Teachers Write an Open Textbook In a Weekend Hackathon 109
linjaaho writes "A group of Finnish mathematics researchers, teachers and students write an upper secondary mathematics textbook in a three-day booksprint. The event started on Friday 28th September at 9:00 (GMT+3) and the book will be (hopefully) ready on Sunday evening. The book is written in Finnish. The result — LaTeX source code and the PDF — is published with open CC-BY-license. As far as the authors know, this is the first time a course textbook is written in three-day hackathon. The hackathon approach has been used earlier mainly for coding open source software and writing manuals for open source software. The progress can be followed by visiting the repository at GitHub or the project Facebook page."
Re:Hackathon? (Score:2, Informative)
I would have agreed with you a year ago, but read up on conservapedia's [scienceblogs.com] crazy leader.
Re:Is it any good? (Score:4, Informative)
You are doing it wrong. LaTeX is source code and so it can be put in any revision control system. We store a load of LaTeX documents in svn and it's very easy to review minor changes just by reading the commit emails. You can't do that with something like Word - everyone needs to check out the document and open it in Word. For reviewing larger sets of changes, I use the latexdiff tool. This annotates changed sections between two arbitrary versions. For stuff I'm sending off to my publisher, I just add change bars so that the copyeditor or proofreader can recheck those sections. For things I'm editing collaboratively, I'll make it highlight the old and new text.
I've also done collaborative work with Word and it was painful in comparison. The rest of the company agreed, and later paid me to produce a custom LaTeX document class for them that matched their publication style so that they could ditch Word. If you have more than two people collaborating, then the Word model is very cumbersome.