PLEASE NOTE: These informal meeting notes were taken by Tom Peters, one of the attendees. They are not intended to serve as an adequate substitute for actually having attended the conference.

eBooks in Education Conference: Challenges and Opportunities for Educators, Publishers & Technologists. Thursday, April 14, 2005 at the McGraw-Hill Auditorium, 1221 Avenue of the Americas, New York City

Conference website: http://www.openebook.org/education/

Key Points and Recurring Themes:

· This conference focused more on adoption and diffusion phenomena of ebooks in education than on cutting edge technologies. For example, fully one-third of the dental students in the U.S. now receive all of their dental school textbooks and documents in digital formats.

· The Open eBook Forum (OeBF) announced that it has changed its name to the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). The new URL will be www.idpf.org.

· In March 2005 a new Symbian operating system version of eReader software from eReader.com (formerly Palm Digital Media) was released. Symbian OS is used by smartphones.

· Display technologies for the general consumer market should improve soon, in terms of contrast, brightness, energy consumption, portability, etc. Kent Displays commercializes the Cholesteric LCD display that requires no energy to maintain an image. This type of display can be placed on plastic or even cloth. There is no flickering with this type of display. E-Ink, Inc. has been working on commercializing eletrophoretic displays, which use microcapsules to create a display. Last week Seiko announced that they will sell a wristwatch using E-Ink’s technology.

· Timely access to formatted, accessible digital content is essential for e-learning.

· Garth Conboy from eBook Technologies encouraged developers to concentrate on the entire aesthetic experience of immersive reading. Reading is a very complex, highly personal experience.

· Tim Magner from the U.S. Department of Education explained how they are supporting teacher training in the e-learning area and virtual schools.

· Disaggregation of content was a recurring theme. The textbook as we know it—as a static compilation of information on a topic—is no longer the best way to meet the curricular needs of schools and the online learning behaviors and preferences of e-learners.

· Repurposing content was another recurring theme. At various stages in the production and distribution processes, content needs to be converted and repurposed.

· Another major theme was the need for centralized, codified catalogs and finding aids for these digital learning objects.

· Sebastian Vos from Elsevier announced that in the fall of 2005 “Evolve Select” will be launched in the field of nursing. It will be an e-learning system incorporating content from 125 nursing textbooks.

· George Kerscher announced that the AAP is working on some national solutions for the DRM situation.

· Ed McCoyd from the AAP seemed to put the damper on the movement toward a national repository of accessible digital educational materials. The AAP’s position is: When an accessible format becomes available, the distribution of the content should be left to publishers, not to a national repository.

· Eight states have passed legislation that requires accessible digital learning materials: CA, NY, WA, KY, NV, etc.

· We need to be more granular in our thinking about ebooks in education. The simple distinction between K-12 and higher education is not sufficient.

· Ruth Adams from the Virtual High School and others noted that the social dynamics of learning are changing as more learning occurs online. Learning is no longer dominated by “the sage on the stage” mode of learning.

· Steven Guttentag from Connections Academy, a for-profit operator of virtual public schools, noted that we need deep linking into content. We need e-content with lots of doors.

· Isabella Hinds from WebCT noted that only 26 percent of institutions of higher education that responded to a Gartner Research survey in May 2003 indicated that their course management systems and library management systems were integrated. Also, a WebCT Quality Assessment Initiative is scheduled to be announced today (Monday, April 18, 2005).

· Craig Swenson from the University of Phoenix gave the keynote address. He noted that textbooks are becoming increasingly anachronistic. It is sad that people do not read like they used to. Every technological development is both a blessing and burden. We need to transition from a culture of teaching to a culture of learning. The U. of Phoenix wants to take e-textbooks apart and recombine the repurpose the smaller chunks of e-content.

· Thomson Learning Labs is conducting a test to learn how digital alternatives will be used in formal learning environments. The University of Virginia is serving as the test site. Wireless tablet PCs are being used in three classes.

· Distributed, point-of-need content creation also was a theme. For example, the Shepard Elementary School in Columbia, Missouri is using PDAs distributed to 4^th graders to create content.

· The new BookLocker plug and play device from SanDisk should be on the market this summer in time for back-to-school purchases.