SLANZA Workshop presentation

Presented at Wellington Girls High School, Thorndon Wellington

24th September 2011

EBOOKS AND TECHNOLOGY TRENDS IN EDUCATION

ABOUT ME

● Worked in Public and Academic libraries for the last 10 years.● I currently work at the Open Polytechnic Library. We are a tertiary distance educational provider,

teaching over 20,000 students a year in unit standards up to degree programs. ● 3 papers away from degree● Have been interested in techie stuff my whole life● Have loved reading my whole life● Intermediate and high school libraries for me, were places of sanctuary, escapism and where I did most of

my learning as I could read about things I was interested in rather then what we were supposed to be learning in class.

● Now I’m in academic environment where I’m responsible for loading ebooks records onto the catalogue, investigating new technologies and services that can support our students.

● I’m personally interested in elearning and mobile learning, and think we are on the precipice of great change, not just for libraries, but for learning at all levels in the next 5-10 years.

● Accessing digital information for learning, including ebooks, is just a part of the coming transformation.

● Today I’ll talk a little about the ebook services we use and why we use them. I'll then touch on the trends I’m thinking will effect secondary and tertiary education and how libraries can adapt, and the biggest challenges we face in adopting ebooks in our libraries.

EBL (EBOOK LIBRARY)

190,000 fiction and non-fiction titles are loaded into our catalogue. EBL has over 6000 children’s and young adult fiction titles. I load about 10,000 titles a month and our students are successfully are using our catalogue and discovering books as we purchase them through a patron driven acquisitions model, and these are being purchased at upto 60 titles a month. This is great from a collection development perspective as we no longer have to guess which books people will like before we buy them, spend time searching and buying them, and hope they use them. Now our users develop their own collections.

TRENDS IN EDUCATION

I’ll now briefly talk about some trends in education that are going to effect education and libraries. Mobile learning, infotainment and will come back round to ebooks and their benefits and drawbacks.

MOBILE LEARNING

We need to be in students’ learning places. The current and future generations of young people are more comfortable with electronic information and devices then any generation before. M-learning is learning via a mobile device, often the smaller the better, so mobile phones are beginning to become the default device for m-learning. Any device that can create, capture, edit, store and transmit information can be used for m-learning. We need to put ebooks in their devices of choice. 2degrees CEO Eric Hertz says their company could be selling smart phones at under $100 in a year's time. I think this is a way of delivering learning that is quite exciting, and will impact not only on distance providers like the Open Polytechnic, but schools and universities. But there is plenty are many issues to work through. A story on Stuff.co.nz about Orewa College making iPad 2s a piece of compulsory stationary generated nearly 300 comments on this one story. The journalism was a bit sensational, as the school wasn’t requiring iPads, rather they recommended them, but instead they did have a requirement to have a one-to-one device, whether it was a tablet, netbook, laptop, ipod touch or other mobile computer. The general consensus of the public was it’s a nice idea but how do we afford it, how can I afford that. Orewa School is a Decile 9, so their communities should be able to absorb this cost over time, but in a poorer area, schools will have to be funded to supply these technologies. I can see the digital divide ever increasing if poorer communities don’t receive the appropriate support, which libraries are in an ideal situation to provide. A school library could provide mobile technologies with the support of how to use them to students who couldn’t afford them. Once students are equipped with technology, some exciting things can happen.

Schools like Howick College are using student’s own devices to help them create their own learning.

An Education review article (Texting to m-learn, 2010) recently reported on their inspiring project using student’s mobile phones:

“Kerr, Douglas, the teacher running their m-learning project, and the students worked out how to send and receive interactive study notes on their mobile phones. The study notes were zapped into the mobile devices via the Bluetooth capability and if they didn’t have Bluetooth (very rare), then the study notes were transferred using SD card exchange, USB, or iTunes functions.On one field trip Kerr’s geography students used their phone cameras to record digital images of erosion, wave action, sand dune formation or other evidence aligned with the topics they’d be expected to know come exam time. Back at school they uploaded the pictures to a server and stitched them into movies, complete with individual narration, music and other effects.”

Here’s the kicker:

“At the end of the school year the test results from his first crop of m-learners came in. The scores of the geography students had shot up 70 per cent over the prior year.”

INFOTAINMENT

Information in bite size chunks, info graphics, wikis, qwikis. [Showed example of qwiki, using examples from the audience] Life is now so busy; it’s tough to find time to do everything we want to do, let alone formal learning. I think this lack of time impacts on the format of the information we prefer, and information in small doses, delivered in engaging ways, when we actually need to know the information, will be a continuing influence on how libraries deliver material.

EBOOKS

Benefits and drawbacks of ebooks:

Benefits

• Portable

• eReaders, and other tools to read ebooks, like iPads, have a “cool” factor

• They can be cheap or even free.

• Accessible to the disabled large print, audio, etc. Good for different learning styles or disabilities.

Drawbacks

• Need a device to read them

• Geographic restrictions

• DRM- less freedom to share the ebook then a print

GENERAL ADVICE FOR EBOOKS

If you are still investaging ebooks when looking at adding ebooks to your collection you should look for ebooks that are device agnostic, free or cheap, and easy to administer for you and your school. There are plenty of free places to get ebooks from.

The first ebooks were created by Michael Hart for project Gutenberg, and they are all free. Kindle has thousands of free and cheap ebooks. They have recently launched cloud reader app, which works from any chrome or safari internet browser, so kindle books will soon be able to be read from any device that can access the internet.

Until everyone has their own cheap portable multifunctional device, and you want to get involved with ebooks, to deal with the equity issue your library should provide a way to read the ebook during this transition period from print to electronic. You can put the savings from buying print classic texts into investing in the cheapest ereader hardware available, as new technology will always be around the corner my advice is to not invest too heavily in any particular technology that will soon be out-of-date.

CONTENT

The biggest challenge facing our library and libraries in universities and schools in New Zealand is content. The texts that we want to provide as ebooks aren’t being provided by the publishers in ebook form, even though every book produced today is made using a computer. All books are ebooks, but publishers don’t want to allow libraries to purchase 1 ebook that could be loaned to many borrowers. So I’d love to hear your ideas for getting NCEA study guides into ebook form, as I couldn’t find any. And university's text books. Coursesmart, an ebook rental company, is expanding internationally, so that is one to watch for.

References

(2010). Texting to m-learn. Education review Retrieved 20th September 2011 from http://www.educationreview.co.nz/pages/section/article.php?s=ICT+%26+Procurement&idArticle=19064

Tom Avery