One of the struggles with online learning is finding tools to create, publish and share text based media within the online learning environment. Here are just some of the many problems:
- Creating: Most of the written text that is created by students and teachers is MS Word based. While it is the best known text based creation application, it has several major shortcomings in an online learning environment, the primary being the difficulty in publishing and sharing the document to an online audience. While the work around is to "attach" the document (to a web page or an e-mail), there is little opportunity for interaction or collaboration. That has helped to drive the interest in wikis, blogs and other web based word processing applications (such as Writely.com) which have their own shortcomings (see below).
- Sharing: Documents that were originally created for print pose a huge problem in an online learning environment. 99.9% of the time, printed media is shared in online education in the form of scanned pages that are stored in a .pdf files. While I am an Internet junkie and live in front of my computer screen, I now refuse to read scanned documents on my computer. Reading a scanned page formatted with columns is beyond frustrating and unless you pay to upgrade to Adobe Acrobat, there are no interactive tools to highlight, notate or bookmark passages. As a result, I end up printing out reams of paper each semester. Further, as noted above, there is little opportunity for interaction and collaboration with others.
- Publishing: While Internet based ebooks, wikis and blogs provide a great way to distribute media and collaborate with others, learners are often tied to their computer screens. If offered, the print functionality for these Internet based applications is usually based on a dump to a .pdf or HTML file which often leaves the reader with a poorly formated mess.
That is why I was so intrigued today when I read about a couple of projects that are addressing the current shortcomings of creating, publishing and sharing text based media online:
- The Institute for the Future of the Book is focused on the shift to the "networked screen" from print media. A project of the Annenberg Center for Communication, the institute is tracking and developing software and web based tools to support the creation of electronic documents, including digital textbooks.
- TK3 from Night Kitchen is both a tool for creating multimedia documents (via the TK3 Author) and a format for viewing them (via the free TK3 Reader). What is interesting about TK3 is the attention to both print and interactive online display of text, audio and video. The TK3 Author is available for an annual subscription (currently $59 per year) or for purchase (currently $149).