Jams/TextbookRevolutionJam

Come join us this weekend in a barnraising for a new volunteer- and student-run wiki to help revolutionize the world of textbooks.

Textbook Revolution Wiki Jam

Date: Saturday, May 17th

Time: 12:00 -- 4:00 EST

Place: OLPC 1 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA 02142

Contact: Joshua Gay & SJ Klein

Not in the area?: Join us on IRC at irc.freenode.net in #textbookrevolution

If you can't make it, but still want to help, just drop me an email :-)

Overview

Help us (re)create TextbookRevolution.org! We need your help relaunching the site, which is scheduled to go live on May 24th.

We'd love to see the following folks join us for the Jam:

• People who love knowledge enough to do data entry (we will provide coffee, both at the Jam and virtually in IRC)
• Savvy designers willing to help make our templates and pages look great!
• Wiki and IRC friends to help communicate about the project so we don't leave friendly communities out of the conversation
• A multilingual community to help localize the project so we can make this a worldwide effort!
• Masters of Ontology to help us make sure our semantic metadata is well formed!
• Systems Administrators to make sure our server continues to hum speedily along!
• Comedians and jokers to help keep things lively!

About TBR

Textbook Revolution is intended to be a primary online source for finding free educational texts. This is a student-run, volunteer-operated website started in response to the textbook industry’s constant drive to maximize profits instead of educational value.

TBR’s mission is to drive the adoption of free textbooks by teachers and professors. We want to get these books into classrooms. Our approach is to bring all of the free textbooks we can find together in one place, review them, and let the best rise to the top and find their way into the hands of students in classrooms around the world.

Found out more from the (somewhat dated) site at textbookrevolution.org.

About the new site

The new site will be a community driven, Wiki-based web site that is simple to use. Visitors can upload reviews or new books through simple forms, link to existing books in different formats, or help us redesign the site by creating new templates. Helping is as easy as tagging a book with an appropriate category, or as complicated as helping us getting two disparate wiki sites to share their metadata.

However, the relaunch of textboookrevolution.org extends beyond just the web site. We are working hard to being working with other free textbook projects and we are beginning to help spread our work onto college campuses so that we can begin working more directly with students, professors, and authors. If you can't join us in person on Saturday, we urge you to can join us on IRC in #textbookrevolution on irc.freenode.net or contact us at anytime!

How to help

If you have your own wiki about free and educational texts, consider moving to use semantic mediawiki on your site, so that you can help us develop better ways to share new textbook information.

Attendees

If you are planning to attend, please sign up here:

• --Sj talk
• jgay
• seth (Via IRC)
• Anne Gentle (also remotely)