Kingston-upon-Hull: October 2014

The first project meeting took place in the
Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation (WISE) centre and colleagues from Hull, Karlsruhe, Stuttgart and Bergen were all able to attend. This meeting focused on the first intellectual output, that of the e-books. In the bid we committed to making 3 different e-books and we discussed how subject areas could be incorporated into some wider questions about the use of e-books in teaching and learning.

The nature of the e-book

The Oriel Chambers, the WISE centre, Kingston-upon-Hull

The e-book has a number of affordances that the print book (or p-book) does not. Some of these we discussed were:

• the inclusion of multi-media elements (video, audio, moving graphics, presentations etc…)
• the option for embedded web content
• the dynamic nature of “always in publication” rather than published
• the option for personalisation
• the ability to collect data and then feedback on that data collection
• the options for non-linear presentation and representation
• able to exist in non-standard format (length, size, format)
• the ease of production / authorship allows for democratisation of the production process

All of these need to be considered within the pedagogic framework model of the project which is focused on teacher education at its heart. So, we have three questions which we could want to ask when considering the application of e-books as a change mechanism within the teaching and learning process and we have three questions we need to consider as we produce the artifacts of learning.

A diagram demonstrating how the affordances of eBooks address the project aims by Paul Hopkins, 2014

So if we take one affordance of the e-book the ease of production process then we have the following possible chain of thinking:

• the ease of production allows for pupils in schools to make e-books as evidence of learning and as potential producers of teaching and learning resource,
• teachers now need to think of pupils as producers of resource as well as consumers – how does this change the activities I will provide for them to do and the potential for collaboration and co-operation as well as commercial possibilities,
• teacher educators now need to think about how they train teachers to be facilitators of the production of learning resources and the skills they will need and the management of pedagogic change.

Types of e-book

eBooks in education can be thought of in a spectrum of the ‘quality’ of the production of the book:

        “amateur” content ——————– “professional” content

where we are thinking of the quality of the graphic design and production of the book as well as the quality of the academic content. We could think of these as:

        produced by students  ——————– produced by publishers

though there is no reason why this should be so it is likely due to the resources, both technical and skill that will be available to the different publishers. Examples of both of these sorts will be used by the MTTEP project.

The books that the project aims to produce

The project is aiming to produce three e-books:

1. An eBook to illustrate the notion of pupil production of e-books – this will include students in schools and also students in Initial Teacher Education – this will include exemplar e-books in the fields of English, Science and History.
2. An eBook which will explore the affordance of interactivity and the use of data and data analytics. This will also look at how interactive elements in eBooks create pedagogic challenge and change – this will include exemplars in the fields of  English, Science and History.
3. An eBook which will explore scenarios in mobile learning. This will explore the scenario for learning, the implications for teaching and learning in the classroom and the implications for Teacher Education – this will include exemplars in the fields of  English, Science and History.