Argumentation and Digital Textbook Selection Technology

Argumentation Community Group,
 
Greetings.  Digital textbooks are an emerging technology and will greatly enhance education.  In the United States, various textbook selection processes exist with some at the state level and others per local school district.

While some have considered web-based appstore models for the sale of textbooks to schoolboards, others consider models with schoolboard-local databases and client-side software.  Where each schoolboard could have each candidate digital textbook in their database and where each schoolboard member could make use of computers in their group processes, collaborative software, we could see that a niche exists for such tools and equipment and that argumentation technologies could enhance such software.

The number of digital textbook options available for schoolboards to select from is expected to increase and, as the dataset is a large number of books, the topic has an additional applicability to library science and to the digital humanities.  Digital books will have, beyond ink and paper books, hypertext, multimedia, interactive 3D graphics, SMIL, navigational, user interface, and other features.  Discussions about and selection processes of digital textbooks are expected to be more complex than those about previous ink and paper textbooks.

With regard to linking into digital textbooks, we can envision URI formats, e.g. EPUB Canonical Fragment Identifier (EPUBCFI) Specification (http://idpf.org/epub/linking/cfi/epub-cfi.html or Media Fragments URI (http://www.w3.org/TR/media-frags/, http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-media-frags-recipes-20111201/), for referencing and linking to broader instantaneous configurations of digital textbooks, including combinations of hypertext, multimedia, and interactive 3D graphics.  The capabilities to quote from digital textbooks and to utilize hyperlinks with digital textbooks are important for both collaborative studying scenarios and discussions about digital textbooks.

There are additionally the topics of indexing, searching, and retrieving digital textbook content, hypertext, multimedia and interactive 3D graphics, including for both students' desktop search and scholarship scenarios and schoolboards' navigation, discussion, and selection of textbooks from a large number of digital textbooks.



Kind regards,

Adam Sobieski