Open licensing of textbooks ?

Bringing open resources to textbooks and teaching
Jimmy Wales,Rich Baraniuk
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
As the founders of two of the world's largest open-source media platforms - Wikipedia and Connexions - we have both been accused of being dreamers. Independently, we became infected with the idea of creating a Web platform that would enable anyone to contribute their knowledge to free and open learning resources. Jimmy started with his popularly generated encyclopedia. Rich developed a platform for authors, teachers and students to create, remix and share courses and textbooks.

Just about everybody dismissed these dreams. Now, with the support of untold legions of people from Nobel laureates to junior high school kids sitting in the back rows of classrooms, from East Timor the long way around to East Los Angeles, Wikipedia and Connexions have spread around the globe and today are organic, growing, information bases used by hundreds of millions of people.

We want to infect you with the dream that anyone can become part of a new movement with the potential to change the world of education: A movement that can redefine forever how knowledge is created and used. Imagine a world where textbooks and other learning materials are available to everyone for free over the Web and at low-cost in print. (Today, some community college students have to drop out because their textbooks cost more than their tuition; and today, some third-graders have to share math texts because there aren't enough to go around.)

Imagine textbooks adapted to many learning styles and translated into myriad languages. (Today, language barriers prevent many immigrant parents from helping their children with their homework because the texts are only in English.) Imagine textbooks that are continually updated and corrected by a legion of contributors. (Today, Pluto remains in the list of planets in the nation's science textbooks, and who knows how long it will take for it to be removed.)

This world was just a dream a decade ago.

But the puzzle pieces of the Open Education movement have now come together so that anyone, anywhere, can author, assemble, customize and publish their own open course or textbook. Open licenses make the materials legal to use and remix. Technical innovations like XML and print-on-demand make delivering the output technically feasible and inexpensive.

The new development and distribution models promoted by the Open Education movement represent a natural and inevitable evolution of the educational publishing industry in a way that parallels the evolution of the software industry (toward Linux and other open source software); the music industry (recall the band Radiohead's recent "pay what you like" digital download); and the scholarly publishing industry (recall the government's recent decision to mandate online public access to all research funded by the National Institutes of Health - some $28.9 billion in federal funding this year).

The exciting thing about Open Education is that free access is just the beginning. Open Education promises to turn the textbook production pipeline into a vast dynamic knowledge ecosystem that is in a constant state of creation, use, reuse and improvement. Open Education promises to provide children with learning materials tailored to their individual needs in contrast to today's "off the rack" materials. Open Education promises quicker feedback loops that couple student learning outcomes more directly into content development and improvement. And Open Education promises new approaches to collaborative learning that leverage social interaction among students and teachers worldwide.
An interesting opinion piece. What do readers think?