Nik’s Daily English Activities and Teachertrainingvideos.com are both excellent Web 2.0 examples of how individuals can have an impact and influence far beyond what was possible a few short years ago.

There is a worthy shortlist for UK award for Innovation and I’m not arguing that a technology based entry is more innovative or deserving than a paper product. The two sites I’m talking about are both special resources. To see the full list of those short listed for various awards go here.  For a list which helpfully includes some links to explore, try this non BC site (nudge to British Council PR dept – clickable 2011 nominees please).

Niks Daily English Activities

Nik’s Daily English Activities is just one of a range of blogs maintained by Nik Peachey.

Daily English Activities currently proclaims 120 self access activities for learners. Labelling these as ‘lesson plans’ doesn’t do justice to a  large, quality range of varied activities which are activities in the most authentic sense.  Among other things, readers are invited to send their friends an English video message,  play the stock market – maybe they’ve got nothing (more) to lose or create an online CV. More than resources, these recommendations are  approached from the perspective of  genuine learning benefit if not real life skill acquisition.

Tip of the iceberg

In terms of prize worthiness, a hard one for the judges is how to separate this from everything else Nik gets up to. Like Russell below, Nik is one of those pillars of the ELT ICT establishment and spreads himself around. This blog isn’t a stand alone product but part of a matrix of activities reflecting student and teacher suppport in multiple teacher communities and, inevitably, on Twitter.

High regard

Nik’s work is held in high regard beyond ELT. He has a respected profile in the UK ICT in education circles such as NAACE and Modern Foreign Language teaching groups.  At the closest the BETT show gets to a language learning (MFL) plenary, Nik’s work was singled out as a star resource in a crowded galaxy, and as having much wider application  beyond ELT.

Teachertrainingvideos.com

What you get is not what you think you’re going to see with this site. Not the the classroom management type of input suggested by the title. Instead there are a large number short video reviews of essential web tools and useful language practice resources. Creator Russell Stannard has a literacy which most don’t: the use of screen capture recordings  – recording what you are doing on screen with a voice over and outputting the result to a short video clip.   He is clearly very nimble with Camtasia and can probably knock off these short films more easily than writing an (old style!) blog post about them.

Why has this had such an impact?

• Because the web is far more video driven than before. Youtube is becoming a global how-to search engine. Want to know how to indent a paragraph in Microsoft Word or remove wallpaper?  Youtube it.  Or eHow it. Or Videojug it.
• The site is giving us what we want – and need. There is a whole industry of Twitterati passing on good links but you still have check them out briefly, if only to decide if they are worth a longer look.  By screen camming a short tour and review of the best, teachertrainingvideos gives quick overview and provides a real sense of how it can be used. Both entertaining, educational and time saving.
• In addition to the videos, Russell’s profilic tweeting and retweeting have established  him, like Nik, as a trusted authority which in turn adds credibility to  anything he recommends or passes on.

The use of screen camming isn’t a difficult skill to acquire. The main obstacle is needing to buy a piece of software and tune up on video editing which sounds worse than it is. If you don’t normally pay (much) for software, think of it as professional development.

It’s about innovation, not technology

As I said at the start and as I hope is clear by now, these are deserving cases on the basis of  high quality content and pioneering approaches to use the medium to get the message across. While in some ways they build on the  tradition of last year’s winner TEFLclips,  both sites are both  much more than  innovative’ products. They are genuine services for the ELT and MFL community. In their own way they  represent new approaches to teacher development and learner engagement. Surely that is worth recognising?

Some of the tentative conclusions were

• Virtual worlds (VW’s) are useful – which is not the same as saying that they have to be used.
• There are insights to be had in comparing and benchmarking VW usage with the resurgence of video conferencing.
• Technologically the future will be a mix of different, interlinking systems. The key will be open ’standards’ rather than open source.
• Research-wise we may be on thin ice when e.g. describing embodiment as an affordance of virtual worlds. We need to revise approaches to making claims about virtual worlds for reasons of research clarity and real world practicality.
• It’s not just about Second Life
• Virtual Worlds have a future but it’s very difficult to know how things will develop.

Below I’ll go through some of the highlights for me.

Video conferencing vs. virtual worlds

First off Ralph Schroeder from the Oxford Internet Institute looked at virtual worlds vs video conferencing. There are two ‘endgames’ or ‘logical end states’ in discussing what’s next for virtual worlds. Either the route of face based video conferencing (VC)  or virtual worlds VW’s).

• VC is proliferating in different forms, has practical constraints, and is merging with other technologies.
• Online spaces support spatial interaction, development of social norms and content that engages users.
• Social networking relates to ‘always on’ togetherness, and expresses identity and social ‘availability and awareness’

One of the key contrasts between the two as that between facial (VC) vs spatial (VW) element.

• ’spatial’ component shows you the context of the other person
• ‘facial’ has the proven importance we hear so much about

Some conclusions:

• VC has not taken off widely though it has been available for decades. Resurgence now with video over IP i.e. Skype and other IM clients
• Online worlds have proven to have a limited range of things which people do together
• VW economic activity to date has been largely self referential
• BUT proliferation of VWs is inevitable because:  time and money and environmental reasons dictate less travel; co-visualization and co-manipulation of spaces works well; it’s possible to do lots of things together which aren’t possible in real life
• Users are confused right now but will adapt to modality and different forms of self representation.
• There will be ‘convergence of modalities’ with a continuum of high end and low end video and computer generated environments according to group size and context.

Quoting from his penultimate slide

• There are  only two ‘End-States’, with few options
• Facial or Spatial (VC = facial, VW’s = spatial)
• Large population worlds  (VW) or small groups (VC)
• Collaborating (VC) or socializing (VW)
• Video or Computer-Generated
• All other forms co-presence approximate these end-states
• Mixed or Augmented Reality are subject to attention limits

Full presentation embedded from Slideshare below. All presentations referred to are here on Slideshare.

UK virtual worlds watch

John Kirriemuir of Virtual World Watch reported on the work he has been carrying out on behalf of Eduserve, drawing conclusions from several years of  the short, less formal reports from ‘out there’ what they call snaphots. Check out the Virtual World Watch site, their latest published report from 2009 – soon to be updated. There is also a book coming, we were told.

Key  points from his presentation

Simulation seems to be one of the biggest growth areas and success predictors for UK HE use

• Nursing and medical training / Biosciences / Midwifery and maternity / Languages (especially Spanish) / Criminology and forensics/ Art and design / Computer science.

Some of his conclusions (again from his slides)

• Core group of UK practitioners has grown steadily, though not rapidly.
• Several universities e.g. Edinburgh, Open, Leicester using virtual worlds for several years.
• Much development is still voluntary, some internally funded, some externally.
• A gradual movement from ‘building things’ to ‘using things’.
• US take-up of virtual worlds in education is happening much quicker than in the UK.
• Second Life, Open Sim and related will be around for a while. More virtual worlds will appear.  Some will stay. Some will fail but they  will struggle to stay head-to-head with SL (and compatible worlds) when it comes to education; due to the amount of momentum.
• Rising travel costs will mean SL and similar platforms used more for academic distance events and collaboration.
• More academics, often volunteers, will find more niche/narrow subject areas that virtual worlds are suited towards. However, much less use for broader subject applications.
• Virtual World developments in UK academia less affected by funding cuts as so much of it is voluntary anyway.

Searching and virtual asset management

This came up across several presentations and from the audience.

• When locating a site or project, Second Life’s built in search is so poor that it is often better to go straight to Google or look it up on Jorum, if UK based.
• At project level, asset tracking and management is very difficult especially for projects with valuable content such as Theatron or which have grown organically over several years and need to manage legacy (Leeds Met, I think, was the reference there)
• There was another fear regarding legacy:  with an eye to how VLE’s developed in the past (Blackboard was cited), people were wondering if it would be better to migrate from Second Life to OpenSim soon in case content becomes more ‘locked down’ in the future.

The affordances of ‘affordance’ and more

Dianne Carr and Martin Oliver  talked about an Eduserv funded project in 2007-2008. Learning from Online Worlds; Teaching in Second Life. The project blog is here  http://learningfromsocialworlds.wordpress.com.

In the first part Dianne Carr focused on some of the disability aspects which surfaced through the project and why “Educators with an interest in equality, online learning and technology need to be thinking about this.”

Some points (from her slides)

• Virtual worlds seem to (but don’t have to) replicate the limitations of the real-world.
• It was not the voice feature as tool that ‘disabled’ deaf users. It was the conventions and practices associated with this tool. It was the choices that people made and continue to make.
• Deafness as disability is re/produced in virtual worlds, through social practices.
• Online worlds and their communities demonstrate how pervasive inequitable practices and discourses can be, and how difficult it can be to articulate and hence resist the power relations that are embedded within, and disseminated by, these same practices.

Then Martin Oliver got into what he jokingly referred to as ‘pedant’ mode.  He talked about the language which educators and researchers are using to talk about their virtual world experiences and how inexact this can be.  The full weight of his displeasure was brought to bear on ‘affordance’ which was given a thorough going over. This was partly as it had been used inconsistently by the original coiner and partly through sloppiness in practice. He illustrated his point with the following (from his slides) – see below

Describing what happened with some precision

• Who did what, with what, and why?
• What was the rug used for?(How did it help people learn, in this case?)
• So what can we say, based on this?

Claims to avoid…

• That rugs cause/permit/afford conversation
• Virtual rugs cause/permit/afford conversation
• Red virtual rugs…

Claims to make

• People created this thing (which happened to be a rug) and used it in particular ways to help them structure their conversation
• So, certain kinds of structuring can help learning activities (and SL can be used to express these)

Sloodle

Finally Daniel Livingstone gave us an update of where Sloodle is at as well as his own contribution to the broader theme of where next for virtual worlds. This had a lot of interesting nuggets. My personal favourite was this great, hand-drawn illustration of a Personal Learning environment from GretchensFrage.

Personal learning environment by GretchensFrage on Flickr

Presentations

The Future of virtual environments by Ralph Shroeder

Good title

The first thing which strikes you about a title like From Blogs to Bombs is, well, how striking it is. Publisher’s pzazz or measured intent? Very much the latter as it turns out but the scope and development of the book is a big ask in a relatively slim volume.

‘Technology’ is more than technology

Subtitled “The future of digital technologies in Education” Pegrum sets out his stall as an educator in this confusing sphere where we are all “swamped by competing arguments … hav(ing) difficulty deciding which experts to listen to or which arguments to believe”. “We have to understand” , he says in his introduction, “that ‘technology’ is about a lot more than technology.”

Now anyone in education who has seriously tried to answer the various ICT related questions of where are we? / what are we doing? / where do we go from here? can empathise only too well with that sentiment.  In itself that is a major reason for taking a closer look at this book.

Multi-faceted approach

Pegrum is not alone in taking this sort of approach overall. Dame Wendy Hall, one of the venerable founders of web science.org along with Sir Tim Berners Lee and others, is a strong advocate for the multidiscliplinary approach, without which we can’t “understand what the Web is, engineer its future and ensure its social benefit”.

That said, in some ways the focus on the book is on the multi-faceted present of digital technologies in education and revindicating educators role in shaping the future.

Five ‘lenses’

The book approaches its task by commenting on the use of different perspectives, which Pegrum calls ‘lenses’. This is much more than just a conveniently clever way of ranging over broad ground. “We need to look at digital technologies through a pedagogic lens, rather than just a technological lens”, he says in the introduction.  Good point as a lot of the, web 2.0 educator community appear overly tool and new-device obsessed.. But it goes further than that: there is the social aspect which inevitably leads to the socio-political realm before finally broadening out into the ecological arena. This is not a question of mere interest, he says. Educators have roles and responsibilities both in allowing for how these areas impact on their specific arena but also in equipping students  to functional effectively in a society with different expectations.

While the last of these doesn’t resonate as strongly  with me, I think there is a strong argument for the others. Anyone in a position of  ICT ‘thought leadership’ within an educational institution – a role often inversely proportionate to a leadership salary – will be aware of having to take a view on mainstream media worries about a range of issues: paedophelia ; racism reinforced (or exposed by?) something on Youtube; how file sharing may be threatening the very foundations of our society or whether social networking sites mean the fragmenting of human relationships.  If you are one of those people and you read around a bit then you will be familiar with some the ground covered in the first three chapters.

Pulling it all together

Then again, It is very refreshing to have a broad overview of the issues in technology and pedagogy without a mention of iPhones or possible predominance of Google in sight. This historical background is helpful such as how the US counter culture movement in the 60’s lies behind many of the paradigms of today’s internet. .  I came across many helpful exemplifications and it was very useful to have it all drawn together.

Concision  with confidence

So how does Pegrum manage to overview this territory in a mere hundred plus pages? Not for him the popular science style of extending  one salient point over a chapter, propped up by anecdotes and musings. He is in a hurry to cover ground and gets very large observations out of the way  in a pithy fashion, ofsetting this with extensive footnoting. There are over twenty five pages of references, or a fifth of the total. In fact, on a side note, someone could build themselves an impressive following on twitter by pushing out a few of these references every day. You can get a feel for Pegrum’s confident handling of a wide array of sources on his wiki / website. He is also comfortable with the bigger themes of government policy, the intersection of privacy, surveillance and censorship and more. The man has form, as they say, judging by the title of his previous book (which he co-edited) Brave New Classrooms: Democratic Education and the Internet.

Discussion of the issues, though brief is far from dispassionate. Indeed you get the impression that Pegrum is genuinely passionate about the importance of these issues and feels he has a unique perspective to help educate and inform the debate in general as well as contribute to specific government policy proposals under  discussion in Austrialia at time of publishing.

The latter part of the book can feel less like research, sometimes veering towards pamphleteering. The socio-political and ecological chapters clearly contain chunks of Pegrum’s view of what should happen, though making many a sensible point. The rise in attention deficit disorder (ADD) and attention hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), for example, are noted as directly attributable to technology.  (The remedy, citing the work of a neuroscientist and other technologists, is to have control over its use and achieve a balance.)

Does it work?

The ‘bringing it all together’ aspect, situating the development of the internet in a historical cultural context and   Most, though, will find his summaries and overviews helpful, even if you don’t always accept the underlying premise.

Pros and cons of brevity

Because of the brevity of treatment of a wide range of topics, Pegrum often relies on a single anecdote to reinforce a point.  Mostly this is effective but deploying the same approach when breaking new ground  can create the impression of case unproven.

The size of the book aids its digestability and it is arguable that anything less than the very minimal approach adopted would  have lead to a much longer book with a different feel. And the chances are a much longer book would have had less traction with some of the policy makers the book is aimed at.

Overall

Overall there is much on offer in this book:

• For schools and teachers, it attempts to be a charter for empowerment
• Policy makers get a comprehensive , if sometimes tendentious, overview of the issues. The sections on digital literacy and language change, cyber-bullying and cyber predation and more are good if brief.
• Publishers will probably benefit from the overview and bigger picture in chapters 1 to 3 but will be worried by their jittery view of the world won’t be assuaged by a section entitled  ‘copyright as theft’. By the way, any publisher who hasn’t already done so should also run out and get Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody.  This and others are referred to in the excellent select bibliography as well as the invitation to get updates on his wiki or, or course, on twitter.

Lenses no more

The lenses and their complex interconnectedness exemplified with the illustration of the overlaps is such a strong opening hand that it is a shame Pegrum isn’t tempted to play it again at the end. Personally I found it a very useful summary.

Pegrum finishes on a plea for almost global understanding.

Digital technologies like the net, the web, and especially web 2.0, with its liberalising, democratising, connective ethos ……could serve us well if we choose to work with rather than against their affordances. And the place to begin exploring and exploiting them? It’s got to be education.

Check out life as a grown up

ICT in ELT has often been seen as either a necessary gimic, a sop to the marketers or as a nice-to-have which sucks up too many resources. To be fair, not nearly enough activity has been properly business or problem focussed but this is changing. What strikes you walking round the enormous range of vendors in BETT is the sense of an evolved, complex marketplace which fulfills real needs: platforms underpinning school information systems; the hardware; furniture and physical infrastructure; training organisations; software; authentic media adapted for education; special needs and more. It feels like necessary stuff.

Marketing: talk the right talk

Unsurprisingly for an industry created by government policy, its marketing reflects the highest levels of policy language and is pretty nuanced. The ELT staples of interactivity and multimedia are rare, even from the software vendors. The closest to it would be the much more substantial engagement. There is a strong aspirational message underlying the messaging of  “we’re here to help you help the children”. There is  the recognition of societal change – 21st century was mentioned a lot. There was the complicit approach – a sort of “like you, we understand the kids are different and need new tools and approaches”. There was the implication that, naturally, education has multiple stakeholders and these need to be involved  so it was important to allow for sharing, engaging with the family. As it becomes more integrated, technology comes with obligations as well as opportunities  so we were reassured that ICT was available for contacting parents about student lateness and absenteeism.

Interactive whiteboards (IWB)…go beyond bespoke content and reach outside the classroom

Increasingly whiteboard content is trackable and publishable to content management systems or just to plain old school websites. Fancy content alone won’t make a business or even a pedagogic case for IWBs in ELT.  Of course offering multi-disciplinary support is an essential part of the rationale for IWBs in a secondary school but it is also clear that these systems are an integrated part of school infrastructure and do more than content delivery.

Check out the ‘boring’ stuff

.. like sms integration with a school ’s information systems to provide alerts about closures, student absence or accidents. It’s not very exciting but clearly useful. Even the systems which offer face recognition for school security may have a role in reducing impersonation for high stakes testing such as IELTS.

Software: try different things with less emphasis on appearance

Because of the way the market place works, there are lots of relatively small companies making a living in this sector. This leads to  overlap and some of it has a here’s-one-I-made-earlier appearance. But.. it also  leads to a lot of variety, a lot of competition, an understanding of the importance of meeting real needs as otherwise someone else will get the business. How much of what goes into the obligatory DVD, website support of ELT digital wraparound is meeting real, measurable needs? ELT puts a lot of emphasis on things looking not just good but finished to a very high level. Where does this come from?  I’ve never met a teacher who valued design over function (Though the ‘font police’ mentality in some quarters of British Council when I worked there, did trickle down a bit).  In BETT there is a lot of stuff  which is appreciated and used (read ‘paid for’) while being far from polished in appearance.

Software: check out other subjects

And not just the usual Modern Foreign Language (MFL) suspects. Look at maths. Look at material related to life skills – what is language, after all, if not for talking about life?

Software – authoring and standards

Teacher authoring is important and is well catered for. Many practice software suites seem to offer an authoring package which helps people create good-looking, fun content. These packages are sometimes completely web based, output to Flash and are SCORM compliant i.e. they can be dropped into a learning environment where they will be trackable. So far so good. This year there was an attempt to foreground the authoring capabilities as part of showing how we recognise the importance of student creativity and, wait for it … “gaming”. The gaming virus  was visible if not rampant with many claiming to be happily infected.  More hype than substance but there were some interesting bits and pieces  which I’ll try to come back to in another post.

Software – literacy and special needs

Look at special needs and early years software. Not by any means the same thing but both highly visible and obviously having lots to offer ELT, EFL. For people who think the jury is still out on text to speech software, well, I think they are wrong. The gain from the ability of some of the dyslexia support software to read out a web or user authored text and highlight it for playback karaoke-style accompanied by a very reasonable machine generated audio, far outweighs any concern it might fluff some of the words. Certainly if it did, I didn’t notice.  The ‘female, middle aged Australian’ voice is convincing – plenty of nationalities and accents to choose from.  This was particularly effective in another scenario where a child friendly story authoring package offered the ability to read the text back using text to speech.  In the example I tried out, miss-spelled words were highlighted positively by the text to speech as the audio  didn’t correspond which what the learner would expect to hear, prompting them to  look at it again.

Authoring & e-books

If you want to know where to start with e-books in ELT, you could do a lot worse than children’s stories. Children’s stories are begging to be enlivened by the potential of multimedia e-book treatment. As anyone who has ever read a story to a young child knows, they need to be acted out, emphasised, repeated as well as offering built-in distraction potential because children aren’t contented linear thinkers or listeners. Again there were some suppliers which seemed to offer this. Usefully the result could be packaged up and then downloaded or emailed to appreciative parents.

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Well maybe but the trend toward smartphones and portable devices has major implications for how people see content relevance, accessibility and functionality and this will create expectations for portable  learning.  So for publishers and ebook / mlearning folk there was quite a bit of good news, albeit indirect. The iPhone and the Tyranny of the App have such an iconic stranglehold on forays into mlearning that many a publishing and other organisation was sitting tight until the Nexus One arrived.  It’s not apparently that there isn’t anything better around than the iPhone.  Rather Google is the only organisation with similar rain-making ability and the market needs rounding out.

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In some ways it doesn’t matter if Apple launches an iTablet or that Microsoft’s new toy is distinctly underwhelming. (The fact that its launch was entrusted to a pudgy guy with a whiney voice and a line in rumpled sweaters i.e. Steve Balmer, doesn’t help). It may not even matter that some are predicting that netbooks are doomed.

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The breakthrough is the increasing number of mobile multimedia devices which can handle ebooks – audiobooks are ebooks too, remember. Subject to actual availability (many of the smart phones are quite expensive and / or have slow rollouts due to the approach of signing exclusive agreements country by country ) and a fair wind from other enablers such as mobile broadband tariffs, there will be a market need for portable learning content sooner or later.  And the more devices, the merrier as it reduces the liklihood of propietary formats.

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So 2010 may not be the year when mlearning takes off but it should be the year when we develop a much clearer idea of the art of the possible.

This is the story of Google Wave – an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. … can be both a conversation  and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more (Google blurb). How can something so patently useful be so wildly overhyped before troughing in despondancy for many?

The answer is partly that it is still product in early beta which generated a dangerous level of expectation. Also though, Wave  aims to facilitate a way of working which the early adopter folk all use and take for granted:  Skype, IM, Wiki, collaborative project tools etc.

A new recombination

For me Wave is something genuinely new where the ‘new’ means a clever recombination of existing elements. Potentially a re-invention of email with the more useful bits of wikis, instant messaging and blogs mixed in. Unlike useful collaborative Web 2.0 gizmos like wikis and web-based project management tools, Google Wave isn’t a tool which we can try out in a safe space “over there” because it would only come into its own if we had it as an everyday tool, completely integrated with (and a regular alternative to) our email.

For education?

Given that educators make enthusiastic use of collaborative tools such as wikis then Wave has plenty of potential there.  ELT and language teachers will revel in the ability to easily embed rich media with text. But really it’s a productivity tool for work environments.

For work

• Big, big time saving for consensus-though-email organisations. The sort of place where the choice is to have brutal email management or regularly stay late to catch up with mountains of mail. Where they have a “We don’t do work, we just do e-mail” ethos. The Wave benefit of keeping “a SINGLE copy of your ideas” would be massive here.

• Even though wikis are straightforward for many, they may be beyond ‘the many’ for whom email is the main work-based communication tool. Something which looks like mail or can be accessed from a mail interface would have much better take up
• Google want to sell the their tool suite to companies and Wave is aggregating front end for google docs. Useful Docs may be but they are also too flexible and very difficult to manage. Much better, in fact, to create and organise them from within a Wave. If in doubt trying running a big content project using a wiki vs one with Google Docs.

Wave promo plays on the real time elements for shock and awe. The  importance is that it doesn’t freeze or lose content when two people are working on it nearly synchronously, something which happens too often with Google Docs

Flexible collaboration

There is nothing new about collaborative tools (Lotus Notes anyone?) but they seem to be set up to support preconceived workflows rather than letting people decide when and how they wish to collaborate.

Go with the fl.. Wave

Wave also recognises that a lot of the information we deal with at work is either part of a larger whole or generates a new stream which continues to propegate inefficiently by people starting new individual communications i.e. an email which they selectively hook into the mother stream through selectively quoting parts of other messages and CC’ing some of the (many) others involved.

Unless you work in an area where skype and messenger chat are the norm, email probably still remains the defacto standard for professional communication.  Personal communications are becoming more nuanced though. For a young generation of course IM clients are the standard.  However,  even the huge numbers from older demographics  making increasing use of  Facebook and other social networking recently, know that posting a status update can save a lot of time in comparison to an email and uploading an album can save even more.  There is probably a tipping point there with people realising that getting into their usual email space, cranking out a whole new mail including laboriously deciding who to address it to  is beginning to seem like something  for special occasions.

As far as work practices go, that tipping point is probably further off but Google Wave and its imitators will change that.

According to this article in El Pais (Google translation here)  Spanish Prime Minister Zapatero announced plans to digitise education in March but negotiations with the major educational publishers and infrastructure companies had been going on for a while. This  more recent article, again from El Pais (Google translation here),  talks about a common ebook platform which publishers were signing up to.  If it were only ebooks and  and digital classrooms,  I would be applauding another worthy step in the direction of modern schooling etc. The catalyst for potentially momentous change is the provision of netbooks to all students.

Enter, stage left, the netbook (the rise of  las maquinitas)

I don’t know about the spec or the hardware – will these be multimedia machines or souped up ereaders.  Possibly not the original OLPC as there is no mention of it here and realistically the OLPC spec is probably too low. Neither is it clear if this is a subsidised or free initiative but the committment to provide them is there. That changes a lot.

Dream on

Everything from  utopias  of kids with only a netbook instead of a bag of books to the realisation that there will be a platform, and therefore a market, for educational e-books for a very large number of people. Much more so than Spain potentially as there are 400 million Spanish speaking students in the world according to the first El Pais article.

Pedagogy

From a pedagogy point of view, it opens up a whole range of possibilities where the students are linking up from home with their classroom material in some shape or form.

Realistically

Although events seem to be moving fast, there are huge, huge obstacles here. It appears very technology and content-led with the would be implementers i.e. teachers  lagging quite a long way behind. The UK is 10 years into something which is well funded and much less ambitious and nobody would claim it was job done.  So expect the crash and burn stories but don’t doubt its significance in the long run.

Iin putting together the last posts which aimed to cut through the device hype and examine what we mean by e-books for e-learning,  I came across a reference to a new publishing house called Flat World Knowledge which has been set up to answer many of the most pressing conundrums in getting the e-learning e-book right.

Flat World Knowledge

Once you scratch your head (or other favoured part of the anatomy in search of inspiration) for more than two minutes the following becomes apparent. E-learning e-books need to

• be available in multiple different formats (B&W, colour, interactive, mobile and audio)
• play on the devices the students already have (laptops, mobiles)
• be customiseable and updatable
• have the option of being part of a trackable suite of materials – Well-designed e-textbooks become learning environments that leverage the advances of publishing in a digital format enable from Michael Ritter’s post here
• offer some part of the product for free, not because Chris Anderson says so but that is the way that existing information web business models work (entertainment and news) and why should education be different?

None of this is really a problem from a technical perspective – the bottleneck is the model: how are these variations going to be made available, not to mention paid for?  Because of their fundamental nature, it is very difficult to resolve these issues on the product level which is why Flat World Knowledge is so interesting. Their real innovation is to change more than the business model. They have re-engineered the model of the business.  Disclaimer, as with any other company or service I focus on in this blog, I have no connection with Flat World Knowledge and this post is put together from publicly available information.

Best way to start is an example – Principles of Economics here. That is the link to the free online edition, one of the 29 titles currently advertised though just under half of those are in preparation. Understandable that it’s not all there yet as the catalogue needs to be commissioned from scratch.   If it’s free though, why pay for it? Because the course leader can ‘adopt’ a book and then customise it by dropping or re-ordering chapters or adding material.  This isn’t an extended feedback exercise on the text such as O’Reilly’s initiative . It is quite different and becomes quite compelling from the institutional perspective. There is also an instructor pack with Powerpoints and flashcards.  So that is the set text which students are required to buy.

Free World Knowledge pricing around the 'book system'

Note the differentiated pricing between basic and colour and print your own PDF editions, either full book or chapter by chapter. The PDF can also be annotated. Students have the option (within the ‘Study Aid Package’ left) to buy short aural study aids and flashcards.  All along they have the access to the full, free online version. As do you.

FWK operate in the US college text book market which is a) a very big market and b) more  susceptible than most to being disrupted by e-books. Industry watchers maintain that publishers  in this sector are staring down a similar gun to the music business when Torrent began to bit(e).

Freemium

Chris Anderson's Open Textbook Revenue vs. Print-only Publishing Revenue

Chris Anderson actually features Flat World Knowledge in his book as a Freemium case study but somehow I skimmed that part at the time – probably assuming it was just another typical Anderson fare free tale.  In fact, as you can see, it is possibly a snapshot of the publishers of the future.

As for the money, on page 160 he has the following comparative illustration of ‘Open Textbook’ revenue vs. Print-only publishing revenue.  He points out several advantages of this business model’s lower cost base:  cheaper cover price means there is less of an incentive for a secondhand book market; the royalty structure is better which, in turn, encourages authors to produce more up to date versions.

Watch that space!

This prompted me to go through  some very broad audiences types in fairly  simplistic way, and consider what sort of e-books they might want / have to read and what they might imply about either the hardware or the software necessary. Some conclusions also dropped out at the end for what this might mean for the ELT publishers.

Conclusions?

If this analysis holds up, the answer is …. there isn’t one single answer. More worryingly perhaps for ELT publishers, while the future of e-books in universities may not be clear, it is clear they have a future.  However, on this logic, the way forward for consumer language teaching and ELT publishers is still uncertain because the interactive software formats likely to be required to work for their content, won’t play on a ’standard’ e-book reader.

Or then again ..

Then again, it may simplify matters:  if there isn’t going to be a consumer device to play sophisticated language learning e-books in the near future, publishers may decide to go for a three-pronged strategy:

• sophisticated content for teacher use / classroom display (Interactive Whiteboard compatible)
• greatly simplified content in straight html for mobile and consumer reading devices (free with paper course title which still needs to be bought)
• complementary  interactive content attached to other services, accessed from PC or laptop. (some free, some charged for with paper course title which still needs to be bought)

E-books provoke surprisingly little excitement among technophile educators.  Perhaps because the topic is associated with gadgets and gear rather than content, especially content which those same educators like authoring themselves.  In the Web toolosphere blogs and wikis monopolise the creative attention of those interested in written student expression and co-creation of text.  And digital text isn’t nearly as exciting as creating digital audio while mobile is just waayy sexier than either.

For whatever reason there hasn’t been a lot of discussion  on the topic which I have come across, aside from a dedicated  group on LinkedIn.  Maybe for good reason as there are quite a few e-book issues still up in the air.  Some of the main ones are

Hardware

Firstly the device itself. Now that they can get their hands on the Kindle in the UK, more people may actually buy one (or get bought one for Christmas) which will help build awareness. E-book readers appear a good deal more popular in the US than anywhere else. In the UK Sony is on to its second round of models, the first apparently too locked down to get excited about.  Are the devices too limited if they only do black and white or don’t handle multimedia or will we be prepared to carry around both an e-book reader and the large touch screen smart phone? Or are we talking about the wrong device entirely when, as some prophesy, Apple will ride to our rescue with an iTablet?

Software

There is a bit of work still to do on formats which are still standardising. The default format option for the Kindle, for example, apparently won’t play on a Smartphone, although there is an easy workaround for this.

Price

This is price of the e-books rather than the device  – 20% of people in a recent UK poll said they were interested in buying a Kindle.   Many people are perplexed by the idea that the e-book should be treated as an equivalent to a full paperback – which I can lend to my friends and resell if I wish – unlike an e-book.  The publishers are quick to point out that distribution is a very small part of the overall price and fair enough but , the marginal cost of producing another copy and distributing it is nearly zero in the case of an e-book – certainly not the case with its paper equivalent.

Copyright restrictions

And then there is copyright. Looking at the way that e-music has gone, will e-books follow suit? Will they gradually come down in price with almost a micropayment model? Gospoken, for example allows readers to buy ebooks chapter by chapter – which actually works out pretty expensive. Will e-books lose their DRM protection such as the intrusive Adobe Digital editions.

These aren’t education specific issues but worth bringing them up to understand the landscape. If those aren’t solved then e-books in education will be a non issue because  education only devices won’t have traction.

What aren’t people talking about?

Educationally what are e-books for? What problem to they solve?

Saving

One answer is that they are big, bulky and expensive so an expensive device might pay for itself fairly quickly in terms of cost and space saved . That is the rationale behind California talking about adopting the Kindle’s bigger brother and “Arnold Schwarzenegger to scrap school textbooks in favour of e-books“.

The outstanding question still is ..what is an e-learning e-book?

For example – novels are 100% plain text so the e-version of a novel works fine as just black and white text.  Educational materials tend to have to illustrate concepts so the ability to display graphics – in colour – is probably essential. Hardware problem – most don’t at the moment.

Again talking about the ebook readers (unless the proposition is that students will be using netbooks) there is Steven Downe’s point that something like the Kindle will need to handle a lot more than e-books – being able to draw in web pages, documents and everything else which teachers would previously have brought into the classroom as photocopies.

Learner & learning friendly content

Many text books are intended to be a triangulation point between learner and teacher with the teacher mediating a lot of the content. Shouldn’t e-books be more accessible for self learning? Shouldn’t the content be indexed and tagged to allow far more sophisticated searching and categorisation than is possible with paper?

Assessment

What about assessment? Mini quizzes before reading (listening / watching?) to whet appetites, test yourself assessments on completion to improve understanding? There is surely room for extension activities which begins to take the e-book towards a practice resource – something you could definitely see people paying for.

Animations & note taking

Learning-friendly engagement: illustrations should come alive showing processes in action, highlighting linkages, offering the ability to zoom in and out. E-books already allow for general readers to bookmark and make notes as a nice-to-have. The ability to do this and export the content into other formats will be essential for e-books.

So it’s a bit like ‘Interactive Whiteboard format’?

Educational publishers who have explored making their content Interactive Whiteboard (IWB)-friendly are probably working on the right lines except for a different audience.

It is very hard to predict what form e-books will take as it is early days and format will evolve with usage. It is easy to forget that another form of e-books have been around and very successful for several years – audio books.  I’ve been a fan of the mighty Audible for a while.  They have an evolved approach  such as full length vs. abridged versions of novels and non-fiction and semi-dramatised versions of fiction which is more akin to listening to a radio play than a book.

E versions of textbooks aren’t the same thing though they probably share issues such as having  to work out whether they are complementary or replacement and if they can be broken down into sub-components (in this case chapters of longer non-fiction works).

Interesting times …. hopefully.