Host: We are now going to move to our lightning talks. Our first lightning talk is by Matthew Rascoff, who's our vice provost for digital education, who couldn't be here because he's a visiting scholar in Germany right now. And so we have a video from him. I just want to start by kind of picking up on this thread of social infrastructure, because I'm going to embarrass Zach — because, you know, I like Zach. Zach came to me, said, "Oh, there's this vice provost for digital education who I had never heard of, and he's really interested in living textbooks, and I know that you have one, and I know Mike Frank has one, and I'm going to go find all the other people on campus who have them." And suddenly, we have this group of people who all know about what each other are doing, which I don't think we would have if it weren't for having somebody who really is like glue, like a — you know — basically somebody who really kind of makes connections across campus. So thanks for doing that, Zach. I don't know how we get the video for the first. I think he's going to start it for us.
Matthew Rascoff: Hi everyone. This is Matthew Rascoff, recording a message to you from Berlin, where I am a fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy. I'm so sorry I can't be there with you in person, but thanks so much for the flexibility and allowing me to participate remotely. So glad that this event has come together, that Stanford Digital Education is a partner in organizing it, and I hope to connect with you in person very soon.
For science to be truly open, it cannot just be about research. Open education should be thought of as a sibling for open data, open source code, and open access to research publications. Yet too often, open educational resources, or OER, are relegated to second-class membership in the family of open science. That's ironic, because open education predates open access journals and open data. Education helped start this movement. Let it back in.
The living textbooks project, starting at Stanford but with plans to scale globally, is an effort to breathe new life into OER and to give open education a seat at the table alongside arXiv for preprints, Zenodo for data sets, and Public Library of Science for journals. Our approach is built on open educational practices borrowed from open-source software. Successful open-source software projects engage worldwide communities who contribute code, fix bugs, and add features. They use GitHub as a platform, not just for hosting a codebase, but for engaging contributors who want to join in. It is not an accident that they call their communities committers, not users. That is exactly the shift we need in education.
Living textbooks translate the practices of open-source communities and engagement for the realm of open education. They can include human language as well as code, which allows them to be interactive, including data visualizations, video, images, and assessments. They live online as open machine-readable repositories, but also have beautiful interfaces that make them a pleasure for humans to read. They have named authors with ORCID iDs, but they also invite in new categories of contributors who, thanks to Creative Commons licenses, can localize, translate, and improve them. Those contributors can be instructors who teach with living textbooks. For instructors, the goal is not adoption of a fixed book written by someone else, but adaptation of a living textbook for their own context. And of course, those instructors can share their adaptations via GitHub for others to build on.
Students are invited to engage in these books in a different way. They too can be contributors. Think of a more scalable online version of the Donald Knuth reward check that he would send out for corrections to his books. How exciting for students to have a chance to fix an error or make an improvement that gets accepted into the main branch of an open-source living textbook project. And through a new partnership with MIT Press, living textbooks can be peer-reviewed, published, and distributed in print and digitally for libraries and bookstores, even as a regularly updated open version lives online.
Living textbooks are global. At a time when there's pressure to confine knowledge within national borders and to limit the flow of ideas and people across countries, open-source principles offer an alternative vision of learning for the collective benefit of humanity. What makes universities special is not their research alone. It is their dual mission of generating knowledge, spreading knowledge, and passing knowledge on to the next generation. By bringing education back into open science, living textbooks reimagine that hybrid mission for the future we want.
Thank you so much.