Thursday, January 23, 2014

Once upon a time textbooks were hard to create ...

My Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow colleague, Arthur Atwell, sent an intriguing challenge out to our gang of fellows. The challenge was to come up with a pitch for our projects that follows the Pixar style of pitch, as described in Daniel Pink's book, To Sell is Human (see full reference at the bottom of the blog entry). The beauty of the style is that it really emphasizes story, which of course is at the heart of movies, and really is at the heart of all human endeavor. But it isn't always easy to articulate the importance and vision of a technical software project. At least not for those of us who regularly geek out and focus deeply on technical things.

The pixar style has the following components:

Once upon a time, ...
Every day, ...
One day ...
Because of that, ...
Because of that, ...
Until finally...

So here goes. Here is my story of the vision behind the work I have done as a Shuttleworth Fellow. 

OERPUB Movie-Pitch
Once upon a time, textbooks were hard to create, expensive to buy, and out of date within a short time.

Every day, college students paid $150 for an algebra book containing information that is hundreds of years old. High school students learned from ten year old Biology textbooks, authors struggled to make everything look good and cursed while they tried to edit math.  Nobody could use the content in the textbooks to create interactive flashcards or quizzes.

One day we created a textbook editor that is easy to use and saves books to github (a place for freely storing books and software). We made sure the hard stuff, like editing mathematics, formatting the books, and delivering them to students was actually easy. And we made sure that things like definitions and homework problems were easy to reuse.

Because of that, authors can collaborate to build textbooks, deliver them to students online, on mobile devices or in print. They can make updates immediately, and share textbooks with others for translation and adaptation. Software developers can create interactive flashcards and study tools that use the content from the textbooks.

Because of that, textbooks are a pleasure to create, cheap or free to buy, always up to date, and part of a much more interactive and engaging experience.

Until finally we've transformed textbooks into true engines of learning.
Reference: Pink, Daniel H (2013-02-07). To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Persuading, Convincing, and Influencing Others (pp. 172-173). Canongate Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Friday, January 10, 2014

Recent talks about creating, editing, and remixing textbooks with the OERPUB editor

Normally I would create a post after each talk, but I got behind so I am going to link in my talks from "The New Publishing" W3C workshop, Books in Browsers, and Open Ed, all in fall/winter 2013. 

First up in September was the W3C Workshop, The New Publishing and the Open Web Platform. The title for my paper is practically its own abstract, "Semantic HTML5 is the Future of Textbook Publishing and Non-technical Authors Can Participate using Customized Web Editors that Support Accessible Authoring".  In the paper, I argue that we should be writing textbooks in HTML5 using a clean, open, and semantic format, so that books can be read online, on the web, and in print, and more importantly are easy to keep up to date, combine, translate, and make accessible to learners with disabilities.

Next up in October was Books in Browsers,
My talk, "Textbooks in Browsers: An Editor for Creating, Adapting, and Sharing", covered our open-source editor for textbook authoring that lets authors create, adapt, and remix textbooks that display well in the browser, on mobile devices, and in print. Since the editor itself runs in a browser, and the book can be read on your browser, it was a perfect fit for the conference. The slides (linked above) show how the editor supports mathematics, accessible images and tables, and structured features like definitions and exercises, using a constrained subset of HTML5. At the end, the slides give links to use the editor and for developers to get involved. You can see me giving the talk, here (minute 8:40 to 28:17). My favorite tweet during the talk: "Github-Bookeditor!? Yes, it's a thing. A very awesome idea brought to life by @oerpub #bib13 oerpub.org/tools/"

In November, I spoke at Open Ed 13, on "Write to share; Real remix realized". Remix is the gold-standard of OER effectiveness, but technical barriers have made it hard to do, even when author-educators want to share their content and reuse and adapt high quality open resources. OERPUB's open-source editor solves this problem by making it easy for authors to create rich open textbooks that can be remixed and shared. The editor supports editing mathematics, embedding multimedia (coming soon), and is supportive of creating content that is accessible to learners with special needs. I reported on Adrian Garcia's research on best practices for motivating author-educators to create semantically rich OER that is easy to share and remix. He found that K-12 teachers were especially interested in content that will work for learners wtih disabilities. I also reported on our textbook creation sprint in South African with St. John's College teachers (see more in this blog entry). We got great feedback from the teacher, enthusiastic support for the collaboration and drag and drop features, and plans for custom Physics and Chemistry textbooks for 11th and 12th grades coming out over the next year. They are using Siyavula textbooks, Open Stax College textbooks, and their own materials. ( You can see the video of me giving the Open Ed talk here).

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Video plugin prototype (from last year) and upcoming implementation plans

Apparently, I never blogged about the prototype video plugin that two OERPUB interns created for the Aloha-Editor last year. We are getting ready to add multimedia capability to the github-bookeditor and so I was looking for that blog entry without success. So better late than never, here is a link to see how the prototype worked.
the editor with the video chooser dialog open
Screen capture from a screencast of the video plugin in action.
Click on the image to run a video of the process, or click here
I like how the prototype lets authors search for videos and pick them from a list that includes a thumbnail and description. There is always a URL backup, but the search means that authors don't have to leave and find the video and cut and paste in a link.

The student developer interns, Max Grossman, and Gbenga Badipe, worked together to create this prototype and explored the possibilities using the Youtube, Vimeo, and Slideshare APIs. They have long since graduated and started computer science careers, but their work lives on.

We are planning to add a plugin soon to the editor so that authors can include video and slides. We will be working with our friends in the accessibility community to make sure that we make it easy for authors to include information about audio and transcripts so learners find content appropriate to their needs. More coming on this topic.