I’m not a teacher, so some of the criteria we’re looking at in the exercise apply less to me than they do to most of the group. That said, the core of my job is to create tools that help facilitate learning, so that’s where I’ll start. Because the context I work in is unfamiliar to most of my classmates, I’ll ask for your indulgence and take a little bit of time to describe some of the basics of what I do.
Traditionally, the job of an acquisitions editor at a textbook house involves deciding what kinds of books we need to publish. I’m then responsible, working with an author, for creating the overall architecture of the individual book/digital project. Student engagement is one of the things we talk about constantly – how does this book engage students, draw them into the subject matter? As all of you know, being familiar with textbooks as both students and teachers, the general techniques are pretty standard – illustrations, use of colour, learning objectives at the start, questions to consider at the end; boxes inserted into the main text to provide additional information or case studies, or ways to tie the subject matter to students’ lives. I’m always looking for new hooks, ways in which the books I publish can distinguish themselves from the other books on the market. Two of the markets I work in – English and sociology – are hugely competitive, and student engagement is always at the core of the constant struggle to distinguish my book from the 18 others that tempt instructors to say ‘All intro soc textbooks are the same!’
In the 20 years I’ve been in publishing, things have changed some, but not as much as you might expect. I would argue, though, that the pace of change is picking up. All of the big publishing companies have moved into digital in a big way, but at a very high level – creating proprietary course management systems with pre-loaded content rather than putting muscle into working within existing course management systems. Over the last couple of years I’ve become convinced that we need to develop digital-age competency at the level of individual project planning – the level at which I work. The analogy I’d make is that I know enough about how physical books are used and produced to be able to design them, although I don’t have any particular expertise in book production. I now need to have enough knowledge about the basic frameworks for digital production and presentation of knowledge that I can design for that context as well. At the moment, the IT people still rule the way we create digital products for students, which is the equivalent, in my mind, of having the typesetter or the printer create a textbook. So, that said, I’ve set out on the MET journey – like all of us enrolled in the program, the fact that we’re here and actively engaged in learning about this brave new world is proof that we are striving to achieve goal #5, engaging in professional growth and leadership.
The MET is at the core of how I would evaluate myself against the NETS. The program has inspired me to take a number of concrete steps to take the theoretical knowledge I’m acquiring and move it into practice. Last fall, for example, I started a cross-disciplinary discussion group at work: totally voluntary and informal, it is a place where people from the K-12 division, our media services division, and the higher education division who are interested in the integration of technology into textbook publishing can come together and discuss anything and everything. We meet about every 4 weeks or so and have talked about a huge range of things, from showing each other new products we’re working on, to comparing how things are moving in the K-12 market v. universities and colleges, to talking about particular internal productivity tools and how one division is using them compared to the other. I’ve also been involved in a cross-group company project and got the group to use a wiki platform to record and contribute to the discussion, as well as Survey Monkey to help us sort through our ideas. These activities I would characterize as modeling digital age work and learning – standard #3.
I’ve also started to create new types of products that shift the balance between print and digital. Instructors in higher education aren’t ready yet for completely digital solutions (the same is true of K-12, based on my discussions in the MET) so creating new digital solutions is like walking a tightrope. I have to balance the needs of the future against the realities of the present, all in the context of having to be able to make a case for profitability to my colleagues. Because it takes time to develop new products, particularly digital ones, I have to have a sense of what is out there on the horizon. I have to be thinking all the time, though, about the middle of the pack, not early adopters. In terms of standard #2, designing and developing digital-age learning experiences, I’ve been able to apply the knowledge of gained from the courses I’ve taken through the MET almost instantaneously. Increasingly I’m able to think differently about producing tools for learning – I’m thinking all the time about the affordances of digital spaces, their flexibility in space and time, and what that means for how we develop educational tools.
My flight path:
What I’m hoping to get out of 565 is to continue to build on my growing sense of what kinds of tools work – regardless of the platform or space they are built in – for teachers and students. That is so broad as to be almost meaningless, but the courses I’ve taken so far in the MET program have convinced me that what will be essential to survival in the future of educational publishing will be a mental orientation rather than a specific set of skills. Or rather, a matching of my existing skills (listening to instructors, evaluating projects on their merits, for example) with a new flexibility in terms of how we deliver what we do. It is like moving from two-dimension chess to three-dimension chess. I’m very interested in the first section, on LMSs, because I see that as the space I’m most likely to be designing for in the near future. I’m also very keen to look at the theoretical underpinnings and research based studies around how new communication tools and social media actually boost the way people learn. I had a fascinating lunch a couple of weeks ago with a cognitive psychologist, who specializes in how people learn math. One of the things we talked about was the concept of ‘learning styles’ – her argument is that there is absolutely no research base underlying the theory of learning styles. So the other goal for me in 565 will be to try and dig more at what kind of research we’re doing on these new techniques; how can we enjoy the ‘coolness’ factor while satisfying our academic selves that what we’re doing is grounded in actual progress for students.
Laura