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.

Web 2.0 storytelling - using narratives in research

Last week, I was working on the Ako Aoteoroa funded ‘teaching craftsmanship’ research project which involves the building of narratives based on information gleaned from questionnaires and interview content. Each narrative is constructed based on set criteria. This then allows a horizontal comparison to be made between each narrative. Commonalities and differences are then easier to distil out of the mass of data presented.

I could clinically construct the narratives as a large spreadsheet or table but building narratives is imminently more satisfying J Narratives are also much more pleasant to read and some of the characteristics that define each research participant come through, even in a rather objectively composed narrative. The narratives tell stories which are much richer and intense then a list of characteristics off a spreadsheet.

However the above is my interpretation, as a researcher of the participants’ original stories. I need to put some time into exploring how to provide opportunities in my future research projects to record participants’ own narratives.

Bryan Alexander & Alan Levine discuss in an educause review article the emergence of the genre of web 2.0 story telling. They propose they consolidation of a range of social networking tools as being methods by which people are able to ‘tell stories’ about their lives. Alan Levine aka Cogdogroo provides 50+ways to tell digital stories, so there are no shortage of ideas of how to people can garner their experiences, archive them on various sites and for others to follow the threads of their thoughts & learning as they navigate through the various hyperlinks presented. Liz Kolb provides a couple of examples of how to use the mobile phone to create digital storybooks using yodio. Chrissy Hellyer presents the use of voice thread as a digital portfolio & Photopeach as another option.

Lots of ideas, some of which I have explored in the mobile portfolios project. Bringing the opportunity of recording learning while it is taking place provides for many possibilities to extend on Graham Nuthall & others’ work on the hidden lives of learners. The emerging field of multimodal discourse analysis is something I will need to explore as this provides for the rigorous data analysis of the plethora of data that will emerge from investigating participant generated artefacts!

Top 100 elearning tools

Jane Hart’s collation of top elearning tools from over 150 contributors is now available as a pdf file via this site. The analysis makes for some interesting reading, in particular, that educators are using Web 2.0 tools more widely than their corporate counterparts. Also , that most of the contributors used most of the tools for their own productivity rather than for ‘teaching’. Jane Hart’s list has been useful to us here at CPIT as it provides a one stop shop for tutors just starting on using ICT in a more creative way in their teaching. Descriptions of the sites are succinct and provide enough information to allow for future exploration to see if the tools will fit well into the learning context for each tutor’s content area and student profiles.

A trawl through the list reveal a couple that I have not come across. Of interest to check out were Voicethread and Jing. Voicethread allows photos / text files to be uploaded and then commented upon via audio. Photos from flickr, powerpoint slides and word / excel and pdf files can all be uploaded. Audio files can be posted via mobile phones or through the use of text or webcam. All of the media can then be shared and comments can be left by viewers. I registered and had a quick look around. The interface is very user friendly. I would assume that displaying on a mobile phone would be difficult and at present, only phones in the USA are able to contribute voice files. However, the whole concept is very useful for digital story telling, moving it forward from just a collection of photos to providing the opportunity to bring in personalised stories with audio & video feedback and commenting.

Jing is a screen capture tool. It allows the user to take snapshots of their desktop and make a video of what they have done. This is then sharable with other users. Being in beta, it is free for the time being & requires the download of the jing software tool on to your computer. It’s a useful tool to help record procedures for using other pieces of software plus perhaps to also record presentations as well.