World System + connexions

Apropos of Mike’s post about his one-man 400-person world Introductory Extravaganza Simulation, I thought it necessary to alert Savage Minds readers, who may also be educators and hopefully fans of all things open access (and despite my recent post, ASCII, or better yet UTF-8). The Connexions Project, of which I am an occasional advisor, at Rice University, is an experiment in open access textbook publishing. More than publishing, however, the aim of Connexions (cnx for short) is modeled on open source collaboration–instead of creating a full textbook and simply publishing it online, cnx encourages people to write short chunkish textbook “modules” which are all added to a central repository. Instructors can than search the repository for relevant content, chunk them together (perhaps with some additions of their own) to form a textbook, and use it in a class.

There are a couple of reasons why this is cool, and why it is better (and worse) than Wikipedia. The system uses a simple XML language for markup, which gives the content a very wide flexibility. It can just as easily be styled, for instance, in the team colors of your university as it can in black and white; it can be converted to a LaTeX pdf document with the push of a button (including conversion of links to footnotes, and continuous pagination, and a couple of other tricks); it uses MathML, which is probably irrelevant for all but the most hardcore kinship geeks on SM, but it does allow something very cool, viz. cutting and pasting of equations into Mathematica/MatLab. It will eventually integrate with QOOP.com so that you can order up a stack of old-school textbooks for your students to have and to hold. Of course it suffers by comparison with Wikipedia, because there are not 8 billion people using it, so the whole effects-of-scale thing has yet to really have its effects (though a number of people have undertaken translations into french, chinese, thai) and it can be a bit tricky to edit the XML documents you create, but getting better all the time (there is also aside-project underway to create an open-source XML editor to ease the process. Believe it or not no such beast worth its salt actually exists). The project was recently freatured at the uber-digitastic love fest known as TED.

Right now, the high quality stuff in the repository is mostly digital signal processing stuff, k-12 Music education, and a couple of other areas. I won’t speak for Mike, but a kind of protocol for his World Simulation project, with instructions on how to do it, would find a welcome home in cnx. Of course, Mike would have to be comfortable with people all over the world simulating his simulation–but that would be pretty real world now wouldn’t it? In any case, please have a look… if anyone has ideas for the project, I, and cnx, would love to hear them…