I have generated few posts lately because I have been updating our textbook to make it available for the Fall semester. I have written about our involvement in writing textbooks several times before (use the book tag at the end of this post if you are interested in reading earlier posts). We have had a book used in the preparation of inservice teachers and the continued development of practicing teachers since 1996. We worked with a commercial publisher (Houghton-Mifflin and then Cengage) through 5 editions and when we wanted to offer a different approach (a Primer selling for $29 augmented with online resources) we could not reach an agreement and then decided to continue with our experiment by selling our Primer through Amazon ($9). Much of this adventure and our rationale is explained in previous posts.
One of our core ideas was that proven authors should write continuously rather than rush every three years to produce the next edition. The combination of a Primer and online resources allows this approach. We reasoned that in a field that moves as fast as the application of technology this makes a lot of sense. What I have been working on for the past few months was the update to the Primer.
I found that my update was more challenging than past updates. It was time to do the update, but the pandemic and how K12 education was forced to change as a consequence left me uncertain how best to position our view of technology integration for the future. Online experiences will undoubtedly play a larger role despite the negative reaction of many educators to their experiences during the past year. The core principles of how learning happens and how educators must provide external experiences to optimize the internal cognitive work of students have not changed. Our best guess is that we better appreciate how to use technology to better individualize learner experiences and part of how this will happen will require educators to function more often as instructional designers rather than rely on commercial instructional content.
I guess we will see as we try to get educators to take a look at our update and make decisions about how best to develop the skills of future and practicing teachers.
I learned a couple of things that may be of value to others who like to work in Google docs. I write almost exclusively in docs and this has been the case for a while. I like working online because I work using many different devices in many locations. I also like the way I can organize the many resources I use in one place. Anyway, here are the issues.
First, I learned that large documents (i.e., a book) cannot be saved as a pdf from docs. I was totally confused by this at the end of work as I needed a pdf to load into Kindle Create. I could download in other formats, but not pdf and I could swear I have never had this difficulty before. Anyway, there is evidently some issue with file size. The solution was simple – print to pdf. This is an old hack, but evidently it works on your own computer and does not stress Google.
Second, I needed to create a Table of Contents that links to the beginning of individual chapters. I have encountered this challenge before and I know I solved the problem in a different way before. Unfortunately, when I am working under a deadline, I frequently solve a problem and then don’t keep an account of how I did it. A few years later and I can’t remember. This time I used the capacity to add internal links in Docs. You add a bookmark at the beginning of each chapter (see bookmark under the Insert dropdown menu), list chapter titles on a TOC page, and then link from each item on the list to the appropriate bookmark. You should see the bookmarks you have created when you select text and then the same link icon you use for external links.
Finally, the last challenge I am trying to resolve is to get Amazon to identify the newer version of our book as an update. This is supposed to work when you upload a new version in place of an older version, but I have not been successful in accomplishing this change. When you update an existing work, the folks who purchased your original work are supposed to be given the opportunity to update their copy at no cost. I know this works because I see the “update” option from time to time in my own Kindle library. This also means any link you have used to reference your book in the Amazon store still works. The downside is that Amazon will continue to list your book by the original publication date which is misleading to new potential buyers. I am waiting a few days to see if the “update” link appears for the old version I have in my Kindle library and then I will have to decide what to do.
