From the blog TOETOE (ˈtɔɪtɔɪ): Technology for Open English - Toying with Open E-resources http://www.alannahfitzgerald.org/e-i-e-i-oh-dear-mcdonaldization-of-the-e-coursebook/

1. Articles from TOETOE Technology for
Open English Toying with Open E-
resources (ˈtɔɪtɔɪ)
E I E I Oh dear… McDonaldization of the e-
coursebook?
2012-02-03 11:02:15 admin
For every E it follows that there is an I, at least that’s how it would appear with
Apple’s latest and much debated ‘free’ app hitting the mainstream and educational
markets, iBooks Author. The only instance I can think of in the reverse is I, Claudius,
first penned by Robert Graves, which now with an e-reader can be read as an e-I,
Claudius.
When considering throwbacks to the analogue age, what exactly is it about e-books
that make us (not forgetting publishers and hardware vendors) feel so at home with
this type of packaging for content? Are e-books, and their close cousins the e-
coursebooks, the great hand-holders as we make the transition from the semi-digital
world of print media production toward a webbed bundle of digital content including
dynamic RSS feeds, all of which can in effect be converted and customized into an
e-book format? There is a very lively and timely open education seminar and
collaborative e-book writing event going on right now within SCoPE (hosted by
BCcampus in Canada), discussing the very nature of e-books. Writing an e-book
about e-books for fun and no profit: February 1-14, 2012 is definitely worth checking
out.
Similarly, within the ELT community, Scott Thornbury’s latest A-Z of ELT entry on e-
coursebooks has created a lot of post-blogpost activity about the ‘need’ for
coursebooks, digital or otherwise, in language teaching and learning. He offers an

2. alternative 8-point ELT scenario for tapping into and toying with a mash-up of
available technologies, both open and proprietary. Youtube is an endless resource
provided you don’t live in a country or work in an institution where it is blocked, and
this is where Apple’s iTunesU as an educational content channel wins the day again.
To provide just one example of this success, The Open University in the UK has
experienced 34 million downloads of their educational content on iTunesU since
June 2008, much of which is open content released under creative commons
licences.
I take Scott’s point that Tom Cobb’s Lextutor is an invaluable resource if you know
how to use it and are willing to invest the time, as he suggests, to make the most of
it in your learning and teaching. However, more in the way of training and the
development of pedagogic wrappers for helping teachers and learners exploit corpus
tools and resources effectively would not go amiss. I’ll be talking more along these
lines in future posts.
Needless to say, this discussion on e-resources in the A-Z of ELT blog along with
David Deubelbeiss’ call via EFL 2.0 Teacher Talk to disrupt ELT with more
openness is what has inspired me to kick-start this blog – thanks, guys.
Pedagogic wrappers
Chinese spring roll wrappers, Burma
Image via flickr creative commons
We have become too dependent on coursebooks and off-the-shelf dedicated
resources for ELT. I’ve spent the better part of the last 10 years trying to
deprogramme myself away from the ELT textbook consumer culture that I was
formally trained into by Cambridge ESOL pre- and in-service teacher training
courses. Yes, we could SARS – Select, Adapt, Reject, Supplement – (Graves,
2003) sections of a coursebook, as we were trained to do, but the coursebook still
remains the crux of the lesson.
Anna Comas-Quinn of the LORO project (Languages Open Resources Online)
talks of typical language teachers as being those who will beg, borrow and steal
anything to teach a language point effectively. We’ve always done this to make our
classes more interesting – taking a clip from a video here, chopping up a research

3. article there – as we try to engage our students in authentic communication in the
target language. So, in many ways we’ve always been at odds with the coursebook.
But how often does our pedagogy, embedded in useful resources which we have
painstakingly designed, remain locked in the secret garden that is our classroom?
Or within the password-protected virtual learning environment of our institutions?
Our language teaching community would benefit greatly from the sharing of these
resources and pedagogic wrappers in the form of lesson plans and tips for teaching.
But what are the barriers to sharing when we’ve never been trained in intellectual
property rights and the use of third party materials? If we had been trained in
harvesting and harnessing open technologies and resources, then perhaps we
would build resources from a different starting point, making it easier for us to share.
We might even end up promoting ourselves and our institutions by releasing our
open educational resources (OER) into the wild, a different business model worth
exploring.
Image via flickr creative commons
By tapping into informal open education practitioner communities like those who
hosted the recent Open Content Licensing for Educators 2012 (OCL4Ed,
sponsored by Ako Aotearoa – New Zealand’s National Centre for Tertiary Teaching
Excellence), attended online by 1067 people from 87 countries with 15,961 unique
visits to the WikiEducator site, we can start to grow our skills and understanding in
this important area of materials development and dissemination for free. The
OCL4Ed materials were developed openly and collaboratively by dedicated
volunteers from the OER Foundation, WikiEducator, the OpenCourseware
Consortium (OCWC) and Creative Commons with funding support from UNESCO.
If you’d like to learn more about creative commons, check out this video here.
Nobody does it better…?

4. ‘Bond’ image via flickr
creative commons
Apple and Amazon are disrupting publishing and their pockets run very deep.
Educational resources developers, many of whom are teachers, have always
engaged in contracts with traditional publishers to pay for the costs of publishing in
one form or another. With the launch of iBooks Author, Apple have their eyes on the
K-12 market and this comes with its problems as is discussed here in the Scholarly
Kitchen, a vibrant blog on educational publishing. David Crotty argues against
Apple’s rush for rich media, stating that he’s perfectly happy to read an e-book
without the bells and whistles of animations and embedded scenes from movies etc
to pump up the text and the e-reader experience, as has been the case with the
release of the popular and digitally-enhanced Alice for the iPad e-book published by
Atomic Antelope. He may not be so interested in the hype around adding movie
clips and animations to text but language teachers are interested in drawing their
students’ attention to differences in features of spoken and written discourse, and e-
books offer us the potential to combine resources in this way.
Apple has pushed beyond the open ePUB format standards for e-books which don’t
necessarily support such a high level of rich media, and have come up with their
own ibooks file format instead. In many ways this push for richer media standards is
admirable. But their EULA (End User Licence Agreement) doesn’t leave educational
resources developers, many of whom are teachers, for both open and proprietary
resources, much room to move by locking us down with a file format for use only on
iPads and for iBook sales only through the iBooks Store.
By tuning into the OER community and by playing with and learning about different
technologies and licensing standards, we may not always come up with e-
resources that are as flashy as the high-end iBooks prepared by animation artists
(although there are some animation artists floating about the OER world who would
love to help!). We can, however, between us come up with pedagogically relevant e-
resources that can be shared and re-used.

5. References:
‘Pedagogic wrappers’ – term coined by Tom Browne, SCORE fellow with the
Open University.
Graves, K, 2003. “Coursebooks.” In D. Nunan (Ed.) PracticalEnglish
Language Teaching. New York: McGraw-Hill.
The E I E I Oh dear… McDonaldization of the e-coursebook? by Alannah Fitzgerald,
unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this
license may be available at www.alannahfitzgerald.org.