A big year, forall x

It’s been over a decade since I released the first edition of the open access logic textbook forall x. It’s been a few years since my last update, because it’s been a few years since I last taught logic.

A number of people have made their own editions of forall x over the years, but 2017 was a breakout year:

• Aaron Thomas-Bolduc and Richard Zach developed the Calgary remix. They opted to start from Tim Button’s earlier Cambridge version. Richard reached out to both Tim and I, prompting me to rethink some things.
•  Anthony Eagle  (Adelaide) and Kathryn Lindeman (Saint Louis) also released variations of the Cambridge version.
• Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa (British Columbia) took my version and added chapters on tree methods.
• EJR Elliott (Leeds) took my version, made changes all over the place, and added chapters on probabilistic reasoning.¹

I think all of this is awesome. It’s fun to see something I made mostly for my own teaching find its way out into the world. And it illustrates the power of Open Education Resources.²

In preparing to fork the project, Richard Zach made github repositories for both my version and the Cambridge version.³ I used to just copy files into a new directory and start making changes higgledy-piggledy when I started a new version, but I’m handling the next revision of forall x as a branch of the repository.

I’ll finalize the new version in the next day or so, and I’ll talk about what’s new in another post. This is just the post in which I’m pleasantly flummoxed by how many people have taken up forall x and made it their own.

1. Although I only learned about it recently, Elliott’s version was actually posted in late 2016.
2. In all-caps because it’s now often shortened to OER.
3. Github is a platform for handling version control, designed originally for groups collaborating on software. Revising a document is like writing code, though, so it works for this.