interactive textbook - examples and direction

‘Interactive textbook’ are not a new concept, as this example shows.  Commercial options include dynamic books, an online ‘repository’ accessed via institutional LMS, Blio as an interactive reader and for the ipad, there is Inkling. PC world reports on several other ipad initiatives including scroll motion and CourseSmart.  However, these are still mainly reconfigured textbooks with the usual text book type layout and embedded links to videos etc.

What is the future for textbooks? 21^st textbooks could also be imminently “personalised and mashable” something that will take some working on.  Neverending books is one approach, bringing in social media, to working through a text book and access to a constantly up to date textbook. Another is Symtext, allowing multiple ways to access a book either as text, podcast or video. Bill Gates reminds us about the need to include 'self - assessment' opportunities/ software in next generation textbooks.

How can interactive textbooks on a tablet enhance students learning? From the above, we can distil a few pointers:

• It HAS to be interactive PLUS be intuitive to navigate through.
• Should provide opportunity for students to do some form of self assessment.
• Students should also have the option of creating their own content – either text, graphic (sketch, mindmap, photos, annotated photos), audio or video (again with annotation options).

electronic literature - contrbution to interactive textbooks

While doing a catch up on reading up on multimodal analysis last night, I came across the use of the hypertext authoring tool StorySpace as a means to compile a multimodal research report. A concept I will explore next year if one of the projects I am applying for funding comes about.

StorySpace runs on Macs and Windows and cost US$295 and also offers multiple user versions for commercial / educational institutional use.

Exploring beyond wikipedia's summary of StorySpace brought me back into the world of electronic literature exampled by the story - Afternoon and a showcase of various examples. Also a good defintion of the differences between ebooks and elit found here.

The examples reveal the capabilities of being able to move through a book using pathways that are based on user choice, moving outside of the book to explore other resources on the www, being able to input/ amend content etc. All not new ideas but execution of these capabilites in an educationally sound way needs to be further explored.

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.