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The invisibility, complexity, and general opaqueness of soil microbial life makes learning about the “black box of soil” difficult. To address this challenge, my project-based biology senior thesis endeavors to develop a biology-based curriculum for farmers to increase microbial literacy. A transition to a microbially centric agriculture necessitates the development of a new knowledge infrastructure. My senior thesis project aspires to contribute to this new, necessary, and expanding infrastructure. It is critical that farmers recognize their unique role as stewards of not only plants and animals but also as shepherds of an unfathomably complex, necessary, and wondrous herd of microbes.

This Guide is meant to be the handbook for using Pressbooks effectively to produce books. Pressbooks is a simple tool, but it’s powerful too, and harnessing that power requires some learning.

This Guide should cover the basics of Pressbooks, including how to quickly get a book into Pressbooks and out the other end as a beautifully designed PDF (for print) or ebook (MOBI for Kindle, or EPUB for Apple, Kobo, Nook and others).

You will also find here resources for various features or special formatting, including how to place images, create footnotes, or put in pullquotes.

The high cost of educational resources and textbooks create a serious obstacle to the accessibility and affordability of a post-secondary education. Traditional educational resources also present barriers to innovation in pedagogy and curriculum design. Fortunately, open educational resources (OER) are a viable solution to both these problems, since they can be accessed for free online or printed at a fraction of the cost of a traditional textbook and can be edited to better fit the curricular or pedagogical goals of an instructor.