We don’t need a… textbook!
Before setting out for work this morning, I received a marketing e-mail from PBwiki announcing a new feature. They also linked to this example hosted at their site: a wikitechbook, “homemade” by students in a college course studying to become teachers.
In my book I mention a scenario for wikis where students in a school produce their own version of the Wikipedia. But the idea here, instead, is students of education create their own textbook. While conceivably high school juniors and seniors might take on such a project in K-12, I think you’d need a special group (highly motivated).
But the idea of having college students, who are learning to become educators (and will very likely encounter the paper-based textbooks in their first jobs) is an excellent idea. They will be collaborating to put this thing together, always be asking themselves “what belongs in a textbook”, and hopefully discovering ways to improve the textbook concept. Alongside other efforts to make open-source textbooks, projects like these could be submitted to some central authority for quality-control and licensing (something “copy-left”, not for profit).
So, kudos to Dr. Delta Cavner of Southern Baptist University for having her students establish a wiki textbook.