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RW James Building, University of Cape Town
Rondebosch 7701, South Africa
fhsst-admin-priv@nongnu.org
+27 21 650 3366
NPO Registration Number: 037-269-NPO
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| What is the Free High School Science Textbook? |
| The FHSST is the contribution of a group of young scientists towards furthering science education in South Africa. We aim to provide a free science textbook for Grades 10 - 12 to all South African learners. |
| Administration |
| Visit our project administration web pages hosted on Savannah. |
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Getting Started | General Information
General Information
Authors' Mailing List
Anyone can join our authors' mailing list. This mailing list is used for announcements and discussion. Traffic is intermittent and our monthly updates are sent to this list. If members request
it, we can send updates separately.
Some General Remarks
We chose to use LaTeX as our typesetting language. It is not easy to collaborate on a book as it is distinctly different from a coding project where code fragments can look completely different. In the book the style must be consistent. This doesn't justify LaTeX but we can define our own environments which will allow us to make book-wide changes by changing a single definition. Granted this can be done with any markup language but we all knew LaTeX and our priority is to write the books not build a book-writing framework.
We realise that not all our authors will be familiar with LaTeX and we'd like them to appreciate that it would be hard to agree on standards and no matter what format was used. If an author is completely adverse to LaTeX we will gladly convert a contribution from some other format.
We also use a CVS server and the reasons are listed on the CVS Setup page. It does give us quite a lot of flexibility and a nice simple backup. If an author is not familiar with CVS its not very difficult to set up as we explain on the CVS Setup page. If you aren't familiar with CVS see this as an opportunity to learn a new skill.
Strategy
Currently we are trying to collect as much content as possible. Although we would like to produce books conforming to the South African syllabus it would be very nice to have sufficient content to cover most countries' syllabus.
At the end of 2004 we hope to have the content completely finished. In 2005 we will focus on getting feedback from schools in South Africa to produce books specific to the syllabus and other requirements. At this stage we can branch the repository so as to allow general content accumulation. We will also post all our content on wikibooks.
Resources - Are We Alone?
No. We can use any content from wikipedia and wikibooks. They use the same license we do so it's not a problem to cut and paste their content. It's also a nice place to start looking for ideas if you are starting a new section. We will give all our content back to the community when we are finished.
For physics we can also use content from Light and Matter but this requires that we ask the author to release it appropriately. We have contacted Ben and it will be possible. If you want to use any of his content let us know and we'll arrange it.
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