Global Collaboration Developing Free Electronic Textbook Library

An international team of academic experts has begun writing textbooks to be offered free of charge to students in the developing world. The group, called Global Text, has participants from academic institutions worldwide and has as its goal, the creation of 1,000 electronic textbooks covering topics typically offered in the first two years of university study.

Two Americans serve as co-chairs of the Global Text team: Richard Watson of University of Georgia and Donald McCubbrey of University of Denver. Watson and McCubbrey each lead one of the group's first major projects--textbooks on information systems and business fundamentals. Other books planned or in development include titles in agriculture, business, science and mathematics, and education.

Before Global Text, Watson had gained experience helping write an electronic textbook on the Extensible Markup Language (XML) that showed how this kind of project can grow into an international collaboration. This book, offered over the Web in a Wiki community format, started as a graduate class project in advanced data management at University of Georgia in January 2004. In May of that year, students at two German universities added material. Soon thereafter, a professor at Fudan University, China partially translated the text into Chinese, and an Italian translation commenced later that year.

Later groups of students in the same University of Georgia graduate class continued to add and refine the book, which serves as the textbook for that and other courses. In each case, the students are asked to improve the book in some way.

Global Text has received funding from the Jacobs Foundation, Zurich for development of the information systems and business fundamental books.

Links:
Global Text
WikiBooks
XML - Managing Data Exchange

Text corrected, 6 May 2007.

Update: 6 January 2007. MIT To Offer All Courses over the Web

Gregory M. Lamb, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

By the end of this year, the contents of all 1,800 courses taught at one of the world's most prestigious universities will be available online to anyone in the world, anywhere in the world. Learners won't have to register for the classes, and everyone is accepted.

The cost? It's all free of charge.

The OpenCourseWare movement, begun at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2002 and now spread to some 120 other universities worldwide, aims to disperse knowledge far beyond the ivy-clad walls of elite campuses to anyone who has an Internet connection and a desire to learn.

Intended as an act of "intellectual philanthropy," OpenCourseWare (OCW) provides free access to course materials such as syllabi, video or audio lectures, notes, homework assignments, illustrations, and so on. So far, by giving away their content, the universities aren't discouraging students from enrolling as students. Instead, the online materials appear to be only whetting appetites for more.

"We believe strongly that education can be best advanced when knowledge is shared openly and freely," says Anne Margulies, executive director of the OCW program at MIT. "MIT is using the power of the Internet to give away all of the educational materials created here."

The MIT site (ocw.mit.edu), along with companion sites that translate the material into other languages, now average about 1.4 million visits per month from learners "in every single country on the planet," Ms. Margulies says. Those include Iraq, Darfur, "even Antarctica," she says. "We hear from [the online students] all the time with inspirational stories about how they are using these materials to change their lives. They're really, really motivated."

Full text, available from the Christian Science Monitor Web site.

Library of Americana Translation Project Unveiled

UPDATE: 27 May 2006. Prof. Cole reports today: "My fundraising drive for Global Americana at my website has raised on the order of $15,000. We now have a commitment of $5,000 from an institutional donor for a book of writings by Thomas Jefferson."

For more information or to donate directly, see the Global Americana Institute Web site.

Excerpt from announcement, 17 April 2006.

The classics of American thought and history have been little translated into Arabic. Worse, even when they have been translated, they have appeared in small editions and fairly quickly go out of print.. Worse still, the distribution system for Arabic books is poor, and there are few public libraries, so that many books that have been published in the past are no longer available to most readers.

We have therefore begun a project to translate important books by great Americans and about America into Arabic, and to subsidize their publication so that they can be bought inexpensively. We are also subventing their distribution. We seek funding from the general public as well as from foundations.

This project is a non-profit. We received 501(c)3 status as a charitable foundation in December, 2005 via the Internal Revenue Service of the federal government. All donations made to the Global Americana Institute are tax deductible. ....

The project will begin with a selected set of passages and essays by Thomas Jefferson on constitutional and governmental issues such as freedom of religion, the separation of powers, inalienable rights, the sovereignty of the people, and so forth.

We intend to have all the founding fathers translated—Madison, Franklin, Washington, Paine, and so on. We would also like to see works that treat issues in democracy and multi-culturalism, as well as engaging histories of the United States. We cannot find in OCLC, an electronic catalogue of over 40 million books held in participating libraries, any Arabic translation of the major speeches and letters of Martin Luther King or of the works of Susan B. Anthony. Eventually it would be nice to see in Arabic a good solid book about, e.g., the history of the American Jewish community, and other important minority groups about which most most Arab readers would find it difficult to get solid knowledge from the sources now available to them.

Likewise, it would be nice to put into Arabic Western books about, e.g., Iraq. Our Middle East Studies programs and university presses publish a great deal of interest to the Arab world, and yet little of it gets translated, and even where books are translated they sometimes take a long time to get into print.

Contributions will allow us to locate and fund qualified Arab translators, to arrange for printing, to subsidize the printing so as to ensure the book is affordable and that there is a paperback version, and to subsidize and ensure wide distribution, to bookstores, street vendors and libraries throughout the Arab world. Although we will definitely launch a web site and try to make things available on the internet, readers should remember that that is still a small and underdeveloped medium in the Middle East. Inexpensive and well-distributed paperbacks will have more impact at this point in time.

Full text of the announcement is found online on the Global Americana Institute Web site.

From Informed Comment, Web log of Juan Cole, PhD, Professor of History, University of Michigan, and President of Global Americana Institute 17 April 2006

Frankly, we have been failed by our government and foundations in getting the message of what America really is out to the rest of the world. We have no ministry of culture, unlike France, and no British Council or Goethe Institute. The United States Information Agency was gutted in the mid-1990s, virtually defunded, and folded into the State Department as a poor sister. Its libraries, with American books, in Amman, Istanbul, and elswhere, were shut down and the books remaindered. The AMPART program to bring American lecturers to the Middle East has been slashed to the bone, and politicized (when USIA went into State, it gave the ambassadors more say over who gets invited, and many ambassadors are political appointees). Our major foundations avoid the Middle East as a program priority for the most part. There are dedicated people in the US government who try to make a difference, of course, and there are small publishing programs in Cairo and Amman, though they don't seem to me to get good distribution. Folks, we mostly are going to have to do this ourselves.

In my visits to Japan, I had become aware of the very substantial and sophisticated American Studies establishment at Japanese universities, most of which have a center for American studies. Books from and about the US are translated in large numbers and there is good press coverage.

What is not available in Arabic is startling. American political thought is almost completely absent. You cannot go into a bookstore and get Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, John Dewey, W. E. B. Dubois, or Martin Luther King. I was told the story of how a Lebanese professor went looking for the Arabic text of the US constitution and could not find it. Of course, it exists. I complained to a State Department official about this sort of thing, and he replied that he used to give out pocket copies of the constitution in Arabic to visitors to the US embassies in the Middle East all the time. He didn't seem to grasp that the text is not in the bookstores or in the libraries, and so is essentially inaccessible.

Full text of the post is found online.