One of the topics the Great Writers Inspire project will explore is the use of ebooks in teaching and learning. The project has invested in some iPads and Kindles for the purpose of experimentation and demonstration and some of the questions we are investigating are:
- Costs
- Advantages / Disadvantages
- Delivery of material
- Libraries – future implications
- Formats
- Changes in behaviour of students
- Annotations and feature requests
One of our academic champions has been out and about with some students in Oxford and Southampton and has had some interesting early feedback.
IPADS VS KINDLES
- Students seem to rate Kindles because they are so much cheaper than iPads.
- The Southampton students really liked the idea of being able to download all their texts onto Kindles rather than carrying around huge books. On their university site they seem to have to move around a lot for teaching and resources and therefore a portable device is appealing.
- Some students with poor eyesight found the contrast (even adjusted) too bright on the iPad. They asked if it would be possible for them, or those with dyslexia, to change screen colour to blue or yellow, which makes it more easily readable.
HOW STUDENTS WOULD LIKE TO USE EBOOKS
The demonstrations were based on ebooks which have been made available by the Oxford Text Archive at Oxford University Computing Services http://tei.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ecco/.
- The students want to be able to read, annotate, and copy and paste out chunks of text for their essays. At the moment ebooks are lovely to read from but not good to quote from. What would make it excellent for use in essays etc is if you could click through from a passage in the ebook to the original ECCO facsimile text, so you could use that page number and also check the text is the same, if you are being careful. Students thought it would be good if they could cut out their quotations from the ebook for their essays while they were reading and import them into Word.
- They like the idea of draw-on annotations, i.e. circles etc rather than just note-making in boxes. The note indicators would need to include something other than the date the note was made – like a couple of words of theme e.g. ‘allegory’ or ‘politics’ or ‘see the Spectator’ that would better reflect the way they make notes.
- The advantage that the ECCO facsimiles have over the ebooks is that they have information on and reflect the bibliographical information about the actual book – i.e. what size it was, where published etc. If this information could be built into the ebooks it would be good.
- They want to be able to see and hide glossary annotation provided by an editor.
- They would like to be able to organise their ebooks by module (or paper, in the Oxford case). An easily useable folder system would be good.
- They would like links to author biographies from the texts.
- Talking to a couple of lecturers it seems that it would be great to be able to use ebooks to put together a tailor-made package for specific options or courses.
We will report on our investigations and any interesting insights through the life of the project.