Community-produced textbooks
As a society we spend a lot of money on textbooks. Textbooks are useful for providing a broad and narrow overview of a topic and good teachers heavily supplement textbooks with customized learning materials.
Since they are a generic overview of a topic, textbooks rarely change dramatically, which is why it seems silly to pay so much money for them.
I would really like to see a wikipedia-like set of textbooks, available for free and edited by teachers. The resulting materials could follow a textbook outline/framework but would have the capacity to incorporate all of the customized learning materials that teachers prepare for their own classes, resulting in a much richer learning experience in addition to freeing up resources.
Open Educational Resources has a very complete list of links to projects similar to the one I described above. Benkler wrote a very interesting paper on the topic called Common Wisdom: Peer Production of Educational Materials. Unfortunately Benkler found that none of the community-produced efforts are working.
I have a lot of other stuff going on, but I am going to spend some time trying to figure out a solution.
