On Friday, I was speaking about electronic learning materials to the Technical Publishers Association. I submitted five provocative arguments:

Electronic materials are going to displace books. Book will follow the digital path taken by music, videos, and newspapers. What Wikipedia and online dictionaries have done to publications will soon affect textbooks.

Quality is not tied to publication format. Quality is a complex issue, and depends much more on other factors than on a publishing platform. For many uses, the quality of open-source material is sufficient.

The added value of e-materials comes from online features. The most important benefits for users are availability, search, links, interactivity, and media elements.

Publishers have not yet been able to develop an effective business model. E-book stores don’t generate much revenue, commercial libraries that charge monthly fee are just starting up, as well as publishers of electronic educational materials. In small language communities like Finland, It’s difficult to apply business models from the far larger, English-speaking world.

Ultimately, ease of use will determine the winner. Usability studies show how crucial a good user experience is to the adoption of new activity. If people can read your book on the device they prefer, without complex logins or downloads, and if you can manage to monetize it, you are a winner.

I’ve been reading The Handbook of University Pedagogy as part of a course I’m taking. Most of the articles deal with abstract learning theories and the constructive alignment of instruction, both of which are interesting issues to reflect on with regard to your own teaching. Unlike the typical academic approach toward education, heavy on statistics and theory, the handbook also addresses some practical applications. The book includes lists of ways to make lectures more active, such as reflections, chats, debates, group work and writing tasks. Most of the methods are well known, but I picked up one fresh idea: the motivation line. This is a physical line or continuum: students place themselves along a line, with enthusiastic and motivated individuals toward one end and those less so toward the other. The learning atmosphere becomes visible, and leads naturally to discussion of important issues of motivation. I plan to try the motivation line in my next course.

Last weekend, the Educa Fair for education professionals was held at the Helsinki Expo and Convention Centre. The exhibitors were mostly publishers, libraries, educational institutions, and associations. The education trade union sponsored the lecture program, and this year’s themes were changes in the learning environment and shifts in the role of the teacher. Change has already occurred in the student’s information environment, but teachers’ attitudes change slowly. In many Educa speeches, the online environment was presented as questionable, traditional books as reliable and appropriate. In the same subordinate clause, speakers bundle up and condemn Wikipedia, Facebook, online dictionaries, e-journals, e-books and databases. How on earth does text become unreliable simply by being transmitted from paper to screen? Will the teacher’s slide become poorer when it is published openly on the net? Attitudes towards online activities are unjustifiably skeptical and negative. In any case, since the students’ learning environment has changed, a better theme for the fair might have been “A Change in Attitude”.

I watched Kai Halttunen’s video on how to guide the collecting of information. I got excited about the task in which students were invited to draw their own information horizons. The horizon is made up of concentric circles on which students place their information sources: the primary closest, then the secondary, and so on. The task is suited to many purposes: it helps to evaluate the sources, deepens the searches, and broadens the range of materials. Also in everyday life you can use this method to trace the sources of speech topics and points of view. The more complex a person’s information horizon, the more interesting material he is likely to produce on social media. If the horizon takes in only a few mainstream media, the person’s discussion tends to be limited to the topics introduced by those sources. So a glance at the information horizon is like the sign at the passport office: “Document Checking.”

My tour through Finnish e-textbook companies continues this week with eOppi Ltd . My guide last Tuesday was the company’s development manager Johannes Pernaa. eOppi, whose name comes from the Finnish word for “lesson,” was founded in 2011 by Simo Veistola, an experienced textbook writer. The company has so far published around 70 e-books and other materials, and works with some 120 textbook writers. The materials are published on the Pedanet and OnEdu platforms. While these are easy enough for an author to use, eOppi prefers to work through editors to achieve consistent quality. The materials are free for teachers; schools pay 5 euros per student for a two-year license. The authors can choose to be paid either on a fixed percentage — which is higher than that from hard-copy publishers — or on a lower percentage that rises after a certain sales volume. The eOppi books seem to compete well with traditional books and add value with their media elements. Their American Geography offers a portfolio for students to collect their own materials, the ePhysics includes several videos of student experiments, and the Music Book even offers sound files for the always-crucial ukulele tuning .

Last week, I learned about the Tablet School and talked with founder Oskari Lehtonen. The Tablet School provides curriculum based courses for high schools and junior high schools. Besides text, the e-courses include a variety of media elements, such as quizzes, links, and YouTube videos. For authors, e-courses are easy to compose in a technical sense: you just add the text, images, and media elements through the user-friendly platform. As for quality, authors know that producing outstanding content is challenging regardless of medium. In the Tablet School, teachers can complete the materials by themselves and compile tests either from a course’s ready-made tasks or from their own questions. For students, e-materials form a handy package that is always available on a tablet or in any device. Extra value comes from a discussion forum and from links to other subjects and online resources. The Tablet School’s pricing seems to make sense for all parties: authors get 35% royalties, teachers use the platform free of charge, and students pay 11 euros for a five-year license.

Last Monday was the annual Community Manager Appreciation Day. A couple of hundred participants showed up at a conference held in Lahti, Finland. Similar events took place in two other small towns, Paris and London. This was the fourth such event here in Finland, and I have participated three times. Volunteers organize the entire event here, and it is free of charge for participants, thanks to the sponsors. As for popularity, this year all the participant slots were reserved in three hours.

Johanna Janhonen opened the program by presenting some results from last year’s community manager survey. Result 1. The person in charge manages communities in addition to his regular job. Result 2. His title is usually related to communication: communication manager, spokesman and so on. Result 3. His professional area is typically education or communications. Ambientia’s Aino Heiskanen and F-Secure’s Samuli Airaksinen, in their sarcastic presentation, described how to ensure that your social intranet will fail: ban non-work related communication, and let the intranet fend for itself. Harto Pönkä, in turn, outlined what makes a quality community in social media. One of the most popular performances was lawyer Elina Koivumäki’s summary of the legal issues in social media: you have to know the law and each service’s terms of use.

However, the best thing in the community manager event is that no one complains if you’re using several different devices to be in contact with other communities during the presentations. That’s just part of the job description.

Jukka-Pekka Pietiäinen, the head of The Finnish Association of Non-fiction Writers, has partnered with professor Joel Kuortti to assemble a list of 100 significant Finnish non-fiction books. Each book is introduced with a compact summary. The collection offers an excellent tour of the history of Finnish non-fiction: it starts in 1543 with Agricola‘s ABC book and ends with Elina Grundström’s recent The Black Orchid, which deals with global climate change. Reading the list, you make interesting discoveries. Matthias Calonius created a foundation for Finnish law with his Civil Law Lectures; in the 1700s, Pehr Kalm’s North American Journey was translated into many European languages; in the background of the publisher of Statistical Yearbook you find an institution established in 1748, which began compiling Sweden’s and Finland’s population statistics, the oldest continuous statistics in the world. The real bestseller has been Pikku jättiläinen (The Little Giant), first published in 1924, which was printed in 300 000 copies. Elo’s arithmetic was published in 1915; its 32nd edition was still in use in the late ’60s. A work unknown to me, Recreational Fishermen, has sold amazingly for a book in Finnish: 50 000 copies in Finland and 150 000 copies in Russia.

The 100 books will be the subject of a special exhibition at the Tampere Main Library from 26 January to 7 February 2015. Come on by!

Beyond its keynote speakers, the Online Educa conference offered many interesting presentations for smaller audiences. I was inspired by three Canadians – Thomas Stenzel, Michael Canuel and Donna Aziz – who dealt with teaching English in Thailand. The Thai government had ordered nine million tablets as part of an effort to improve miserable student performance on the PISA exams. The tablets ended up on the shelf. No content had been planned for them, and teachers couldn’t even charge the batteries. Only after this failure was the Canadian group invited to establish a workable, web-based model for learning English. The case is a typical example of what happens when a so-called reform begins by purchasing technology without a pedagogical plan and without training teachers. Technology deployment requires their skills and commitment. Without their own e-learning experience, it’s impossible to implement new teaching methods. Unfortunately, the acquisition of tablets in particular seems to be a value in itself, rather than their purpose. Before deciding on a device, we should analyze its intended use: is it a tool for working and interaction, or mainly a reader for ready-made materials? In the search for fast solutions, we often grasp the wrong end of a problem.