Department of Computer Science
San Jose State University
Special Talk: CK-12 and Flexbooks
By Murugan Pal
Thursday, November 13, 2008, 3 p.m.
MacQuarrie Hall Room 422
CK-12 Foundation, a non-profit organization founded in January
2007, aims to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market
both in the US and worldwide. Using a collaborative and web-based
compilation model that can be manifested as an adaptive textbook -
termed the "FlexBook" - CK-12 intends to pioneer the creation and
distribution of high quality educational web texts both as traditional
print and online medium. At the same time, CK-12 hopes to use the
leverage that open source models, like Linux software and Wikipedia
encyclopedia, have used to continually improve regionally and
temporally relevant content. This talk will give an overview of the
development effort so far and describe the innovative technologies
being used, as well as provide information on jobs and internships at
CK-12.
Murugan Pal is currently the co-founder
& President of CK-12
Foundation (ck12.org), a non-profit organization launched in 2007, that
aims to
reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market both in the
US and worldwide. Before joining CK-12 Foundation, Murugan was the
founder and CTO of
SpikeSource, an entrepreneur-in-residence with venture capital firms
Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, and Foundation Capital. Before
that he was a principal developer at Oracle Corporation
in the Application Server division and was part of the company's early
XML initiatives. He has engineering degrees from
Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai, India and Arizona State
University, USA.