[FM Discuss] Beyond manuals

[Andy Oram]

You've got a great initiative there. Have you looked at the O'Reilly Head First series? I forget whether you and I talked about it. I can get you a couple free copies if you like. Head First promises to engage the human mind more deeply and intensely than plain text.

And could you expand on the last paragraph? I'm not sure what context to provide; what level you want me to answer at:

>I want to make a decent living at this, fund some non-profit work, and
>have time to volunteer on other books. What would you like to achieve?

Andy

----- Original Message -----
From: "Edward Cherlin" <echerlin at gmail.com>
To: discuss at lists.flossmanuals.net
Sent: Monday, March 23, 2009 10:29:30 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: Re: [FM Discuss] Beyond manuals

On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 7:00 PM, Andy Oram <andyo at oreilly.com> wrote:
> I want FLOSS Manuals to have an extra splash of quality, but I don't believe we'll get there just by reader reviews. My own career is based on the proposition that my skills are worth paying for and can't be replaced by a thousand eyeballs looking randomly over material. But I want to make the most of what volunteer reviewers do.
>
> Andy

Some of us have briefly discussed the topic of digital "textbooks"
based on Sugar, but we have not gone into it in detail together. My
idea is to get Ministries of Education, US states, NGOs, and aid
agencies to commission textbooks where we can pay subject-matter
experts, learning experts, programmers, editors, and the like at
prevailing rates and save countries huge amounts of money with the
book sprint methodology and free licensing. We can then help
governments by organizing translation sprints.

The XO-2 will cost less than textbooks in all but the poorest
countries, where textbooks are utterly inadequate at present, while
giving access to far more than textbooks.

Bryan Berry estimates that something like 10,000 topic modules will be
necessary for grades 1-12 in all of the usual subjects. That's
something like five subjects for two semesters for 12 years, or
nominally a minimum of 120 books of up to 100 topics each, not
counting foreign language instruction. Larry Lessig (Creative Commons,
Change Congress) and PJ at Groklaw both want to contribute to
textbooks on such matters as corruption in government and so-called
"Intellectual Property" issues. Alan Kay wants to do whatever
Smalltalk is capable of, much of the world of Python is ready to join
us, and I have other individual contributors in various subjects,
education researchers, and others ready to move when we can get
ourselves together. All of the tech museums and children's museums I
have talked to want a piece of this.

I want to make a decent living at this, fund some non-profit work, and
have time to volunteer on other books. What would you like to achieve?

-- 
Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name
And Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination.
http://earthtreasury.net/ (Edward Mokurai Cherlin)
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Andy Oram  O'Reilly Media                     email: andyo at oreilly.com
Editor     10 Fawcett Street, Fourth Floor         voice: 617-499-7479
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