Ebook on Mobile Learning
This ebook on mobile learning field activities in the humanities is now available via Amazon. To go to the product page, please click the image below. This will direct you to the US store, but it is available through Amazon in the UK, Canada, Japan, Italy, France, Germany, Brazil, India (and others that I am forgetting here). If you prefer to click a link rather than an image, please do so. Following the image is a description of the book and some notes on edits and quick fixes that I frantically performed. For those of you considering buying it, I thank you. For those of you pausing (or snickering) at the pricing point, let me know and I can adjust. For those in my community who have encouraged me to write this, especially the tireless Inge de Waard, I am indebted to you.
Once you buy it, you are free to do what you want with it as I am making it available under a Creative Commons-Attribution-Non Commercial CC BY-NC. So teachers and learners can use it, remix it, share it to their heart’s content. I just prefer it not to be used commercially.
Book Description
This book is designed for teachers and learners wanting to explore mobile learning field activities in the disciplines of the humanities. It is especially designed for teachers and learners that have wanted to use mobile technology more for their learning and weren’t sure how to begin. This book should be useful for anyone teaching in the humanities that wants to extend learning beyond the classroom walls; it is also most useful for learners in these disciplines that want to extend their engagement with their subjects to their neighborhoods, their streets, and their cities.
It provides a definition of mobile learning that stresses the transformative nature of learning (for the learner), outlines multimodality and its application to these field activities, and suggests how meaning can be made by learners out in the field. It discusses how these field activities can be organized, reflected upon, and executed, and what the resulting compositions might look like. It concludes with a discussion on how teachers and learners can design mobile learning, and what resources or tools might make the activities most productive.
Throughout the book, the emphasis is on how learners make meaning in their day-to-day environments and how that meaning can be presented through multimedia compositions. The emphasis in this book is on positioning learning as a creative (even artistic) exercise of coming to know through observation, interpretation, and creation.
Edits and Quick Fixes
I managed to catch a few typos and frantically uploaded it again to Amazon and some of the formatting is a bit wonky, but overall it gets across what I intended it to. I will write a few subsequent posts on the challenges of self-publishing for any and all interested as it is an animal unto itself. I hopefully kept the price point low enough that it won’t prove too taxing for anyone who might want it.
Formatting the book took about as long as writing it and that process will improve the next time around. At the very least, I will know specifically which format to begin with to get the cleanest version possible. I will also note that what renders perfectly as a MOBI file in Kindle or an EPUB file in a reader (or converted through Calibre) or even as HTML looks awful in that Amazon Preview window.
So my apologies for the occasional formatting issue. This was a labor of love and there were only two of us (illustrator sister included) working with the text and the formatting. I thought of putting some clever, faux quotes in here but I resisted. If they were to be included, they would look like this:
This looks neat!- Prudence Gallagher, aka the author’s mother
Or
What do you do for a living again?- my uncle to whom I speak once every decade or so
Thankfully I resisted doing that.