Textbooks: Investigate sources of Open Source Textbooks

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Humane Heritage - OLD VERSION

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Textbooks: Investigate sources of Open Source Textbooks #31

Open braddockcg opened 11 years ago

braddockcg commented 11 years ago

Someone should look into good sources of Open Source Textbooks for the IIAB. There are a lot of projects out there.

For a start see: http://www.teachthought.com/technology/5-sources-of-open-source-textbooks/

The buzzword is "Open-source educational resources" — usually abbreviated as OER

It is possible that we could trivially import all of Wikibooks using the scripts I've already written, but I don't know if it is worthwhile (never seen a GOOD book on Wikibooks).

-braddock

omwah commented 11 years ago

Here are some links I had laying around or found just now. I haven't vetted them yet and most are more geared towards college text books.

Search Sites:

Lists of books on other sites:

This one appears to be a torrent site, do not use:

Textbook Nova

omwah commented 11 years ago

I went through all my links and the link you have in the OP. My impression is as follows:

Not all free books have a liberal license. May are all rights reserved but allow you to look at it online
Most books are geared towards college students
The books that were for younger students are geared towards high school students. Lower bound for grade level I saw was about 9th grade.
Even the California initiative for free text books was looking at other people's existing work, not creating their own work.

I think the better approach (as California is doing) is to identify courses and then look for content. If your project gets bigger people might fill in the blank.

There really seems to be not many free resources for early learning.

omwah commented 11 years ago

Now that I think of it, Jenn Greenway who gave the Your Baby Can Hack talk at SCALE 11x seems very interested in early learning. She might be a contact for help. She is teacher and the wife of Gareth Greenaway, one of the co-founders of SCALE.

leonardcj commented 11 years ago

You should look into LibrarianChick:

http://www.librarianchick.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

leonardcj commented 11 years ago

Also look into Internet Archive Children's Library

http://archive.org/details/iacl