Read the original interview in Italian here
The #ELRPUB series ends with a nice interview with Francesco Leonetti, an expert in digital school publishing. The topics dealt with in this series, are in this interview precisely on the needs and dynamics of the world of school. How does the way of teaching with ebooks change? How does the way of learning change with audio-visual effects and interactive functions? What are the obstacles to the development of digital publishing in schools? These are some of the points of the interview to which Leonetti was able to respond in a precise and detailed way, availing himself of a long professional experience in this field (without having to crib from his colleagues).
ELR: Francesco Leonetti, for about 25 years you have been working in the field of e-learning. How did your interest in the use of multimedia and interactive technologies in teaching begin?
Francesco Leonetti: Fortuitously, even before graduating in Computer Science at the University of Bari, a private Technical Commercial Institute for Accountants Programmers, run by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart, asked me if I was interested in working as a technical assistant in a computer laboratory and also to hold some computer science lectures. I accepted, mostly because I needed money to complete my studies. They didn’t tell me, however, that the classes were made up of deaf students. It was in fact a specialized school for the deaf.
At first, I was completely disoriented and confused. I explained that I had absolutely no idea how to communicate or even teach people with this kind of disability. They reassured me by saying, “You’ll find your way”.
It was an absolutely enlightening experience. First of all, I learned sign language from the kids, who were obviously very happy to teach it to me in exchange for my lessons on sorting algorithms or on how to turn on the computer, and I realized that the notion of “disability” is quite relative. The learning difficulties observed on deaf people were not due to their presumed intrinsic cognitive limitations, but to the inadequate method of teaching and in the design of study content, typically paper textbooks.
Multimedia and interactive technologies could be useful in this regard. I started to study pedagogy, learning theories, metacognition techniques with concept maps, etc. and I dedicated to this theme the thesis: “Hypertexts, Multimedia and Interactivity for teaching the hearing impaired”. I also developed a prototype, we speak of 1991, written with Hypercard on Macintosh SE, which showed text content accompanied by sign language translation (I filmed with a camera the guys who lent themselves to help me), and interactive concept maps and so on.
The Laboratory of Educational Technologies of the University of Florence was interested in my work and called me to collaborate, as was the Laboratory of Experimental Pedagogy of the University of Bari. Since then I have remained in the field of e-learning and digital education. I found my way.
ELR: Together with other experts who form the group Espertoweb you have created the project Epubeditor. What services do you offer?
Francesco Leonetti: ePubEditor, despite its name, is more than just an e-book editor in EPUB format.
It was created to offer a tool to e-book authors that would not psychologically manipulate the author him/herself, making him/her think of the e-book only in paper terms despite writing it digitally.
If you notice, in fact, opening Word, or Google Documents or LibreOffice, InDesign, any word processing tool, these begin by presenting an A4 sheet of paper. It is telling you: “think of something that works for paper”.
An e-book, instead, must work on the screen of a digital device, even connected to the Internet. It’s not good to present an A4 sheet of paper to the author of an e-book, but something that looks more like content for the web, not for printing.
Therefore, with ePubEditor it is possible, in a very simple and intuitive way, to create exhibition contents that combine texts, images, videos, sounds, with interactive contents, typically quizzes of various types, making it particularly suited to the school and training environment. You can create a page with media overlay, in which, as in a karaoke, the text is highlighted in synchrony with the execution of an audio track, you can semantically mark the parts of the text in order to activate a “semantic search engine” on the contents of the e-book, able to perform queries such as: “let me see all the historical characters mentioned in this e-book who lived in that period, or in the context of such an event, or in a particular geographical location”.
The finished work can be distributed in the form of EPUB, or in SCORM, if you want to import it into an e-learning platform, such as Moodle for example, and track its use by users.
ELR: Which projects are you currently working on or which are you going to implement in the future?
Francesco Leonetti: I would like to build a larger and richer environment around ePubEditor, of which ePubEditor will be one of the components. A space for learning and teaching that allows teachers and students to create effective and meaningful digital experiences.
The project is underway, and I believe it will be up and running by the end of 2018.
ELR: A short web research on electronic books shows that the history of digital publishing began around the year 1993 when two Italians, Franco Crugnola and his wife Isabella Rigamonti, created the first electronic book and when the poet Zahur Klemath Zapata published ” Murder as One of the Fine Arts” by Thomas de Quincey in DBF (digital book format). When do you think the history of digital books began and what are some of the highlights of the history of digital publishing?
Francesco Leonetti: In 2001 I went to the Buchmesse in Frankfurt, the equivalent of the Turin Book Fair, but bigger, I would say a lot bigger. The catchphrase of that year was, in fact, the e-book and I was curious to see how they looked. The devices, however, were cumbersome and heavy, the paper publishing could still rest easy.
The turning point was the release of the Amazon Kindle in 2009 and then the Apple iPad in 2010.
The Kindle has shown that a paper book, as it is, can also be read digitally. The iPad has shown that a paper book can also be read digitally, as it is, or better, enriched and expanded, thanks to multimedia, interactivity and connectivity.
Yet, even today, there are few books that really exploit digital status. They are still for the most part conceived and designed primarily for paper and then made by them a “reduction” and an adaptation to digital. Too bad.
Let me be drastic: today we don’t really know digital books yet, but only paper books, brought to digital. In the future, we will see. But we need a radical change in the minds of authors, above all, and publishers.
ELR: In 1997 Project Gutenberg, which began in 1971, reached the number 1000 of books published with the e-book #1000 ” The Divine Comedy” by Dante Alighieri. How has the market developed and how have electronic books been sold and disseminated in the last 20 years?
Francesco Leonetti: I’m sorry, I don’t have reliable data about it. Maybe by doing a quick search on Google you can get something out of it. But still, not having available the data of Amazon, which they jealously guard and do not make public, every statistic is objectively incomplete of the most important and incisive data.
ELR: How has the e-book market developed in school publishing?
Francesco Leonetti: Lazily and forcibly. No school publisher would have really considered the idea of completely migrating their editorial production to digital if it had not been forced by precise laws. In 2008 it was the Minister of Economy Tremonti who persuaded the Minister of Education Gelmini to provide an explicit obligation for publishers to provide families with the e-book option, purely for reasons of savings, certainly not because we had in mind an idea of e-book distinct in design and function from the paper book. Before then, digital was considered a gadget, often represented by a CD glued to the back cover of the paper book and almost systematically ignored by teachers and students, because if you tried to use it various problems of operation and compatibility with different operating systems came up, and so on, so as to discourage its use if not by tenacious and motivated users.
However, it was the ministerial decree no. 781 of 27th September 2013, signed by the then Minister of Education Carrozza, that better defined the notion of digital book that publishers should then adhere to. In reality, guidelines were also announced for the production of digital books, which have not yet been received. So, on average, publishers do what they want, each with its own editorial platform to which students and teachers can access, with its own functions and content, often incompatible with reciprocal platforms and editorial content, translating everything into a frustrating experience for end users.
In November 2013 I was invited by Minister Carrozza to give a speech, along with many other speakers from various worlds, university, editorial, school, during a conference at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa with which I tried to contribute to the definition of the criteria for the drafting of the Guidelines, proposing the adoption of international standards for metadata, representation and interoperability of editorial content on different platforms, avoiding the idea of a “single platform”. At the moment, as I said, nothing is done. Each succeeding Government and Minister has reaffirmed in words the strategic importance of digital without actually providing effective tools for their shared and meaningful use.
ELR: How is the new technology received by teachers and students? How is the transition from print to digital experienced in school publishing?
Francesco Leonetti: Teachers generally do not welcome new technologies. Certainly, in the didactic use. Elsewhere, teachers, like everyone else, use a lot of digital technology, but not in the classroom. If they do, they do it here too a bit forcedly and without much conviction, apart of course from the minority of particularly enlightened teachers, but decidedly a minority compared to the almost 800 thousand role teachers. The reason is soon explained: the way of teaching does not require the use of technologies. It is perfectly useless, in fact, to use tablets, smartphones, interactive whiteboards, etc. if the lesson and the didactic activities that students want to carry out are in fact based on the procedures enabled by traditional tools such as blackboards, notebooks, pens, paper books.
It makes no sense to say, for example: “open the tablet on page 23”, as unfortunately many e-books actually force you to do as they are built, replicating even-even the paper book on the screen. In fact, the digital book should not even be considered a “competitor” of the paper book, but rather an ally with which to integrate the content and educational activity enabling things that paper does not allow.
In short, on a student’s desk there must be a paper book, simplified and limited to represent the things that only paper can do well, and a digital device, with contents and functions that only digital can express.
Today, instead, we are still witnessing the pathetic diatribe: digital yes, digital no, paper is good, the screen is bad, and so on.
It has not been understood that using digital means changing the way we teach. Changing the way we do school is much more complex and articulated than setting up an interactive whiteboard. From this, I believe, derives the de facto failure of all the initiatives that have tried to introduce digital at school, from the Plan for the Introduction of Educational Technologies of the mid-1990s to the National Digital School Plan of 2015.
ELR: How does the way of learning change with text enriched with audio-visual effects?
Francesco Leonetti: It’s not just about audio-visual effects. Digital technology enables completely new user experiences. For example, it allows you to geolocalize places and events mentioned, allows you to act on content in an interactive way, studying for example physical phenomena, historical events (how did Hannibal defeat the Romans? And if the soldiers had been arranged differently, how would the battle have gone?), it allows us to formally represent, through semantic tags, the meaning of the contents and to do with them interactive elaborations and manipulations, and so on.
The digital state of the content, when designed specifically for digital, allows us to create educational experiences that, in addition to the representation of knowledge (which is usually fixed by the paper book), also provides the opportunity to build on it. In short, the student has not only a book in front of him, but a laboratory with which to learn and also experiment and apply what he has learned.
ELR: In a 2017 video you explained the characteristics of an e-book. What do you think are the fundamental aesthetic criteria for the layout of an e-book?
Francesco Leonetti: I personally detest fixed layout e-books. But not only for aesthetic fancy, but also and above all for a functional one. I understand that an e-book with a fixed layout is cooler for the author. It allows you to define the optimal graphic and visual aspect to give the user an agreeable and enjoyable experience in the studio. However, it poses a serious obstacle to the accessibility and usability of the content from different screens and devices.
On the other hand, an e-book page is not a real page. We continue to use the word “page”, but it is only a metaphor of the paper one.
The page of an e-book can scroll endlessly, it can show content at various levels, for example, with a click I can open deepening boxes and then make them disappear when I no longer need them, and so on. These are features that a designer should know and use to design the e-book and its user experience. It is totally meaningless, in short, to apply to the e-book the same criteria and design limits that are adopted on paper, because paper has different limits and functions than digital devices.
The challenge of the e-book designer, therefore, must be to reconcile aesthetic and functional effectiveness. Not easy, of course, I do not envy the designer at all in this task, but it is what should be done. If you don’t succeed, I personally prefer to give up the graphic aspect, preferring to provide at least an effective functional use experience, independent of devices and operating systems. Too easy to make fixed layout e-books only for iPad, for example, and they would also be too similar to paper books. So, in that case, paper is better, right?
ELR: How important is it to know the programming languages to create e-books? What advice would you give to those who want to start learning to program?
Francesco Leonetti: It’s not important, but it helps. Especially if you want to go beyond the e-book that can be created with generalist authoring tools, such as Adobe inDesign, for example, or various word processing software. If you want to explore the interactive potentialities, besides the multimedia ones, you need to know how to put together a little code.
The languages of the EPUB are, essentially: HTML, CSS, Javascript, XML. As chance would have it, they are the same languages used to develop websites. As chance would have it, again, the EPUB consortium has joined the W3C consortium (the one that defines the standards of web languages) in forming Publishing@W3C with the aim of defining the evolutionary standards of EPUB, unifying itself, once and for all, with those of the web. Because, all things considered, what is an e-book, a real e-book, if not an object of which “webitudes” are more evident than books? (Ok, words that don’t exist, I asked the Accademia della Crusca if they accept them, but they haven’t answered me yet, anyway you understand what I mean).
So, for those who want to acquire programming skills in e-book codes, I can suggest the same path as those who develop websites, starting from ‘open simple e-books and see how they are made, then try to modify, extend, enrich and then deepen as they go techniques and syntax, always remaining with antennas well-tuned and open to any change. Those who do this job are forced to never stop learning. For this reason, above all, I like it.