Textbooks on the Net in God’s own country

“Something revolutionary is happening in Kerala’s education sector,” senior journalist K G Kumar and now a champion of the Free Software movement in India, said recently. He was referring to the idea of sharing school texts via the Net.

Believe it or not, this is actually happening. It’s visible in India already. One of the first states to do this was Kerala. Its textbooks, available in portable document format (PDF), are already downloadable. Go to either www.keralaeducation.org or www.education.kerala.gov.in and you’ll find the textbooks just a download away.

What makes this idea particularly interesting is the potential it has to generate new wealth simply by sharing. In this case, sharing of textbooks.

It’s time India too looked to the potential of IT and digital technology beyond just the traditional technological sense, and in a more ‘social’ manner. Already, institutions like the United Nations Development Programme, UNICEF, international development organisations, NGOs, academics, Net-based volunteers and others are looking at how information and communication technology (ICTs) can help battle poverty and development.

Solutions such as these, which enrich the recipient without impoverishing the giver, have a big role to play.

In Kerala, from the coming academic year, all textbooks for Std X students will be available on the Internet. Some books in the Malayalam or English medium are already available online. More languages are expected to come online soon. Students and teachers can download the printer-friendly PDF-formatted textbooks free of cost, provided they are used only for educational purposes.

Can we expect more Indian education boards and universities to put up their resources in the public domain via the Net? One of the pioneers in the field, that could inspire others here, has been the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s OpenCourseWare.

OpenCourseWare is a free and open publication of the prestigious MIT’s course materials, available via both the Web and Dspace. The latter is a software that makes OpenCourseWare possible. Dspace is a long-term ‘digi library’ or a super archive of virtually the entire intellectual and research output of MIT scholars and researchers, estimated to be around 10,000 papers, data files, images, collections of field notes, and audio and video clips each year.

The idea that knowledge and technology needs to be shared freely—as pushed earlier by groups like the Free Software Movement, active since the early eighties—is spreading to other fields too. Today, there is OpenLaw, Open Source Biology, and even Open Source Mining, a Free Encyclopedia, and Open Music. Most of these are still restricted to beyond Indian shores, and there is lot for all to gain from implementing similar knowledge-sharing ideas here too.

Open Law has as its basic idea the “crafting of legal argument in an open forum” and the harnessing of “distributed resources of the Internet community.”

Under traditional legal practice, legal arguments are crafted in closed rooms by lawyers, and are kept secret until in front of the court, where the opponent unprepared for a particular line of argument may fail to make a convincing counter-argument. Open Law, on the other hand, constructs legal arguments “out in the open” and thus removes the surprise element from its arguments. This turns the traditionally adversarial and secretive world of the legal system on its head.

Open Source Biology raises the question of whether “a band of biologists who share data freely out-innovate corporate researchers.” Project Gutenberg (http://gutenberg.net) was founded in 1971 by Professor Michael Hart of Illinois, USA to create a library of books in the public domain. Many more books from India need to find their place among such a collection, though a small trickle has already started.

Then, there are free dictionaries and encyclopaedias—like the Nupedia, Wikipedia and The Open Dictionary. The Open music movement has seen near-perfect copying software and compression technologies (MP3, OGG) couple with peer-to-peer technologies like Napster, Kazaa and Gnutella. We in India obviously have a lot to be done. But Kerala has shown the way.