Free Software Linux

There’s been a whole lot of press on open textbooks lately, in addition to my own posts on the Flexbook and the Student PIRGs’ recent report encouraging open source textbooks as the right model for digital textbooks (versus the limited e-books that commercial publishers currently offer). The difference in open source and commercial e-books is wide and deep. Open textbooks are freely editable, downloadable and repurposable by others, keeping with the notion that the search for truth in any academic field is continually being revised, especially in the science and technology fields.

The language learning website, italki.com, has been around as a social networking site since 2006. Starting in April, they decided to develop a new version of italki: italki Knowledge. italki Knowledge is made up of a bunch of wikis functioning as open textbooks—free for anyone to access and edit. The wikis span a multitude of languages, learnable in almost as many (you can learn Korean using German, Spanish using Mandarin, vice versa and more). The Wired Campus reports that the site really only took off this month, so make sure to check it out and contribute if you can.