Jimmy Wales (the creator of Wikipedia) is guest posting over at Lawrence Lessig’s blog on “Ten Things That Will Be Free.” Today’s installment is a free curriculum:
The second thing that will be free is a complete curriculum (in all languages) from Kindergarten through the University level. There are several projects underway to make this a reality, including our own Wikibooks project, but of course this is a much bigger job than the encyclopedia, and it will take much longer.
In the long run, it will be very difficult for proprietary textbook publishers to compete with freely licensed alternatives. An open project with dozens of professors adapting and refining a textbook on a particular subject will be a very difficult thing for a proprietary publisher to compete with. The point is: there are a huge number of people who are qualified to write these books, and the tools are being created to leave them to do that.
And you can hear the chorus of “Butwhatabout”s from educators of every stripe who have yet to understand what’s happening “out there.” It’s like I tell those who are the vicitims of my blogvangelizing, it’s not that you necessarily have to use all of these tools (though that would be nice because kids need models for how to use them well,) but it is that you have got to get your brain to recognize what social, collaborative, easy content creation and publishing means to our classrooms and to our practice. It is transformational, and to not take the time to at least consider the potential could very well render you irrelevant in short order.
If you do read the whole post, make sure you read the discussion that follows as well.
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