The inspiration for this project comes largely from the efforts of Richard
Stallman and the Free Software Foundation. We
are motivated to both promote learning and freedom, and to encourage the
members of our community to become good neighbors.
The Open Book Project is aimed at the educational community and seeks to
encourage and coordinate collaboration among students and teachers for the
development of high quality, freely distributable textbooks and educational
materials on a wide range of topics. The advent of the Internet and the World
Wide Web are making collaboration among educators on a global scale possible
for the first time. We want to harness this exciting technology to promote
learning and sharing. We will thus produce all of our materials with the
following aims and guidelines in mind:
- All educational materials will be covered by a free license such as
Copyleft
to insure contributors that their contributions will remain freely available
for all users to share and develop.
- All software used in our textbooks will be covered by the
GNU General Public License
or some similar free software license.
- We will promote the development of a community of learners by actively
encouraging both teachers and students to take part in the development of
educational materials.
- We will support the equality of languages by helping to make our
materials available in as many languages as our resources permit. We will
be developing materials in both English and Spanish ourselves, and we will
seek out and host translations into other languages.
- We will make extensive use of web based technologies to make our
projects multidimensional and interactive. We will keep explanations
as concise as possible and use hands on,
learn by doing
methods
wherever we can.