Hello, antilibrarians!
This edition of the Analects is on the shorter side, because I mainly want to tell you about an event we're hosting soon on Hyperlink:
The Future of Textbooks
Sat. March 13 @ 2pm EST
At Hyperlink we focus on live, interactive courses, as well as more casual clubs and peer-driven learning. Active experiences supported by content, rather than the other way around.
But the content we use in learning — books, videos, lesson plans, assignments and other resources — is important, and we see course creators exploring interesting ways to create and share learning materials, from "micro-textbooks" to digital publishing tools to git repos and other iterative online resources.
This event will be a fairly casual roundtable session, looking at interesting examples / projects, and thinking about possible things to build and explore further.
A sampling of things we may talk about:
- "Textbooks" in the most expansive sense
- How course materials might integrate with curriculum design and publishing workflows
- Open textbooks; branches and forks; adaptable and learner-generated material
- Social mechanisms for reading and writing together in learning contexts
- Artifacts, portfolios, reflections, and other modes of learner interactivity
We'd love for you to join us. And if you're working on something related, you're welcome to do a quick show and tell.
Finally, a few references & examples to give a sense of the sort of things we're thinking about:
- Andy Matuschak's work, including ideas on "mnemonic media" and "timeful texts", and interactive text experiments with Michael Nielsen
- Interactive online or app-based textbooks like Mathigon and Open Music Theory
- Free, open online textbooks like those from OpenStax
- This very intriguing hyperreadings essay + platform
- Powerful open source academic publishing platforms like Manifold
- Networked versions of classic books like those in the Roam Library project
- Various other web-published books, as in this books that are websites Arena collection
We'd love to add to this list, and think about some experiments we might try to integrate these kinds of ideas into the experience of teaching and learning on Hyperlink.
Hope to see you there!
Brendan