e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • Apple and Textbooks, Part 2: Is There a Class In This Text?

    When Apple announced both the release of their iBooks 2 and upgrades to iTunes University, I was curious to see what kind of integration they had between the two. If you do a web search on the subject, you will find plenty of articles that tell you that iBooks textbooks “fully integrate with” iTunes U—but without providing any details. What does that mean?

    From what I can tell, it means that you can put a deep link from iTunes U to a specific page in an iBook. That’s what “fully integrates” means. What it apparently doesn’t mean is the ability to insert iTunes U content directly into the book via an iFrame or some other means. Technically, speaking, it would have been easy for them to do this. The iBook format is essentially EPUB. It’s HTML, CSS, and Javascript. A collection of web pages. They even have explicit support for widgets. It wouldn’t have been hard at all for them to create an iTunes U widget. But they didn’t go there. I think that omission, while not a huge deal in and of itself, is deeply revealing about the limits of Apple’s vision about textbooks and education.

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  • Webinar on Textbooks

    I just wanted to drop a quick note to point out that the always interesting Rob Reynolds will be running a webinar on the future of the textbook on Friday. Here are the deets:

    The Future of Digital Textbooks in U.S. Education (And What That Means for
    You)

    Date: Friday, February 10
    Time: 1:00 CST
    Open registration — http://bit.ly/x8EGIw

    Textbooks will be predominantly digital by the end of the current decade
    and that means big changes in both the publishing and education markets in
    the U.S. In this webinar, Dr. Rob Reynolds will explore the current trends
    in the textbook publishing industry, the continued evolution of digital
    textbooks, and the rise of open textbook and OER content. His presentation
    will feature research from his forthcoming book (The Future of Learning
    Content: E-textbooks, Open Content, Apple and Beyond!), and is also based
    on his professional experience as an educator, author, administrator,
    educational technologist, and publishing executive. Specific topics
    addressed in the webinar include:

    Current and future trends in educational publishing
    Top 10 obstacles faced by traditional textbook publishers
    Market projections for print and digital textbooks through 2020
    The impact of tablet devices on digital learning content and the
    curriculum
    The evolution of the open textbook and self-publishing markets in
    education  (and their challenges)
    The rise of low-cost, digital-first publishing in education
    Trends in e-reader software platforms for e-textbooks
    The real impact of Apple, Amazon, and Google on textbooks

  • OER Funding: Ask the Right Questions

    David Wiley writes:

    You have to admit that some of the things the publishers are working on are both cooler and better than almost everything that currently exists in the OER space. Can you name a single OER project that does assessment at all (and I don’t mean PDFs of quizzes)? Can you name one that does diagnostic assessment or handles mastery in any meaningful way? We’ve narrowed the entire field of OER down to CMU OLI, Khan Academy, and possibly Thrun’s new stuff. Now, can you think of one of these three that openly licenses their assessments and the engines they run them on? No.

    Open education currently has no response to the coming wave of diagnostic, adaptive products coming from the publishers. To the best of my knowledge there is no one really working on next gen OER – OER that are interactive, simulative, really rich with multimedia AND combined with OAR that drive diagnosis, remediation, and adaptation. There’s certainly no one funding next gen OER. And believe me – if it took $100M to get the field to where it currently stands in terms of relatively static openly licensed content, it will take at least that much investment again over the next decade for the field to do something truly next gen.

    Because this stuff costs so much to do, if no one steps up to the funding plate the entire field is at serious risk. Much has been written about 2012 being “the year of OER.” Let’s hope it’s not the year OER peaks. We need brains, energy, and funding on the next gen OER/OAR problem NOW. [Emphasis added.]

    I have long argued that for-profit companies are neither the mortal enemies nor the white knights of education. In this particular case, given the heavy lift involved in funding this sort of effort relative to the resources available in the academic and philanthropic communities—and David is in a position to know—I think it is important to think about for-profit entities in roles that are potentially cooperative with rather than in opposition to OERs. We should be asking the following questions:

    • What sort of commercial ventures could prosper in an ecosystem where quality educational resources are abundant and free rather than scarce and expensive?
    • Specifically, what sorts of ventures could make money ethically by adding real value in the context of abundant and free educational resources?
    • What are the barriers preventing those ventures (either existing or yet-to-be-formed) from helping to create such an ecosystem?
    • Who are the right people and what are the right institutions to forge the relationships that could foster such an ecosystem?

  • When It Comes to Content, Say “Yes” to Wrappers But “No” to Containers

    Scott Leslie has a good post up ruminating on the moving target of open textbooks which reminded me that I have long intended to write a follow-up to an exchange that he, I, and Rob Abel had in the comments section of a post a I wrote a while back. Scott lamented that the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges was releasing its open course content in IMS Common Cartridge format, which seemed to him to be not so easily accessible or universally usable as one might like. I wrote in response,

    Fundamentally, I don’t believe in cartridges. I don’t believe in forking a copy of a digital resource and stuffing it into another system. It’s bad for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to the implementation challenges that Scott ran into with Moodle (although it’s fair to say that some LMSs handle CC import better than others). Common Cartridge made more sense 5 or 10 years ago, but it’s late to the game and is ultimately destined to be eclipsed by in-place APIs, including but not limited to IMS LTI. (By the way, I’m not so sure it’s such a good idea to let Google own our integration API either.)

    Unsurprisingly, Rob Abel, as CEO of the IMS, took issue:

    If there is agreement that CC helps with the issue of content in an LMS then, well in your scenario the content is inside the publisher “LMS” (or equivalent).

    Can I tailor it? Can I put things in there – like a syllabus – and get it out? If I’m the student and I create something in there can I get it out? Can I mix and match with other publisher materials? Can I archive that mixing for next term? Can I share what I did with my faculty peers who might want to learn from it? Can I create assessments in there and then use them somewhere else or just put them somewhere so that I can use them in the future?

    Common Cartridge – or something like it – helps solve those issues. Fits right into the topic of openness. But, most importantly, in the digital education age we need to make digital education easy for the faculty and the students. Otherwise there won’t be a digital education age :-)

    Perhaps a mixture of OER and publisher proprietary stuff might be a solution. IMHO, some stuff needs to be tailored, remixed, moved in, and moved out. Doesn’t matter whether it’s a publisher platform or an LMS. Faculty want their stuff. Students want their stuff. Publishers need to help them, not thwart them.

    I said that the binary choice Rob was offering up wasn’t the right one and promised to elaborate in a future post. Here, at last, is that response.

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  • Apple and Textbooks, Part 1: The War on Paper

    Unsurprisingly, there has been a lot of good coverage of the Apple announcements already. I’m partial to Phil Hill’s pre- and post-announcement write-ups here at e-Literate as well as Audrey Watters’ analysis at Hack Education. Nevertheless, I do think there are a few more things that can be said about the announcement.

    From a functional perspective, there really isn’t anything new about the e-textbooks that Apple is touting. Pretty much all of the functionality can be found in one, several, or even all of the entrants in the product category that I have occasionally referred to as “nextbooks,” e.g., Inkling, Kno, MIYO, DynamicBooks, and my own employer’s MindTap product. In fact, as I’ll go into in a later post, Apple’s entrants are missing some features that are critical to this product category. But the facts of the product announcement alone don’t tell the whole story. I don’t think you can really tease out the full impact without understanding the company’s commercial goals—particularly when the company is Apple, which has a history of moving markets in ways that other companies can only dream of. In the next couple of posts, I’m going to tease out what I believe Apple is trying to accomplish for itself, and then use that context to explore where their efforts are likely to have progressive effects on education and where there are gaps or problems.

    Let’s start with Apple’s prime motivation. They want to kill paper.

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  • The Zone of Proximal Curiosity

    Gardner Campbell has a great piece at Campus Technology that asks the following question:

    What if we took another tack, specifying that students should not only remember information but also demonstrate increased curiosity?

    I have enormous sympathy for this line of inquiry. In this post, I’m going to cover why I think it’s so important, how educating for curiosity interacts with other sorts of educational goals, and how we might begin to encourage it.

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  • Taking the Next Step at e-Literate

    As you know, I have been experimenting with having more featured bloggers (both regular and occasional) here. This decision was triggered by the fact that I haven’t been able to blog as much or as widely as I used to, but the truth is that it’s something that I’ve wanted to do for a very long time. The conversation has been what has interested me. My main concern was whether I could pull off a group blog in a way that would maintain the voice, focus, and quality that I strive for without more effort than I can sustain.

    From my perspective, the experiment has been an unqualified success. Phil Hill has been a particularly prolific contributor, burning up the blog with posts that provide the kind of analysis and raise the kind of questions that are in what I believe is the best spirit of what e-Literate has always strived for. The other writers—Jim Farmer, Audrey Watters, David White, and Kim Thanos—have provided a wonderful, rich, and well-rounded array of complementary insights and perspectives. I am thrilled. A couple of you have told me that you only read my pieces and skip over the other bloggers. Let me be clear: You are making a mistake. Some of the best writing ever to grace the pages of e-Literate is being published right now, and it’s not coming from me.

    And so today I am announcing that the experiment has ended. I am making the blog officially and permanently a collective endeavor. If you look around the site, you will see changes in the branding that de-emphasize me and positioning e-Literate as a group publication. (The last piece will be adding full-page bios for the other authors, which I will do as they become available to me.) I expect to bring on board a few more regular bloggers and more occasional guests. And I am going to start experimenting with themes that I invite the bloggers, here, and elsewhere, to discuss with each other. I want e-Literate to be a stone thrown in the pond. I want it to create ripples of conversation about topics that are important to us.