ebooks on workplace learning / education research relevant to vocational education research

There are now many ebooks in the CPIT library. During my summer trawl through the University of Canterbury library, I noticed many of the journals now only available as digital (as from 2008) and there are more books listed as ebooks on the library catalogue.
At CPIT, many of our ebooks are available via the eblib (EBL) subscription. You can either browse the books (5 minutes – arrghh) or make a request for a loan. Loan requests are for 7 days and there can be gap of a few days (for some books) before the access email arrives. Not the most user-friendly experience in comparison to just picking the book off the library shelve and flicking through it. I also checked access to the ebooks via my ipad. On-line reading worked without any glitches, the only drawback being the multiple logins required to obtain access.

Anyway, I worked through three ebooks a couple of weeks ago, as I requested them all on the same day. Something I will need to make plans around as working through three books in a week is heavy going.

The first book “Making work visible: Ethnographically grounded case studies of work practice” (2011) edited by Margaret Szymanski and Jake Whalen and the most relevant to my current work. This book records the work of Xerox and the work of well-known researchers in the field of workplace learning including Lucy Suchman and John Seely Brown. In a sense, it is almost a history book, as it documents the many studies made from the 1970s, on improving workplace learning but also machine-human interaction. Chapter one is a transcript from a presentation by Suchman, detailing the journey of the work practice and design project.

The second chapter is by Wes Sharrock and Graham Button, detailing their engineering investigations on ‘ what is made visible on making work visible?’. This chapter has a good discussion on the advantages and pitfalls of using ethnographical research methods (ethnomethology) to study workplace practice. As an example, they describe studies of engineers planning work and how these workplans may at times become barriers to the actual work progressing.

Chapter 3 is by Peter Tolmie on ‘uncovering the unremarkable’ and focuses on studies of software engineers working at home or at office, to understand ‘unremarkable’ computing a precursor of ubiquitous computing : having technology work in the background without acknowledging but using the capabilities when required. Although seemingly a simple task, the article details the complexities of uncovering the unremarkable, a clear warning to those of us trying to study and understand tacit learning.

Francois Brun-Cotton and Patricia Wild write on ‘work practices to understand the implications of nascent technology’, of relevance to our netbooks projects. Provides a good description of ethnography, based on collection of a wide range and volume of artefacts, both static and multi-media.

The next chapter is interesting reading both from the technology and cultural point of view. Diane Schiano and Victoria Berlotti work on ‘ using field study to inform the design of a mobile leisure guide for Japanese youth’ called Tokyo to Go. A good overview of how to conduct a field study using various approaches.

The above are from the first two parts of the book, the next two parts are less relevant covering ‘practices around documents’ and ‘the customer front’. The last two parts ‘ learning and knowledge sharing’ and ‘competency transfer’ – as applied to the projects detailed in the book, have a few chapters for follow up. The last chapter in the book is especially useful to my current learning about ethnography as a research method and how to introduce analytical thinking to other trades tutors. This chapter by Brigette Jordan on ‘Transferring ethnographical competence: personal reflections on the past and future of work practice analysis’ provides a realistic guide to mentoring others into the culture of ethnographical research.

The second book is written by Leslie Rupert Herrenkohl and Veronique Mertl called “how students come to be, know and do: A case for a broader view of learning’ (2010). Here, a research study of a group of American grade school students, is used extend the understanding of how people learn. The book strongly advocates a sociocultural approach to try to increase the numbers of women and minority people into the sciences.

The third book is Yrjo Engestrom's work on ‘from team to knots; studies of collaboration and learning at work’ (2008). Here, 6 case studies are used to illustrate the activity theory framework to study how teams work. The case studies include a TV broadcasting team to find out why the team has ‘stagnated’ in their work approaches; a court trial team as an example of a supposedly tightly restricted/controlled work, innovating possibilities to bring about efficient trial process; a primary health care team to study how newly constructed teams find their bearings and a mode of working together; a teaching team as an example of boundary crossing; industrial machining teams engaged in knowledge creation; and how telecom call centre teams build a shared concept and attain their own social capital. Good examples of how activity theory has been used to study diverse workplaces.

Common themes run through these three books. They are related to preparing people (and students) for a work life of continual change. Xerox’s studies and the case studies in Engestrom’s book provide insightful observations with some recommendations for future strategic learning directions. The book by Heerenkohl and Mertl offers one possible route for education to prepare the next generation for the complexities that lie ahead as humanity copes with social, technological and environment challenges.

The three books are part of the Cambridge University Press ‘Learning by doing: Social, cognitive and computational aspects’ series and over the next few months I will work my way through other pertinent books in the series.

We have the technology and the pedagogy, but will education change?

I think that there is little doubt we have the technology (an example extolling the ipad from Graeme Brown – Handheld Learning) and mobile learning is about here (as per Oz/NZ Horizonreport for 2010 via Derek Wenmouth’s blog).

We have also have the pedagogy pitched about right – inclusiveness, participative learning etc. need for critical thinking skills etc. and bringing it together with constructive or curriculum alignment and sumarised in this slideshare (Biggs & Tang, 2008) 

But are our classrooms, institutions and IT departments ready?? As the horizon report summarises,

‘even when technologies are strongly promoted, professional development is still crucial’ and ‘there is a mismatch between pedagogy and the design of emerging technologies’ – which is becoming less of a challenge as with say the ipad’.

Two technologies to become mainstream within a years are ebooks and mobiles.

Ebooks are not pervasive in our polytechnic environment. Many of our students and some of our tutors are not ‘natural’ readers. There is also resistance to reading ‘off the screen’ with many people  printing off items to read, rather than reading on screen and storing the digital copies for later reference. I have lost count of the number of people I have introduced pdf readers with annotation tools (like FoxIT) but few have taken up the challenge. True, there is a learning curve and the need to relearn years of acquired skill through reading hard copies. However, the advantages of digital make the effort worthwhile. I now find articles easily, whereas in the past, I would have to fossick into my card catalogue and hunt down the article either in the library or through boxes of printouts. Now, most journal articles are archived in various folders under the references section of each project. I can use Endnotes to find the article and once the article found, use the search function on the pdf reader to find the relevant section. Usually takes all of 2 minutes compared to at least 15 – 20 minutes for the manual option or a couple of days for the library option if the article is at the university.


For the adoption of mobiles, concerted efforts to bring down the cost of mobile web access will be required OR better access to WiFi within out institutions. Without either, access to the www will be stymied and that makes mobile access slightly superfluous. The small screen of pdas, ipod touches and phones have always been a barrier to the uptake of mobile. Tablets like the ipad make web surfing a joy and reading off an ipad is much more 'book like' although annotation etc. needs to again be learnt.

So will need to work on both the above. An interactive text book approach using the advantages provided by tablets will be an interesting way to tap into both ebook and mobile technologies. The pedagogy underpinning the project will be aspects of using the interactive text book as a resource for both constructive and participative learning. So something wot work through and investigate more deeply.

Ipad - convenience and mlearning tool

The mobility of netbooks / ipad along with Wifi has changed the way in which my family interacts. Both my ‘kids’ (one 22 , the other 25) are currently back at home. The younger establishing herself into work after completing uni. last year & the older back home a month ago, after a 6 month break in Thailand and a couple of years working in Melbourne. He is now back at Polytechnic doing a Cert. in Fitness course. Most evenings, we are gathered around the TV, each with netbook (2 eee PCs), ipad or ipod touch (2 of them), surfing the web, playing games, reading etc. while the 6pm news does its best to bring our attention back to things happening in the big wide world. The husband now has the daily newspapers all to himself but does borrow the ipad for his bit of web surfing as well, he finds the ipod touch screen too small. So besides comments on what is happening on the news, we also share sites we are surfing, latest videos, music, compare scores on games (Scramble2), plan movies to see or walk/tramp/ski trip over the weekend. In the past, we tended to each be busy at our computers & four to five years ago, just before both of them left home, they had TVs in their rooms. We actually now interact socially much more in the evening then we used to!!


From the education focus, I have never been a great fan of teaching in computer suites. The students ‘hide’ behind their computers and group activity, peer interaction is difficult when the physical barrier of a large computer screen prevents people from seeing each other properly. Access to WIFI and encouraging students to make use of laptops/netbooks/ipads presents teachers with a much better physical environment which can be flexibly reorganised to enhance learning activities taking place in the classroom. Untethered web access leads to mobility and the opportunity for students and teachers to centre learning on the tasks at hand.

The classroom then becomes a true learning space as access to information relevant to the lesson is much more easily sourced. This information can then form the basis of learning moments for students and teachers.
Here and here are comprehensive lists of links to various ipod touch/ipad apps – many educational including a good list from Rasmussen college. Also an example of an interactive book in the digital form of a well loved NZ book - Hairy Maclary of Donaldson Diary with a video trailer.

Ipad - ebooks and elit

The ipad launched in NZ last Friday. Although I have had the ipad for a couple of weeks, I have not had much time to really play with it. So far, I have been able to evaluate the ipod touch apps I want to keep and update any ipod touch apps which have ipad versions. Of note is Stanza which is my present ebook reader platform. The added capability which I love is being able to add files off my computer easily and transfer these on to the ipad. Stanza allows various ebooks I have purchased over the years which are .epub files to be read along with .pdf files. So I am now able to more easily access my rather large collection of study / research articles on the ipad. I have always been a fan of reading with a digital device and the ipad’s display really enhances the experience. As recommended on the Stanza FAQ, calibre can be used to convert various file formats into .epub or .pdf. which is user friendly and not only converts the books but also had a nifty ebook reader as well.

However, reading print books on an ipad is rather old hat although more ebooks are now sole through Amazon than hard cover books. So the next thing to work on is to evaluate the collection of elit and also here. This article features the multimodalities possible by bringing digital technologies into books. All require multimedia players and the ones which run on shockwave or flash will not run on an ipad (sigh). However, many of the examples are reminiscent of music videos, with audio of poems running with visual presentations, often with fast moving or scrolling images or using animations. Some have interactive sections or use text graphics to tell the story. Many are art forms rather than actual narratives but all tell a story of sorts. Here is an example which runs on a Mac. A guide to writing elit provides for some interesting approaches and ideas.

So it will be worthwhile looking into the future of textbooks and also children's literature which has been the natural home for interactive books for a while, exampled by one Kiwi company's approach to putting Kiwi classics on the ipad.

Interactive ebooks with Inanimate alice and istories

An great example of the future of ebooks via Evan McIntoch’s edublog. Inanimatealice has been released since 2006 and currently has 4 out of 10 episodes available for download and viewing/reading. The book details how a young girl grows up to become a game digital designer. Each chapter seems to improve in sophistication as the techniques possible through interactive ebooks are explored and modelled. Also, each chapter increases in length, fro 5 minutes to 30 minutes, with greater use of interactive sections. There is some work still to be done on navigation, for instance if you are part way through an interactive section and are interrupted, when you click on the icon to go back to the relevant bit, you need to repeat the entire interaction. So a criteria I would like to see for interactive ebooks is to be able to dip in and out where ever you want to, like in a real book. 


There is a discussion on the impact of interactive ebooks on publishingperspectives. Interative ebooks will have many possible applications in education. It is also possible to purchase the platform on which inanimatealice has been developed. Istories is promoted as a straightforward way to construct digital stories which include pictures, text, videos, interactive sections and sound/music. Does cost a bit though.

I have been reflecting on the different literacies our staff bring with them and how to better introduce staff unfamiliar with academic tasks like reading education journal articles. The end objective is to encourage a deeper engagement with the scholarship of teaching and learning. Will think through a possible project to develop an example of an interactive ebook that can be useful to introduce some of the concepts or theories of adult education. Staff can then build their own versions to share with other staff and this can then be a shared resource we can use for future courses. This ebook could be consolidated using powerpoint or better still using something like voicethread or perhaps even live binders. Live binders featured on Jane Hart’s tools this week and seems to be imminently suited to eportfolios with a show and tell type structure. So there are possibilities to explore for interactive ebook authoring and application.