and is not specifically delivered as source content that users can then modify and compile on their own. Users can make modifications to the output .html and .xml files and that updated content will load (if done properly) from the help menu. Those content changes can be contributed back to the project for everyone's benefit. This process is documented in the XAware wiki for contributing code (see http://www.xaware.org/).
Modifying the output help files will result, however, in a mismatch between that updated content shared in the community and the content management system we use to produce new content unless the author alerts the XAware team who can then make the changes and push it back out to the community.
It may not be the perfect solution, but it is what we have for the time being. We wanted to know if other writers were faced with the same situation.

Recently, I sent out an informal survey to ask Technical writers who write for open source projects what kinds of documentation they deliver, how they manage and deliver the content, and whether the content is internationalized.

1. First, tell us a little about what your open source project does and how you got involved with the project.
<JS> My employer publishes the "Enthought Tool Suite" <http://code.enthought.com/ets/>, which is a collection of Python packages that we use for building scientific applications.
<JW> OpenOffice.org (OOo) is a full-featured office suite: word processor, spreadsheet, presentations, vector drawing, equation editor, and database. All user documentation (other than the help files included with the program) is produced by volunteers, members of the OOo community.
<VO> The company I work for, XAware <xaware.org>, produces and delivers an open source composite data services product, which provides real-time data integration services.
... and for part two of the question, "how you got involved with the project":
<JS> I've worked for Enthought for over 4 years. One of the factors that attracted me to the position was the company's attitude towards open source.
<JW> I got involved 5 years ago when the project was fairly new and no user documentation existed, other than some poorly-written and frequently incorrect help files. I had recently retired from a technical editing career, so I wrote and self-published a book about the word-processor component, OOo Writer. Soon after that, I was asked by a group of volunteers to act as lead editor for a user guide they were writing. This group (OOoAuthors) works on a separate website from the "official" OOo project and makes its products available to the official project.
<VO> I got involved almost 6 years ago when the project was still in the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs Incubator and they had some minimally useful technical documentation. I started as a full-time employee in 2002 and have been working for them since. XAware recently converted their commercial product to open source, so it's been an interesting transition.

2. How many writers do you have working on the project?
<JS> Only one person officially known as a 'writer', but 5 others who contribute content
<JW> Don't know; it varies a lot as volunteers come and go. OOoAuthors currently has perhaps half a dozen people active at any given time, though in the past we had a lot more active members. The "official" project may have more members, but few seem to be actively producing documentation.
<VO> Only one person offically tasked with the writing, but others on the development team contribute to the wiki content.

3. What kinds of documentation do the writer(s) deliver with the product and in what format (User’s Guides in PDF, help systems as .chm, etc.)?
<JS> Most User Guides are in PDF, but one is in HTML. API docs are in HTML. Since this project consists mainly of libraries, there are no applications that have online help.
<JW> The online help (not produced by our group) is in HTML.
<VO> User's Guide in PDF (FrameMaker), the help system is Eclipse-based help (which is its own challenge! AuthorIT) delivered in the product, flash tutorials (Captivate) hosted on the xaware.org web site, cheat sheets (XML) built into the product, executable examples (BizDocument, BizComponent, and BizDriver files with dynamically loaded help and Derby databases) built into the product, training (FrameMaker, plus Hypersonic databases) delivered separately, and Wiki pages (WikiMedia).

4. Have you implemented the use of wikis and what kind of content has been migrated to those wikis?
<JS> The project has a wiki that is integrated with the issue tracking system and source control system. Most of content on the wiki is volatile, such as installation and build instructions, or "raw" content contributed by developers, which may be incorporated into more formal documentation at a later date. On the other hand, the wiki has the capability to display files that are checked into the source control system, so some formal documentation is also available on the wiki.
<JW> The OOo project has a documentation wiki, which includes FAQs, how-to's [sic], and tutorials in addition to the user guides produced by OOoAuthors.
<VO> Yes, we have wikis and up to now, the content there is primarily written by XAware employees. The wikis include FAQs, some how-to material supporting the use of XAware, information for new XAware developers who may contribute to the project, and instructions to add the Designer to third-party applications.

5. Have you implemented any animated or flash content and for what purpose (to demonstrate feature usage, etc.)?
<JS> No. One developer has created some demos using Camtasia, which he hosts on his own server.
<JW> No.
<VO> Yes, we have used Captivate to generate some demonstrations of how to use the design tool to create web services, to publish web services, and more. We are adding to the list of tutorials all the time. Each is hosted on the xaware.org site.

6. Do you produce and deliver e-learning?
<JS> Not for this project.
<JW> No, but some third parties do.
<VO> No, but we do produce training, which is instructor-led.

7. How is the documentation delivered (i.e., pushed to a web site, included with the product, etc.)?
<JS> The primary means of publication is delivery with the project. However, it is also made available on a static web site, and in some cases, on the wiki.
<JW> The documentation produced by the volunteer writers is not delivered with the product, but it is made available on the official project's website and the OOoAuthors website. It is provided in ODT (OpenDocument Text) and PDF forms, and on the OOo wiki. Friends of OpenDocument Inc, an Australian organisation, publishes printed books from the PDFs; these are sold through Lulu.com.
<VO> The primary amount of supporting documentation is delivered with the product, as cheat sheets, help, supporting examples, and dynamically loaded help. The User's Guide (PDF) is delivered to the xaware.org web site, where the wikis and tutorials are also hosted. This is intended to reduce the size of the download and provide the type of content the user will expect where they expect to encounter it. Specifically, tutorials on the web site so they can be viewed in a browser (and stopped or re-started, that kind of thing) and help in the product to support pressing F1.

8. What project documentation is written and delivered to users by people who are not technical writers?
<JS> It depends on the component. Some of the tools included in the Enthought Tool Suite are coded by people who are not employed by Enthought. Those tools are more likely to have developer- or user-written documentation. I focus on tools coded by Enthought employees.
<JW> Many of the volunteers do not have a technical writing background.
<VO> So far, almost all of it is written and delivered by a Technical Writer (except for the wiki content, which the entire product team contributes to).

9. What products do you use to deliver the documentation (i.e., FrameMaker to DITA, AuthorIT to HTML help, etc.)?
<JS> I write PDF documentation using Word, but convert it to PDF using OpenOffice.org Writer (to satisfy Debian packaging requirements). The documentation that has been written by others is written in ReStructured Text, and converted to HTML or PDF. API documentation is extracted from Python documentation comments and formatted as HTML using our own tool called "endo". This could also be done using "epydoc". When I write online help (using RoboHelp) for the proprietary products we create for clients, I maintain a separate help project for the features that are provided by the open source tools, and I include that project in the "master" help system for the client product. I include the source files for that help project in the open source repository, along with CHM and RoboHelp WebHelp outputs. AFAIK, no one has ever used this, but it's available on the principle that documentation for open source code should also be open source.
<JW> All documentation from our group is produced using the product itself, OpenOffice.org. OOo can export to PDF and to MediaWiki, among other formats.
<VO> The User's Guide is done in FrameMaker as are the training materials (we use single source content modules where possible). The help is produced from AuthorIT with a SQL Server database back-end and delivered as Eclipse-based help (which requires manual changes). The tutorials are done in Captivate. The supporting examples are built with our product and use a Derby database (also open source). The cheat sheets are done in a text editor as they are XML files.

10. Does your writing team integrate a content management system into the process and if so, which one do you use?
<JS> No.
<JW> Plone.
<VO> AuthorIT, with a SQL Server database back-end, and single sourced FrameMaker content files.

11. Does the writing team deliver the content source to users but also allow users to compile or transform it into other formats?
… if so, what value do you believe is added for the user?
<JS> Yes. The documentation is also "open source".
<JW> Yes, the content source is made available for users to download and modify as they choose.
<VO> Not yet.
... and for part two of the question, "if so, what value do you believe is added for the user?":
<JS> Same value as for open source code.
<JW> Consultants, teachers, others can easily modify to suit their needs, for example by adding their own examples and exercises, selecting specific parts of the user guides and producing another document, localising for a different country or a different variety of English, or translating into another language.
<VO> Some development work is occurring now that will let users contribute their own help when they contribute new components, but we currently have no plans to open source the content even though we acknowledge it might be a good idea down the road.

12. Is the content internationalized, and if so, to how many languages,
<JS> No.
<JW> Don't know. The Creative Commons license allows reuse and modification without notifying us. We don't attempt to control or coordinate translation or localisation. Some of the original source documents are in German or another language, though many originate in English. The user interface of OOo itself is translated into over 40 languages.
<VO> Not yet.
and using what process?
<JW> Volunteer translators. I don't know what process or tools they use.
<VO> AuthorIT's support for translation libraries will help us do this later, but we don't do this now. The product is not localized yet either.

13. How has open source changed your writing practices overall?
<JS> Working on open source has affected me less than simply being a lone tech writer. Because I need to collaborate on documentation with non-techwriters, I choose tools and processes that are accessible to them. This is true whether I am collaborating with coworkers on a client project, or with outside developers or users on an open source project.
<JW> Working with volunteers has required more mentoring, leadership (not management), negotiation, and editing than when working with staff or contract writers. I've enjoyed the opportunity to write in "international English" and work with a talented group of people, many of whom do not have English as a first language. Balancing the varied writing styles of the volunteers with a need for some consistency in results has been challenging, and has reinforced my opinion that many things some editors obsess over are (and should be) far down on my priority list for getting usable documentation published.
<VO> Because the methods users currently use to access supporting content have changed so drastically with Eclipse plug-ins, I am (finally!) able to consider useful ways of presenting user- and task-centric content to the user in an interactive way. No longer is the divide between what the user is doing on the screen, and the help they need so wide - and the gap will close even further with the development of Eclipse and supporting products. So, while some users still seem to want a PDF they can print and study, most users are not willing to spend that amount of time. Instead, these users want and need useful, specific support for what they are trying to do right now. It has opened up the channels of user support and initiated writing a lot of different types of supporting content, which I believe would be difficult to manage without our content system. While we don't currently deliver our content as source the user can contribute to and compile, that day may come.

Other Resources
Lately, I've joined the Content Wrangler's community and found the discussions and articles there to be very timely.