Monday, February 22, 2010

Revise As You Go: Customized, Interactive Textbooks

Let just hope the Texas Board of Education doesn't get wind of this idea. They'll want to do the rewrites for everyone!

Link to February 22 New York Times article, "Textbooks That Professors Can Rewrite Digitally".

Excerpt: In a kind of Wikipedia of textbooks, Macmillan, one of the five largest publishers of trade books and textbooks, is introducing software called DynamicBooks, which will allow college instructors to edit digital editions of textbooks and customize them for their individual classes.

Professors will be able to reorganize or delete chapters; upload course syllabuses, notes, videos, pictures and graphs; and perhaps most notably, rewrite or delete individual paragraphs, equations or illustrations.


While many publishers have offered customized print textbooks for years — allowing instructors to reorder chapters or insert third-party content from other publications or their own writing — DynamicBooks gives instructors the power to alter individual sentences and paragraphs without consulting the original authors or publisher
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