Opera at SXSW 2008

My next panel was "Textbooks of the Future: Free & Collaborative!" The members of the panel were:


Melissa Hagemann, Program Mgr, Open Society Institute
Richard Baraniuk, Professor, Rice University
Samuel Klein, Directory of Community Content, One Laptop per Child
Erik Moeller, Deputy Dir, Wikimedia Foundation Inc


Baraniuk is an engineering professor who was frustrated with textbooks. He argued that any time you put your ideas into a textbook you are putting nonlinear ideas into a linear format, and he found it hard to pull together a community of people to write a textbook. Also, the glacially slow and expensive textook publishing process meant that producing or changing text was extremely difficult. The wiki model provided answers to some of these problems, and Baraniuk was able to help create Connexions, a vetted and open content textook resource. Baraniuk compared the publishing industry to the music industry, and he claimed that publishers are now having to deal with the same issues that musicians and producers are dealing with. He also discussed some print-on-demand services that allow people to publish paper copies of open content works. A book that would normally be $120 becomes $20 (this is in place at Rice University.) Baraniuk also mentioned the Budapest Open Access Initiative as a jumping off point for those interested in open textbook projects. In fact, the BOAI triggered another statement (one that Baraniuk was involved with) called The Capetown Open Education Declaration. The Capetown Declaration states that all publicly funded learning materials should be available for free online.

Moeller discussed the range of wiki projects that the Wikimedia foundation hosts - wikibooks, wiktionary, and - of course - Wikipedia. Moeller also mentioned that the ability to fork a project like Wikipedia changes the delivery of knowledge. Want a conservative encyclopedia? You can take Wikipedia and give it your own spin [Note: some folks did create Conservapedia, but they didn't create it as a fork. Instead, they started from scratch. This impulse to start from scratch is, in my opinion, a holdover from previous modes of publishing. Forking, is something that the publishing industry is going to have to grapple with in the coming years.]

Klein is looking to couple open access tools like Wikis as he expands the One-Laptop-Per-Child project. He's doing so to show various smaller communities that there are ways to publish online. For Klein, what these tools allow educators to do is communicate knowledge in a way that doesn't focus on who "owns" the ideas. The focus instead becomes: How do we communicate this information by removing the barriers that are in place for traditional publishing? When the topic of print-on-demand came up, Klein called it "distinctively unsexy." He said static texts are too cumbersome and can't respond to feedback quickly enough, but he also added that the shift from static to dynamic is not bad news for publishers. Instead, these publishers need to "change some of those midlevel pieces of infrastructure." If publishers see themselves as "curators of knowledge for their readers," they can take advantage of some of the current shifts taking place.

This panel was really interesting. I'm a fan of the wiki model, so I didn't need to be persuaded. But I wonder what the CEO of Penguin or Knopf would have said as a member of this panel. I think the panelists did a great job of debunking the idea that wikis will "kill" the book, but I do wonder what a hostile audience would say to some of the projects presented here. It may not be possible to persuade the extreme skeptic, but I'm curious.