Recently the Teaching and Learning Technology Fellows have gotten off the ground on their various projects. I'm working with Craig Vasey on a project to create a new, online textbook for his Introduction to Logic course. We're using a Drupal installation to make use of the book module, but the rest of the Drupal features are leading us happily into some neat ways to rethink the structure of a book:

One of my favorites came from an idea of his to build students blogs into the book's assignments, so that instead of the end of a section having an "Exercises" section that directs students to do exercises on paper, they would go to a group blog to contribute their responses and solutions. But, with the organic groups in Drupal they could instead submit the work as additional book pages. That way students' work becomes an additional part of the logic book itself, but only visible to others in that group. The textbook, then, becomes something that is slightly different for members of each group. Everyone has that core work that Craig writes, but it is augmented for each student with their own submissions. This nicely, I think, balances the need for a stable textbook with some versatility of removing the monolithic status of a traditional book.

There will be some fine-tuning to do to make it come out the way we'd like. The way it is currently set up, it doesn't quite have true group editing of the group submissions--each student's contribution is separate from the others' in the same group. We'd like to make it somewhat more wikilike with true collaborative editing by members of the group. I'm looking into into the Taxonomy Access Control and TAC Lite modules to see if they'll help wiggle it all into the position we'd like. Other Drupal users have been seeking similar things here and here. Failing that, I might have to get adventurous into the code to see if the editing permissions can be hacked: the basic functionality I'm hoping for is that when a page loads, the script checks what group the page is visible to, then checks whether the current user is a member of that group, and if so gives editing permissions. Sounds straightforward in theory, but we all know where the Devil is....

Another exciting idea is to convert some Powerpoints that walk through the steps of constructing a truth table into Flash files to embed directly into the book. That's striked me as another fun remediation of the book by including a block that changes over time (or, rather, with clicks). My picture of it is a lot like the books in Harry Potter that are non-static. The steps of a proof seem like perfect content for that kind of extension because one of the difficulties of representing them in text is that static text doesn't lend itself well to reproducing the sequence of changes that go with each step. Something more like frames in a film (or indeed slide in Powerpoint) handles it better, and this approach would merge the two media nicely. That would hit at a richer sense of the term "multimedia", which I think too often really means "two or more distinct media thrown together in hopes that the reader can figure it out."