Presentation on European Conference of Educational Research, ECER'13 Istanbul

1. Re-thinking E-textbooks:Towards Integration Of Proprietary
And User-generated Digital Educational Content
Mart Laanpere, Veronika Rogalevich, Hans ldoja :: Tallinn University
ECER :: European Conference of Educational Research :: Istanbul, 13. September 2013

2. Disruptive innovation
 Christensen (‘Innovator’s dilemma’, 1997): improving a product
or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically
first by designing for a different set of consumers in a new
market and later by lowering prices in the existing market
 Examples:
 Music business: MC > CD > mp3
 Book business: book > e-book
 In school: class journal > eSchool
 Is e-textbook going to be another distruptive innovation?

3. Socio-technical transitions
Geels 2002

4. Good vs. evil
 Dramatic 1984: http://youtu.be/2zfqw8nhUwA
 Black & white world of IPR
 Both camps hope to win in the next socio-technical transition
 eTextbook scenarios:
 eTextbook as e-book – Apple iBooks Author
 eTextbooks as app – been there…
 eTextbook as e-course
 eTextbook as aggregated set of Learning Objects in repository
 Searching for the 5th scenario: dialectic approach (not just
antithesis, rather synthesis)

5. Some thoughts
 eTextbook might not be e-book
 Borders disappear: physical & virtual, content &
software, learner & teacher, author & user, school & life,
learning & assessment, professional & user-generated
 Trialogical learning: learning as knowledge creation
through interaction with digital artefacts & tools
 Author gains the most from the textbook, why can’t the
students be coauthors of eTextbooks?

6. LEARNMIX project
 Aims: to find economically & technologically sustainable,
pedagogigally meaningful solution for next-generation
eTextbooks that can be used across various platforms and usage
contexts.
 Seeking for the road in the middle: new business models for
publishers, aggregating with user-generated content
 Two integrated research directions:
 Human-Computer Interaction: platform-independent interaction
design, ubiquitous interaction, advanced analytics
 Pedagogical scenarios: 1:1 computing, BYOD, outdoor learning,
inquiry-based learning

7. LEARNMIX vision of eTextbook 2.0
 New pedagogy: eTextbook is not an input to learning, rather output
 LEARNMIX eTextbook 2.0 has three parts:
 Professionally produced, commercially distributed content: simulations,
games, interactive exercises, exams, virtual labs etc
 Content created by teachers: worksheets, project plans, assignments,
exercises, examples
 Content created by students: remixes, products, prototypes, project
reports, presentations, journals
 Requirements for LEARNMIX eTextbook 2.0 software:
 Interoperability framework
 Authoring tools for teachers, delivery tools for publishers
 Cloud-based repositories
 Authoring, mashup & remix tools for students’ BYOD devices

8. Availability and reusability of digital
heritage
 LEARNMIX eTextbook 2.0 requires critical mass of digital texts,
photos, videos that are:
 Freely accessible ja easily found (federation of repositories,
semantic annotations, recommender systems)
 Editable, remixable, extendable, reusabel in various contexts
(legally, technologically, ease of use)
 Monitoring and analytics (both originals and versions)
 Localisable
 With business potential