E-books, Wikibooks
What are they?
E-books are textbooks or course readers created in electronic format (e.g. PDF), which students can either read on the screen or print and read on paper. Typically, an e-book designed for on-screen reading will include hypertext links to enable readers to jump directly to specific pages (e.g. from the contents page, cross-references in the text) and can even include video clips and interactive exercises.
The Educause Learning Initiative’s (ELI’s) 7 Things You Should Know About... series contains a useful guide to e-books (PDF).
Wikibooks are e-books, frequently authored collaboratively, that are created in a wiki. They have been pioneered by the Wikimedia Foundation, which now has over 1,000 textbooks that anyone can edit. However, many of these books are unfinished, their quality varies, and the limited formatting available within MediaWiki restricts the way authors can lay them out.
How can I use them with my students?
E-books:
You use an e-book in the same way as you would its printed equivalent. You can either:
- Find an existing e-book from the growing numbers available on the Web (but note that many are inappropriate as academic textbooks), or
- Create an e-book yourself. However, if you expect your students to read the e-book on a computer screen, you will need to organise the material very differently from a printed book. We haven’t found a good set of guidelines for writing e-books yet, but you can find some useful tips on writing for the Web in general on the MIT Libraries Website.
Wikibooks:
Given the limitations of wikibooks written by others, you may not want to use them with your students. However, creating their own wikibook can be a valuable knowledge-construction exercise for students, helping them also to develop skills in team-working. Moreover, their finished work could be made available as a resource to a future cohort, who could then make their own modifications and additions.
Examples
We are still researching examples and case studies for this topic. If you would like to contribute any (whether from your own teaching or from other sources), please contact us.
How can I create one?
E-books:
Although special tools are available to help you, you can easily use a conventional word processor and a printer driver that creates a PDF file. Students can then use the Adobe Acrobat Reader to read (or print) the book (Acrobat Reader can be downloaded free from Adobe’s UK Website. To create the PDF file from the word processor you will need either the full Adobe Acrobat product, or one of the many free PDF converters that you can download from the Web. Note, however, that some converters may put their own watermark on your document. Or, they may not render less common fonts correctly.
If you have Microsoft Word, you can create a Microsoft e-book which students can read using Microsoft Reader. To create the e-book, you will need a free add-in to Word, which you can obtain from the Microsoft Download Center (type “Word Reader add-in” in the Search box). To read the e-book, your students will need Microsoft Reader itself, available free from the Microsoft Reader Website.
You can find a more comprehensive list of free tools for creating and reading e-books on the Website of the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies.
Wikibooks:
To create a wikibook you will need access to a wiki.
