{"id":1003,"date":"2006-09-26T13:18:02","date_gmt":"2006-09-26T13:18:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/tools-creating-publishing-and-sharing-written-text-online\/"},"modified":"2026-11-11T22:04:59","modified_gmt":"2026-11-12T03:04:59","slug":"tools-creating-publishing-and-sharing-written-text-online","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/tools-creating-publishing-and-sharing-written-text-online\/","title":{"rendered":"Tools: Creating, Publishing and Sharing Written Text Online"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>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: <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Creating:<\/strong> 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 &quot;attach&quot; the document (to a web page or an e-mail), there is little <span>opportunity<\/span> for interaction or collaboration. That has helped to drive the interest in <span>wikis<\/span>, <span>blogs<\/span> and other web based word processing applications (such as <a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/accounts\/ServiceLogin?service=writely&amp;passive=true&amp;continue=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.writely.com%2F&amp;ltmpl=homepage&amp;nui=0\"><span>Writely<\/span>.com<\/a>) which have their own shortcomings (see below).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Sharing:<\/strong> 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 .<span>pdf<\/span> 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.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Publishing:<\/strong> While Internet based <span>ebooks<\/span>, <span>wikis<\/span> and <span>blogs<\/span> 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 .<span>pdf<\/span> or HTML file which often leaves the reader with a poorly formated mess. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p> 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: <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.futureofthebook.org\/index.php?frame=http%3A\/\/www.futureofthebook.org\/projects\/\">The Institute for the Future of the Book<\/a> is focused on the shift to the &quot;networked screen&quot; from print media. A project of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.futureofthebook.org\/index.php?frame=http%3A\/\/www.futureofthebook.org\/projects\/\"><span>Annenberg<\/span> Center for Communication<\/a>, the institute is tracking and developing <a href=\"http:\/\/www.futureofthebook.org\/index.php?frame=http%3A\/\/www.futureofthebook.org\/projects\/\">software and web based tools<\/a> to support the creation of electronic documents, <span>including<\/span> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.futureofthebook.org\/next\/text\/\">digital textbooks<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li><span>TK<\/span>3 from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nightkitchen.com\/\">Night Kitchen<\/a> is both a tool for creating multimedia documents (via the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nightkitchen.com\/product\/author\/index.phtml\"><span>TK<\/span>3 Author<\/a>) and a format for viewing them (via the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nightkitchen.com\/download\/reader\/index.phtml\">free <span>TK<\/span>3 Reader<\/a>).  What is interesting about <span>TK<\/span>3 is the attention to both print and interactive online display of text, audio and video. The <span>TK<\/span>3 Author is <span>available<\/span> for an annual subscription (currently $59 per year) or for purchase (currently $149). <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p> <!-- technorati tags begin --><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-size: 10px; text-align: right\">technorati tags:<a rel=\"tag\" href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/ebooks\">ebooks<\/a>, <a rel=\"tag\" href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/TK3\">TK3<\/a><\/p>\n<p><!-- technorati tags end --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[194,230],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-design","category-writing-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1003"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1003\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3126,"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1003\/revisions\/3126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}