FHSST Publishes 10th grade Math Textbook on Connexions!

The Siyavula and Free High School Science Textbooks project have published a new, full-featured mathematics textbook in Connexions. The textbook links to video examples and has many worked examples to help students learn. The textbook is a 10-grade math text aligned with South Africa's curriculum, but it will be applicable to students globally.

The textbook covers a wide-variety of topics including rational and irrational numbers, exponentials, radicals (surds), number patterns and functions, geometry, statistics and probability.

From the Siyavula project blog about it:

"The great thing about this is that it means you can adapt, change, and edit the book, be it by adding in new chapters of your own, removing chapters, changing wording or content – whatever you like! At the click of a button you can have the chapters converted to a pdf, ready for download and or printing. How cool is that?"

Connexions App for Android Released

The Connexions team is launching an Android application for the Connexions website. The App has the following functionality:

• Search Connexions using Google Site Search and view Modules and Collections found in the search results.
  
• View the list of Lenses from Connexions, view the content of a Lens and view the Module or Collection that is part of a Lens
• Save a search, Lens, Module or Collection to a list of Favorites that is stored locally on the phone. It is not the same list of Favorites you might have on the Connexions site. There is no login required. You can select a favorite from the Favorites tab and view it.

The app is free and can be downloaded from Connexions. It is also in the Android Market. The application help file gives a good overview. Source code for the app is released under an LGPL license like all of our other code so it is free and open source.

The app was tested on an Archos 32, Droid X, Droid, enTourage eDGe and a Haipad M701 using Android versions 1.6 to 2.2. If you try out the app, let us know what you think at techsupport@cnx.org.

Collection Composer Upgraded

We have released a new Collection Composer that makes building and modifying collections even easier. The new Collection Composer allows drag and drop movement of all elements in a collection. Add modules, subcollections and links all in the same interface, then move them by simply dragging the element to a new location.

The new Collection Composer was funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation with development by Upfront Systems. There are more details in the Collection Composer documentation.

Webcraft 101: Introduction to Web Development

Calling all web designers, web educators, technical writers, and fame-seekers. At the upcoming Mozilla Drumbeat Festival, we will be conducting a Textbook Sprint and Remixing Hackspace to write an open textbook on web development. If you are coming to the festival in Barcelona this week (November 4 and 5, 2010), come by and try the latest cutting edge tools and join us for an Open Textbook Sprint and Remix Fest. There should be a lot of expertise at the festival around topics like web development - come share it by putting it into a new age textbook. We will be putting the textbook together in Connexions (cnx.org) and Flat World Knowledge.

Even if you are not at the festival, if you have web development teaching expertise that you would be willing to include in the textbook, you can participate also. If you have materials in Word, LaTeX, or HTML, we can team you up with folks at the conference to build modules and chapters from your materials. Lecture slides would be great also. We can put them on slideshare and build a teaching module around them. If you already have relevant modules in Connexions, even better; just send us a link. Email cnx@cnx.org with your ideas and we will get in touch with you to join in. Below is a tentative table of contents for the book.

Hope to see you at the festival in person or virtually!

Table of Contents for Introduction To Web Development Textbook

Preface
Chapter 1: Introduction to the Web
- Tools
- Finding Answers
- A short history of computing and the web
- Internet architecture: How does the Web work?

Chapter 2: Planning your site
- Having a Plan
- What is Information Architecture?
- Basic Development Processes
- Content Analysis

Chapter 3: User Experience
- User-centered design principles
- Engaging users throughout the development process
- Testing and refininig

Chapter 4: HTML
- Introduction to HTML
- Introduction to CSS
- HTML5
- DOCTYPES, Languages, and other tips

Chapter 5: Getting Deeper with HTML
- Text: Headings, Fonts, and more
- Links
- Images
- Lists
- Tables

Chapter 6: Forms
- Introduction to Forms
- Styling forms
- Floats and positioning

Chapter 7: Accessibility
- Introduction to accessibility
- Accessibility testing

Chapter X: Javascript
- Introduction to Javascript

Chapter XX: Bringing it all together: Sample Project