I am delighted and honoured to be one of the moderators for “Crafting your e-Perfect e-textbook” along with 15 fabulous and experienced moderators, who are teachers, course material writers, trainers: Shelly Terrell, our inspiring team leader, Lindsay Clandfield, André Spang, Jennifer Verschoor, Sylvia Guinan, Jason Levine, Chuck Sandy, Janet Bianchini, Ozge Karaoglu, Jake Duncan, Jackie Gerstein, Terry Freeman, Dave Guymom, and our EVO mentor Rubena St. Louis.
Registration for Electronic Village Online, EVO, is open from january 6 to January 12.
Important links for “Crafting the e-Perfect e-Textbook MOOC
Session Wiki: This is where we find the missions and tutorials
The syllabus
Google Community: This is the official forum for the whole EVO session
Community Guidelines & Navigation
Listly Bookmark & e-portfolio
As I will be moderating Week 1. I made this video to let participants get to know a little bit about moderators and to try to help those who might be attending a MOOC for the first time
We already had a Twitter chat, our hashtag is #EbookEVO. Shelly has put it together here.
We started by introducing ourselves and sharing what kind of e-book we want to create.
ELT ebooks
Trainees development e-books / book for Trainees on integrating technology
Helping students write better essays ebooks
Ebooks for elementary schools students
No idea yet
Some questions:
What limits do you find teaching with your current textbook?
How do we update the material in our ebooks?
What is we think the internet is the almost perfect ebook? Some think it would be too much to handle
What is an interactive ebook?
Sharing the process rather than end products?
Will the course be focused more on design and tech tools or also deal with planning content for ebook?
What will the impact of learning in the open have on my career and digital identity?
Are we going to work on customizable templates that we can use for our varied ebooks in the future? that would be good
Is it ok to look silly and accept that others will critique my work? Will people be critiquing me personally?
How do you get 100% & learn anything when there are no marks? What learning currency does a offer me?
Discussing about using textbooks:
Some participants commented that they use textbooks as schools are structured in order for testing standards. Instruction is controlled. Textbooks are selected to meet tests standards.
Textbooks are fine, but they are standard. I want something customizable for each class
Would be great if students could have part in ‘making’ the textbook
They are too generic & dated.
Why creating ebooks
My eBooks are school & community focused with lots of relevant live links resources
If we focus on tools and design we might find ways of dealing with updates
What you invest in the ebook as far as design, completing tasks, convos with others & feedback impacts your textbook
We need eBooks filled with challenges and personally customizable by the learners.
Some personal reflections
We don’t use textbooks in my classes, so I encourage students to create their own ebooks at the end of term as a way of putting their productions together.
I have been thinking and exploring this area of creating an ebook as a way of replacing the textbook, but I wonder if this option will not lead to the same challenges we are already questioning about existing published textbooks.
When I think Internet can be the almost perfect ebook, some people think it would be too much to handle. My viewpoint on this aspect is that as we approach a different way of dealing with learning we’ll definitely have to deal with different skills to be taught.
In my personal teaching context, imposing content doesn’t really work much. And this has led to some failures regarding projects I tried to encourage my students to participate in. The more freedom students are given regarding the content of the curriculum, the more motivated they become to learn.
If you are interested in this topic you can check Rhizomatic education: Community as curriculum by Dave Cormier.
Right now I am exploring ways to adapt Rhizomatic Learning to my teaching context. I have blogged about this here.
My personal belief about creating templates for future work is that templates will not help much to trigger creativity and curiosity to find new ways to improve, mix, remix, adapt or modify our productions and others as well, especially if we can think that by sharing processes rather than end products, we will be involved in lots of rethinking and redesigning.
“Will people be critiquing me?”. As for me, nothing moves me forward to learning more than when those educators I trust (we all have our favourite mentors, don’t we?) encourage me to reflect through their questions, critiquing our work is different from criticising us as teachers. We all need support, but above all if we want to move forward and become better teachers we need honest positive feedback.
Regarding the Creative Common License for our ebooks, there has been an extensive discussion on our forums. Most educators are choosing the Creative Commons by-nc-sa, however some are questioning about the commercial definition, given the fact that many of us, or some of us are freelancers.
Evan Frendo has triggered some interesting points:
“If you use content for general research, even if not for any specific purpose, and you or your organisation generates income, that counts as commercial use. So does using content for pro-bono work (from the Latin pro bono publico, meaning ‘for the public good’, or working for free), if it also enhances your reputation or leads to income-generating work in any way whatsoever.”
Copyright issues can be thorny. Just the other day I was reading a monthly newsletter I get delivered to my inbox by one of the most well known and popular educational sites. I found an interesting activity and thought that if I adapted it a little bit for my adults students it could work really well. Just because I am more aware of CC, I read all the detailed info provided in the site regarding copyrights and I found this:
Copyright – please readAll the materials on these pages are free for you to download and copy for educational use only. You may not redistribute, sell or place these materials on any other web site without written permission from the …
I think this is a very restricted policy regarding ownership. I see many teachers sharing links to great material and resources from this site, I wonder if they know that if they are going to share their students productions in the class wikis, for example, we have to get their permission.
After reading and learning a little bit about CC, and getting some interesting, positive feedback and support from André J. Spang, my choice regarding CC is: Creative Commons: by-nc/4.0/
Now, if you feel you are more on the share and let others modify and adapt under less restricted terms I suggest you read amazing Alec Couros writing about A Copyright Tale
“Personally, I do not feel ripped off or cheated as I don’t feel a strong sense of ownership for the content that I create. However, the lack of attribution cheats your readership (the general public). While it may not seem like a big deal in the case of this single photograph, I feel that proper attribution is essential in providing others with the origin, adaptions, and travels of an artefact or idea. I love seeing that my work is useful for others. But, without attribution, we silence potential conversations around the matter and the context of ideas/artefacts being shared.” – Alec Couros
What do you think about this?