Tag Archives: fwk

Flat World Knowledge Progress

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Flat World Knowledge, the company I serve as Chief Openness Officer, is making great progress! We released a lengthy press release today full of good news. I include only the first two paragraphs below, which both give a sense of where we’re headed and include an awesome quote from Hooks Johnston of Valhalla Partners:

NYACK, N.Y., March 24 /PRNewswire/ — Flat World Knowledge, the world’s first publisher of commercial open-source college textbooks, today announced that it received $8 million in Series A funding from Valhalla Partners, Greenhill SAVP, and High Peaks Venture Partners, with continued participation from several angel investors.

“This is an exciting investment,” said Hooks Johnston, General Partner at Valhalla Partners. “Like MP3′s blew up the delivery model for recorded music, the blogosphere and online news sources blew up the newspaper business, Flat World Knowledge is poised to blow up the college textbook market. We’re backing the perfect team to make it happen.”

Brian Hirsch from Greenhill SAVP is also blogging about their investment today. Full speed ahead, FWK!!!

Flat World Knowledge Public Beta!

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FWK, the open source textbook publishing company, has come out of private beta! Find out what all the excitement is about at http://flatworldknowledge.com/.

As a quick recap, FWK textbooks are much like traditional textbooks in that they are:

  • beautiful looking printed books,
  • written by world-class authors,
  • supported with all the supplementals and teaching aids (like an instructor manual, slides, and assessments) teachers expect, and
  • available as review copies (for teachers),

FWK textbooks are UNLIKE traditional textbooks in that they are:

  • licensed CC BY-NC-SA,
  • always available in full-text online for free,
  • offered in a variety of additional, affordable formats (paperback black-and-white ($30), full-color ($60), audio book ($30), individual book chapters as audio ($3), etc.),
  • supported by a variety of study aids available at the student’s option (NOT forcibly bundled with the book)

I’m SO excited about FWK because we’re going to show the world that extremely high quality open educational resources can be produced and disseminated in a way that is sustainable over the long term. Jump over to the Catalog page, choose a book with a Feb 2009 publication date, and click “Start Reading” to see what I’m talking about.

Twitter Detective

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Chris Snyder at Wired exercised his detective skills on Bijan Sabet’s recent tweet to find out who Spark Capital (one of the VCs that funded Twitter) has been talking to recently:

i had a mtg with a company today & one of their execs had the title ‘Chief Openness Officer’

What company is so committed to openness that it has someone like this? Flat World Knowledge of course! :)