Textbook Authoring in the Digital Age--2
There is a whole new language for the teaching and learning enterprise today, and it is not textbook-based. The very word textbook has become vilified, vulgarized—a dirty word associated (rightly and wrongly) with the profit-taking and business practices of commercial higher education textbook publishers. Expository writing on a course subject for digitized delivery is not even called a textbook. Rather, the product is content—in the form of learning objects, modules, and media assets, offered in the form of an online course or a portal or gateway to new (or newly networked) knowledge. The term textbook will become obsolete or will be narrowly defined to refer only to conversions—non-interactive digitizations of textbooks in print.
Textbook authoring in the Digital Age thus requires a different way of looking at yourself, your mission, and the students. Today, as an erstwhile textbook author, you are regarded not as an instructor but as an SME (subject matter expert). SMEs provide authoritative content and sources, organized into templates that reflect principles of instructional design.
Principles of instructional design for online application have rules and conventions quite different in many ways from traditional lesson planning and pedagogy writing. Words, sentences, and paragraphs are adapted for readers who only skim or scan text, for example. Pedagogy becomes graphical and font-based navigational clues, hyperlink jumps, and concept webs. To set out scope and sequence, you write learning objectives keyed to telescoping outlines (rather than to fixed topical parameters). You create storyboards or content maps, gather and annotate instructional aids, and build networks.
As an SME, what you do is not instruction, however, which is regarded as linear and one-way, but rather conversation (nonlinear and two-way). You design conversations with students, who interact with you (and with each other) as often as you do with them. Students are collaborators in their learning (wikitexts are the ultimate expressions of this). Students also are consumers of the information conveyed in these conversations, information in packages and bits that students use to build and archive their own unique knowledge bases. Students will not be “responsible” for your information, only for their own learning, and they will choose what they will learn, based on the perceived personal or professional relevance and usefulness of that information to them at a given time.
Thus, for better and for worse, there is no canon—not any more. Rather than conveying a body of knowledge by writing a textbook, you are facilitating conversations that enable active (and interactive) elective learning. This learning is self- and socially constructed—the ultimate expression of the postmodern constructivist movement in educational philosophy—a movement buttressed by developments in psychometrics and educational psychology.
Your designed conversations with students may still include evidence-based narratives, but you will develop your manuscripts more like scripts—with settings, stage directions, and special effects in addition to players, speeches, and lines. As odd as it may seem compared to conventional textbook writing processes, screenwriting is appropriate for content that will be displayed on a screen. Your content will be displayed on computer monitors, laptops, PDAs, ebook readers, mobile phones, and any other so-called destructive technologies (so-called simply because they necessitate structural change) that the future holds.
If this sounds a bit like theatre—drawing in an audience to affect the way its members think and feel and potentially the way they act—I think this is accurate. Online instruction, like classroom instruction, is performative, a foundation of edutainment. As in theatre, audiences share or cohabit a cloud of both unreality and suspended disbelief. Witnessing, engaging, and participating is a form of play, a gaming process in which nothing is really certain. Things could go any which way, and I believe this, more transparently than in the past, is the true nature of future knowledge. Perhaps the permanent decline of textbook publishing, in addition to making us more prone to error and confusion, will also make us better actors, more honest and open-minded, with better scripts.
In screenwriting, your principal concern is not with students’ acquisition or mastery of a subject but rather with their experience as participants in a kind of theatre as well as their experience as self-directed consumers of information about your subject—much as they experience restaurant dining or marriage. Yes, I know this sounds a lot like marketing speak—inviting “consumers” to “join the conversation” and “share the experience” of learning, as if they were taking a taste test for Pepsi or Coke. Marketing and advertising jargon and habits of mind infiltrate every crevice of our existence. We live by capitalist precepts as subliminally and stubbornly as true believers do who attempt to live by their holy books. And with the power of a religion, those precepts preempt education along with other social institutions, recasting everything as business models.
I have come to understand that the marketing of information along with the permanent decline of textbook publishing is neither necessarily good nor necessarily bad; it’s merely different—not perverse but legitimately reflecting deep historical changes. There is no tragedy here, not yet, not compared to other changes educators have labeled tragic (or not) in retrospect. Meaningful learning and effective teaching will still take place, only by different names and in different forms, and humans will still inherit our evolutionary capacities for motivation, perception, cognition, communication, and so forth.
As Eugene Kim, media consultant, said about Wikipedia’s need for reform in August 2009, “There is a spirit and a culture that is starting to shift. That is a necessary thing. But the question is how do you scale [“scale” is marketing speak for “change”] without losing sight of your essence?” (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/business/media/ 31link.html?th&em) And that is my point exactly. How do text and academic authors in the Digital Age scale without losing sight of what they truly do?
I think you adapt to the changes, embrace the differences, and flourish through the practice of new ways of creating instructional narrative, context, and flow for online courses and new media. It’s exciting, and that, after all, is where the students are. Educators have always had to find students where they are.
Labels: college textbooks, constructivism, digital age, edutainment, instructional design, marketing of information, online courses, online textbooks, screenwriting, SME, textbook authoring
Textbook Authoring in the Digital Age
On August 19, 2009, I finally saw in print a statement echoing my long-held belief that the business of textbook publishing is truly in a state of radical (some would say, catastrophic) change. The statement was in a Courthouse News Service summary of a suit brought by a group of stockholders against their company, Barnes & Noble.
B&N had just bought BN College, its own spin-off private company, for nearly $600 million. BN College is a chain of more than 600 campus bookstores serving nearly 4 million college students and a quarter of a million faculty members. The stores provide textbooks, ancillary materials, trade books, and other goods through exclusive supply chains, especially Barnes & Noble.
The suit claimed that this acquisition lacks transparency (it allegedly enriches B&N’s CEO, who allegedly has a controlling interest in BN College), wastes corporate assets, and increases shareholders’ exposure to risk (potentially reducing their earnings), because, QUOTE: With used textbooks available on the Internet and rental textbooks available at 40 percent to 70 percent off sale price, the college textbook business has entered ‘permanent decline’ END QUOTE (http://www.courthousenews.com/2009/08/19/ Shareholders_Fight_Barnes_&_Noble_Deal.htm).
There it is: permanent decline (and note that lawyers, not the publishing industry, first uttered these words in print.) I couldn’t agree more and first said as much in 2007 upon news of three precipitous events that struck me as particularly ominous:
1) In 2007 the government responded officially to the CALPIRG price revolt, which started in 2004 and was being strongly reinforced by the mushrooming open access movement. Congress’s Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance called for free and low cost textbooks and facilitated access to used textbooks, textbook rentals, digital textbooks, and textbook lending libraries (http://www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/acsfa/edlite-index.html). The current international member roll of the OpenCourseWare Consortium (http://www.ocwconsortium.org/members/consortium-members.html) attests to the success of the open access movement, which has reached critical mass alongside the wiki-textbook phenomenon (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/).
2) The Thomson Corporation promptly sold all its higher education imprints. (Thomson Learning had included, for example, Wadsworth, Delmar, Heinle, Brooks/Cole, South-Western, West, and Gale—most of which became Cengage.) In a parallel development, publishers in other parts of the industry began to dump their soon-to-be no-longer-so-lucrative scholarly journals.
3) CourseSmart was founded the same year, in which industry giants (including Cengage)—once to-the-death rivals—suddenly teamed up to try to appear to be complying with public mandates while propping up prices before it was too late. (In addition to Cengage, the CourseSmart club currently includes Bedford, Freeman & Worth, CQ, Elsevier, F.A. Davis, Wiley, Jones & Bartlett, McGraw-Hill Higher Ed, Nelson Ed, Pearson, Sage, Sinauer, Taylor & Francis, and Wolters Kluwer.)
And now that the actual curse has been spat (that the college textbook business is in permanent decline), there is no going back. The tipping point, Malcolm Gladwell would say, has been reached and passed (http://www.gladwell.com/tippingpoint/index.html). The question now is, how can textbook authors survive, perhaps even thrive, in this giveaway Digital Age. I see four essential, broad, brave new world measures (Are there more?):
1) Negotiate electronic rights separately with commercial publishers. Do not sign away any “content”. Demand adequate royalty consideration in textbook rentals, the sale of e-textbooks, and the sale of digitized textbook content (not to mention foreign textbook sales and other deeply discounted sales).
2) Keep alive and find ways to promote and publicize the values of authority, validity, credibility, accuracy, currency, and reliability in the authorship of reviewed expository text. Use the new social media to communicate these values. Develop and disseminate guidelines for assessing the quality of online textbooks and for building them. Promote yourself as an expert. Have things to say, and say them in online forums.
3) Author high-quality online textbooks though new publishing models that will not pauperize you for your efforts. Some entrepreneurial online textbook publishers offer royalties, for example. Some combine both free and monetized layers of access to their textbooks and supplements, allowing them to be profitable. Some also act as academic portals, providing comprehensive web site support for users of their products. Depending on your qualifications and market, ability to invest, and desire to have a business, self-publishing is also an option.
4) Sell your content in bits, as learning objects or modules, for example, or share your content on sites that earn money for you through some means other than sales of your content—through blog subscription, for example, or under the auspices of an organization that has publication grants or does profit sharing through advertising revenues (or other sources of income besides donations).
Thus, the statement that the college textbook business is in permanent decline must be modified. It’s only the traditional business model for commercial textbook publishing that is going the way of the dinosaurs. The world truly needs the stuff of good textbooks. In whole or in part, they are here to stay. Textbook authors need to defend the world’s right to good textbooks along with their right to earn a decent living from writing them.
Labels: ACSFA, BN College, CALPIRG, CourseSmart, digital age, digital textbooks, online textbooks, open access movement, open courseware, textbook authoring, textbook rentals, tipping point, used textbooks
Pedagogy for Media Assets—3
Media assets and learning objects for online courses include activities built on common web site capabilities. RSS feeds can supply a steady stream of relevant current content. A search bar can permit students to search the online course content or go outside to the World Wide Web. A calendar can show due dates, test dates, and other course benchmarks. Internal and external links can lead to articles or readings, a glossary, and other reference materials or course aids or supplements. Polls can work as information surveys or as pretest and posttest assessments.
A course on personal finance, for example, could begin with students responding to a poll on their current financial thinking and habits. Do they have a budget, for example, do they have a savings account, do they have a mortgage, do they carry credit card debt, are they risk averse, do they participate in an employee benefit plan, how old will they be when they retire, etc., etc.? This type of questionnaire serves a number of functions. The respondent begins to focus on key topics and anticipates learning more about them. The exercise activates their prior knowledge, confirms personal relevance and usefulness, and arouses motivation to learn. For the instructor, the poll may provide insight into the learners' levels of knowledge and mindsets about the subject, which may guide instruction. The poll may also be constructed as a test, self-administered before and after the course as a general assessment of learning.
Other built-in capabilities adaptable to online instruction are message boards, discussion lists, and email. The ability of learners to communicate with each other as well as with teachers or mentors is a critical component of effective learning. Learners become engaged through interaction, and interaction may be even greater and more inclusive in online environments than in physical classrooms.
Dialoguing in message strings, attending chat rooms, blogging, or teleconferencing, students can discuss course topics, ask and answer questions, debate issues, and develop collaborative projects. The most inclusive form of online interaction is the wiki, in which instructor and students generate, contribute, and edit course content. The types of communication or interpersonal interaction made available in an online course are limited only by the software and technologies employed.
Open source software has made sophisticated means of communication widely available at low cost. A web site developer could develop a site for an online course in Drupal, for example, or Joomla, Wordpress, or other free software. Depending on the level of technological commitment, an online "course" could be as simple as a blogsite with comments or a series of podcasts (basically slideshows with voice) or webcasts (basically online broadcasts of events), or as complex as an intranet site or academic portal with comprehensive hyperlinked text and multimedia. Like Facebook or MySpace or Linked In, a course can even create its own social network--the ultimate enhancement, perhaps, of the classroom as a learning environment.
The initiation and response patterns that communication technologies introduce also permit the development of test item files with answers, scoring, and answer feedback. Student assessment and course evaluation are key components of any instruction. Thus, just as pedagogy can be added to articles and media assets, pedagogy can be added or incorporated into the very capabilities that are built into software programs for developing web sites.
Labels: academic portal, distance learning, e-learning, e-textbooks, media assets, online courses, online textbooks, open source software, pedagogy, wiki-textbooks
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
New Business Models in Textbook Publishing
Digitization, the online delivery of instructional materials, the used book business, the rise of self-publishing, and the open access movement collectively are fundamentally changing the world of higher education textbook publishing. Many are asking, how can the college textbook business remain profitable for both authors and publishers? Authors stand to lose out on advances and royalties, not to mention losing intellectual property. And to survive, publishers must find ways to provide low-cost instructional materials while competing with free online sources and the used textbook market.
Depending on their mission and commitment to a traditional publishing model, publishers' responses have included divesting themselves of their higher education divisions, becoming online rather than print publishers, licensing textbooks to institutions as part of course management software, and slicing and dicing their backlists to provide free or low-cost course content. Solutions also have included a "pay-per-view" approach, selling textbooks by the chapter, and a consortium approach, in which a group of publishers shares a website for retail sales where customers can buy textbooks or mix and match textbook content from a variety of publishing houses.
Publishers' dollars that once went into textbook development and design are now going into web site development, content delivery software, and online marketing. Job boards in the publishing industry now call for workers filling new job categories like the following (from Publishers Lunch, publishersmarketplace.com): online editor, digital workflow associate, digital manager, digital analyst, electronic media editor, online marketing manager, digital publisher, digital community builder, web producer, and digital business developer. Many big houses now offer advances only for projects with the greatest projections of sales revenue, and royalty schedules are kept at the lowest until a book breaches high sales benchmarks. Publishers also increasingly require that authors pay back advances that don't earn out, and books that merely break even are not revised (i.e., get the axe).
What can authors do to continue to derive income from textbooks they have written? They can try to keep their textbook alive in online revisions and adapt or provide content for companion web sites or other digital supplements. They can try to negotiate electronic rights separately from print (and good luck to them). If they get back the right to their existing textbook, they can parse and repurpose text to sell as instructional content. They can self-publish the work as an e-textbook and sell it online. And they can use their existing work as the basis for constructing a new interactive online course that institutions or students pay for. These latter solutions essentially put authors in competition with publishers. How's that for a paradigm shift!
Finally, authors can give away their textbooks or supplements or other content for free online and make money on collateral goods. Some online textbook sites, for example, offer royalties for downloads or print copies ordered or for homework site subscriptions. Some repositories offer to pay for the exclusive or nonexclusive use of content. Some authors offer some content for free on their web sites and deliver other content by paid subscription, or offer fee-based teleseminars, webcasts, or consultations. Thus, though it seems counterintuitive, the irresistible open access movement toward free textbooks is actually suggesting new ways to make money.
In my next posts I will explore those new ways and how authors can repurpose existing text and construct original digital textbooks.
Labels: business models, digitization, e-textbooks, Mary Ellen Lepionka, online textbooks, open access textbooks, textbook publishing
Online Courses, Continued
No, I haven't abandoned my blog--just a very busy spell when I could not make time for it.
I was talking about online course development and have expanded my studies on this topic in preparation for participating in the 2008 convention of the Text and Academic Authors Association (TAA) in Las Vegas, June 19-21. On Saturday I will be in a publisher's Q&A roundtable and also will be giving a presentation on the future of textbooks (e.g., how textbook authors can continue to make money in the digital world of free online content). I also signed up for some 15-minute mentoring sessions with textbook authors on Friday. On Thursday I look forward to attending Michael Spiegler's workshop on writing a textbook. Michael has used my book as a text (Writing and Developing Your College Textbook, 2nd Edition, Atlantic Path Publishing 2008). TAA is a great resource for textbook authors and editors (www.taaonline.net).
Topics for my mentoring sessions cover standard areas in textbook publishing, such as writing a prospectus, finding the right publisher, the publishing cycle and process, textbook organization and headings, apparatus and pedagogy, working with co-authors and editors, and doing revisions. My presentation/discussion focuses on the online environment for instructional materials, however, and is called "Textbook 2.0" (at a TAA member's apt suggestion). The deeper I go into this subject, the more I find out, and the more questions arise--an exciting prospect as I love both the research and the puzzle. I look forward to writing and speaking on this and learning even more.
As it happens I have also been developing online courses for clients, learning by doing and thus discovering both limitations and ways to get outside the box. I've also discovered how expensive it can be to have software written for online course platforms and applications. I don't know much at all about that, as my involvement has been on the soft side, with content, using templates. I have not even had to learn a markup language (html or xml). I think I would like to do that anyway, though, as soon as I get a chance. There seem to be many good tutorials online, e.g., at www.killersites.com.
One platform you can check out without commitment and at no cost is the beta at www.utilium.com. [Disclosure: I am listed as a partner in that venture (though I'm only a consultant and not a legal partner or an investor).] In any case, I think Utilium and sites like it hold a lot of promise for instructor-led development of high-quality custom course content that can be sold or shared, as desired, without permissions problems, but with the full potential of the World Wide Web and, hopefully, the interactive user interfaces of social networking.
I look forward to sharing on this blog more of what I learn about the future of textbooks in a digital world.
Labels: e-learning, e-textbooks, Mary Ellen Lepionka, online courses, online textbooks, text and academic authors, Textbook 2.0, Utilium, writing and developing your college textbook
Providing Pedagogy
In addition to narrative context, the learning objects and media assets in an interactive online textbook need pedagogy--devices or elements that are not part of the narrative and are not in the link per se but that teach about the content and are useful or essential to the learning process or otherwise help students achieve the learning objectives. Minimum pedagogy would consist of learning objectives--what students should know, think, do, and/or feel after completing the module--and a system of headings to structure the scope and sequence and relative salience of the content.
Pedagogy also may include a systematic way to begin and end each module, links to definitional glosses, contextual or historical asides, bibliographic or reference annotations, graphic organizers, chronologies, expository captions for photos and art, questions or problem sets, interim reviews, and examples or applications. The pedagogy you provide may reside on your computer as files to which your course is hyperlinked. Pedagogical elements that hyperlinks themselves provide may include, for example, case studies, profiles, research studies, news reports, or journal articles with thematic content. However the links have pedagogical value to the learner only to the extent that learners are given opportunities to interact with the content and assess their grasp and use of it.
Thus, a link to a document describing ground-breaking research would have pedagogical value to the extent that you frame questions about it (or guide learners in framing questions) and to the extent that you suggest answers to those questions (or provide ways for students to interact to find answers). At the least, you would ask or test why the research was ground-breaking and what knowledge it discovered, expanded, or overturned.
One consequence of providing pedagogy in online contexts is that textbook supplements for students--such as test questions and study guide material--may become integrated into the course rather than provided as separate publications. These components, too, enhance the pedagogical value of online courses.
Labels: e-textbooks, hyperlinks, learning objectives, learning objects, media assets, online courses, online textbooks, pedagogy, writing and developing your college textbook, writing narrative
Permissioning Online Resources
Getting permission to use or link to online content is still a gray area in copyright law and application. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf) confirms that you must request permission to use anything you find online that is protected by copyright law, unless a grant of release appears with the material. In that case the author or copyright holder of the published material has authorized its use. A notice may appear such as, "Permission is granted for teachers and students to copy and use this content so long as no fee is charged and this web site is cited as the source". Not all material is protected, nevertheless, including facts, ideas, methods, works in the public domain, many government documents, and so on. Clear explanations of "public domain" may be found online.
The best explanation I have found for determining if you need permission is published by the University of Texas at www.utsystem.edu/ogc/Intellectualproperty/COPYPOL2.HTM. That site also has a clear explanation of the four tests for fair use. Basically, if you are using a lot of original material commercially (online or in print) in such a way that the value of the material to its owner or creator will potentially be diminished, then you must have written permission. Educational use is not fair use if money is involved. For example, if students have to pay for your coursepack or online course, then you must make sure that everything in it is permissioned or falls into the public domain or is defensible as fair use on other grounds.
It used to be that we were supposed to request permission to link to another site before doing so. That practice has been found to be largely unenforceable, however, and is contrary to basic web architecture, which distributes information via hyperlinks. Although link requests increasingly are viewed as a mere nicety, the nuances are still being tested (or threatened) in court cases on trademark infringement. In your online course, use hyperlinks to direct students to other sources of information or media assets, taking care to link to the home page rather than internal pages that may be viewed as more proprietary. Importing hyperlinked material into your web site is another matter, however, and in that case the rules for permissioning apply.
Another gray area is the use of social networking sites to gather information for publication. Private speech is protected, but defining privacy on social sites is troublesome. I recently advised an author to incorporate a waiver into his online questionnaire such that people understand that responding to the questionnaire automatically grants release for him to use it as he sees fit without further consideration to them. I also advised him that the speech of minors is extra-protected and he must have written permission from parents regardless. Also, email is protected speech, and making speech anonymous does not necessarily protect against privacy infringement.
I am not an attorney, though, and my advice cannot substitute for the real thing (which can be found at reasonable cost). My own policy (erring on the side of caution, perhaps) is always to cite sources, include credit lines, observe terms of use (and publish my own), and seek authorization or ask permission whenever I have any doubt.
Labels: copyright law, fair use, hyperlinks, online courses, online textbooks, permissions, public domain
Finding and Choosing Media Assets
In my last post I discussed how to develop a shell for your online course--the structure and conceptual framework for the course you want to teach. You have your units, modules, and headings, along with learning objectives for each module and section in your outline. Now, finding the right media assets to plug into your online course shell is part art and part the luck of discovery.
Recall that media assets include web sites, documents, podcasts, audio files, webcasts, videos, animations, photos, other images, or any of a host of specific files, such as maps or graphics. The best way to find these assets is to start with links you already know or that have been recommended to you by colleagues, and those that are available through your institution, such as library subscriptions to online resources. Then move on to the keyword or key phrase search, preferably trying a variety of search engines.
Evaluating assets for inclusion in your course should be based on the following criteria:
1) Does it directly advance the learner's potential ability to fulfill the stated learning objective for that topic or section? Is the content at the right intellectual level for your audience?
2) Is the source known, credible, authoritative, authentic, literate, accurate, and reliable? Does it cite sources?
3) Can you use it or link to it legally without permission; or can you get permission? (more on this in the next post)
4) Is the web site or link stable and secure? Is it current or routinely updated?
5) Depending on context you also may want to ask, Is it free? Is it free of advertising? Does it require registration or subscription?
Web sites to favor include large or well-known national or international organizations; academic associations; federal and state government sites; online archives of newspaper, journal, or research articles; and open-access college- and university-based repositories.
Web sites to avoid include students' and instructors' pages; personal home pages other than your own; unarchived articles (which tend to disappear); commercial sites with pop-up ads or registration requirements; pages with internal links that are broken or lead to inappropriate content; sites with offensive or salacious content or undeclared bias.
Collect your finds into a bookmark folder, annotating each URL and categorizing it for placement in a section in your course outline. The bookmark folder will help you conveniently hyperlink your narrative text or pedagogy to your assets, or, alternatively, to hyperlink your assets to the learning objectives and headings in your course outline. Providing narrative and pedagogical contexts for your media assets will be the subject of a future post.
You no doubt will find far more resources than you can use in your course. As you develop your bookmark folder, try to choose the right number of assets to correspond with your predicted "time on task" for students to get through a module and satisfy the learning objectives. You may wish to apply the traditional industry standard of a maximum of 50 pages of reading per college course per week, and then reduce this to account for the time needed to study real-time media assets such as audio and video.
Many resources you find will not be conveniently available to you because of permission issues, the subject of my next post.
Labels: media assets, online courses, online textbooks, textbook development
Online Course Development
My recommendations for developing an online course start with building a working table of contents with textual headings, just as you would for a print textbook. The best structure for online application is a sequence of units of study, which can be presented online as a learning sequence comprised of self-contained modules. Depending on length and complexity of content, a module can function at the level of a unit or a chapter. In any case, text headings serve as conceptual organizers for topics and subtopics within a module.
The more self-contained modules are, the more easily they can be moved in the sequence of instruction or chosen for other customizations with content from other sources. Learning objects, your own or ones you find online (or in repositories such as MERLOT), are self-contained lessons or bits, such as definitions or examples. You can put bits together to help populate sections within a module. Discrete learning objects and modules permit maximum flexibility in constructing courses, but it it critical to functionally interrelate information as well.
I think a serious flaw in online course development is the tendency to unharness information from larger meaning. For this reason it is essential to include pedagogy, such as learning objectives, module openers and closers, discussion questions or critical thinking questions, overviews, summaries or reviews, and glosses for technical terms. Each module should have learning objectives--what students should know or be able to do after studying the unit. There should be one of more learning objectives for each main heading within a module. Among your learning objects should be text boxes or links to brief documents in which you address the question of larger meaning within each module and the conceptual (and logical or historical) relationships between modules.
Consider developing a course in 8 to 14 units or modules inclusive of pedagogy, depending on semester length and course requirements, such as opportunities for assessment or student presentations. The number of modules should provide a practical course load for learners (and for the instructor to administer) at a rate of around one module a week. Getting course content into a finite number of modules is the same challenge you face in having a reasonable number of chapters in a textbook. Highly dense and technical material usually needs a larger number of shorter modules assigned at a rate of two a week. Keep in mind learning theory and research about chunking information for maximum effective learning rate.
Module content consists of the learning objects, bits, personal documents, links, and media assets that you assemble to help students satisfy each learning objective. If you wanted your introduction to economics students to distinguish among financial markets, for example, what would you show them and what would you have them read and what would you have them discuss, etc.? Learning materials you offer them might include choices among podcasts, videos, animations, simulations, news articles, scholarly articles, research reports, interviews, graphics, photos, links, prepackaged lessons, maps, demos, tutorials, blogs, dictionary entries, government statistics, and so on. For teaching effectiveness, the media assets you choose must be somehow endowed with pedagogy and couched in the larger meaning that makes learning anything worthwhile.
Next time: More on finding media assets and endowing them with pedagogy.
Labels: distance learning, e-textbooks, learning objects, media assets, online courses, online textbooks, pedagogy
Wiki Textbooks 5
The more research on wikis I do online, the more convinced I am about fundamental fallacies in the use of wiki-textbooks for content area learning. There is the question of standards of accuracy and veracity--editors can be anonymous or use fake names; one assistant professor even has his students VOTE on whether or not to accept edited content in their wiki textbook--and there is the question of the professoriate's role--the same assistant professor actually celebrates exchanging his role and status as an expert with that of gatekeeper! He has students write everything from the course syllabus to the exam questions (Heather Havenstein, Computerworld, 8/15/07, Wiki becomes textbook in Boston College classroom; Stan Gibson, 11/20/06, Using a Wiki: A Textbook Case: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2061136,00.asp).
Even experts in IT, possibly the most relevant field for application, debunk wikis as just another form of groupware, prone to fall into disuse as burdens of information management displace knowledge creation (Steven J. Vaughan Nichols, 5/22/06, Wikis Are a Waste of Time: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1965848,00.asp). Not to mention the potential for vandalism, e.g., the pre-calculus wiki-text containing ads for Viagra, Cialis, Levitra, Propecia, Phenteramine, and auto insurance (http://pc40s.jot.com/WikiHome).
But I also see that this is not an all or nothing thing. There IS a place for wikis: providing contexts for skill development. By creating wiki-texts students can develop search skills (how and where to find out all you need to know), thinking skills (how to evaluate what you find and where you find it), judgment skills (how to choose what to include and exclude and what to believe as true), and organizational skills (how to structure and interrelate information from diverse sources). In this use, which is certainly very important, specific content areas are not needed; any topic will do--even, for example, umlauts in the names of heavy metal bands (http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/umlaut.html).
Thus, I think I would have a wiki-text project as a course supplement cum cooperative learning activity rather than as the primary vehicle for transmitting course content. If I were a modern history professor, for example, I might have students write one chapter on "between the wars" to show contributing causes of WWII. In this instance the wiki-text is restricted in scope and integrated around a particular (albeit complex) question and serves a particular instructional goal. I have to wonder, though, if I would have the time to manage the project.
On practicality, a high school history teacher (Clay Burell, 4/12/07 http://beyond-school.org/2007/04/12/update-on-the-broken-world-wiki-history-textbook-project/) had the following to say: "The wiki textbook project has not been difficult to manage at all, so far (but at the same time, it’s not a very student-centered project–the only choice students got was to choose which chapter of WWI to WWII history to turn into a textbook chapter). All students have drafted their re-write of the textbook chapter (paraphrasing skills, reading comprehension, writing), added multimedia (using del.icio.us searches, rss searches, etc–research skills), made a presentation (normally Powerpoint, but that’s fine, and they’re improving impressively at that, possibly because their slideshows are published for real audiences on the wiki), then given, with their partners, lectures to the class using their Powerpoints (speaking skills). I film the lectures, capture them in iMovie immediately after, and upload them to Google Video daily.
To keep the other students learning from these student-taught classes (rather than zoning out), they are quizzed each class on the content from the prior class’ lectures. (And yes, I do some post-mortem teacher lecturing after each student lecture to clarify points and model the “presentation as storytelling” approach I’m pushing them to learn. That is filmed and posted on the wiki too, which has interesting applications for semester exam reviews, next year’s classes, and general uses for world audiences as well.)
Finally, students self-assess their embedded lectures with a rubric my English dept colleagues made, and write goals for improvement for their follow-up lecture. They post these metacognitive skills-reflections on the discussion tab of their wiki page.
They’ll do the whole process again in a “Cold War” wiki textbook, and be graded for their lectures that time as an oral test grade (this first round is just a quiz grade for the lectures).
So the wiki textbook project is really traditional in terms of content, but offers a legacy product for future students with multimedia offerings a paper textbook obviously can’t offer.
Above all, my objectives for this project (like all my projects, really) are about literacy: reading, writing, speaking, listening, researching.
And collaborating."
Collaborating can be forced, however. I recently discovered a wiki tutorial on how to write a textbook. It has glaringly uneven topical development with many unpopulated sections. It was created by an IT prof. in the UK and guess whom he cites extensively on the subject of textbook authorship: ME! Thank you, but now I have to think about editing that wiki to accurately reflect what I actually say in my books and completely cover the topic!!! Maybe I should ask him if he would like to coauthor a book (a real one) with me.
Labels: custom publishing, custom textbooks, online textbooks, wiki-textbooks, Wikis
Wiki Textbooks 4
What Role for Instructors?
Wiki classrooms seem to turn instructors from imparters of knowledge into gatekeepers (and, necessarily, censors) in the global information network. Instructors provide the structure and tools for self-directed knowledge quests, and self-publishing professors and scholars help provide the theory and research that populate the web and constitute that knowledge. Potentially, everyone--and noone--is the expert. This raises an accountability issue.
For decades educators have been calling for nondidactic approaches to instruction, for instructors to be mentors and guides and sounding boards rather than "sage on the stage" lecturers. Now that the classroom is the Internet and the textbook is a class project, this change in job description is really happening for the first time. How does it sit with academics? Is it a relief or an imposition to not be accountable for what one knows or imparts to students? Are measures of teaching effectiveness to be reduced to classroom management skills?
I'm conflicted about this. On the one hand, I know that what I know is not a thing that I possess that I can just hand off to others. What I know is just as constructed from my thought and experience as students' knowledge is for them. The amount and quality of thought and experience is certainly different, however. How would that difference be reflected in a wiki classroom or a wiki textbook? When I try to imagine this, I see myself having to structure and direct investigations without imposing content. I see myself teaching critical thinking skills rather than my subject area. Wouldn't this make me more a technician than an expert or preferred knowledge source in my field? Is this to be the role of college instructors, and, if so, what outcomes might result in higher education?
I wish there would be some comments!
Labels: academic writing, custom textbooks, online textbooks, textbook writing, Wikis
Wiki Textbooks 3
How Will We Know What to Accept as True?
I suppose we can have confidence in the currency and accuracy of information in students' wikitexts to the extent that instructors serve as the final arbiters--and to the extent that the instructors themselves are credible as authorities in the subject. In this context a wiki textbook is a hermetic product, no different, really, from the unique pedagogical dynamics of the classroom in which a particular instructor and his or her students perform their rituals and epiphanies. But what about online textbooks produced this way that are thrown out to the world? What is the authorship? Can we have confidence that the content is correct and that the ethics of authorship are observed?
Conventionally, authors and publishers of textbooks are authoritative, identified, and accountable for documented content that is periodically revised. In a public wiki document, however, authors are anybody and content constantly changes. What is true one moment may be swept away the next--by anyone. What is seen as politically incorrect or unfavorable to any particular entity (such as a group or government or corporation) can be cleansed--anonymously, repeatedly. Vandalism and deliberate misinformation are commonplace. Content is supposed to be self-correcting, as self-appointed experts police entries until the truth is fleetingly achieved consensually.
There is a demonstration site by Jon Udell--very effective--that shows changes to a wikipedia entry over time using the electronic equivalent of time-lapse photography with voiceover. It shows the progressive development and correction of information about the use of umlauts in the names of heavy metal bands (http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/umlaut.html). The demo shows how corrupt entries are removed within seconds of appearing, how accuracy is continually honed through word substitutions, and how organization is gradually imposed on information after it appears--a breathtaking view of bottom-up processing at work. I think the demo is intended to inspire confidence in wikis as reliable sources of information, filtered as they are through a meta leveling mechanism: the online general public, which collectively knows what truth it wants.
I am not inspired to confidence, however. It scares me to death. The online general public has decided that we should learn and care about heavy metal bands and why they use umlauts in their names. The online general public also has decided that "Hitler-like," "Nazi-inspired" and "skinhead-related" are all too strong to explain the typographic preference for umlauts. They have decided on "Germanic" and "Gothic" but cite no etymologies, primary sources, or theories that might enlighten us on the first use of the umlaut in a band name and why it inspired such a raft of imitators. Is this truth as trivia? Democracy as tyranny?
Labels: academic writing, college textbooks, online textbooks, textbook writing, Wikis
Wiki Textbooks 2
Well, now that I've had a chance to survey briefly some wiki textbooks online, I see some clear pedagogical benefits relating to the instructional models I mentioned in my last post. The students are forced to survey a variety of information sources in order to construct text, which means more reading and writing and further development of literacy and thinking skills. In most cases the instructors structure the wiki text in some way, by providing a detailed table of contents, for example, to show the sequence of conceptual and factual categories of information that students should fill. Some instructors further structure the collective textbook writing project by assigning individual students particular topics and particular roles in the creative process. Student A might have to write an explanation of hybrid vigor, Student B might then have to provide examples of it, Student C might have to peer review or fact check the piece prior to publication, and Student D might have to be responsible for monitoring and editing subsequent changes to the entry. I thought this was a good use of the medium. It also points out other clear pedagogical benefits relating to social interaction and peer-mediated learning. El-hi education literature has promoted cooperative learning since the 1960s--along with discovery learning, active learning, self-regulated learning, authentic (contextualized or situation-driven) learning, and technology-mediated learning. It's interesting to see these models actualized in higher education today through dramatic applications of the wiki software.
I say dramatic because I think the changes are and will be profound. They will affect what we know and what we think we know, how we talk about things, what we regard as important, who we regard as an authority or an expert. Standards will fall left and right (starting with grammar and punctuation--e.g., how I resent public disregard for the proper use of apostrophes). Talk about dumbing down! And the changes will be mind-bending as well. We will learn (if we haven't already) to accept reality as an illusory, factuality as relative, truth as interpretation, uncertainty as normal chaos. Meanwhile, however, I now really want to co-write a wiki text!
I keep thinking of students in a summer course I taught at a state college on U.S. History and Constitutional Government, 1865 to the Present. I was an anthropologist, assigned out-of-field, and had successfully taught a few semesters of world history. With my Henry Steele Commager and various other hastily compiled texts, I managed to stay slightly ahead of my students, who, alarmingly, proved to be high school history teachers taking summer courses for advancement! I.e., they undoubtedly knew more than I did on the subject. We met once a week for 3 hours--a lot of time in which to screw up. I studied day and night and took a tutorial on constitutional law (way more complex than I had imagined), but I was still worried about the 3 hours. About halfway through the course I asked the students to team up and take particular constitutional issues that interested them to report on. To my astonishment, they flat-out refused! One explained, "We know what group work is; we assign it to our students all the time. But we didn't pay money here to do the work ourselves. We paid money to learn what you have to teach us that we can bring back to the classroom."
So I guess those students would not have co-written a wiki textbook with me. Maybe undergraduates don't notice (or care) that with wikis they do the work themselves. Which leads me to the questions, How will be know what to accept as true? and, What will be the role of the wikitext instructor?
Labels: custom publishing, custom textbooks, online textbooks, textbook authorship, textbook writing, Wikis
