Do you want to participate in an online effort to create free science textbooks that could be downloaded by any school in the world that lacks proper textbook resources? The Physics Department of the University of Cape Town, South Africa is currently supporting this effort and is looking for authors who can dedicate some of their spare time and knowledge. The URL is www.fhsst.org. Click read more, if you'd like to know more about my relation to this effort.

Exactly one year ago, I was in Cape Town, South Africa styding physics and chemistry at the Univesrity of Cape Town. Due to intense feelings of wonder lust, which had been growing in me for quite some time, I could think of little else besides escaping the cultural confines of my stomping grounds, the state Indiana, by studying abroad in another country. I wanted to go to a country where I could be reasonably certain that everything I took for granted would disappear, and I would be enlightened as to what those things actually were...When I got there, I signed up for a highschool tutoring program called TeachOut, where a group of UCT students and myself would go to the surrounding Townships and give supplementary attention to those students whose circumstances giving them little opportunity to develop their potentials were seeking extra help. Every week we issued TeachOut students worksheets to work on, as we went around the classroom of the interested township students and answered their questions. But TeachOut and Township schools in general are noriouslly underfunded. These kids don't even have textbooks, let alone computers, printers, broadband internet, and all the other technolgies we take for granted in the US. When my friend Warren, the head of TeachOut Science Division, just told me of a site based in the physics department at UCT whose purpose is to generate online textbooks from the collaborative efforts of knowledgable people across the globe, I was pretty excited.

As just a reminder, the URL is www.fhsst.org. I higly encourage anyone who has some spare time and knows anything about science and likes to help out other less fortunate countries to check it out, and make your contribution to this "Wikipedia ressembling", UCT project to help those schools who need help most.