Exploring Geoscience textbook
Most authors are unhappy if people plagiarise their work, but Exploring Geoscience Across the Globe was written with the hope that it would be plagiarised. Chris King and colleagues explain an initiative to encourage creation of your own geoscientific textbooks
The geoscientific textbooks available to many schools globally are generally moderate, poor or non-existent. So, why not create your own? We want to encourage geoscientists and geoscience teachers across the world to develop a textbook for their own country, region, state or even city.
We have shown the way by developing the book Exploring Geoscience Across the Globe – England. We took the original open-source book, Exploring Geoscience Across the Globe, and five of us worked together to:
• replace 280 of the 500 international photographs with photos from England
• write 40 new ‘interest boxes’ of interesting geological features in England, to add to the 60 international interest boxes – all intended to enhance the core text, which addresses the international geoscience syllabus
• record the time this took us
For the investment of 200 hours of time distributed among five people (i.e. 40 hours each on average – or just one working week), we were able to prepare a geoscience textbook for England. Such a thing has never been done before.
Exploring geoscience across the globe – England
So, who is next? Scotland? Wales? Ireland? A textbook for the Isle of Man? Anglesey? Yorkshire? Bristol?
If you live in a non-English-speaking area, you can do this too. The Turkish translation of Exploring Geoscience Across the Globe took Hükmü Orhan, recently retired from the Department of Geological Engineering at Konya University, some 180 hours, with the help of his colleagues.
So, wake up, world! You too can have a textbook of your own that helps to educate and enthuse schools, teachers and students across your country.
To create your own textbook, contact Tanja Reinhardt (Reinhardtt2@ukzn.ac.za) for a Word document template to populate. Once finished, we will add a customised cover, unique ISBN number, and post it for free download on the International Geoscience Education Organisation website.
The textbook Exploring Geoscience Across the Globe – England and the international geoscience syllabus, as well as a range of other resources, are available at: igeoscied.org
Authors
Chris King with Elizabeth Devon, Peter Kennett, Pete Loader and Maggie Williams
This article was drafted by Chris King shortly before he sadly passed away in February 2022. The wide uptake of this initiative would be part of a wonderful legacy for a truly remarkable man.
