The Open Content "Washington State History and State Government" Book Project

About

The Open Content "Washington State History and State Government" Book Project will result in a free textbook and course work for Washington state history and civics.

The textbook will be a public endeavor: the text will be freely and publically accessible and redistributable.

Open content (like open source software) means that the text will be freely available for reuse. And the text will be written/compiled using open collaborative methods. For information about open content, see:

The textbook will be built in collaboration of various Washington state history and government teachers, professors and historians (either as writers or reviewers).

Why?

To save money for schools -- hopefully to increase school teacher's salaries or to decrease taxes.

Each school would be responsible for own printing, if desired. (For example: in-house printing, low-cost comb-binding, weekly photocopied handouts, or even web-based reading assignments.)

According to Mike Papritz, the Social Studies/International Education Program Director for the State of Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction: There is no state board whose charge is to approve curriculum. That is all done at the district level. Because the state is a local control state, many textbook adoptions and curricular decisions are made at each district.

(** Need to add statistics on how much money is spent on these textbooks. **)

Because of the open content model, corrections and updates can be easily made. The open, peer review can continually improve the textbooks (so history is not rewritten or biased, for example).

How?

Various teachers and historians will be able to share updates to the textbook.

The content could be done in DocBook or SGML format. These formats are supported by various tools and can be used to generate various other documentation formats. For example, the free word processor, AbiWord, supports DocBook. (It is available for Windows and other operating systems.)

A content versioning software (like CVS) will be used to keep track of changes. In addition, all changes to textbook will be available via website interface to the content versioning software.

All submitters (contributors) will be able to know about (who and why) any updates/changes to the content.

Discussion can be done via mailing lists.

Automatic builds of the book could be done nightly to create books in HTML and PDF (Adobe Acrobat), for example.

Example

An example of an open content book: The FreeBSD Handbook is 500+ page book written by a variety of contributors. It is available for purchase in print form or freely downloadable in various formats.

A few pages from the book.

cvsweb: This is the browsable CVS of this FreeBSD handbook in original format. It contains all changes (so you can go back to a previous version), who made changes, and notes why changes were made.

The license

Based on BSD (aka Berkeley) license: anyone can use or reuse book for any purpose including commercial. The goal is to have a freely available book.

In addition, some parts of the text (and artwork) may be based on public domain, like old texts (which can't be relicensed).

Needs

The project (textbook) name may be changed, for example: "Washington State History and Social Studies" or "Washington State History and Civics".

This project was based on ideas from Jack Johnson of Meridian SD.