What if my world was iworld

This fortnight the biggest chunk of work I've done is to go over to the dark side of proprietary ebook formats, the apple ibook.  I have started using ibooks author on my mac at home to generate the example content for my DCLP project.

Part of my project was to use the action mapping process for two example units of competency.  The first was Use Business Technology, which I was going to specifically tailor to event management, something that I have taught before but when I did, was very unhappy with the resource that I was using; it was just a generic workbook that the students wrote it.

While the template that I have used to write the content in is a word document formatted using course genie styles, I didn't want to have a standard wimba punch out, or have to bother our multimedia technicians with non-essential work, or spend hours in dreamweaver tweaking css.  When David Drinkall suggested an ebook session at the next conference it inspired me to update my mac with the latest os and download the free ibooks author software.  Yes, I know the output is only good for ipads, but I'm going to guess that when we go to the face to face workshop next week that the ipad will be the dominant (if not only) e-reading that isn't a computer or phone.  Can't say I've ever seen a kindle at a conference and I know that there is a huge amount of users in the iworld.


If you have an Ipad with the latest os and updated ibooks app you should be able to download the current version of my ibook with this link: Use_Business_Technology.ibooks. It's not finished, still a fair bit of content to go in, but the basic layout and some simple interactions are there.

This month I also sent out a copy of my template, action map and a survey.  Got about 33% respondents, with a good mix of feedback.

Something that isn't progressing too much is our April webquest, a group activity Colleen setup which has successfully demonstrated the difficulty of online collaboration, especially with time-poor participants,  though I'm sure it will come together at the last minute. I've got a powerpoint template setup which will use links instead of linear navigation and am going to try an encourage us to record audio to use as narration on image rich slides that will have small amounts of text.  Todays webconference is setup for us to work on the project, hope the whole team shows up.......