The package metadata of an ePub can include a selection of Dublin Core elements and terms. These can be refined, for example you may have two dc:title elements with refinements to specify that one is the main title and the other the subtitle. You can also extend with elements from other XML namespaces, or if you prefer you can just link to a metadata record of your favourite flavour which can be either inside the ePub package or elsewhere on the web. Any of this metadata can relate to the eBook as a whole or some part of it, e.g. a single chapter or image. Without going into details there seems to be enough scope there to experiment with how educational characteristics of the eBook might be described.

But how to see the results? I took an ePub (a copy of O’reily’s EPUB 3 Best Practices, since it seemed likely to provide as good a starting point as I was going to find in a real book), made a copy, unzipped it and changed the values of the meta elements so that I could easily identify what elements were being displayed. For example I changed
<dc:title id="pub-title">EPUB 3 Best Practices</dc:title> to
<dc:title id="pub-title">dc:title</dc:title> and so on.

Here’s a list of the metadata elements in that file:

• <dc:title id="pub-title">
• <dc:creator id="..." >
• <dc:publisher>
• <dc:date>
• <meta property="dcterms:modified">
• <dc:identifier id="pub-identifier">
• <dc:language id="pub-language">
• <dc:contributor> (repeated)
• <dc:rights>
• <dc:subject>
• <dc:description>
• <meta id="meta-identifier" property="dcterms:identifier">
• <meta property="dcterms:title" id="meta-title">
• <meta property="dcterms:language" id="meta-language">
• <meta property="dcterms:rights">
• <meta property="dcterms:rightsHolder">
• <meta property="dcterms:publisher">
• <meta property="dcterms:subject">
• <meta property="dcterms:description>
• <meta id="...." property="dcterms:creator"> (repeated, different ids)
• <meta name="cover" content="cover-image"/>
• <meta property="ibooks:specified-fonts">

I then looked at this with various eBook readers:

Readium

I had hopes for Readium since it is pretty much the reference implementation of EPUB3. It displayed

in Readium

• dc:title
• dc:creator
• dc:publisher
• dc:date
• meta dcterms:modified
• dc:identifier

Note that it doesn’t even check for a valid value for dates.

Calibre

Calibre, while it doesn’t claim to support ePub3 is targetted at managing personal book libraries. It displays:

in Calibre

• dc:title
• dc:creator
• dc:subject (for tags)
• dc:description
• dc:publisher

It probably uses dc:language and dc:date (for published) as well but recognises that the values dc:language / dc:date aren’t valid.

Ideal Reader for Android

The Ideal Reader for Android is the other ePub3 reader I use. It displays

In Ideal Android Reader

• dc:title
• meta dcterms:creator (just one of them)
• dc:date
• dc:publisher
• dc:description
• dc:subject
• dc:rights

iTunes

Finally I gave a chunk of diskspace to Apple

in iTunes desktop for Windows 7

• dc:title
• dc:creator
• dc:title (again)
• dc:subject (in the info tab, as Genre)

Yep, title is there twice: the info tab shows dc:title in the Name and Album fields, so you can gauge the amount of effort that Apple have put into adapting iTunes for books.

What did I learn?

I learnt that none of the ePub reading/management apps or tools that I have show more than the bare minimum of metadata, even if it is there. None of them will be much good for trying out ideas for how educationally characteristics can be described since I strongly suspect that none of it will be viewable. That’s not too surprising, especially when you consider that none of the tools I looked at are geared around resource discovery, but I can’t really go uploading dummy ePub files to book seller sites just to see what they look like. May be any meaningful exploration/demonstration of educational metadata in ePub is going to need a bespoke application, but if you know of a tool that might be helpful do drop me a line.

level one: the base technology. In phones this would be the physical design of antennae, the compression algorithms used for audio and video, the physics of the various sensors, and so on.

level two: the product. That is putting all the base technologies to create features of a working unit that (if it is to be successful) fulfills a need.

level three: user experience. Making the use of those features a pleasure.

I’ve found this useful in thinking about what it is that Apple gets right compared to, say, Nokia. It’s my impression (and I think the various patent claims bear this out) that Apple are very good at innovating for user experience whereas Nokia and others did a lot of the work somewhere around technologies and product.

I’ve also found it enlightening to reflect on just how hard it is to work out from the technology alone what would be a set of features that make up a successful product. I was using CCD cameras for science experiments in the early 90s, when the technology had been around twenty-odd years, and never once did it occur to me that it would be a really good idea to put one in a phone. Light sensors so that your curtains would open and close automatically, sure they were certain to come, but a camera in your phone!–why would anyone want that?

Put those together, and I think what you get is a picture of some people who are good at spotting (or just prepared to experiment with) how technologies can do something useful, and others who are good at spotting what is required in order to make those features pleasant enough to use. So Diamond and Creative and others showed that really small MP3 players were devices that people might find useful (others before them had put together advances in audio compression and storage technology to show such devices were possible), Apple made something that people wanted to use. What was it that made the difference? The integration with iTunes maybe?

Sometimes identifying the useful feature comes before the technology that makes it usable, at least to a certain extent: Palm showed how touch screen devices could be useful but Apple waited until the technology (capacitive rather than resistive sensors) was available to give the user experience they wanted. Of course that area of human endeavour which puts creation of innovative products completely ahead of technology developments is called science fiction–how’s that flying car coming along?

Changing paradigms

With the earliest printed books, or incunabula, such as the Gutenberg Bible, printers sought to mimic the hand written manuscripts with which 15th cent scholars were familiar; in much the same way as publishers now seek to replicate printed books as ebooks.

We need to treat digital content as offering new possibilities and requiring new ways of working. This might be uncomfortable for publishers (some more than others) and there was some discussion about how we cannot assume that all students will naturally see the advantages, especially if they have mostly encountered problematic content that presents little that could not be put on paper but is encumbered with DRM to the point that it is questionable as to whether they really own the book. But there is potential as well as resistance. Of course there can be more interesting, more interactive content–Will Russell of the Royal Society of Chemistry described how they have been publishing to mobile devices, with tools such as Chem Goggles that will recognise a chemical structure and display information about the chemical. More radically, there can also be new business models: Lorraine suggested Institutions could become publishers of their own teaching content, and later in the day Caren Milloy, also of Jisc Collections, and Brian Hole of Ubiquity Press pointed to the possibilities of open access scholarly publishing.

Caren’s work with the OAPEN Library is worth looking through for useful information relating to quality assurance in open monograms such as notifying readers of updates or errata. Caren also talked about the difficulties in advertising that a free online version of a resource is available when much of the dissemination and discovery ecosystem (you know, Amazon, Google…) is geared around selling stuff, difficulties that work with EDitEUR on the ONIX metadata scheme will hopefully address soon.

Brian described how Ubiquity Press can publish open access ebooks by driving down costs and being transparent about what they charge for. They work from XML source, created overseas, from which they can publish in various formats including print on demand, and explore economies of scale by working with university presses, resulting in a charge to the author (or their funders) of about £150 for a chapter assuming there is nothing to complex in that chapter.

eTextBooks

All through the day there were mentions of eTextBooks, starting again with Lorraine who highlighted the paperless medic and how his quest to work only with digital resources is complicated by the non-articulation of the numerous systems he has to use. When she said that what he wanted was all his content (ebooks, lecture handouts, his own notes etc.) on the same platform, integrated with knowledge about when and where he had to be for lectures and when he had exams, I really started to wonder how much functionality can you put into an eContent platform before it really becomes a single-person content-oriented VLE. And when you add in the ability to share notes with the social and communication capability of most mobile devices, what then do you have?

A couple of presentations addressed eTextBooks directly, from a commercial point of view. Jenni Evans spoke about Vital Source and Andrejs Alferovs about Kortext both of which are in the business of working with institutions distributing online textbooks to students. Both seem to have a good grasp of what students want, which I think should be useful requirements to feed into eTextBook standardization efforts such as eTernity, these include:

• ability to print
• offline access
• availability across multiple devices
• reliable access under load
• integration with VLE
• integration with syllabus/curriculum
• epub3 interactive content
• long term access
• ability for student to highlight/annotate text and share this with chosen friends
• ability to search text and annotations

Discovery

There was also a theme of resource discovery running through the day, and I have already mentioned in passing that this referenced Google and Amazon, but also social media. Nick Canty spoke about a survey of library use of social media, I thought it interesting that there seemed to be some sophisticated use of the immediacy of Twitter to direct people to more permanent content, e.g. to engagement on Facebook or the library website.

Both Richard Wallis of OCLC and Robert Faber of OUP emphasized that users tend to use Google to search and gave figures for how much of the access to library catalogue pages came direct from Google and other external systems, not from their own catalogue search interface. For example the Biblioteque Nationale de France found that 80% of access to their catalogue pages cam directly from web search engines not catalogue searches, and Robert gave similar figures for access to Oxford Journals. The immediate consequence of this is that if most people are trying to find content using external systems then you need to make sure that at least some (as much as possible, in fact) of your content is visible to them–this feeds in to arguments about how open access helps solve discoverability problems. But Richard went further, he spoke about how the metadata describing the resources needs to be in a language that Google/Bing/Yahoo understand, and that language is schema.org. He did a very good job distinguishing between the usefulness of specialist metadata schema for exchanging precise information between libraries or publishers, but when trying to pass general information to Google:

it’s no use using a language only you speak.

Richard went on to speak about the Google Knowledge graph and their “things not strings” approach facilitated by linked data. He urged libraries to stop copying text and to start linking, for example not to copy an author name from an authority file but to link to the entry in that file, in Eric Miller’s words to move from cataloguing to “catalinking”.

ebooks?

So was this really about ebooks? Probably not, and the point was made that over the years the name of the event has variously stressed ebooks and econtent and that over that time what is meant by “ebook” has changed. I must admit that for me there is something about the idea of a [e]book that I prefer over a “content aggregation” but if we use the term ebook, let’s use it acknowledging that the book of the future will be as different from what we have now as what we have now is from the medieval scroll.

Picture Credit
Scanned image of page of the Epistle of St Jerome in the Gutenberg bible taken from Wikipedia. No Copyright.

Schema.org represents two things: 1, an ontology for describing resources on the web, with a hierarchical set of resource types each with defined properties that relate to their characteristics and relationships with other things in the schema hierarchy; and 2, a syntax for embedding these into HTML pages–well, two syntaxes, microdata and RDFa lite. The important factor in schema.org is that it is backed by Google, Yahoo, Bing and Yandex, which should be useful for resource discovery. The inclusion of the LRMI properties means that you can now use schema.org to mark up your descriptions of the following characteristics of a creative work:

audience the educational audience for whom the resource was created, who might have educational roles such as teacher, learner, parent.

educational alignment an alignment to an established educational framework, for example a curriculum or frameworks of educational levels or competencies. Expressed through an abstract thing called an Alignment Object which allows a link to and description of the node in the framework to which the resource aligns, and specifies the nature of the alignment, which might be that the resource ‘assesses’, ‘teaches’ or ‘requires’ the knowledge/skills/competency to which the resource aligns or that it has the ‘textComplexity’, ‘readingLevel’, ‘educationalSubject’ or ‘educationLevel’ expressed by that node in the educational framework.

educational use a text description of purpose of the resource in education, for example assignment, group work.

interactivity type The predominant mode of learning supported by the learning resource. Acceptable values are ‘active’, ‘expositive’, or ‘mixed’.

is based on url A resource that was used in the creation of this resource. Useful for when a learning resource is a derivative of some other resource.

learning resource type The predominant type or kind characterizing the learning resource. For example, ‘presentation’, ‘handout’.

time required Approximate or typical time it takes to work with or through this learning resource for the typical intended target audience

typical age range The typical range of ages the content’s intended end user.

Of course, much of the other information one would want to provide about a learning resource (what it is about, who wrote it, who published it, when it was written/published, where it is available, what it costs) was already in schema.org.

Unfortunately one really important property suggested by LRMI hasn’t yet made the cut, that is useRightsURL, a link to the licence under which the resource may be used, for example the creative common licence under which is has been released. This was held back because of obvious overlaps with non-educational resources. The managers of schema.org want to make sure that there is a single solution that works across all domains.

Guides and tools

To promote the uptake of these properties, the Association of Educational Publishers has released two new user guides.

The Smart Publisher’s Guide to LRMI Tagging (pdf)

The Content Developer’s Guide to the LRMI and Learning Registry (pdf)

There is also the InBloom Tagger described and demonstrated in this video.

LRMI in the Learning Registry

As the last two resources show, LRMI metadata is used by the Learning Registry and services built on it. For what it is worth, I am not sure that is a great example of its potential. For me the strong point of LRMI/schema.org is that it allows resource descriptions in human readable web pages to be interpreted as machine readable metadata, helping create services to find those pages; crucially the metadata is embedded in the web page in way that Google trusts because the values of the metadata are displayed to users. Take away the embedding in human readable pages, which is what seems to happen when used with the learning registry, and I am not sure there is much of an advantage for LRMI compared to other metadata schema,–though to be fair I’m not sure that there is any comparative disadvantage either, and the effect on uptake will be positive for both sides. Of course the Learning Registry is metadata agnostic, so having LRMI/schema.org metadata in there won’t get in the way of using other metadata schema.

Disclosure (or bragging)

I was lucky enough to be on the LRMI technical working group that helped make this happen. It makes me vary happy to see this progress.

There’s nothing new here, I’m posting these thoughts here just so that they don’t get completely lost.

Subjects and disciplines in JACS

One of the issue identified with the use of JACS is that “although ostensibly believing themselves to be using a single system of classification, stakeholders are actually applying JACS for a variety of different purposes” including Universities who “often try to align JACS codes to their cost centres rather than adopting a strictly subject-based approach”. The cost centres in question are academic schools or departments, which are discipline based. This is problematic to the use of JACS to monitor which subjects are being learnt since the same subject may be taught in several departments. A good example of this is statistics, which is taught across many fields from Mathematics through to social sciences, but there are many other examples: languages taught in mediaeval studies and business translation courses, elements of computing taught in electronic engineering and computer science and so on. One approach would be to ignore the discipline dimension, to say the subject is the same regardless of the different disciplinary slants taken, that is to say statistics taught to mathematicians is the same as statistics taught to physicists is the same as statistics taught to social sciences. This may be true at a very superficial level, but obviously the relevance of theoretical versus practical elements will vary between those disciplines, as will the nature of the data to be analysed (typically a physicist will design an experiment to control each variable independently so as not to deal with multivariate data, this is not often possible in social sciences and so multivariate analysis is far more important). When it comes to teaching and learning resources something aimed at one discipline is likely to contain examples or use an approach not suited to others.

Perhaps more important is that academics identify with a discipline as being more than a collection of subjects being taught. It encapsulates a way of thinking, a framework for deciding on which problems are worth studying and a way of approaching these problems. A discipline is a community, and an academic who has grown up in a community will likely have acquired that community’s view of the subjects important to it. This should be taken into account when designing a coding scheme that is to be used by academics since any perception that the topic they teach is being placed under someone else’s discipline will be resisted as misrepresenting what is actually being taught, indeed as a threat to the integrity of the discipline.

More objectively, the case for different disciplinary slants on a problem space being important is demonstrated by the importance of multidisciplinary approaches to solving many problems. Both the reductionist approach of physics and the holistic approach of humanities and social sciences have their strengths, and it would be a shame if the distinction were lost.

The ideal coding scheme would be able to represent both the subject learnt and the discipline context in which it was learnt.

JACS and 5* data

Tim Berners-Lee suggested a 5 star deployment scheme for open data on the world wide web:
* make your stuff available on the Web (whatever format) under an open licence
** make it available as structured data (e.g., Excel instead of image scan of a table)
*** use non-proprietary formats (e.g., CSV instead of Excel)
**** use URIs to denote things, so that people can point at your stuff
**** link your data to other data to provide context

Currently JACS fails to meet the open licence requirement for 1-star data explicitly, but that seems to be a simple omission of a licensing statement that shows the intention that JACS should be freely available for others to use. It is important that this is fixed, but aside from this, JACS operates at about 3-star level. Assigning URIs to JACS subjects and providing useful information when someone accesses these URIs will allow JACS to be part of the web of linked open data. The benefits of linking data over the web include:

• The identifiers are globally unique and unambiguous, they can be used in any system without fear of conflicting with other identifiers.
• The subjects can be referenced globally by humans by from websites, emails, and by computer systems in/from data feeds and web applications.
• The subjects can be used for semantic web approaches to representing ontologies, such as RDF.
• These allow relationships such as subject hierarchies and relationships with other concepts (e.g. academic discipline) to be represented independently of the coding scheme used. An example of this is SKOS, see below.

In practical terms, implementing this would mean:

• Devising a URI scheme. This could be as simple as adding the JACS codes to a suitable base URI. For example H713 could become http://id.jacs.ac.uk/H713
• Setting up a web service to provide suitable information. Anyone connecting to that URL would be redirected to information that matched parameters in their request. A simple web browser would request an HTML page and so be redirected to http://id.jacs.ac.uk/H713.html; web applications would request data in a machine readable form such as xml, rdf or json.

The main overhead is in setting up, maintaining and managing the data provided by the web service, but Southampton University have already set one up for their own use. (The only problem with the Southampton service–and I believe Oxford have done something similar–is a lack of authority, i.e. it isn’t clear to other users whether the data from this service is authoritative, up to date, used under a correct license, sustainable.)

JACS and SKOS

SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) is a semantic web application of RDF which provides a model for expressing the basic structure and content of concept schemes such as thesauri, classification schemes, subject heading lists, taxonomies, folksonomies, and other similar types of controlled vocabulary. It allows for the description of a concept and the expression of the relationship betweens pairs of concepts. But first the concept must be identified as such, with a URI. For example:
jacs:H713 rdf:type skos:concept
In this example jacs: is shorthand for the JACS base URI, http://id.jacs.ac.uk/ as suggested above; rdf: and skos: are shorthand for the base URIs for RDF and SKOS. This triple says “The thing identified by http://id.jacs.ac.uk/H713 is a resource of type (as defined by RDF) concept (as defined by SKOS)”.

Other assertions can be made about the resource, e.g. the preferred label to be used for it and a scope note for it.
jacs:H713 skos:prefLabel “Production Processes”
jacs:H713 skos:scopeNote “The study of the principles of engineering as they apply to efficient application of production-line technology.”

Assuming the other JACS codes have been suitably identified, relationships between them can be described:
jacs:H713 skos:broader jacs:H710
jacs:H713 skos:related jacs:H830

Once JACS is on the semantic web relationships between the JACS subjects and things in other schemas can also be represented
http://example.org/123 dct:subject jacs:H713
(The resource identified by the URI http://example.org/123 is about the subject identified by jacs:H713).

Into the Wild (Book cover)

From the blurb:

Between 2009 and 2012 the Higher Education Funding Council funded a series of programmes to encourage higher education institutions in the UK to release existing educational content as Open Educational Resources. The HEFCE-funded UK OER Programme was run and managed by the JISC and the Higher Education Academy. The JISC CETIS “OER Technology Support Project” provided support for technical innovation across this programme. This book synthesises and reflects on the approaches taken and lessons learnt across the Programme and by the Support Project.

This book is not intended as a beginners guide or a technical manual, instead it is an expert synthesis of the key technical issues arising from a national publicly-funded programme. It is intended for people working with technology to support the creation, management, dissemination and tracking of open educational resources, and particularly those who design digital infrastructure and services at institutional and national level.

You may remember Lorna writing back in August that Amber Thomas, Martin Hawksey, Lorna and I had written 90% of this book together in a Book Sprint. Well, the last 10% and the publication turned in to a bit of a marathon-relay, something about which I might write some time, but now the book is available in a variety of formats:

• If you want glossy-covered paperback, then you can order it print-on-demand from Lulu (£3.36); if you’re not so fussed about the glossy cover and binding then there is a print-quality pdf you can print yourself.
• If you have an ePub reader you can download, there is a free download of an epub2 file.
• If you have a Kindle, you can download the .mobi file and transfer it, or if you prefer the convenience of Amazon’s distribution over whisper-net you can buy it from them (77p, they don’t seem to distribute for free unless you agree to give them exclusive rights for all electronic formats).
• finally, if you prefer your ebook reading as PDFs, there is one of those too.

All varieties are free or at minimum cost for the distribution channel used; the content is cc-by licensed and editable versions are available if you wish to remix and fix what we’ve done.

Available via the Cetis publications site.

“Scratch your own itch”

One of the most telling comments on sustainability, from Julian Tenney talking about the Xerte project, was that a project would most likely be sustainable if it was about doing something that the people involved needed doing anyway. Not necessarily something that would be done anyway (though in Xerte’s case mostly it was), but definitely not something that was being done just because the money was there. I agree with a comment that was made that there is a problem with the way that Universities treat project funding in this respect (at least in research departments), always the emphasis is on chasing money, getting the next grant. There were many examples of what it might be that “needs doing anyway”, at personal, subject community, institutional, and national/sector-wide level, from the sharing of resources between humanities teachers using HumBox, extra mural studies of the Department of continuing Education at Oxford University, the institutional teaching and learning policy at Leeds Met University, FE colleges in Scotland working in ever closer union and student progression from College to University.

(By: Nick Sheppard, Leeds Metropolitan University)

Nick Sheppard asked for a technical infrastructure to support these institutional and other policies. He (and others) asked for APIs and other links between repositories (and the rest of the web, I assume) so that the greatest advantage could be had for effort. Sarah Currier told us about the new offers from Mimas to make your OER effort “Jorum Powered” through a hosted repository, a web interface into Jorum, or by building custom applications using the new Jorum API.

But with technical infrastructure come technical requirements, David Kernohan was worried that these requirements are only bearable by an academic with help, and that once the Jisc funding goes that support will also go. Suzanne Hardy also touched on this.

by David Kernohan, Jisc. The teddy bear is an academic.

The concept involved here was identified by Yvonne Howard as relative advantage, the advantage of something has to be compared to the costs and the costs have to be minimised, as can be done through clever technology such as maximum use of machine created metadata.

“It’s like MOOCs stole OER’s girlfriend”

So far I’ve mentioned advantages for many people but glossed over the fact that different people will see different advantages; they don’t and for that reason they will pursue different directions, as we have seen with MOOCs. Amber Thomas of Warwick University (but yes, the same Amber as was of JISC) described MOOCs and OERs as distant cousins who used to get on but are now no longer friendly for some reason. And it’s not like the O for Open in the two really stands for the same thing, as Pat Lockley said, their open is not necessarily our open. But, he asked, what is open? a footpath through private land or a National Park with the right to roam where you please (if you can manage to get there)?

(this last photo is mine and is covered by the CC-BY licence of this blog; the others aren’t and are used according to their various licences or permissions from their creators.)

The stakeholders present represented many perspectives from throughout Europe: publishers, publishing industry specification bodies (e.g. IPDF who own EPUB3, and DAISY), national bodies with some sort of remit for educational technology, and elearning specification and standardisation organisations. I gave a short presentation on the OER perspective.

Many issues were raised through the course of the day, including (in no particular order)

• Interactive and multimedia content in eTextbooks
• Accessibility of eTextbooks
• eTextbooks shouldn’t be monolithic and immutable chunks of content, it should be possible to link directly to specific locations or to disaggregate the content
• The lifecycle of an eTextbook. This goes beyond initial authoring and publishing
• Quality assurance (of content and pedagogic approach)
• Alignment with specific curricula
• Personalization and adaptation to individual needs and requirements
• The ability to describe the learning pathway embodied in an eTextbook, and vary either the content used on this pathway or to provide different pathways through the same content
• The ability to describe a range IPR and licensing arrangements of the whole and of specific components of the eTextbook
• The ability to interact with learning systems with data flowing in both directions

If you’re thinking that sounds like a list of the educational technology issues that we have been busy with for the last decade or two, then I would agree with you. Furthermore, there is a decade or two’s worth of educational technology specs and standards that address these issues. Of course not all of those specs and standards are necessarily the right ones for now, and there are others that have more traction within digital publishing. EPUB3 was well represented in the meeting (DITA is the other publishing standard mentioned in the eTernity documentation, but no one was at the meeting to talk about that) and it doesn’t seem impossible to meet the educational requirements outlined in the meeting within the general EPUB3 framework. The question is which issues should be prioritised and how should they be addressed.

Of course a technical standard is only an enabler: it doesn’t in itself make any change to teaching and learning; change will only happen if developers create tools and authors create resources that exploit the standard. For various reasons that hasn’t happened with some of the existing specs and standards. A technical standard can facilitate change but there needs to a will or a necessity to change in the first place. One thing that made me hopeful about this was a point made by Owen White of Pearson that he did not to think of the business he is in as being centred around content creation and publishing but around education and learning and that leads away from the view of eBooks as isolated static aggregations.

For more information keep an eye on the eTernity website

In the last few years, however, there has been an increasing stream of stories about ebooks outselling printed books by some measure or another. For example, in August 2012 it was widely reported that Amazon in the UK had sold more ebooks than hard- and paperbacks combined[1]. Although there is of course often an element of advertising hype in many of these stories, they do reflect a real shift in the popularity of ebooks.

Various visions of ebooks
This shift has largely been prompted by two developments in ebook readers: the Amazon Kindle and Apple iPad, with associated apps. In technical capabilities neither is unique. Arguably, they are not even innovative as they both do no more than bring together pre-existing technologies. Nevertheless they do represent major initiatives that demonstrate their technical potential. Interestingly, they also represent somewhat opposing visions of what an ebook is.

The Amazon Kindle is by far the most successful representative of a range of devices that adopt the approach of trying to deliver the same content as a book, in as convenient a manner as possible while maintaining the ease of reading. The emphasis is on cheap, lightweight e-readers that allow owners to carry all they could desire to read without too much thought or effort. The minimal size and weight allow the Kindle to be no more of a burden to carry than a small paperback. The screen is designed so that the reading experience is similar to that of paper, rather than that of a computer screen. The memory capacity and network connectivity are designed so that owners need never run out of material to read and need never worry about syncing content with their computers. The battery life typically extends to days of use, so owners need rarely be worried about charging the device. The emphasis is on the text, so that design elements such as font, colour, and layout may be lost. This represents one of the potential drawbacks of the Kindle approach in education since the layout of many textbooks is carefully designed to enhance the explanation being presented through choice of colour, boxed explanations of concepts as asides, or (especially in technical subjects) complex tables and equations. It is important to recognise that many of the news stories concerning the explosion of ebooks relate to the Amazon Kindle and to linear texts (such as novels) read for pleasure, rather than complex material designed for study.

Not surprisingly ( given Apple’s history of an emphasis on good-looking, well-designed products and a target market of customers who appreciate such things), Apple’s ebooks designed for the iPad (iBooks) place greater value on the appearance of the printed page. Apple’s iBooks can support full-colour, high-fidelity representations of a printed original. The iPad is capable of displaying the original look of historical manuscripts such as mediaeval bestiaries or the original handwritten and illustrated copy of Alice in Wonderland (and other rare books held by the British Library). While maintaining some of the convenience of the Kindle approach, Apple’s approach requires greater computing power, at a cost of increased weight and price — and decreased battery life. With this greater computing power also comes the opportunity toChallenges of ebooks in academic contexts go beyond what can be displayed on the printed page. An image on a printed page has to be static, whereas hardware such as the iPad allows moving images and interactive 3D models to be displayed, offering a potentially rich educational experience.

Challenges of ebooks in academic contexts
One of the challenges facing Higher and Further Education is how to respond to these possibilities. Does interactive content that can be brought into the classroom by students change the role of the course textbook? Does the facility of even the modest Kindle for sharing comments and annotations among readers allow new ways of discussing a text? Are there deep-seated human factors surrounding the way that students study, which cannot be satisfactorily replicated by ebooks and could even impede learning when using them? For example, such factors include: making notes, annotations and bookmarks; jumping around a textbook rather than reading it sequentially cover-to-cover; having several books open at one time; or just the plain familiarity of the paper-based format as compared to software navigation that has to be learnt. It does seem clear from studies so far that students in general will not welcome ebooks unless there is some clear advantage to be gained by their use[2].

There are other challenges. The change in publishing brought about by ebooks represents a challenge to publishers. It is noticeable that none of the developments in ebooks (from Project Gutenberg through to the Kindle and the iPad) have come from publishers. They are challenged by the change in publishing that ebooks represent. Typically, publishers are challenged by the difficulty of producing content for novel and varied platforms. Such interoperability issues are accentuated by the desire of some to push the interactive capabilities of ebooks as far possible (and these capabilities are important to education). Publishers are also challenged by the way that digital content changes the way in which material can be distributed and copied. This is a problem that they pass on to libraries: in essence an ebook may be “lent” out by a library numerous times without degradation or loss of availability to others, whereas a paper book can only be lent out to one person at a time and will eventually fall apart. As a result, in order to protect their income, publishers seek to limit what libraries can do with books by limiting the rights that libraries buy when they purchase a book, and by enforcing those rights through Digital Rights Management technology. Alternatively, publishers will need to redefine what libraries purchase, moving from a transfer of ownership of a copy to something more akin to rental or subscription to a service. These changes impinge on libraries’ scope for action in Higher Education.

As with any other technology in education, there are still many barriers and challenges that exist and these need to be overcome for ebooks to be adopted more widely in Higher and Further Education. This report introduces some key concepts related to ebooks in general and discusses the technical, cultural and legal challenges that need to be addressed for the successful adoption of ebooks in education. Furthermore, it also offers scenarios showing effective use of ebooks in libraries and in teaching and learning across institutions. It provides us with useful insights into the future directions of ebooks development.

footnotes
1. See, for example, this August 2012 report in The Guardian of Amazon’s announcement that “for every 100 hardback and paperback books it sells on its UK site, 114 ebooks are downloaded”.

2. For commentary on recent research into university student attitudes toward and usage of etextbooks, see this August 2012 article: “Students Find E-Textbooks ‘Clumsy’ and Don’t Use Their Interactive Features” The Chronicle of Higher Education, online . For more in-depth summary of this research, see also:Internet2 eTextbook Spring 2012 Pilot Final Project Report (1 August 2012).

Phil Barker & Li Yuan, JISC CETIS, September 2012

Sarah Currier had arranged for projects that had worked with JLeRN blog something about what they had done before the meeting, here’s the email with a summary of them, if you haven’t come across JLeRN before you might want to have a look through them before reading on. What I want to describe here is my own understanding of where the Learning Registry is and to report some of the issues about it raised at the meeting.

The Learning Registry: Nodes or a network?

The learning registry as a network from a presentation by Dan Rehak and others.. © Copyright 2011 US Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative: CC-BY-3.0.

From the outset the Learning Registry was conceived as a network, the software created would be nodes that connected together to share data about resources. Some of the details have been put on the back burner since those early descriptions, for example the ideas of communities and gateway nodes haven’t been much developed.

The community map on the Learning Registry website shows three nodes (the red pins), including the JLeRN node; Steve Midgely told us via email “There are a few development nodes out there that we know of: Agilix, Illinois Dept of Commerce and California Dept of Ed. To my knowledge there are no production nodes beyond the ones we currently run. Several companies have expressed interest in taking over our production nodes including Dell, Cisco and Amazon.” To that tally I can add the EngRich node at Liverpool. Steve adds that the only network he knows of is the LR public network. Now, I’m not sure about the other nodes, but I do know that the JLeRN and EngRich nodes haven’t interacted with the public network in any meaningful way (yet).

So I think we have to say that, to date, there isn’t really much to prove the concept of the Learning Registry as a network. There are, however some developments in the works that I think will change that, for example the Learning Registry Index, see below.

Services
The other aspect of the development of the Learning Registry against the vision shown in the diagram above is that of services being built to interact with the data in the nodes (these are shown as square in the diagram above). This is crucial since the Learning Registry is no more than plumbing to shift data around, it does nothing with that data that would interest a teacher or learner. It is left to others to develop services that meet user needs–Pat Lockley summed this up quite nicely in his presentation showing how the learning registry was targeted at developers and promoted relationships between developers, service managers and users more than was the case with traditional repository software.

“I think the major point of my slides was to suggest the learning registry is a “developer’s repository” – not that you need a developer to use it, more that you develop services around a node. Also, I feel there is a greater role for the developer in the ecosystems around a node than around a repository – the services on offer, and the scope of services you create seem richer – partially as any data can be stored.”

Well, there are some services for getting data in, there is the OAI-PMH to Learning Registry Publish Utility, and there is Pat’s RSS importer, Ramanathan, and his Google analytics data importer, Pliny. Also at least two projects–Scott Wilson’s SPAWS and Liverpool University’s EngRich–had involved the submission of data to Learning Registry nodes as part of the services they created.

But putting data in is meeting a service manager’s needs, it’s no good in itself since it doesn’t meet any user needs. There are a few user oriented services built off data in the Learning Registry. Pat showed us a couple of Chrome plugins, demos here and here. These are great as proofs of concept, and really important as such, they help show non-technical people what the learning registry is for. But there then follows some expectation management while you explain the limitations of the demonstrators. Other projects had embedded means of getting data out of the Learning Registry nodes into their project outputs, for example EngRich have an iLike widget for the Liverpool student portal that shows what resources students on specific courses have recommended based on data in their Learning Registry node.

Steve Midgely provided us with some very promising information, “the Gates foundation is funding several groups to build index and search services on top of Learning Registry (called Learning Registry Index) and that will require running nodes of some kind.”

Does it work?
One message that I picked up during the meeting and elsewhere is that the Learning Registry, as software, works. The people who set up nodes seem to have done so quickly, the people who used the APIs didn’t report problems in doing so. That’s a good place to be starting.

At a deeper level I guess we need to wait until there are more services built off the data in the Learning Registry to find out whether the Learning Registry works as a concept. Some known problems have been deliberately pushed out of scope in the development of the Learning Registry, one key one is not worrying about what formats and schemas for the data that goes in. This is good if you are submitting data, but unless some level of agreement is reached it does place the onus for making sense of the data on the people who are creating services that use the data. So far, the extent to which this (reaching agreement or making sense of arbitrary data) is possible in the context of the Learning Registry is untested.

Other questions remain over how the learning registry will function as a network, for example how duplicate and complementary records about the same resource will be dealt with when many people might be providing information about the same resource.

Why use it?
Owen Stephens and David Kay were at the meeting asking some very pertinent questions. Neither are particularly caught up in the education technology world, with more of a background in information systems for libraries, where of course there are different approaches to solving similar problems. So, why use the Learning Registry rather than raw couchDB, or some other schemaless, NoSQL, document store (e.g. MongoDB, which is popular for research data management), or free text indexing and search software such as Lucene/Solr, or RDF triple stores, or just a traditional relational database with SQL? To some extent the aim at the moment is to try and answer some of those questions: we won’t know if we don’t try it. But it’s valid to ask how far have we got to answering them, and here is my appraisal.

RDF?
Schemaless sharing of data still appeals to me because I don’t think we know what schema we want to use to share some of the interesting information about the use of resources for teaching and learning. I think the RDF approach will influence the data that is submitted, for example there is interest in using the Learning Registry to store LRMI style metadata. LRMI is adding properties to schema.org so that educational characteristics of resources can be described, and schema.org is only a step or two away from semantic web approaches such as RDF. But some influences of RDF we don’t want. For example there is a tendency at times for RDF approaches to fixate on ontologies. That would stall us. So, for example in LRMI it is possible to say that a resource “aligns” with some point in an educational framework: i.e. it is useful for teaching some topic in a standard curriculum, or assessing some skill required by a competency framework. That’s really useful, but the vocabulary for the nature of the alignment has had to be left open (”teaches” and “assess” are two suggested terms, others are that the resource has a certain “text complexity” or requires a “reading level” or other “educational level”)–the understanding of what education is about varies so much over the world and between settings that agreement on a closed ontology seems unattainable. Still, you could use RDF if you didn’t specify and ontology, and if you could make sense of the RDF without one.

Another weakness of RDF in this context, as I understand it, is its ability to deal with subjective opinions. As soon as a teacher or learner sees an assertion that resource X is good for teaching topic Y (to continue the example used above) they should be asking “says who”. Engineering students at Liverpool are more interested in what other Engineering students find useful, especially those at Liverpool, than they are in the opinions of physics students. Yes, you can have named graphs in RDF and provide information about who asserted which triples, but it goes beyond what is usual, whereas in it is built in from the start in the Learning Registry concept of paradata.

All of that is somewhat conjectural though, because as yet there is little in the Learning Registry that is not metadata that could be expressed in some standard schema such as LOM XML or DC RDF.

Other schemaless data stores
Why not use just CouchDB, without the Learning Registry API, or MongoDB, or Lucene? All of these would make sense for single instance data stores, which is pretty much what we have now with single more-or-less isolated nodes rather than a network. And, yes, I am sure that some way of sharing data between them could be worked up if that is what you wanted. So again any advantages of the Learning Registry is still putative at this stage.

One advantage of the Learning Registry is that, as I mentioned above, it does seem to work: it does seem to come out of the package as a functional way of storing and sharing data that is tailored to education. So as an introduction to No SQL databases it’s not a bad place for the education community to start.

In summary
In a post about the end of the JLeRN project David Kay has quoted Simon Schama on his not being sure whether the French Revolution was over. I’ll quote what Chairmain Mao supposedly said when asked what he thought of the French Revolution; “it’s too early to tell”. The things to look out for are a functioning network of nodes and user-facing services being delivered from data in those nodes. Then we can ask whether that data could be shared in any other way. For the time being I think that the main achievement of JLeRN and the UK’s involvement in the Learning Registry is that it has started people thinking about alternatives to relational databases and they have taken first steps into working with these. Too often, I think, data has been squeezed into an relational data where the benefits of doing so are simply that it is what the developer happens to be familiar with. If all you have is a hammer then you can have real problems dealing with screws.

[updated to correct an attribution error as to who was comparing JLeRN to the French revolution]