Rod Gammon's blog
eBooks are certainly all the rage. Vendors pop up daily to support publishers testing the waters. At TESOL 2012 Pearson raised eyebrows with a (kind of sort of) print bookless booth display. But at the end of the day, learning is not about just books and eBooks are mostly trying to be just books.
Scott Thornbury is one of the world's best English teachers and ESL materials designers. So when he blogs what a good eLearning experience is, one should read up.
Been thinking about eBooks a lot. How to make them, how to align them with publishing processes. Been reviewing a new vendor almost every day.
When trying to communicate findings, three general types have emerged: Flat eBooks, embedded media books, and interactive books. This short post quickly defines these, reviews some options, and shares my own cost expectations. I think it's important because "eBooks" is too big a term-- Ford doesn't talk about "cars", they design coupes, sedans, trucks...
Publishers need to segment eBooks.
At the Turkish Private Schools Association annual symposium in January 2012, I gave a presentation on coordinating mLearning with structured education.
Slides with Turkish translation (if you'd like to help finish translating the last slides, please do!):
Spent some time developing in iBooks author tonight and after having thought about and read about and discussed it all day, it seems right to jot down a few thoughts. Right now it isn't a revolution, but we live in the world of the fast update. I think it could very quickly become a revolution.
Today I went back to the very first episode of Leo Laporte and Tom Merritt's great Triangulations series. The opening episode was an interview with game industry legend Warren Spector. They never really leave the theme, but the first fifteen minutes or so capture a great conversation on games as an artistic medium. I love the eagerness to really think about new media as new, rather than simply a way to further existing publishing successes. In fact, it's not even eagerness but a sense of artistic integrity that seems to drive this view.
Over the summer I posted on "5 differences in publishing print and digital courses". That post was inspired by the 2011 mLearning conference and was really about how differences in print/digital product features affect the publishing process. In this post I'd like to consider how differences in the print/digital development processes affect the business model. However, it's not simply print vs. digital, it's traditional vs. new media-- the point is that more than just the products have changed, at least for the successful!
If I have to summarize, I would say the big difference is social.That includes "social networks" but I mean social more in the sense of "interactive" products and "interested" organizations.
Tonight I went to a forum on Digital First at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. @jxpaton and Justin Smith were interviewed by @jeffjarvis. (Jeff Jarvis wrote an essay in the Guardian earlier this year called Digital First.)
In no particular order, and with respect to all others who also helped make the following so, these are some things Steve Jobs introduced for which I am thankful, almost daily:
- Educational computing being taken seriously
User's guide
Step 1: Collect Activities
The app is about keeping track of how you spend your time: Who was it done for, what was the project, what was done, when, and for how long. The first step is to simply take out your phone, start the app (tap 1) and then press the add button (tap 2).