I’ve not been blogging much recently, because (a) I’ve been on holiday for a month in the Mediterranean and (b) I’ve been writing my book.
Teaching in a Digital World
As you are probably aware, I’m doing this as an open textbook, which means learning to adapt to a new publishing environment. As well as writing a darned good book for instructors on teaching in in a digital age, my aim is to push the boundaries a little with open publishing, to move it out of the traditional publishing mode into a a truly open textbook, with the help of the good folks at BCcampus who are running their open textbook project.
You will see that there’s still a long way to go before we can really exploit all the virtues of openness in publishing, and I’m hoping you can help me – and BCcampus- along the way with this.
What I’d like you to do
What I’m hoping you will do is find the time to browse the content list and preface (which is not yet finalized) and read more carefully Chapter 1, Fundamental Change in Higher Education, then give me some feedback. To do this, just go to: http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/
The first thing you will realise is that there is nowhere to comment on the published version. (Ideally I would like to have a comment section after every section of each chapter.) I will be publishing another post about some of the technical features I feel are still needed within PressBooks, but in the meantime, please use the comment page on this post (in which case your comment will be public), or use the e-mail facility at the bottom of the chapter or preface (in which case your comment will be private). Send to tony.bates@ubc.ca .
What kind of feedback?
At this stage, I’m looking more for comments on the substance of the book, rather than the openness (my next post will deal with the technical issues). To help you with feedback, here are some of the questions I’m looking for answers to:
- Market: from what you’ve read so far, does there appear to be a need for this type of book? Are there other books that already do what I’m trying to do?
- Structure: does Chapter 1 have the right structure? Does it flow and is it logically organized?How could it be improved?
- Content: is there anything missing, dubious or just plain wrong? References that I have missed that support (or challenge) the content would also be useful.
- Do the activities work for you? Are there more interesting activities you can think of? How best to provide feedback? (e.g. does the use of ‘Parts’ work for this?)
- Presentation: are there other media/better images I could use? Is the balance between text and media right?
What’s in it for you?
First, I hope the content will be useful. Chapter 1 is probably the least useful of all the chapters to come for readers of this blog, because it’s aimed at instructors who are not comfortable with using technology, but if the material is useful to you, you are free to use it in whatever way you wish, within the constraints of a Creative Commons license.
Second, the whole point of open education is to share and collaborate. I’m opening up my book and the process; in return can I get some help and advice? In anticipation and with a degree of nervousness I look forward to your comments.
Dr. Tony Bates is the author of eleven books in the field of online learning and distance education. He has provided consulting services specializing in training in the planning and management of online learning and distance education, working with over 40 organizations in 25 countries. Tony is a Research Associate with Contact North | Contact Nord, Ontario’s Distance Education & Training Network.
So great to see the progress on this, Tony! And thank you for being an early adopter on the BCcampus PressBooks platform. I should say that by default Pressbooks does allow the kind of commenting that you are looking for. But we made the decision to disable the comments on the BCcampus version of Pressbooks at least for the time being. In a nutshell, the books in our collection have no owners – there are no single faculty assigned as the steward of the books in our collection, and the PressBooks books could be used by dozens of faculty at the same time independent of each other. We thought that could set up the possibility for confusion, so we disabled the comments. You are a bit of an outlier in our collection because the book is your book. You are watching your comments and you could respond to them. So, apologies that in this instance our version of Pressbooks isn’t meeting your needs. But the reason lies with our internal decision not to enable comments and not with the platform itself.