Tue

Feb 12
2008

Brady Forrest

Brady Forrest

CK-12: Remix and Share Your Own Text Books as FlexBooks

ck12 logo

CK-12 wants to bring open data to school textbooks under the name of FlexBooks. Through the tools on their site they'll let schools, teachers, parents and students can pull articles from different sources . The books will be available to others via the site. The demo that they showed this morning at TOC really wowed the publisher-heavy audience. The non-profit, currently in limited beta, will be launching in August.

ck12 editing

The UI for book creation is simple and attractive (the Engineering Book above was made during the demo). You can search content from CK12, Wikipedia, Wikibooks, and WikiUniversity. The results are articles that can be previewed. Once an article is selected for inclusion in the book it can simply be dragged over to the Table of Contents. At any point in the process the book can be downloaded, viewed as a PDF or saved to CK-12. The internal storage format is DocBook, a format used by book publishers (like us; in fact the tool is very similar in concept to our own Safari U -- just different source materials and pricing).

The site is hosted on Amazon's EC2 and was built with a combination of Python (Django) and Java.

In the future CK-12 will add support multi-media (audio & video; the books already support images), RSS feeds, and in-book widgets (no thinking yet on maps). The widgets would be visible when the book is online and would be removed for printing. They are also working on authoring tools.

This service needs data. The interface has to be easy to use (and it is), but the service will live and die by data. Having the Wikimedia data sources will be good for general subjects, but specialized data sets will be necessary for advanced text books. For a data set to be added it must have an appropriate license (Wikipedia's is GNU FDL; CK-12 will releasing FlexBooks under Creative Commons Share-Alike). CK-12 will be adding APIs that will let people and companies increase the available data sources (it would be pretty powerful for this to be hooked up directly to Scribd).

Assuming they acquire attractive data sources, CK-12's next challenge will be spreading the word. The education system is not quick to adopt new technologies. I think that finding teachers able to use Internet-born text books will be their biggest challenge. They will have to communicate outside the tech channels that will give them initial buzz.


tags: emerging tech, publishing, web 2.0  | comments: 4   | Sphere It
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Comments: 4

  Tony Hirst [02.13.08 07:50 AM]

One place they might go to for content is the Open University OpenLearn OER site.

OpenLearn is the only OER site I know of that makes its content available via full RSS feeds (that is, each text based course unit is available as an RSS feed) which means it's possible to move the OpenLearn content around quite painlessly.

(That said, I have created a few mashups that expose some MIT and Yale OER courses via RSS and OPML - see http://ouseful.info ;-)

For example, http://feedlearner.com provides an alternative interface to OpenLearn and is bit wholy around OpenLearn unit feeds - click on the title of any course to see it displayed in an embedded Grazr widget.

  audio drama [02.14.08 03:13 AM]

I have been listening to audio books for years. I listen to audio books while driving to and from work.I have heard the demo on flex books and it is really fascinating

  jan [02.14.08 05:49 AM]

There are allready some similar projects aviable, for example OpenLearning.

  Joseph Alter [06.19.08 05:53 PM]

I would greatly appreciate knowing when this site becomes available for public teacher use.

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