This Summer, Hybrid Pedagogy launched a new long-form publishing venture, spearheaded by Robin Wharton and Kris Shaffer: Hybrid Pedagogy Publishing (HPP).

Hybrid Pedagogy Publishing seeks to encourage active public discourse by publishing works that are born out of, or facilitate, community (inter)action—works that are crowdsourced or collaboratively authored, openly accessible, encourage remixing and republishing, and/or blur the lines between author and reader.

HPP began with a call for participation in The Generative Literature Project. That call reached its goal of finding 10 faculty willing to join their writing classes with this collaborative, multi-institutional, creative writing project.

HPP is now conducting a crowdfunding campaign to build an open-source, interactive music theory textbook that is easy for instructors to use, customize, and augment with their own resources. For details or to make a contribution, watch the video below and click here to visit the crowdfunding project page by July 9. (Trinket, who are helping us by providing a development platform and funding, is matching funds for the first $2500 of donations to this project.)

[vimeo 94529215 w=500 h=281]

We hope this project will help many music instructors find readings and multimedia resources that they can provide, and tailor for, their students.

But we don’t just want to create one open textbook. We want to open up textbook publishing — and academic publishing in general — finding new ways for scholars and teachers to create, disseminate, and customize academic resources that include a variety of media types. Thus, this open textbook project will help HPP lay the groundwork for future projects with scholars in other disciplines.

Hybrid Pedagogy Publishing has a second major goal for this and future projects. We want to enable the creators of academic content to be paid for their labor and expertise, without placing that financial burden on consumers (typically students and scholars). Crowdfunding is one way in which we hope to finance academic writing while still making the ideas expressed in that writing available to as many people as possible.

We hope you will join us in these ventures — creating an open, interactive music theory “text” “book,” and finding an open, sustainable model for academic publishing. For more information on this project, visit the crowdfunding project page by July 9. For more information in Hybrid Pedagogy Publishing or Trinket, see the links below.