/iTextbooks

Project to collect my thoughts and technology demonstrations for how digital textbooks are different from digital ebooks.

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iTextbooks

Project to collect my thoughts and technology demonstrations for how digital textbooks are different from digital ebooks. This project represents a personal passion. It's very early in the digital learning space. We've come a long way in a short amount of time, but primarily, we're still replicating the print experience on a tablet.

Reading Harry Potter is not the same experience as reading Campbell Biology. Fiction is a linear experience, like pulling on a string. You pull and pull on the string, and eventually, you reach the end, and you've read Harry Potter.

A quality textbook like Campbell Biology is not a linear progression, because learning is not a linear progression. Learning has branches. Some times the branches are small, like the presence of a figure in the text. You have to stop reading, go look at the figure, and then come back to the text.

In an eReader, something as simple as a figure can be hugely distracting, because while in a physical book, the publisher makes an effort to lay out the book such that its convenient: The figure may be merely on the facing page, or a quick physical flip.

Other common practices in physical textbooks that don't translate well to the digital realm are sidebars (mini chapters inside the main chapter to explain something in depth), margin notes.

In an eReader, which presents a "page at a time" metaphor, a lot of the power of the physical textbook is lost.

But that's OK, physical textbooks have their strengths. We don't have to slavishly copy the physical textbook. Rather we need to harness the strengths of the digital textbook. If we do that, we can create an experience that is far superior to a physical textbook, because we are no longer limited to what a dead tree can do.

This application represents a simple demo of this concept. There is main text representing the main learning flow. From that main flow there are branches. The interface is designed to show both the main flow, and the branching flow in parallel. You can easily switch from the main flow to a branch, and go right back again to where you were.