[OSGeo-Edu] Latex Authoring instructions and reflections on educational material formats

[cschweik at pubpol.umass.edu]

Quoting Landon Blake <lblake at ksninc.com>:

> I'll try to put together some documentation of getting set up for LaTex
> that can be used by new OSGeo authors. I'm guessing the OSGeo wiki would
> be a good place for this?

Great idea, Landon. We're doing the same for the process we've used creating
pdfs via Docbook. I think we should create a new page on the wiki for these
kinds of "authoring" instruction documents. Feel free to create it if you want.
If you don't, I will when our documents are completed.

You may recall the discussion we had on formats a few months back that started
when we sent out a Docbook proposal. I should say that I've come to the
conclusion that we should embrace whatever formats an author wishes to publish
in. I also think for at least some authors, something like Open Office Writer
might be preferred. This conclusion is after more reflections on the concept
Yochai Benkler in his book Wealth of Networks talks about -- granularity, as it
relates to modularity. For those who haven't heard this, granularity has to do
how easy is it to complete a task. My conclusion also relates to Eric von
Hippel's concept of "user-driven innovation."

In volunteer "open content" situations like ours, people will be more apt to
help with new content if we have something that helps them (content they could
use for their own teaching - the von Hippel user-driven innovation piece) and if
modular tasks don't take too much of their time. To encourage this, we want to
make it as easy as possible for authors to derive new derivatives of existing
educational content. For example, taking material that was written for release 1
of some software and revise it for version 1.5. Some, like you Landon, will be
willing to learn LaTex or Docbook. Others may not want to go through the
learning curve and a word processor might be best. So I've concluded from this
that the format should be left to the author, for now, and as we continue
perhaps certain formats will become defacto standards.

**But**

...in order to get to that vision above, we need content for people to derive
new derivatives from. I hope others with educational content in hand or in
development will be willing, this summer, to at least keep us up to date on
their process and will consider uploading their module source to Subversion as
we at UMass are doing. More soon on that.

Cheers all-

Charlie