New England Physicists Convene for Textbook Hackathon

Open Educational Resources (OER)

New England Physicists Convene for Textbook Hackathon

Nov 14, 2012

PHYSICS HACKADEMICS: Hacking is a serious term in Silicon Valley. Many computer science mavens and budding entrepreneurs view it as a programming philosophy if not an all-out way of life -- even the blog site for top tech incubator Y-Combinator goes by the pseudo name hackerne.ws . So we can only imagine that the folks at Boundless may have felt a little trepidation when it invited a bunch of non-hackers for its first hackathon. The non-hackers of course were local physicists from the likes of Harvard, MIT, Boston University, and Brandeis. And the big hack was an OER introductory Physics textbook. The collection of snappy Newtonians cranked out a third of the content in only three days -- a full 727 days faster than it takes big publishers to finish a textbook. No word on when or if the book will hit the interwebs but you can check out a video of the event here.

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