Wiki book

Draft

The term wiki book is ambiguous and means several things:

• A collection of wiki pages about a topic. The best example are the Wikibooks from Wikipedia. Sometimes PDF versions are made available too.

• A print book authored on the wiki and then post-processed for typesetting and minor adjustments

• A real print book prepared on the wiki, but heavly edited once imported to a word processor.

• A collection of wiki articles assembled on the fly by a user into a PDF document.

See also open content and open educational resources (OER). Wiki books are a favorite tool for open content authors.

Why wiki books

There are several arguments:

• Wikis are good tools for mass collaboration (social computing) as well as for fairly large groups work. This idea seems to work in some Wikibooks projects.

• Some people create wiki pages about isolated subjects and that could grow into a collection of related subjects.

• With a wiki one can test (and change in real time) tutorials. These could then be assembled into a printable textbook. E.g. with (lots) of extra work I could do this for my Flash tutorials. What I do now is to generate PDFs for handouts.

Links to wikibooks and organisations that publish them

Wikipedia books

• Wikibooks “Wikibooks is a Wikimedia community for creating a free library of educational textbooks that anyone can edit. Wikibooks began on July 10, 2003; since then Wikibooks has grown to include over 35,021 pages in a multitude of textbooks created by volunteers like you!”, retrieved 11:43, 20 March 2009 (UTC).

• Wikibooks.org (List of international Wikibook wikis).

Other organizations

There are lots of educational organizations that use wikis or similar CMS technology, e.g.

• WikiEducator. Some of its contents can be considered virtual books, but you'll have to dig a bit - Daniel K. Schneider 11:43, 20 March 2009 (UTC)
• Connexions
• Scholarpedia (not a collection of books actually, but it does include "encyclopedias about subjects")

See also open contents and open educational resources

Publishing companies

• Flexbooks
• http://www.webook.com/ weBook], online writing and reading in several areas

Wikibooks in educational technology

Orey, M.(Ed.). (2001). Emerging perspectives on learning, teaching, and technology. Retrieved <insert date>, from http://projects.coe.uga.edu/epltt/

Various links

• Wikinomics has some propaganda for the "collective intelligence" argument.

Bibliography

• Barton, Matthew D. et al (n.d.), Rhetoric and Composition, Wikibook, http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Rhetoric_and_Composition. (Good example of a wikibook, but also includes good information on composition and collaborative writing).