Pathways and appointment of an Associate Editor

Pathways
There is a Chinese saying, “There are many paths to the top of the mountain, but the view is always the same.” Our view is a library of 1,000 open content, electronic textbooks, and we have identified three paths to this viewing point.

Commissioning books
Based upon our experience with the XML text, we started with the idea of seeking volunteers to write chapters to create a text. We called for volunteers from within the academic community to write chapters for texts titled Information Systems and Business Fundamentals.

Our optimism for this approach has been tempered by reality. While many volunteered to write a chapter and promised to meet the deadlines we set, less than a third delivered their chapter on time, and some have still not delivered. Furthermore, individual authors write individual chapters, and there remains the major task of integrating the material to give the book some coherency.

Acquiring out of print books
We have accepted and sought opportunities to speak about the Global Text Project to academics. As a result, we soon learned that there a considerable number of out of print or unpublished books that authors are willing to publish under a Creative Commons License.

Mergers and acquisitions in the publishing industry have caused a pruning of offerings by publishers. For example, when two publishers, who were each offering two books in Information Systems, amalgamate, the new firm will likely discard two of the Information Systems books so that it continues to offer two books. When a book becomes out of print, most publishing contracts have a clause that enables the author to regain the copyright.

It might well be that the majority of the books we need for the library exist in out of print format, and our task is to find the authors and ask them to let us publish the book under a Creative Commons License. The author will retain the copyright.

Out of print books have a considerable advantage over commissioned books, they are complete and integrated. However, they might be out of date, but we can get students to update tables, figures, and so forth to give the books currency, and in the process students create value for other students.

For example, I recently spoke on a panel at the European Foundation for Management Development conference in Oslo. At the end of the panel, one of the attendees sought me out and offered his two out of print books for inclusion in the Global Text Library. The books are on "China Business: Context and Issues" and "Managerial Economics: The Analysis of Business Issues."

We are now getting out of print books at the rate of one per week, and will soon seek such books more actively.

Buying the copyright
Given sufficient funding, we could simply buy the rights for a currently published book from the publisher and then release it under a Creative Commons License so that it is free forever. This approach would support a more focused approach to creating a library. For example, we have identified a set of 30 books for a core science library, and buying the copyrights for these would be a major step forward in supporting university level education in many developing economies.

Going forward, we will use a blend of three approaches, We plan for the near future, however, to focus on finding out of print books as this an economical and fast way of adding material to the library.

Associate editor appointed
Marisa Drexel recently joined the Global Text Project as its first employee. She is responsible for preparing books for publication and coordinating the volunteers who help with book preparation. I have asked Marisa to write a blog introducing herself and her role in the project.

Rick

Building the network

I returned yesterday after a 12 day trip to Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, and Dubai, and I managed to advance the Global Text Project on several dimensions.

Ethiopia
I was part of a team that conducted a 2.5 day workshop at the Addis Ababa University to initiate a PhD program in IS. I arrived early on the day before the workshop commenced, and Dr. Salehu Anteneh organized for me to give a lecture to AAU Business School faculty and students on U-commerce and the Global Text Project. Salehu's MBA class had piloted the IS book and provided chapter level feedback to the authors. As a result of the lecture, several students volunteered to help with the project.

Salehu and I had extensive discussions on the Global Text Project. He estimates that a 300 page book can be printed locally for about USD 5, which is a ten-fold reduction on the typical price of about USD 50 for texts in developing economies. We also discussed the possibility of getting AAU students to create the graphics for texts. Professors are rarely artists and diagrams should be consistent across a book. Salehu reports that AAU students have training in products such as Adobe Illustrator and are capable of creating quality drawings. Our first step is to develop a standard for graphics, and we will then pilot some graphic preparation in Ethiopia. Because students in developing economies often need to use their spare time to earn income, we plan to pay for each graphic.

As part of the PhD program, I will be co-teaching a course titled "Systems Thinking and Sustainability" with Drs. Irwin Brown (University of Cape Town) and Peter Meso (Georgia State University). We will organize the class to write a text on this subject.

A member of the PhD project is Dr. Moustapha Diack, who is active in the Merlot Africa Network and the Pan-African Forum on Open Education Resources 2008 to be held on May 28. We plan to work together, and I will attend the Pan-African Forum in 2009.

Saudi Arabia
Each year, I teach an EMBA course an e-commerce course for the King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals in Saudi Arabia. One of my former students, Mr. Thamer Al Munajem, had encouraged me to visit him in Riyadh and examine aspects of his family's company, the largest food importer in Saudi Arabia.

During the visit, I also met with Mr. Abdullah Mashari, another former student. Abdullah is the CEO of Dale Carnegie Training in Saudi Arabia. Formerly, he was an executive with Jarir Bookstore. After a short briefing on the Global Text Project, Abdullah offered to donate USD 1000 to the project and to organize and pay all costs associated with translating a book from English to Arabic. As you might imagine, I was amazed by the generosity of his offer. He has also established a model that we might be able to use with other Saudi Arabian firms to support translation of books into Arabic.

Before I left Saudi Arabia, Thamer announced that he will donate USD 2,500 to the project and organize for the translation of the Global Text Project brochure into Arabic so that he can circulate it to Saudi companies that might be interested in supporting the project. This was another very pleasant surprise.

Dubai, United Arab Emirates
My first doctoral student, Dr. Patrick Doran, has been teaching at Zayed University for six years, and I finally found time to make the promised visit. I met several faculty and gave a talk to two classes on the Global Text Project. Again, the response was highly positive. Acting Dean, Dr. Leon Jololian, came up with a number of very good ideas and saw several opportunities for involving faculty and students. One of the students, Fatima, volunteered to translate my slides into Arabic and promote the project to other students at the University. Fatima is active in Zayed University's student leadership, so her support is valuable. Dr. Rahman Haleem (the head of Institutional Innovation), who has experience in using students to translate from English to Arabic, has also agreed to help with the project and has contacts in the Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation, a potential source of funding for the Arabic division of the project. Given the positive support from several Zayed University administrators, Pat is looking at establishing a center at Zayed University to support the project and will soon send us a proposal.

I also paid a visit to Mrs. Maryam Salahuddin Razick, a senior manager at ETA-SEMS, which runs schools in the UAE and has plans to expand into other countries. While her focus is on K-12, she quickly saw how the Global Text Project model could be applied to K-12. One particular problem for the UAE is the time for book delivery. Sometimes, classes will be well underway before books arrive from the US or UK. Of course, this is not a problem for our texts.

Overall, this was a very successful visit. I was able to tell many people about the project and there were several important developments that will advance the project.

Cheers

Rick

The GlobalText.org as Research Project for College Students

College students from Ohio University of USA are taking solid actions to contribute to the Global Text Project (GTP). In their Systems Analysis and Design class (MIS320), offered to MIS major students of the College of Business, students are doing two projects that are based on the Global Text Project (GTP):

(1) Conducting research on how to implement GTP so that it will be well known to college students and successful around US and the rest of the world (like in Mexico and China)?
(2) How to design and develop a website for GTP so that it will be well known to college students and successful like FaceBook.com?

MIS320 class students formed 7 teams to do the two projects. They are: Team En Fuego, Team C#, Team Primetime, Team Red, Team Sweet 'N' Savory, The BobCats, and Team X-Treme.

So far, the first project was finished. All teams have done good work in doing research on how GTP could learn from other websites being successfully implemented targetting on college students. Some interesting and innovative ideas emerged. Two teams’ project reports were scored highest: Team En Fuego and Team Sweet 'N' Savory.

The second project will be completed within 2 weeks. I’ll report to you then. (Note: the completed second projects on designing websites for Mexican and Chinese college students were here: Team En Fuego, Team Sweet "N" Savory, and Team PrmeTime)

(Note: MIS320 instructor is Professor Wayne W. Huang. Two teaching assistants are CEPANEC, ADAM J. and HENTHORN, BRITTANY L.).

Momentum report - February 15, 2008

The first 6 weeks of the third year of the project has been very fruitful.

• Several books have been donated to the project. Thanks to Dr. Paul deLespinasse for Basic Political Concepts, Dr. Stell Kefalas for Global Business Strategy, and Dr. Jurg Nievergelt and Klaus Hinrichs for Algorithms and Data Structures with Applications to Graphics and Geometry. We are in the process of converting these books to the Global Text Project format.
• Dr. Michael Orey of the University of Georgia has his graduate students assisting in the conversion of three books: The Foundations of Instructional Technology, The World Almanac of Educational Technologies, Emerging Perspectives on Learning, Teaching, and Technology. Students in his classes have assisted with the writing of these books over several semesters, and his current class is helping with the conversion.
• Dr. Franz Lehner, our Chief Technical Officer, has arranged for the German division of Accenture to assist with developing the specifications of the Global Text Project production system. We have quickly learned that managing multiple books and their revision requires good software that supports workflow and versioning. We will with Accenture during May when I will be in Germany teaching.
• I have recruited six University of Georgia students to work with me this semester on developing a student-operated business that handles the production and distribution of books. Using the student newspaper has a model, the plan is to run the Global Text Project with a small professional core, to provide continuity, and a large number of student volunteers. Students will work on preparing books for publication, marketing books, maintaining the database, prepare management reports, and so forth. Currently, this semester's volunteers are working on identifying target universities, populating the marketing portion of the database, and preparing books for publication.
• A cover for Global Text Project books has been created. I commissioned Alan Campbell, a local artist, to paint the globe (see the upper left of this posting). Alan has been a US National Science Foundation Antarctica artist, is a member of the Explorers Club, and an ecological artist. I have personally paid for the painting, and Alan has given the Global Text Project the right to use a reproduction at 72 dpi for book covers, and other matters related to the project. We plan to use the painting to brand the project.
• MBA students at the Addis Ababa University have provided feedback on their use of Information Systems, which has been relayed to the authors. We want to get students involved in thinking about to improve our books. This means the quality of our books will gradually improve and students will learn more because they are expected to reflect more deeply on what they are reading.

Cheers

Rick

Momentum report - December 30, 2007

As we approach the end of 2007, we look back on a year of progress, but still much has to be achieved to make this project successful.

• We have several books in production stage, which mainly means converting them to the look and feel of the library by applying styles, putting the chapters together as book, and creating a pdf. Expect to see several releases in early 2008.
• Release 4 of Information Systems will appear in a few days. You will also note that with each release, we now publish release notes to advise of changes. Release notes are common in the software business, and as that is a model for much of our thinking, we have instituted that practice.
• The Chronicle of Higher Education printed an excellent article on the project in its November 19 issue. Take a look at it via the “In the News” page on the website. We had two good contacts for additional publicity. One from the Voice of America is out and also available on the “In the News” page. The other, The Atlanta Journal Constitution, published a report on the project on December 30, also linked to at "In the News." We also had several expressions of interest from potential editors in chief for additions to the library, on topics ranging from medicine to philosophy and tourism. Finally, we were contacted by the Global Learning Portal and USAID and had a good conversation which we are confident will lead to a collaboration agreement.
• The Voice of America publicity resulted in our receiving volunteers for translating texts into Chinese and Vietnamese, as well as other expressions of interest.
• Don and Rick had a conversation with QAB member Ike Williams and his associate, Paul Sennot. They will draft a letter of agreement for EICs and chapter editors to clarify copyright issues. Ike and Paul will also draft a standard letter for authors to send to publishers to have copyrights returned for existing texts not being marketed.
  Such texts will be added to the library after they have been updated and run through the Global Text Quality review process.
• Rick met with several of the chapter editors of Information Systems at the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) in Montreal. As usual, he came away with some good ideas on advancing the project.
• During ICIS, Ted Stohr of the Stevens Institute of Technology chaired the first meeting of SIG on ICT in Global Development (SIG GLOBDEV). The Global Text Project has been adopted as a project by the SIG.
• Rick has spoken to several people on building a GIS to provide details of volunteers, adopters, universities, etc. He and Don and will review the situation soon before taking action.
• We are in the trial stages of using Sajan's software for translations. Sajan is making some modifications to enable the use of Open Document Format.
• Don gave a talk at a PhD seminar at the University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center. As a result, Dr. Arlen Meyers volunteered to be EIC of a book on Bioentrepreneurship, and Dr. Mike Mannino will contribute his database book. Dr. Meyers introduced Don to the Dean of the School of Public Health, and Don has a meeting set up for late January to discuss the project.

We both wish you well for 2008.

Cheers Rick and Don

Momentum report - November 12 2007

I apologize for the lack of a report in October. We were busy preparing for the Quality Assurance Board meeting and getting the Information Systems in shape. Since we last reported the following has happened.

• The second meeting of the Quality Assurance Board was held near the Munich Airport in the last week of October. The minutes of the meeting will be published soon.

• Information Systems has been released. See http://ocp.uni-passau.de/drupal/. We had some problems getting Drupal to create a quality pdf so the decision was made to put the book together using OpenOffice. The first edition has already undergone several releases to improve quality, and another release will be made soon. We treat books like software and release patches to correct errors or add material.
• Pilots of Information Systems are underway at the Addis Adaba University in Ethiopia and Atma Jaya Yogyakarta University in Indonesia. As part of the project, Peter Sclavos, a University of Georgia undergraduate, has worked with me to establish procedures for the operation of Student Quality Circles (SQCs), who will provide feedback for improving individual chapters. More details are on the project's Web site.
• Initial drafts of chapters for Business Fundamentals have started to come in. Reviews have been started and, as of this date, one chapter has been completely reviewed. Don estimates that a realistic date for completion is now late March or early April 2008.
• Don was a panel member at a symposium on Intellectual Property and the Trend Towards Openness held in Cambridge, MA on October 10. It was co-sponsored by the RSA and the British Consulate.
• I was a keynote speaker on the Global Text Project at the International Association for Computer Information Systems in Vancouver in early October.
  
• John Taylor " Ike" Williams, a partner in Fish & Richardson, PC, the oldest IP firm in the US, has joined the Quality Assurance Board.
• I spoke on the project at the Fourth Annual Conference of Learning International Networks Consortium (LINC), a meeting organized by MIT at the Dead Sea in Jordan. This was a good opportunity to make some important contacts, particularly in the Arabic academic community, and I met some senior scholars from Jordanian and Egyptian universities who are most willing to help with the project.
• Martin Dougimas, the lead developer of Moodle, an open source course management system, spoke at the LINC conference, and we are now looking at how Moodle can fit into the general scheme of the project. Interestingly, Doug and I both grew up in Western Australia and were educated in Perth.
• We are refining the process by which we turn submitted chapters into books to increase the efficiency of the process so we can scale the project. We are still very much in the learning mode on how to streamline the system, which is really the intent of this phase, proof-of-concept, of the project.
• Anders Gronstedt and Clarke Caywood have agreed to co-edit Integrated marketing and communications. The goal is to cover the introductory level classes of the rapidly converging fields of marketing , marketing communications and corporate communications. Anders is President of the Gronstedt Group and Clarke is the Director of the Graduate Program in Public Relations at the Medill Graduate School at Northwestern University.
• Doug Broadbent has signed up to be editor-in-chief of a chemistry book. He has extensive academic and industrial experience gain over a long career and now holds a visiting professorship at Bishop's University in Quebec, Canada
  

Rick

Students Protest Textbook Prices in Colorado

According to an article by Erika Gonzalez in this morning's Rocky Mountain news, the concern about textbook inflation has finally reached Colorado. Maybe it's been here for awhile, but under my radar screen. Anyway, more than a thousand students on the Auraria campus (Metro State College, CU-Denver, and Community College of Denver) rallied to protest textbook cost inflation. As you've been reading on this blog for awhile, there is concern about the issue and students want something done. Andrew Bateman, the student government leader at Metro State was quoted in the article as saying "It would be nice to know how long they're keeping a book in circulation, because if the next book is coming out in five months, it's essentially worthless because a student can't sell it back". Here's the link to the article: "Hundreds protest textbook prices".
-Don