Isn't this very old hat or are you assigned to come up with "web 2.0" ideas which will obviously be completely different? :-)

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Web 2.0, pah, now is the time for Web 3.0!

Don't ask me though, I didn't set myself this silly assignment did I? Anyway, we've got about one week to come up with something actually or at least ostensibly innovative, or else all of us will be sacrificed to the blood god Khorne.

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Oh, I did exactly that for an engineering department at a university in my last job (and still work in the educational technology area).

Give me more details, and I can point you in sensible directions.

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That'd be great! Basically they want to offer these engineering bods textbooks that are not only cheaper, due to some dodgy third world connections, but also innovative through "digital differentiation" and possessed of "wow factor". What this actually entails seems to be for us poor employees to find out, and for our CEO to unveil with visionary fervour next week. The company seems to have a good track record of producing multipurposed content, so it's a question of what purposes it would be actually useful and exciting to put that content to, I guess. What do engineering students need that they don't get? I can't believe they asked a classicist to work this out.

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Classicists, as you well know, can be relied upon to work anything out, in their multi-disciplinary way. There was engineering in the Classical era, or did you miss that chapter in H.H. Scullard?

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The problem is exactly the same one that I encountered in my Philosophy finals though. I wrote about Plato in my Plato paper, Aristotle in my Aristotle paper, Plato in my Epistemology paper, and Aristotle in my Ethics paper.

As far as classicists are concerned, the supposed "advances" of the past 2000 years are basically trivial footnotes.

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What sort of engineering is it?

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All of it! The ones offered by most Canadian university programs are Civil, Computer, Mechanical, Chemical and Electrical, so I guess they're the most significant.

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OK, assuming you're after content rather than environments, then you've there are roughly the following options

Videos - The elec eng students we had really really loved the MathTutor videos for instance (google for them), which really aren't that complicated. They had textbooks with the same content but lots of them just preferred watching videos to reading

Podcasts - probably doesn't work so well with engineering which is quite a visual subject, but lots of students like

Formative assessment - always really popular with students, lots of questions on topics that students can use for revision and get instant feedback on (multiple choice, true false, numerical)

'Simulations'/'learning objects' - subjects like engineering often have lots of stuff that is better explained with interactive animations of various sorts. There are some packages specifically designed for building such things (can't think of the name of the most popular offhand) or you can custom-build in e.g. Flash. Take a look e.g. the Merlot learning object repository for examples of this kind of thing (not sure offhand what it has for engineering).

The other perspective to look at this from is that of the teachers - although it may be the students buying the books it's the teachers who will be telling the students what books to buy. If you can provide resources that make it easier for teachers to teach the course e.g. material for VLEs and the like, assessment systems, electronic voting systems or 'lesson plans', then you may be onto a winner.

It may also be worth seeing what the HE Academy subject centre for engineering provide. I can't remember offhand if they're one of the good ones.

Obviously there's also a difference between what's going to make a difference pedagogically and what's going to sell :-)

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Awesome! Great to have some ideas from an actual engineering perspective - I owe you one :)

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Is the workbook to remain as solely a paper object, or can it have accompanying websites, CDs, etc?

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"Digital differentiation" is the big buzzword of the week, so it's all about providing things to magnify the use of the boring old paper object, really.

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I'd like textbooks to come with a CD containing a hyperlinked copy of the same book. This includes both links to the contents of the book and links to bibliography entries for things that are not explained (so that I know which book I need to get out of the library or buy in order to fill the corresponding gap in my knowledge).

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Slightly more usefully I would want to abandon this whole text book malarky and have a set of linked information modules which reference each other in a less linear fashion (i.e. instead of a chapter 2 following a chapter 1 there would be several chapters or module equivalents which would be referenced from 1 and the same for all chapters/modular thingies). The same with external references where possible.
I would want synonym searching/automatic synonym lists (of those present in this information set for example) for searches.
A range of multimedia (coo trendy) rather than just pictures, so maybe for engineering 3D SVG example diagrams or something. Videos of exisiting buildings following the current design principle to be illustrated that kind of stuff.
Hyperlinking in the text - web 2.0!

That kind of thing.
metame used to quite a lot of this.

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Sounds pretty much the sort of thing we're meant to be thinking of... sweet! Can you give an example of synonym searching in action, to check I understand it?

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I know no engineering student worth their steel would be searching this but say if someone typed the word "building" into the search box the system would either search automatically, return a list of, whatever the synonyms for such as "edifice".
They could maybe tick a box for loose relations/children or something and get "house", "sky scraper" etc.

It basically would require you (actually preferrably a team of your company and the department data experts - also known as a very bored person fishing through text books if necessary) a map of the common terms (taxonomy maybe) and their synonyms. Or if you fancied or could persuade them to pay you to produce something more comprehensive maybe even an ontology - see the multiple links between nodes!
Google if you need to - but beware the context - information management should help.

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Coo, call me a tedious old dinosaur but we were doing all these things in my last job but one, in the mid 90s, in what we pointedly used not to call Web 1.0. Surely there must be some new whizzy paradigms since then?

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I bet William Caxton Jr was lamenting along similar lines in Printers' Guild brainstorming sessions in the early 16th century...

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"But these days we can use italic typefaces for a fully-integrated emphasis display, William!"

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Ummm. nope.
That's it.
Isn't web 2.0 glorious :-)

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If it's that easy... I hereby declare myself to be Matt 2.0! INVEST IN ME, BUSINESS MAGNATES OF THE WORLD!

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No, no, Matt 2.0 is all about the users.

Basically, you're the same old Matt, but now we can make comments on everything you do.

And we can configure things so that you appear in a sidebar. And we can access you from our mobiles.

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Tsk, all you need to do is get my number off me and you can do all of those things already!

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linked information modules which reference each other in a less linear fashion

Although personally I'd want such a thing to still have an optional linear order (I think this might be what is called "breadcrumbs"). Because sometimes, with a book, you need to read the whole thing. That's not much fun if it's arranged as a clever web of associated concepts.

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not sure how true this is generally but i hate reading long/difficult things on the screen. so i would still favour wordy stuff on paper.
a non-linear structure could still work with that though - the 'book' would be just a collection of all the wordy stuff printed out, so when you settle down to read something it's there already. index tabs or page numbers referenced in the linky on-linear info thingy (sorry that was the wrong way around - you use the whizzy modern thing mostyl, but when you need to read.. it's like having printed appendices to a CD-rom).
an obvious way to use multimedia would be to do stuff printed paper pages cannot - 3D models, time-based stuff, (like for fluid dynamics maybe), things that you can take 3D 'layers' off, for civil engineers maybe.
i dunno. i am not engineer.

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Engineers do not read things. Many of them cannot read things. If you give them more than a couple of pages of stuff to read, they will probably not read any of it. If you give them n lines of stuff to read, they will start reading at line n/2, assuming that the first half is irrelevant waffle.

Basically, what engineers want out of a textbook (or any other course material) is that it has to be absolutely focussed on whatever they are trying to learn, and it has to have as few words as possible. They don't mind textbooks which are well organised so they can find two or three sentences telling them how to do something, and can get back quickly to doing that rather than reading about it.

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Gosh, it sounds like you work for the same company as me.

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All companies are pretty much the same, aren't they? And every one of them convinced of their own unique potential.

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Engineers? They want a pop-up textbook. Not just as a gimmick (though that could be fun - imagine a pop-up choose-your-own-adventure book, only here it's a quiz, and if you pick a wrong answer then you turn to a page where a dunce's cap pops up and out at you) but only where there's something three-dimensional to demonstrate that can't properly be shown in two dimensions - or, alternatively, with a selection of two-dimensional projections accompanying the 3-D pop-up.

Then there's an accompanying CD with a picture of the 3-D pop-up item as it travels THROUGH TIME, with a variety of different stresses and sources and external forces applied to it. Compare and contrast in four dimensions! How could you beat that, man? You'd need to use a stick so large it would have to be sent by courier.

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From what I recall of my university education, I was generally tickled if the texts actually had the correct answer and/or provided an explanation of why said answer was correct (unless of course it was of the 2+2 variety).

A couple courses also had digital texts as well, usually on CD or could be downloaded or somesuch. I found them mostly to be a pain, because they wouldn't work for all computer systems or usually required the most lastest version of some software which students or even university computer labs often didn't have. I'm also one of those that likes to mark pages with sticky notes for future reference. Hard to do that with CDs.

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You mean these products didn't allow persistent annotation of their learning objects? For shame!

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oh come now, that would be far too simple. Besides if it were that simple, the engineers would question its validity or assume it to be outright wrong. They like things to be complex and obtuse, it gives them the excuse to drink more beer in order to help things make sense!

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Well, um, for me I like books to study to. If there's something specific I want to read on the 'net I tend to print it out and read it. The great difficulty with using lots of technology in these things is that's it's superseded by better technology every three or so months, meaning that within two years you have the equivalent of a child's toy that adds to the world's growing waste problem and is generally a thorn in everyone's side. Plus if you had something with links in it or 'net related, the links wouldn't be there in X amount of time, giving the SuperBook a fairly short life.

But that's not what you needed to hear at all. : )

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It would seem that the only way to get round this is to have a ringbindered textbook, which comes with a subscription, where they send you updates every month.

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I put myself in the position of both teacher and student. I failed to see the need for a textbook in either case.

I put myself in the position of a teacher, which prompted me to barricade myself in my bedroom for a day, and refuse to come out.

I put myself in the position of a student, and almost immediately found myself travelling on a National Express coach, intent of going somewhere to play MTG, with a vague sense of guilt that I should probably be in a lecture somewhere.

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Given that the consensus seems to be "well I'd rather just have a book" maybe that's the revolutionary principle you need to propose. I could send you loads of statistics on how people read more slowly from screens and retain less information etc.

That said, stuff screens are good for: finding information easily; short digestible chunks; having a built-in way to tell what you've read if the arrangement of the chunks is non-linear. None of this is startlingly new of course but you could present it as "lessons we've learned from the 90s about what works and what doesn't".

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Diagnostic tests for each chapter or section, which are marked by computer, with the results going to the student and (if desired by the lecturer) the lecturer.

Something similar to this:

http://www.cimt.plymouth.ac.uk/interactive/mat/default.htm

Interactive versions of the exercises for each chapter with additional questions. Students could do questions set by the lecturer or choose their own for extra practice. Again, results sent to lecturer and student for set work and student for practice work.

E.g.:

http://www.mathcentre.ac.uk/resources.php/265

Step by step solutions to questions where one line of the solution is revealed at a time.

E.g.:

http://www.mathsnet.net/asa2/2004/c45parts.html

Support - links to explanations of some of the assumed knowledge which might not have been covered in sufficient detail.

The option for staff (and possibly students) to add annotations: comments about particular sections, links to sites they have found helpful, etc.

Some/all of the above to be posted online so that other people can use it... ;-)

I'll keep thinking.

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Sorry for the lack of hyperlinks - brain not yet quite there yet.

Also: 3D models and animations to illustrate particular points and concepts - not just a building or bridge you could rotate at the click of a mouse, but also a real-life concept, mathematical modelling of that concept and associated graphs all being displayed at the same time so you can see how they are related. This could be made even better by the ability to change a parameter and see what happens.

Video clips.

Probably much more online with only basic notes, examples and exercises printed out (but the option to print more).

Something which can be modified as things change rather than completely rewritten.

Support for interactive whiteboards e.g. premade flipcharts and Activote quizzes.

There may even be more ideas after the BETT show!

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I like this answer. Exercises online is like doing a personality quiz, whereas exercises from a book is like, well, something that most engineers wouldn't bother to actually do. Having a shower?

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Personalised textbooks containing only the things they actually need to know, plus access to good online supporting material. Have a look at Pearson Choices for an example.

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It sounds to me, in my poor ignorance, as if your job has nothing at all to do with devising genuinely useful educational reference materials and everything to do with making absolutely sure your CEO sounds cutting edge.

With this in mind, there is no need to canvas the actual requirements of students or teachers, or to know anything about the subject of engineering. Such things will merely distract you. You need two things:

(1) an understanding of how clever your CEO is, and the ability to craft something that makes him sound just a little bit cleverer than that
(2) an understanding of his audience and precisely which idiotic buzzwords happen to be de rigeur in their circles this week

I get the impression, from the wording of the question, that the sort of buzzwords they'll be comfortable with are about two years out of date. I'd therefore suggest a "Wisdom of Crowds" approach, redesigning the humble textbook so as to help its "users" learn and understand things as a group rather than as individuals. A textbook that links to a tailored social networking site would probably hit all the right buttons.

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You are 100% spot on, of course. There is no requirement to actually be amazing, just to make him sound it when he gives his presentation. Plus there are definitely people holding a significant torch for tailored social networking sites in this company...

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Probably much too late by now, but I've been pondering this a bit and come up with something I'd actually like to see.

A website throws a bunch of multiple choice questions at you. Each question has to be answered on a fairly tight time limit. At the end of a sequence of questions, the site recommends which chapters you should be rereading and which exercises you should try for practice.

Works on the basis that students mostly only touch their textbooks when revising and this helps them to focus their efforts efficiently.

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This is totally where we're trying to go! Good call.

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Do your own fecking work!

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But I'm not qualified!

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Hyperlinked text version is good.
Annotatable copy is good.

Only thing I didn't spot that I'd like to see in biology texts is the use of animations where previously, there were just static figures. Think how much easier flat-pack furniture would be with video instructions, regardless of woeful translation.

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Ask Paul. He's an engistine. He can be your guinea hog, and will probably shine your shoes if you ask him to. He'll argue at first but then realize it's best for everyone, because that is the order in which he does things.

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Actually, he has mentioned that there are two competing programs that the U of A currently uses for online testing. One is good, and the other seems to be flaw-riddled. A diagnostic that shows skill level for concepts seemed to pique his interest, and engineers already use a facebook group for discussion of homework and exams with high frequency. Some hideous and efficient congolomerate of these services would appeal to most engineers I would imagine.

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