e-Learning Professor

E-Textbooks – Reading on a screen

22 April 2016 by Graham Stewart Leave a Comment

hipster_02_transpIt’s getting on for a quarter of a century since the New York Times Book Review announced “The End of Books”. Computer screens had started to allure readers with a new nonlinear or nonsequential space that offered not only the words on a page, but the promise of information rich hyperlinked pathways into new knowledge. Today, although printed books haven’t yet disappeared, the widespread use of e-books, and especially e-textbooks in higher education is overwhelming. It is undeniable that the adoption of the e-textbook brings with it all the advantages of interactivity, animations, simulations and instant online quizzes to test your progress. But it is also true that e-textbooks are popular because they are cheap, not necessarily for the individual student, but certainly for the distributors.

Back in the nineteen nineties, Sven Birkerts challenged the notion of e-books and even questioned the possibility of maintaining coherent thought while reading on a screen (I recommend the chapter entitled “Hypertext: Of Mouse and Man” in Birkerts’ 1994 book The Gutenberg Elegies). Kolb presents a similar argument in “Socrates in the Labyrinth” (1994). Birkerts’ reservations have particular resonance now in an increasingly digital learning environment. We need to be critical of the e-textbooks we prescribe to our students, and even more so if we venture into authoring them ourselves. Are we sufficiently aware of the requirements of on-screen reading? Does the design of the learning material we recommend provide a sufficiently logical framework to our users? Are we providing an abundance of information but very little clarity?

I hope that the readings provided below provoke a debate that will ultimately benefit our students. At the very least we should be in a position to scrutinise our burgeoning e-textbook collections with a more discerning eye.

Birkerts, S. 1994. The Gutenberg elegies: The fate of reading in an electronic age. Faber and Faber.

Birkerts, S. 2012. Why Read? School Library Journal, 58 (3): 26.

Kolb, D. 1994. Socrates in the Labyrinth. In: Landow, G. P. ed. Hyper/Text/Theory. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 323-344.

Kolb, D. 2008. The revenge of the page. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia. Pittsburgh, PA, USA, 1379112: ACM, 89-96. Available: http://www.dkolb.org/fp002.kolb.pdf (Accessed 12 November 2015).

Rainie, L., et.al. 2012. The Rise of E-Reading. Pew Internet & American Life Project:  Available: http://libraries.pewinternet.org/2012/04/04/the-rise-of-e-reading/  (Accessed 15 August 2015).

Stoop, J., Kreutzer, P. and Kircz, J. 2013. Reading and learning from screens versus print: a study in changing habits: Part 1 – reading long information rich texts. New Library World, 114 (7/8): 284-300.

Filed Under: Digital Scholarship, Innovative Pedagogy, Mobile Devices, Open Educational Resources (OER)

The Future is Digital

15 May 2014 by Graham Stewart Leave a Comment

The Future is Digital
The Future is Digital

I was delighted to find this banner in a Pretoria street “The Future is Digital”. The slogan from the South African Department of Communications chimes with the 2014 Educause major IT  issues for HE and the strategic direction for e-learning at DUT.  Four of the Educause “Top 10” are specially important right now at DUT:

  • Improving student outcomes through an institutional approach that strategically leverages technology
  • Assisting faculty with the instructional integration of information technology
  • Using analytics to help drive critical institutional outcomes
  • Addressing access demand and the wireless and device explosion
  • Developing an enterprise IT architecture that can respond to changing conditions and new opportunities

Take a look at the full Educause article (thanks to Nicky Muller for sending it):

https://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM1421.pdf

 

 

 

Filed Under: General, Innovative Pedagogy, Mobile Devices

Library in the Zone

29 October 2013 by Graham Stewart Leave a Comment

20131029_iPad_Zone_Launch
DUT Staff members at the launch.

A new iPad Zone was launched at DUT’s B.M. Patel Library today, putting 15 brand new iPads into the hands of our students. The miracle of these little devices is that each one is a key to all the knowhow and the wisdom in the world. It’s significant that it’s our university library that is making these tablets available to students, because the library is traditionally the heart of the university – the library has always been the store of accumulated knowledge that students and lecturers draw on to learn, develop and conduct research.

In the past, human knowledge was stored in the books and journals that still line the shelves of our library. With the opening this new facility – the iPad Zone (along with its other services like laptops-on-loan, and Kindles for e-books) the library has propelled our students into the new online digital storehouse of knowledge.

Library Director Lucille Webster thanked IT Manager Sagren Moodley and Core Group representative Lise Botes for making the iPad Zone a reality.

Filed Under: General, Mobile Devices

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