http://ocw.mit.edu/

It contains freely available lecture notes (mostly in PDF) for all of their course. Some courses even provides the full textbooks for free.

Many authors also post their works (notes, monograms, books, textbooks) for free/libre/gratis on the net. If you searched around for “free books”, you can find these free texts ranged from the very old to the very new.

Some websites even try to collect and organize these scattered book into their own set of curriculum. One of such project is FreeTechBooks.com, mostly intended for computer science and mathematics books.

http://www.freetechbooks.com/

I hope someday there will be a compromising point, where publishing companies can retain a profit while students can afford to purchase their textbooks. In the meantime, the current trend of free full text is relieving enough for college students.

So there is an interplay between what the unit co-ordinator wants in the unit and what textbooks provide. In this interplay I think things are being lost.

Sorry, Chris

Your idea of a free curriculum is a really good idea. I have only been lecturing for a couple of years and find my lectures closely follow the chosen text book for a particular topic. This effect is encouraged by the textbook distributors and the need to put all lectures on-line for external students. The text book manufactures provide PowerPoint copies of the images in the textbook and the students have come to expect lectures will not stray too far from the text. The lecturer acts more as an interpreter, demonstrator and problem poser. So there is an interplay between what the unit co-ordinator wants in the unit and what textbooks provide. In this interplay I think things are being.

Another aspect of the problem is that older members of staff are retiring and all their experience goes with them. Often I have been talking about what my students are doing and one of the older members of staff have piped up with “There’s a good demo for that” and goes on to explain. Often you would not be able to find this information on the net because the net is biased to what people want to put on it and the old stuff seems to get forgotten. Or perhaps the people who know about it are not computer savvy enough or too busy.

So I guess I am asking that you put Physics and Chemistry on your free curriculum list so that there can be a repository for knowledge that otherwise may get lost if the adaptation of content for e-study continues.

Chris

There is no one curriculum. And, if there were we would lose more than we gain. What would the people who now work on curriculums do if curriculums were free? What would happen to the ecology that generates improved appraoches?

In business, we have silo busting, best practices, and offshoring. How has any of this actually made business better? It hasn’t.

The variations in curriculums are tied to subject domain paradigms. Getting a new paradigm to birth in the bibliographc system takes years. It is a very slow process. But, with it comes the moment when the paradigm arrives in your corporate functional unit and demands a culture change. The notion that there is only one culture in corporate is false. A belief in this has lead to such things as requirement volitility, which is not inherently a charcteristic of the encoded domain, but rather of politicized IT practice. I suppose that a single curriculum is the perfect device to close minds just as No Child Left Behind is the perfect device for closing public schools and subjecting children to the brainwashing of the theocracy.

The following statement is from Thermodynamics, Availibility and Emergy by Thomas L. Wayburn but is only one example of many.

“It is easy to see that fewer than 10% of the projected population of the earth in 2030 can spend energy at the current American rate, under the condition that the remaining 90+% subsist on 0.3kW. Moreover, for each person within the subsistence class who exceeds his allowance someone must die! If the current populations of the U.S., Europe and Japan survive and all else perish, the surviving population must still spend less than 90% of the current American energy budget.” see http://web.wt.net/~twayburn/emergy.html

From this it is clear that to energy to participate in an electronic culture is going to become a critical problem for everyone.

As stated previously with proper controls and protections it is easy to manipulate content of wikis for any of a raft of reasons. Therefore, widespread participation in the process to protect it from manipulation or perversion is necessary. In the last election in the province of Alberta in Canada, the Conservatives won 62 of 83 seats with 21 per cent of population elligible to vote.

You will need to check the licensing on each article but almost all the articles on Wikipedia are licensed under the GNU FDL, so you can download, distribute and print them out under the terms of that license.

Three questions:
Where can free artwork useful for a text be found?
Is there an artwork generating program that can be recommended that will provide a consistent quality and portable format?
Can a text be downloaded from wikipedia? (I realise that the point is to keep it online for all to edit, but when I ask 1,000 students to access a text, it would be much more convenient to distribute in on a CD)

That’s how we’ve always perceived the homeschooling movement – as a small pocket of resistence against everything wrong with the school model. There’s plenty of good within the school model, of course, but as Ivan Illich, John Holt, John Taylor Gatto and many others have pointed out, there’s a lot wrong.

This free curriculum idea – indeed the whole concept of “What Will Be Free” – is, by the very fact that it needed to be brought up and by the reactions of those reading, a pretty good indicator of how far we as a society have progressed down the “nutty idea” path of hoarding and selling basic human needs like information. I wonder what the world would be like today if this concept had taken root in, say, the forties…