I know I am being brand specific here, but please think about any portable device like a smartphone that has the ability to display text and pictures on a screen and you actually look cool sitting on the train, plane or bus as you swish your finger and tap away on the non-reflective glass screen.

I have a good friend who is a publications expert. He packages notes created by scientists into fact sheets, reports, how to documents and even books for the general public.

Over the years this home grown library of documents related mainly to primary industries such as cattle, fish and horticultural industries has expanded and transformed from a print only library of paper based documents that are given away to existing farmers or even backyard enthusiasts to a magnificent online library of documents in formats ranging from pdf documents to streaming video presentations.

This friend, Jason, rang me the other day and asked me about how to put some of these documents onto an iPhone. Brilliant I thought. Here is a guy always trying to improve the way he can deliver his service to customers. His observation was that he had attended a number of cattleman's events over recent times and could not get over the fact that every one seemed to have an iPhone. So making the logical assumption that if they have the delivery mechanism or rather reading mechanism in their top pocket, why not offer up the ability to put information in their pocket in the form of eBooks.

My response to Jason's question was - "well you upload it to itunes into a library and then they download it". Sounds simple, but I thought to myself - I haven't done it before so how hard is it really?

 

Jason's thoughts triggered an idea within me in relation to reaching our principals, teachers and even students. My 15 year old niece has an iPhone and it seems to be a popular accessory with teachers and students alike.

So... I thought to myself -  we have a large enough number of people (learners and teachers) with these devices, so let's explore how we can get existing content onto their phone and discover how we can create and put our on content in a library for people to download. Then if we get really tricky, why don't we create some asynchronous exercises, place them in our Learning Management System and link the content to the exercises.

Before some of you react with "this will never work!" - Bear with me for a bit.

Kids don't have the bandwidth to download books

Books can be downloaded via a wireless network connection or via a tethered connection when you synchronise your smartphone. This can be done at home or school, so Internet access isn't a problem.

Books aren't available or aren't free

Many of the books are available as eBooks from websites like project Gutenberg

http://gutenberg.net.au/ (Australian chapter with 2000 titles)

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page (33,000 titles)

http://manybooks.net

If you prefer to listen to your books, http://librivox.org/ which has over 3,000 books. My 8 year old son is currently listening to Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book on his Mom's iPhone at night.

The screen is too small

For those who are the same age as me and have or about to notch up their half century, you will probably peer over your bifocals and say "the screen is too small" - my reply to that is buy an ipad although personally I find the iPhone just a nice size for reading, plus I can hit that little "make the font bigger" button if the eyes get tired.

I am sure there are many other questions and potential problems, but I think the really exciting opportunity is to be published so your work appears in the iTunes library or can be consumed via other distribution channels including Amazon.com.

This is not just about teachers publishing. My eight year olds creative pieces should be available for consumption as an eBook. How many folks' theses sit in a dusty basement, never to be read again?

Not only are there many distribution channels, but there are a variety of readers, including, yes, the humble PC - be it windows, Linux or mac. So we can be agnostic about our distribution channels and the device that consumes the content.

I am, however for the purpose of this journey going to concentrate on taking a document, an original piece of work and seeing how I can get that turned into an eBook that anyone can download to their computer or an iPhone using iTunes and at least one other distribution channel.

I will ensure that this piece of work is basically a picture book and that the result should not only be readable on an iPhone (or similar device) but a teacher could deliver it to a group of 5 year olds using a smartboard.

So I guess to use MasterChef parlance, this is an invention test and I am hoping that it will be so easy that any teacher who can use a word processor (rather than a food processor) will say to themselves "I can do that!"

After we have created a simple eBook, can we create a talking eBook? a Comic eBook. Some folks may be wondering why do this when we already have wonderful paper books. I partially agree. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows weighs more in paperback form than an iPhone which can store much more than the entire series of Harry Potter books. Alas, they are a long way off appearing in the Project Gutenberg collection.

...and to also steal a little showmanship from Matt Preston... We'll continue this in the next blog entry.

This entry was posted on August 5, 2010 at 4:24 AM and has received 275 views. There are currently 2 comments. Print this entry.