Craig Vasey has been hard at work using Drupal to produce an online logic textbook as his project for the Teaching and Learning Technology Fellows here at UMW. Since he has Powerpoint presentations he's used before, we worked a bit on how to incorporate them into the text. Seems, though, that the best bet with them will be to attach them to appropriate chapters for two reasons. First, as Powerpoints developed for class they lose their context and meaning significantly when put in the very different context of the book. Second, though OpenOffice happily converted them to Flash videos, it could only convert slide by slide, which lost some of the effects built in to the Powerpoints.

It did get me thinking, though, about where a slide presentation converted to flash could be useful in an online writing space. One thing that struck me as possibly useful is the way a flash video of a slide show could be used to reorient the temporality of reading. That is, traditional print books correlate progression through time with progression down the page: later in time = farther down the page. Putting a flash video into a page lets that switch around so that progression through time has a new dimension to follow: the sequence of clicks to progress through the slides of the presentation. That strikes me as being useful for thinking about content that has a tight temporal progression such as steps in a process or, more particularly, steps in a proof.

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.