[Open-education] Open Education Handbook available on Wikibooks

Thu Dec 18 10:17:59 UTC 2014

Phil writes:
> Might be worth having periodic reviews of changes that have been made to
the wikibooks version to see what needs to be pulled back into the OKFN
hosted version.

That's exactly what I'm hoping will happen, and that's why I've documented
the corrections made while transferring to Wikibooks.

Mick writes:
> The other is the more community based debate on when is it a good idea to
fork a project, artistic differences, different audiences / use cases etc,
and when it is a bad idea to fork in that you have a similar community but
different versions of a resource so potential contributors don't know where
they should update.

That's a fair point to raise. I'm on the side of more versions giving a
greater chance of a version being truly sustainable. FLOSS manuals is an
ideal additional audience of readers and contributors: so is Wikibooks.
They overlap, but are not the same. Putting a version on a Wikimedia site
means that its editable in a way that's familiar to millions of people. The
process of transferring into Wikibooks has already resulted in improvements
that can feed into other versions.
I admit that keeping versions in sync is possible in principle but in
practice it's a tedious manual process. Periodic update combined with
review, as suggested in the video discussion and this thread, seems to me
to be the way to go. The different versions don't have to be peers: as in
wiki-to-journal publication, we can have authoritative, checked versions
and immediately editable versions.
If the Wikibooks version gets ignored and people maintain the other
versions, I'm fine with it: that'll be an experiment I'll learn from. Let's
see what happens.

On 17 December 2014 at 13:48, Barker, Phil A <Phil.Barker at hw.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>  ...and EPUB-WEB makes this even more attractive.
> http://w3c.github.io/epubweb/ my summary at
> http://blogs.pjjk.net/phil/initial-thoughts-on-epub-web-portable-documents-for-the-open-web-platform/
>
> Phil
>
>  ------------------------------
> *From:* open-education [open-education-bounces at lists.okfn.org] on behalf
> of Mick FM [mick at flossmanuals.net]
> *Sent:* 17 December 2014 12:47
> *To:* open-education at lists.okfn.org
> *Subject:* Re: [Open-education] Open Education Handbook available on
> Wikibooks
>
>
> On 17/12/14 11:33, Barker, Phil A wrote:
>
>
> Yep, there are lots of platform dependent ways. Booktype, the platform
> that the handbook is hosted on at OKFN, has some support for cloning. But
> not everyone is going to use the same platform, and yes, there is no
> standard for OER content. By saying it was a problem I didn't mean to imply
> that it was solvable, and even if it is solvable won't be solved until the
> pain caused by forking is greater than the effort and sacrifices necessary
> to create and adopt a solution.
>
> Did you mean OAI ResourceSync ? It's worth a look
>
>
> Booktype does support cloning, but one key limitation is that is doesn't
> preserve information on who has made which edit to the book (perhaps that's
> asking a bit much at this stage).
>
> My vote would be for epub to be the most likely candidate for an exchange
> format which would facilitate such a federated approach.
> There is a bit written about the work we did on this for the Libre
> Graphics Research Unit here.
> http://lowstandart.net/index.php?entry=entry120911-005039
>
> Why epub? Well it's self-contained and export to epub is already supported
> by many online platforms for to allow reading on ereaders / tablets. For
> example Media wiki can do it.
>
> It's importing where things become a bit more tricky.
> However Pressbooks.com already allow you to import epubs into their
> writing platform based on Wordpress. And Booktype allows you to import
> epubs too.
> There seem to be a lot of code libraries that allow for easy reading and
> conversion of epub so that's already a head start.
>
> I'd love to see more research and practice based study on what a healthy
> interacting system of educational resources would look like in an
> accessible federated writing system.
> I can imagine webs of teachers collaborating on resources, forking them
> for particular audiences and remerging the advances made.
>
>
> nice one
> Mick
>
> --
> Mick Chesterman - mick at flossmanuals.net
> mickfuzz [skype]
> @onefuzzyduck [twitter]
> http://clearerchannel.org - training and freelance workhttp://flossmanuals.net - Free Manuals for Free Software
>
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Dr Martin L Poulter
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The Economics Network
University of Bristol

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