Digital Textbooks

Hello Everyone & happy New Year! Following up the earlier message regarding digital textbooks, DigitALL has made a first attempt to put one together on Bioethics & Visions of the Future for ARW/RCA. It blends a mix of resource types from a variety of online sources, but it is very much a work in progress & would benefit hugely from your input. As always you are always invited to float new ideas and offer your expertise in any way.

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ARW RCA Bioethics VOF Textbook

Differences: Traditional & Digital Textbooks
I refer to Dave Cormier:

In addition to the freshness of the material, the multiplicity of voice and perspective and the fact that your textbook will never be out of date, one of the first things that would happen is a decentralization of the instructor. While the instructor would usually be responsible for the basic set of links (although I believe I’m going to be in a class soon where we start with none) gone will be the rabbit out of a hat magic that comes from controlling the flow of knowledge. Students will actually be able to add to that flow of knowledge as their research brings up new sources of course material.

Dave's view that the instructor will be decentralized may unease some of my colleagues, but it really depends on how you wish to manage such a resource. Nevertheless, the concepts he alludes to; collective intelligence & reciprocal apprenticeships, are empowering & digital textbooks may encourage greater engagement by some learners (& teachers?).

Getting started First, you will need to set up some websites to provide the content for a textbook. The ARW RCA Bioethics VOF Textbook is seeded by selected RSS/XML feeds from accounts set up at del.icio.us (various selected resources, including pics from Flickr), flickr (bioethics & future pics fed into delicious), and blogger (Owen's shared class blogs), as well as a feed from Ray Kurzweil's futurist blog. This resource & participant content is aggregated at Suprglu as the ARW RCA Bioethics VOF Textbook (you can find what content comes from where easily by going to SOURCES on the right side of the textbook).

Do not worry that you have to use the above sites, you don't at all, any website carrying an orange RSS/XML tag can be used to populate your Suprglu textbook (or any webpage displaying forever updated content).