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Re: [Phys-L] writing your notes and/or text



On 07/04/2013 07:13 AM, Anthony Lapinski wrote:
I have my own
notes that I've been giving my students for years. These are clear,
compact, and concise.

I would encourage people to do this.

A few miscellaneous suggestions:

1a) Beware of copyright issues. The law in the US (and probably lots
of other places) says that if you write something in the course of
your employment, copyright belongs to the employer. I kid you not.
This means you cannot even make copies of your own work without
permission.

1b) It is traditional (whatever that means) in the academic community
for the institution to cede the copyright back to the author. However,
you reeeally want to get a binding agreement on this point before you
start writing your book. There could be serious limitations, especially
if you work for one of the new for-profit outfits.

If there is any kind of union or association representing the teachers,
they need to insist on this during contract negotiations.


2) Don't try to write a book all at once. Write a few rough notes here
and there. Next year, when you revisit the topic, polish the notes a
bit and expand the coverage a bit. And so forth.


3) Rather than writing on a chalkboard, consider writing on a tablet
PC and projecting a copy onto a big screen so the class can see it.
Note that VNC + WiFi allows you to walk around with your tablet and
still project a copy onto the big screen. The equipment to do this
is rapidly dropping in price.

One big advantage of doing it this way is that you can keep a copy
of whatever you wrote during class. This is a super-quick way of
producing a rough set of notes.


4) For more polished stuff, I recommend writing in LaTeX. That allows
you to produce
a) nice-looking hardcopy (via pdfLaTeX), and
b) nice-looking html (via HeVeA)
... both from the same source.

On various occasions I have been suckered into trying some of
the alternatives ... which have all turned out to have horrible
disadvantages.


5) Please consider putting your work on the web where it can be seen
by everybody (not just your own students). The incremental cost of
doing this is practically zero, and it makes the world a better place.