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What’s smart about Wearesmarter Wiki book project?

Wearesmarter.org is a Wiki book project initiated by publishing giant Pearson which has joined hands with a couple of business schools to create a business book that will be edited ‘wiki’ style by an online community.

Now, since this project has been started by Pearson, I am sure the PR angle is working overtime. No publisher would give out books for free. I think Pearson and other publishers have learnt from the relative failure of the Wikitexts project from the Wikipedia foundation. Students and academic boards haven’t picked up on it. Why? The schools are very much rule-tied. Books have to go through the accreditation process and Publishers know that the real money is in Academic Publishing.

At best, Wikitexts is a great model for open schooling and self-learning types.

Pearson is aiming to kill two targets with one stone: It gets a book for free and later, it will sure license out versions or additions to the book (audio, video, additional material, worksheets) to the schools.

Smart idea, wouldn't you say?

posted by Pramit Singh @ 6:21 PM