E-books in class
There is no difference in content between an original (printed) book and his e-book version. But the medium has changed and with it the reading experience.
The advantages of e-books are the availability of many data sets which allow us to download books from the internet. Another advantage could be that young people might rather read an e-book than a printed one. But at the same time this focus on e-books might narrow the choice. The main objective or aim should be to get the students to read whether it is a printed or an e-book. Reading is one of the key abilities for education, for studying and to gain knowledge.
Reading books also means a concentrated exposure to longer texts and its understanding, arranging, and processing. Corresponding to reading skills is also text production. In case e-books are more motivating for the students than printed books they could bear a great potential in class.
Using e-books requires that each learner has an e-book reader at his or her disposal. Therefore, the availability of books can be replaced by the availablity of e-books readers. Whether this is cheaper or not will be shown by the future development. Until now printed books are cheaper.
Most interesting are those books which are conceived as e-books. Here new forms and potentials emerge (e. g. following the creation process of a book via internet and partly influencing this process by comments). Students could be encouraged in this way to write or compose an e-book as group or to play a part in such a creative writing process. Hence, the blurring lines between author and reader could be used creatively in class.
Do you think e-books can improve English teaching? Do you think it will be easier (or more attractive) for the students to read longer texts as e-books than as printed books? Do e-books motivate students to read even more than they would read printed books?
Viviana
2 comments:
Hi, this is an interesting point: are traditional books (those not conceived as ebooks) different in mode/form from the ebooks? It will be great to compare and contrast these two forms of creativity. You also mentioned length of text. Are you implying that ebook will inevitably be shorter?
As long as e-books are merely a digital transcription of printed books (e.g. literature books), they just mirror the original in length and form. These originals were surely not written as e-books. They show, therefore, quite an unusual form compared to the other digital formats: They have hardly any pictures, they are comparatively long, they do not interrupt the text with summaries and subtitles for the following sections...This most probably will invite digital publishers in future to add these qualities to the books to present them in an appropriate digital form. Accordingly, I assume that we will in future face a change of books within their transformation into an e-book.
Until now the focus obviously still lies in quoting the original and not just presenting a (shortened) digital version of the "real" book. But the format of e-books will change more and more , I predict. When more publications will be published that take into account their digital version from all the beginning, the look and form of books will change in general.Old books may be brought into a comparable form then to make them more consumable for a public that prefers e-books to printed ones.
Viviana
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