Textbook Authorship

Pedagogy for Media Assets—2

In my work I have found it challenging to locate good media assets to treat pedagogically in aid of learning (and also, alternatively, to find good content to convert into digital media assets). Some fields are more forthcoming than others. For science subjects, for example, the Web abounds with good cheap or free authoritative images, animations, and videos unencumbered by cookie captures, registration requirements, restricted access, random pornography, marketing campaigns, advertisements, pop-up contests, or monetization schemes. In contrast, unencumbered videos and graphics on business and finance subjects are harder to come by. Most are network or cable television news clips, video blogs by amateurs, student spoofs, or storefronts for commercial enterprises.

Images are plentiful online and there are good free or low cost sources. I usually first go to Google Images—Advance Search to find what I'm look for. Depending on the course subject, my personal favorites are the Library of Congress, NASA, and open source sites such as http://www.arthist.umn.edu/aict/html/. Stock photo sites with royalty-free images also can be good sources, but in many cases you must pay for the use of an image to embed it or to download a high-resolution version of it for print publication.

To direct my efforts I always ask up front if there is a photo research and/or permissions budget for the course and if the author has any photos for use, potentially, in the course. I guess I'm thinking here of the author I worked with who had a collection of slides of apes and monkeys, which I had added to the companion web site for his textbook--back in the days when web sites for textbooks were a novelty. Imagine the images, videos, audios, and animations one might assemble today for an online course on primate evolution!

Video repositories such as YouTube and Google Video have search bars, but it often takes too much time to separate the wheat from the chaff. Edutainment or infotainment can be difficult to distinguish from uncontaminated efforts to inquire, inform, or educate. TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) (http://www.ted.com/) is an example of the kind of video sources I look for when developing online courses.

Animations also abound, but most gif files are clip art or expressions of popular culture. Educational animations are mainly for elementary and high school school students, although there are wonderful animations for science and medicine. See, for example, http://www.dmoz.org/Science/Physics/Education/Interactive_Animations/. Software and tutorials exist for animating images, maps, and graphics and for creating 3-D animations, but I usually recommend investing in the services of professional digital animators to support important learning objectives using original content.

Good wav and MP3 audio files also exist online, but they may have limited applicability to most textbook subjects. For a literature course I could envision using links to Librivox recordings, for example, of people reading passages from classic works. I always encourage academic authors to record audio files or tape their lectures for use in online courses. Voice recordings of key points, pronunciation guides, or glossary terms and definitions aid the learner. An audiobook is a useful addition or alternative for many students as a content delivery platform. Providing voice recordings also makes online courses accessible to students with special needs.

Embedding files may be the best option for some projects, but care must be taken to obtain permission or, for free sites, to obtain appropriate information for the credits. Citing or linking to a URL is easier and avoids permissioning issues. This is especially true for articles. I always choose sources that do not require subscription or purchase, although in some projects I have encouraged authors and publishers to license the use of articles through repositories such as EBSCO, Gale, or ProQuest.

Google Scholar has proven to be a useful source of articles and there are many other good online open source professional association, university, and government-archived articles. It typically takes me much longer to screen articles for use in a course than to pedagogize them. Articles often provide theoretical or historical or statistical background, but in most subjects the best use of articles, I find, is to provide concrete examples for teaching and learning chapter/module concepts.

There are many good online news sources as well, if you can find stable URLs for them. Ability to update and frequency of updating is an important consideration when linking to news. Some academic portals, for example for college courses on marketing, economics, archaeology, education, astronomy, etc., may benefit from having an RSS news feed targeted to the course subject.

Other than images, videos, audios, animations, articles, and feeds, online courses can have original interactive features that are pedagogically effective and use the built-in functionalities of the Web. These features will be the subject of my next blog entry.

Labels: academic writing, e-learning, e-textbooks, higher education, hyperlinks, media assets, narrative context, online courses, online textbooks, pedagogy, textbook

posted by Mary Ellen Lepionka @ 1:12 PM