One of the new projects I’ve joined (as a late addition) is the ‘[flipping textbook]1‘ project – a collaboration between CIC/MDSI, the library, and IML at UTS. The idea is to work on a ‘flipped textbook’ – getting students to write textbook elements in their course, going through the editorial process, and creating the textbook as a resource for that course. The team has looked at some of the existing platforms for open book writing, e.g.: * * * But I’m also wondering about wordpress, in part because ([in another project]2) students will be engaging in a community-based wordpress multisite installation, and writing there already. For this extra purpose of creating a collection of written resources for publication, I’m imagining that ideally we’d want students to be able to: * Collaborate on posts, and track their contributions (this is basically native through [revision histories]3). This collaboration might be realtime e.g. with etherpad integration ([participad]4) but I guess people can always move between real-time editors and wordpress * Fork content, so that posts can be built on and expanded year-to-year or across cohorts (e.g. [post-forking plugin]5 and [persistent-forking plugin]6) * Arrange content into collections (e.g. with [anthologize]7) * Possibly editorial review workflow (e.g. with [oasis]8 or [edit-flow]9 ) and other [project management elements]10 * Obviously citation (which we already do with [zotpress]11) * License content as appropriate (I use [Creative Commons Configurator]12) * Include code snippets (e.g. with [Crayon Syntax Highlighter]13) and multimedia (native in wordpress, although the [ImageInject]14 plugin is pretty useful for creative commons material) * Cite individual posts, and create posts as citeable objects (I use [ScholarPress Coins]15 to embed metadata in my posts) * Give feedback – perhaps through an editorial ‘submission’ process (per above), or perhaps in a more community-driven way (e.g. using the [Inline Comments plugin]16) To create a collaborative open authoring environment, what else would we need? What other tools are available? Do the tools above meet the need?

Footnotes

  1. http://utscic.edu.au/projects/uts-projects/flipping-the-textbook/

  2. http://utscic.edu.au/projects/uts-projects/1675-2/

  3. http://drew.agilelearningcenters.org/revision-history-on-wordpress-posts/

  4. https://wordpress.org/plugins/participad/

  5. https://wordpress.org/plugins/post-forking/

  6. https://wordpress.org/plugins/persistent-forking/

  7. https://wordpress.org/plugins/anthologize/

  8. https://wordpress.org/plugins/oasis-workflow/

  9. https://wordpress.org/plugins/edit-flow/

  10. https://github.com/WebDevStudios/CollabPress/

  11. https://wordpress.org/plugins/zotpress/

  12. https://wordpress.org/plugins/creative-commons-configurator-1/

  13. https://wordpress.org/plugins/crayon-syntax-highlighter/

  14. https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-inject/

  15. https://wordpress.org/plugins/scholarpress-coins/

  16. https://wordpress.org/plugins/inline-comments/