My blog updates have been lagging lately. When you use Twitter and Facebook, you end up not making time to write longer, consolidated posts.

Well, this past first semester, I taught a course called “Introduction to E-book Creation.” It was centered around iBooks. Four curious students enrolled in the class.

In this course, we covered everything from planning the content of an e-book to designing and creating it. The photos show the final presentation. Students from my other classes also came to watch the presentations. One group created a guidebook for Kenroku-en Garden, incorporating panoramic photos that are difficult to include in paper media, as well as videos that are impossible to include in print.

Perhaps because the members of the other group belonged to a music-related club, they created a textbook for trumpet beginners. This was also very interesting. Not only were trumpet sounds included, but the two creators’ characters appeared in a manga-style story, similar to the direct mail sent by a certain major correspondence education company.

Technically, knowledge of HTML5 and CSS is sufficient, but I think it was difficult because they also had to understand the ePub format, the characteristics of e-book development tools, and how HTML is processed within them. It was also unexpected that InDesign is surprisingly difficult to use. I consider it a good authoring tool, but there were significant issues, such as the layout on InDesign differing greatly from the layout on iBooks. The tools are also expensive. I would like to use something like Adobe’s Publishing Suite, but it seems to cost money. We are using it for class, and the students aren’t planning to use the books they develop for commercial purposes. I’ll have to look for more user-friendly tools for next year, even if it means spending a little money.
Information related to e-book development is also information that can be monetized, so the fact that there was little publicly available information was one of the factors that made it difficult, but even so, the students were proactive in searching for sources of information.

Twitter was a medium that connected me with the students, but it also served as a source of information. While appointments and requests for me were often made via Twitter, it was also effective for finding information.

I feel that this course has great benefits, such as experiencing the development of content that runs on a new medium called the iPad, rather than just creating web pages with HTML and CSS, and making full use of tools that run on the iPad. And above all, through the collaborative work of creating an e-book as a team, I wanted them to learn a lot about what is necessary to act, learn, plan, execute, and complete tasks as a team. This is the goal of this course, “Introduction to E-book Creation.”

After the final presentation, I talked about that. I concluded the class by explaining what is important about learning and acting as a team: “Even if the final product, the e-book, is a failure, I want you not to forget the process of creating it as a team. I want you to look back on what you learned in that process and make use of it in your future student life and career.” I feel that they have changed through this course.

Also, something that hadn’t happened before is that although the students in my “Online Communication” and “Introduction to E-book Creation” courses did not overlap, they interacted with each other on Twitter and recognized each other. Of course, Twitter has only recently become popular, so throughout my time as a part-time lecturer, I had never connected students taking different classes, but I realized that depending on how you use it, Twitter has the potential to connect the students I teach, make them aware of not only the course content but also each other’s interests, and lead them to a new place of learning that expands new human networks. In fact, one of the students in “Introduction to E-book Creation” was monitoring the content of the “Online Communication” class on Twitter, and said they wanted to participate on days when they didn’t have a part-time job, and they did participate. And as mentioned above, one of the students in “Online Communication” participated in the final presentation of “Introduction to E-book Creation.” This is surprising for a general education course. In the end, there was even a proposal from the students: “Why don’t we have a dinner party for the students of your two classes?”… This isn’t a seminar, you know. Even though it’s a general subject that students take for the purpose of earning credits. I was happy.

I would like to offer a course like this again next year. I want to make it a better course by applying the lessons learned this year. Maybe I can use Facebook to supplement the class next year. Maybe I’ll do that. I will also conduct this kind of project-based, student-led class in the second semester. One of them will be to thoroughly learn the power of discussion, the power of presentation, and logical thinking skills. Despite being a general subject, there are weekly assignments, and the workload is high. Therefore, I will only accept serious students. I’m not expecting dozens of students. I want to do it with a few students who are serious, who are thinking seriously about their future, and who have a strong desire to work hard. I decided to conduct this class because I wanted to do something about the bad habits of students at this university, but unintentionally, it seems like it might become a class related to the Employment Ability GP? (Has it reached the ears of the Vice President???)

I don’t really understand what is meant by “employment ability” (I laugh at such fabricated naming), but I just want to give the current Kanazawa University students the skills they lack the most, so I’m just going to do it. I only want people who are serious about changing themselves to come.

I’m looking forward to the second semester as well.