Talk:Contributing

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This page can be used for general discussion of how to improve Textbook Revolution. Please sign and date your entries by inserting ~~~~ at the end. Start a new topic.

Contents

[edit] Todo List

[edit] General

  • I rephrased the about page, but it could still use some more material. Derek Kaser talk 01:51, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Site Appearance

  • Make design more vibrant (Branden Gay has started doing some of this and is making progress).
  • Fix the Submit a new book page so that it's clear that you are adding the title of the book and that it is likely to be ambiguous, you may want to add something in addition to be more descriptive
  • When a person lands on the add or edit page and they are on an existing book that is not the one they are adding, give them clear instructions on how to create a unique page for their book
  • Why are the titles listed by the initial articles (e.g. A Field Guide to Genetic Programming, listed in the "As") and not listed following office filing rules and library filing rules? Both those standard filing (i.e. listing) rules state that the initial article of a title (i.e. A, An, The) are not to be used to file (list) the title and the 2nd word in the title is to be used. For example, following those standards, the example title given before should be listed in the "F" section as: Field Guide to Genetic Programming, A. Following the standard and accepted (for over 100 years) filing (listing) practices keeps the A and T sections from being cluttered with titles starting with "A," "An," and "The." Think about it.

[edit] Other textbook projects

Create some new properties, a template, and a form for reviewing and linking to other textbook projects. Sites like maketextbooksaffordable, open textbook project, etc., would all be good to link to. A good example to follow might be the creative commons case study example.

There are lots of case studies to be written here, for sure. See if you can find brainstorming exerciss for other textbook sites as well, to highlight and link to. 'interwiki' links are great. Sj
Also, Check out http://wiki.okfn.org/opentextbooks/lists --Jgay 20:36, 19 May 2009 (UTC)
  • www.TextbookTango.com ...a community of students from all over the country that are trying to buy or sell their textbooks

[edit] Collections

People should be able to create a collection of books and then describe what the collection is for. For example, one might create a collection of books that cover the core subjects of a standard 10th grade curriculum. Or, I could have a bundle of my favorite graduate physics books. I think it would be really cool if these collections could actually contain the complete set of books in whatever formats are available. Then you could download them all at once. We'll have to work on getting copies of every book that we are legally allowed to onto our site. We should be asking more authors of materials under copyright if we can do that and in turn ask them if they'll release under CC BY or something along those lines.

Also, we may want to look at this, http://dev.laptop.org/~sj/music-intro/ as something similar conceptually.

That's a short-form course put together by a very cool group that had their own archive to work from.

[edit] OpenCourseware Reviews

People could rate Open Courseware courses. Then they could add a list of materials that can be used to supplement the non-free texts used in the class. This would allow people to use the videos, the syllabus, and the homeworks combined with free resources to have a complete course.

More than 60% of all OCW funds go towards copyrityht and other giths clearance. This ifg succesful would start to show how much money those projects could save, and would ideally be integrated into new nonpublic course development to avoid those clearance costs in the first place, once people learn about the initiative... Sj 19:22, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

This would help provide educators a roadmap for creating courses that use only free materials.


[edit] Course Code

In Form:Course, we should create a field for course code. So, there will be the "official title" and then a "course code" field, which will uniquely identify that course relative to the school.

Todo:

  • Create new Data for course code
  • Update template
  • Update form.


[edit] Contacting/notifying opencourseware professors

When we add an opencourseware page to the system, we should keep track of the Professor and the contact address of the professor. Perhaps this can create an account for the Professor. Then, when any of their courses is added to the site, they can get emailed notifying them. This course/wiki-page can be added to his or her watchlist. When new reviews or collections are added relating to their courses, they can be notified via the watchlist. We should see if we can template the watchlist so that it gives more meaningful emails. This would be an opt-out list.

Some sort of bot-assisted professor/uploader contact form for OCW courses would be useful even before a course gets added here. Sj 19:22, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Extensions to investigate

Lots of Extensions to go through and figure out which ones will help us. Some are listed in the extension matrix. Help us go through and list ones that might be helpful below.

  • This might not be necessary -- now that reCaptcha is working again, the spam shouldn't be an issue. If the spam becomes a problem again, however, this will definitely be worth looking at. Derek Kaser talk 21:23, 10 May 2009 (UTC)
  • There's still a little bit of spam getting through. I updated the reCaptcha extension to require confirmation on any change by anonymous users or users who aren't autoconfirmed. (Previously, it would only appear when at user registration or if a link was being added to a page). Derek Kaser talk 22:54, 15 May 2009 (UTC)
  • Update: I'm in the process of deleting and blocking a bunch of spam accounts / user pages; I'll confirm if the recaptcha is working, but there shouldn't be this much... Derek Kaser talk 01:26, 13 July 2009 (UTC)
  • Additionally, with regards to extensions: we need to be really careful about what extensions we implement. We've had some problems in the past two weeks with the server running out of memory and crashing; it's running fine at the moment, but we don't have a lot of memory to with, so we have to be sure that we need an extension before we install it. Derek Kaser talk 22:19, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Let us know what you think about the site

  • Hi. Good site. Phoenix, AZ 16:08 30/12 *
  • A novel idea! It's true that capitalistic greed is slowly turning the economy against the very essence of its creators, transforming the ideal into a business initiative. I guess it's an obligation of the romantics to convince the realists of the beauty of existence!
  • Revoluion is wow. Sj
  • Way to go! I love what you have done. And thanks for including the physiology book my students and I made on Wikibooks! You have created a great resource and I hope to use several things here to reduce costs for students. ~Kevin Young
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