Searching High and Low

It seems the movement away from high priced textbooks is gaining momentum. I saw references to these three happenings in the past few weeks:

• Don’t Buy That Textbook, Download It Free – The New York Times
• A statistics textbook written by a couple of professors was released under a license on the Connexions (a site for creating, sharing, and borrowing educational materials.)
• Virginia recently announced an open source “flexbook” project for physics education and is seeking contributors.

Here are some additional sites:

• Flat World Knowledge – http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/minisite/index.html (launch planned in 2009). See this article on Ars about the company.
• Merlot – similar to Connexions.
• Washington Open Educational resources (blog) – http://blog.oer.sbctc.edu/