I agree with you, Nick, though setting them up in opposition in polemical writing is often too much fun for me to resist. What is sometimes forgotten in these discussions is that the textbooks are often just as important for the teachers as for the students. I definitely don't know everything I need to know to teach my history of rhetoric course next spring. A good textbook will help me build the structure for the course. An even better textbook would provide structure and readings at a cost that would make creating my own materials less desirable.

What surprises me is that some textbook publisher hasn't already done what I'm trying to do, but on a commercial scale. The scenario I'm seeing is a cadre of professors and grad students working on a wikitext, but being paid to do it. The publisher could provide the reviewing and the editing. The finished project could be offered as either a print textbook or a pdf download (using a peer-to-peer network, perhaps). An online version could be supported by ads and banners targeted directly at the students using the text.

The subscription model that CWO uses would make more sense if it wasn't just static text there. That's bogus. It makes more sense to have constantly updated content--blogs, discussions, online tutoring, etc., all for an affordable price. In this scenario, the "text" would just be more value-adding data on the site. The draw isn't the exclusivity of the materials, but the services offered by the publisher.

I've never heard students complain about the publishing industry in terms of copyright law. Their argument is always simply that the prices are too high. Distributing the costs of creating, distributing, and marketing a textbook with a wiki just seems to me the best way to maintain quality in all these areas.

Matt,

When you say, "What surprises me is that some textbook publisher hasn't already done what I'm trying to do, but on a commercial scale," you get at two things.

One, it is a good idea to do what you're doing. But trying to do it on a commercial scale --when it's never really been done before on a commercial scale-- is hard to do good. There's nothing worse for a good idea than for it be executed poorly.

And poor execution might come from doing it too soon, before there is enough commercial interest or doing it wrong (even if the time is right). The other difference is that when a publisher does something, it comes with greater expectations. So teacher or program experiments can proceed with more forgiveness, usually, when things are quite what people expected or don't work --to start-- as planned. Because usually the people who drop in to join the experiment share the spirit of adventure.

If a publisher offers something, they have to get it right. Even if it's free, if it's not right or right enough, lots of folk won't come back and you get bad word of mouth and so on and so on.

Which is why I love these incubator projects that you're doing and others are doing. You may feel like you're slaying a dragon, and you may slay a few, but really what's happening is that your creating changes in the landscape that publisher, schools, teachers, students, and others invested in education share. You're changing the direction of rivers, how resources are used, what services are needed, and how different members of that land bring their varied skills to bear in the creation of learning tools (and therefore in the shape of learning).

At heart, the shift in ecology and economy brought on by these new technologies create a shift in our ontological firmament -- it changes not just our roles, but the whole way we think about teaching, learning, knowing, and the communities that define those acts.

And I can't think of anything more fun to have as my job right now with these things going on.

Nick Carbone