Filed under: computing
Observe the process.
The open textbook process is something you can watch and/or participate in.
Check out the progress of a weekend of work to complete a draft of the FOSS book “Practical Open Source Software Exploration”.
More information is available:
http://iquaid.org/2010/03/26/observe-the-operating-room-wiki2xml-sprint-for-foss-textbook/
http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/Textbookwiki2xmlconversionsprint20100326
March 26, 2010
The Free Technology Academy has announced the availability of Introduction to Free Software, one of a series of modules teaching/learning modules which intend to support university level courses that use free software to teach computer and technology concepts.
The Free Technology Academy (FTA) is a joint initiative from several educational institutes in various countries. It aims to contribute to a society that permits all users to study, participate and build upon existing knowledge without restrictions.
This group is supported by several organizations including three European universities. Check the
About link for details.
January 18, 2010
Paul Hewson at the University of Plymouth got in touch about a textbook he is working on, ‘Multivariate Statistics with R’. The book is currently being used for teaching the UK and in Italy. On it he writes:
This is intended (eventually) to be a book “Introductory Statistics with R”. There are already rather a lot of multivariate statistics books around, but I wanted to emphasise the applications (and introduce contemporary applications) with a little more mathematical detail than happens in many such “application/software” based books.
The book itself, along with source material, is under the GFDL and available from the opentextbook subversion respository:
April 3, 2009
An digital version of How Wikipedia Works by Phoebe Ayers, Charles Matthews, and Ben Yates has recently been under the [GFDL](
http://howwikipediaworks.com/apf.html). From the blurb:
Wikipedia is made up of people just like you: students, professors, and everyday experts and fans. With about 10,000 articles added to Wikipedia each week, there are plenty of opportunities to join this global community. How Wikipedia Works explains how you can make the Web’s go-to source for information even better.
You can read the book online, or download an 8mb zip file of the HTML.
October 3, 2008
A brief but interesting little booklet from the Tactical Technology Collective on information design. From the blurb:
Modern life is saturated with ever increasing amounts of information, advertising and media with little time to digest what is being said. Against this background, NGOs and advocates too often find the information they want to communicate, either buried in long reports full of professional jargon and statistics, or overlooked in an endless stream of media releases. Whether communicating to the public, staff, donors or government officials, information design can help NGOs communicate with more impact, increase accessibility, and present issues powerfully.
Visualizing Information for Advocacy is available as a PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike license.
August 12, 2008
Introduction to Programming Using Java by David J. Eck at Hobart and William Smith Colleges is available under a CC-BY license. From the blurb:
WELCOME TO the fifth edition of Introduction to Programming Using Java, a free, on-line textbook on introductory programming, which uses Java as the language of instruction. This book is directed mainly towards beginning programmers, although it might also be useful for experienced programmers who want to learn something about Java. It is certainly not meant to provide complete coverage of the Java language.
July 7, 2008
How to Think Like a Computer Scientist is available in 4 versions, each based on a different programming language:
All versions are licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (
GFDL) and make their source code available.
2008-07-07: updated links!
October 1, 2007
Here are two interesting open textbooks with practical instructions about communications technologies:
August 22, 2007