There’s been a whole lot of press on open textbooks lately, in addition to my own posts on theFlexbookand theStudent PIRGs’ recent report鼓励开源教科书作为数字教科书的正确模式(相对于商业出版商目前提供的有限的电子书)。开源电子书和商业电子书之间的差异是巨大而深刻的。开放式教科书可以自由编辑、下载，并可供他人重新使用，这与任何学术领域对真理的探索都在不断被修改的理念相一致，尤其是在科学和技术领域。知识永远处于贝塔状态不仅仅是一种矛盾修饰法;旧式的教科书在这个通讯快速的时代已经过时了。此外，学生和许多教授再也不喜欢这种生活了。
The New York Times article, “Don’t Buy That Textbook, Download It Free,” features an interview with Cal Tech professor, R. Preston McAfee, who offers his “Introduction to Economic Analysis” online for free. Anotherarticle by the LA Timesreports best-selling co-author Steven D. Levitt ofFreakonomicscalling McAfee brilliant. If brilliant minds putting out open textbooks and students buying in (for free and for low-cost print versions on places likeLulu.comandFlatworld Knowledge) are not an indication of a revolution in textbook making, I don’t know what is.
The numbers don’t lie either. Quotes the NY Times on McAfee:
“如果我完成了我自己的书，我几年前就会完成了。”“这可能需要五年时间。这本书要印刷5年，卖出2000本。”他说，相反，他把它放在了网站上，他的教科书《信号与系统》(Signals and Systems)已经有280万页的浏览量，包括一本翻译成西班牙语的书。
Wiredalso quotes a long-timer in the traditional textbook industry, Eric Frank, who is getting with the changing times: “The nice thing about open content is it gives faculty full control, creative control over the content of the book, full control over timing, and it give students a lot more control over how they want to consume it and how much they want to pay”…“On the surface they’re (traditional publishers) doing OK, but underneath the surface there are lots of problems.”
A long-existing and solid promoter of the open textbook isConnexions, an online platform “for collaboratively developing, freely sharing, and rapidly publishing scholarly content on the Web.” Connexions, created by Rice University’s Richard Baraniuk, initiated a new way of thinking about textbooks:
“Most textbooks are a mass of information in linear format: one topic follows after another. However, our brains are not linear – we learn by making connections between new concepts and things we already know. Connexions mimics this by breaking down content into smaller chunks, called modules, that can be linked together and arranged in different ways. This lets students see the relationships both within and between topics and helps demonstrate that knowledge is naturally interconnected, not isolated into separate classes or books.”
According to the NY Times, theWilliam and Flora Hewlett Foundation, a staunch supporter of the open educational resources (OER) movement, has granted $6 million to Connexions alone. Connexions licenses all of its contentCC BY该许可证允许最大程度的共享能力和教育创造力，同时仍然保留作者身份，从而提高合作输出的质量。
