The Library as Publisher�How Pressbooks Supports Knowledge Sharing
Steel Wagstaff, Educational Client Manager, Pressbooks�WiLSWorld | Madison, WI | July 23, 2019
Slides posted to Twitter @steelwagstaff this afternoon
Slide template by SlidesCarnival, released under a CC-BY license
Hi, I’m Steel
Earned MLIS & Ph.D. [English] from University of Wisconsin-Madison
Taught English lit & composition courses and served as administrator for a freshman writing program
Worked 6+ years as an educational technology consultant in the College of Letters & Science at UW-Madison
Ran grassroots OER publishing program at UW-Madison, grew to love Pressbooks, joined Pressbooks full-time in November 2018.
What is a publisher?
On “value added” and library values
Publishing books was difficult & expensive
For most of human history, making even one copy of a print book has been costly.
Printing required significant capital outlays, technical expertise, skilled labor, & time.
Image credit: Jan Van Der Street, Wellcome Collection.
What Publishers Do
Publishers have historically provided value by filling 3 broad roles:
Image credit: Renate & Roger Rössing, Deutsche Fotothek
Scholarly Publishing in Digital Era is Weird
For scholarly & educational publishing today, the value provided by traditional publishers is less clear.
Image credit: Jeff Miller, UW-Madison.
Elise Schimke holding a copy of her photo book, Libraries of UW-Madison.
Librarians can help!
Libraries are helping!
Libraries, both academic and public, have become increasingly involved in the production and sharing of knowledge as publishers.
Two important directions have been
Image credit: Meggie Wright, Twitter
Open content on � open platforms?
The struggle over the future of educational content
Original Art by Michelle Reed
Libraries already understand free!
Where else can any member of the community get a card that entitles them to borrow, at no charge, just about any media that has ever been widely published?
Image credit: Stenaros.com
The Permissions of OER
The 5Rs
In addition to being free, these five basic permissions (as described by David Wiley) are constitutive of “open content.”
Retain
The right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
Reuse
The right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
Revise
The right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
Remix
The right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new
Redistribute
The right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give copies away to students)
Graphs depicting the US consumer price index for ‘educational books & supplies’ since 1967; since March 2014 [5 years]; & since September 2016 [2 ½ years]. Generated May 2019 at Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis & U.S. Bureau of Labor websites.
Major educational publishers have abandoned the traditional ‘textbook’.
We live in an era of courseware.
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Growth in the market of digital solutions ... enables us to capture a greater share of the total market, given the embedded and gradeable/assessable orientation of our digital products as well as lack of alternative substitutes. … [H]igher education core digital gross sales have grown at ~11% CAGR over the last three years. … Our revenues are now predominantly derived from our courseware technology. … Our sales, marketing & services teams have shifted over the last few years from a textbook to a software sales & support model.
— Cengage’s Annual Report to Shareholders (2018)
OER Delivery = Content + Platform
CONTENT
The actual book, activity, or object that learners use
Examples: everything in the Open Textbook Library, Merlot, OER Commons, & LibreTexts libraries; OpenStax books.
Content can be copyrighted, permissively licensed, or in the public domain. Openly licensed textual content is increasingly common, but requires a platform to edit, remix, integrate w/ LMS.
PLATFORM
Where content is authored, edited, assembled, & distributed.
Examples: Mindtap; Connect; Revel; Top Hat Textbook; Open Author; Waymaker; OpenStax CNX [retired]; Pressbooks
Platforms can be proprietary or open-source. Can be free/$ to use (for creators); free/$ to implement (for instructors or institutions); and free/$ to access (for learners).
Courseware is a mixture of content and platform, each of which can be licensed separately.
Content is increasingly OER, but most platforms remain proprietary.
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Our Platform Principles
Non-proprietary
Is open-source & uses open-source components
Pressbooks is an online book publishing platform that makes it easy to generate clean, well-formatted books in multiple outputs. Pressbooks is built on WordPress and is open source.
— Hugh McGuire, Pressbooks founder
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Common Uses for Pressbooks
Replace $$$ Textbooks
Free textbooks for high-enrollment courses
Remixed versions of existing OER
Manuals, guides, handbooks, course ‘teasers’
Copyleft Anthologies
Collections of Creative-Commons licensed work
Anthologies of work published (in the US) before 1923
Government docs or other public material
Student/Community Authored Projects
University-Community Partnerships [GLAMs]
Renewable assignments, “object studies,” field work
Student writing, class projects, ePortfolios
Is Open Source
At left: Pressbooks.org
At right: Pressbooks on GitHub
Each Pressbooks instance is a centrally-managed network.
At left: Each Pressbooks network features a sortable catalog of publicly listed books
Webbook Homepage
Each book has a unique web address. Books can have different structures, themes, licenses & permissions. Each book’s homepage includes:
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Editing Interface
AT RIGHT: Pressbooks features a standard WordPress visual/text HTML editor. Editing text and inserting media is as easy as using a word processor.
Many collaborators can work together on the same book with different roles & permissions (admin, editor, author, contributor, etc.).
Organizing a Book
AT RIGHT: Pressbooks features a drag-and-drop chapter organization interface. You can create front & back matter, as well as two-level ‘part’ & ‘chapter’ organization for main content.
Content can be published/hidden from web & included/excluded in exports (ePUB, PDF, etc.) separately.
Lets users come & go freely
Avoids vendor lock-in by allowing easy import & export of content
Importing Content
If you find openly licensed content that isn’t already in Pressbooks, you can import it. We’ve added shortcode support to make it even easier to import from Word docs.
At left: Pressbooks export page. We support one-click creation of a dozen different formats.
At right: Pressbooks PDF export options.
Can be made personal/local
Supports open ‘permissions’ by letting users quickly clone, revise, & remix content
Selecting An Appropriate License
At right: Licensing options at both the book [L] and chapter [R] level.
Cloning Content
Any public, openly licensed book can be quickly cloned from one Pressbooks network to another.
Below: Source attribution in a cloned book.
At Left: A view of the ‘Show Comparison’ tool for a cloned book which has been edited from the original.
Plays well with others
Uses broadly accepted standards
Uses Broadly Accepted Standards
Supported Web Standards
HTML5 + CSS
Schema.org [microdata]
Supported Export Formats
EPUB
MOBI
XHTML & XML
ODT
Accessibility Standards
Supported IMS Global Standards
LTI 1.1
Thin Common Cartridge
Supported SSO Protocols
Pressbooks LTI Integration
AT RIGHT: Users can produce Thin Common Cartridge exports with LTI links and bring books directly into the LMS.
Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tqL-9z_fFA.
ABOVE: Pressbooks allows network managers to set up SSO with CAS or SAML2 authentication systems.
Is inclusive & participatory
Invites and enables public (& private) standards-based web annotation
Open Web Annotation
The Hypothesis plugin adds flexible annotation layers which invite public annotation, ‘publisher’ commentary, class discussion or editorial review in private groups, and/or highlighting and personal note taking (marginalia).
AT RIGHT: A Pressbooks chapter with public annotation layer embedded in Canvas.
Web annotation can include more �than text on text
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At left: Pressbooks chapter with public annotation
See more ideas for using Pressbooks & Hypothesis in Steel & Jeremy Dean’s OpenEd week talk.
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Helps learners achieve their goals
Includes interactive components where feedback is designed for learners first
Embedded Interactive Elements
AT RIGHT: Authors can add interactive components (like YouTube/Vimeo videos, PHET simulations, open assessments, TimeLine JS, and more) just by pasting the URL into the editor.
Examples of embedded media in Pressbooks:
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H5P Interactive Activities
PressbooksEDU networks allow users to make interactive H5P activities directly from the Pressbooks dashboard. These H5P activities are included when books containing them are cloned.
AT RIGHT: An H5P multiple choice quiz being created from the Pressbooks dashboard.
ABOVE: Full list of 40+ unique H5P Content Types at https://h5p.org/ content-types-and-applications
H5P activities in Pressbooks. Left: An image hotspot interactive built by Emily Hunt at Indiana University. Right: A flashcard activity built by Naomi Salmon at UW-Madison.
Graceful Fallback in Exports
Placeholder links for interactive elements are automatically added to export formats which do not support interactivity.
AT RIGHT: An embedded YouTube video as seen in an example PDF export file.
Português Para Principiantes is a Brazilian Portuguese language textbook first published in 1964 (last revised in 1993). The digital edition of this free, online text now includes 30 audio dialogues, 1000+ vocabulary words (pronounced by native speakers), and 120+ interactive H5P activities.
Skeptical of surveillance
Only permits ethical, learner-centered analytics and reporting
Learner-Centered Analytics
Pressbooks does not track or store any information about learner activity in our texts. See our privacy policy.
We have begun to talk with existing clients and others in the open education community about what ethical, learner-centered analytics might look like.
Two possibilities we are considering:
Using Pressbooks as � your open platform
Understanding your options
Pressbooks Public
For public libraries, Pressbooks Public (a version of Pressbooks best suited for self-publishing authors) is now available to every resident of the state of Wisconsin. Access has been provided by the Wisconsin Public Library Consortium with grant support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
New WiLS Partnership
We now offer a 30% discount on PressbooksEDU hosted silver networks to WiLS cooperative purchasing members.
Pressbooks has already been adopted by dozens of global educational institutions, including UW-Madison, UW-Milwaukee, and several members of the Wisconsin Technical College System.
Learn More About Pressbooks
Questions?
Email: steel@pressbooks.com
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