[Edu-sig] How best to publish?...

[Kirby Urner]

At 03:50 PM 05/13/2000 -0400, Jeffrey Elkner wrote:
>I have a question that I think is of importance to our efforts.
>
>What format is best suited to creating content that can be both 
>web ready and generate good looking printed copy from the same 
>source?  At this point I have settled on learning DocBook, but 
>the big problem with DocBook is that the tools needed to use it 
>affectively are propriatary and expensive.

Given the desk-top publishing tools we almost all have 
access to, I think local authorship of lots of curriculum
materials is the likely trend.  Teachers have their own
creativity and ideas about what they'd like to share with
students, so I think it's unnecessary to work on the model
of a mass-publisher, thinking "what I do and put on the
web is going to be used in exactly this form by other 
teachers."  I mean, you can do that, but I think you're
probably wasting energy.

Best is to put really good ideas, and working Python stuff,
in the public domain, with the expectation that other
teachers will edit/recombine, crediting you of course, if 
you're a source, but desk-top publishing their own materials 
for local distribution, materials which incorporate their 
own thinking and attitudes.  The whole point of cyberspace
curricula is that you're NOT tied to some centralized 
bureaucracy with a one-size-fits-all mass publishing 
approach.

I've got my 4-part 'Numeracy + Computer Literacy' essay 
showing how I do it.[1]  Lots of excellent graphics, many
of them made using the very techniques I share in the 
materials, lots of color-coded source, downloadable zips,
links to related resources.  But I'm not really expecting
teachers to print out and use this material verbatim
with students (for one thing, it's really written for
other teachers, more than it is for kids) -- although 
they might download and run the source code.  

It's the ideas that are important, and that I value when 
I find them on other teacher websites.  I don't really 
care if they've archived a lot of camera-ready hand-outs, 
because I can easily author similar materials myself, 
customized to my needs, am not really depending on 
others for such "end user" aids (like I've made a whole 
book of nifty color overhead transparencies, using my 
Epson Stylus and special 3M cels).

Kirby

[1] http://www.inetarena.com/~pdx4d/ocn/cp4e.html