California’s Governor has recently announced an initiative to allow the use of electronic textbooks in the classroom. This is being done to reduce costs in a time when the state’s budget is in crisis. Unfortunately, at least in my opinion, the stated initiative misses the mark.

Instead of allowing textbook publishers to present their materials in an electronic format we should be looking into bypassing the textbook publishers entirely. There is no reason that the educational material could not be crowd-sourced to the thousands of certificated teachers currently working in California. Sure it would take some time to compile the material and there would need to be a strict approval policy, but a wiki-like textbook would be effective, efficient and cheap.

Imagine the combined brain trust of thousands of teachers all contributing, discussing and editing an evolving, online repository of information that is available free of cost or copyright restriction to anyone, anywhere. Additionally, local repositories could be branched off to suite the needs of individual communities and we could allow for a free and open discussion of contentious topics to ensure that the children being educated by the state are receiving the information in a manner that is judged to be fitting by people. Parents could comment, object or provide insight into any number of topics included and these comments, objections or insights would be available directly to the content providers. I am not suggesting a completely open system ala Wikipedia, but certainly something similar with controls over who can edit.