Most writers have one or two trusted readers-of-drafts, critical friends who are relied on to make suggestions and offer that gentle critique that we didn’t know we needed. And the closer we get to conventional publication, the more likely we are to find ourselves working with an editor who scrutinizes our text for errors, ambiguities, sloppiness and – horror of horrors – breaks with convention. With the publication of my essay on picnic and community, published using Bookleteer last month, I had the chance to reflect on the experience of ‘doing without’ an editor. It was stimulating but also a little scary.

In the summer of 2011, I needed to take a decision about finalising and publishing the work. Choosing Bookleteer presented me with a new option: it meant I could go all the way to publication without any editorial oversight.

Picnic was an unfunded project: no client, no defined audience, no expectations, no responsibilities. That may seem liberating but it also means no feedback, no reassurance, no confirmation. I kept the text to myself (apart from sharing it necessarily with my collaborator, the artist Gemma Orton) at the obvious risk of missing out on potentially valuable guidance, having mistakes spotted, and being seen as arrogant.

The key justification for me was that to submit to editorial control would have been a crass betrayal of one of the essay’s themes. The essay contrasts picnic with formal meals, it contrasts organisation with networking, and disorder with order, as a way of exploring our tendency to idealise community in structured, formal terms. I felt that by submitting to the convention of editing – a fundamentally conservative process – I would have contradicted that theme in a rather feeble way.

I was also aware that Picnic challenges people’s expectations, because it doesn’t fit easily into any recognised genre. An editor might have made valiant, corrosive efforts to turn it into this or that.

I don’t wish to imply that the editorial process is either redundant or pointless, but it may be that many writers come to be over-dependent on editors. Perhaps this is to do with perceived differences between non-fiction and fiction. Few musical composers or visual artists would expect to cede so much influence over what they do. On the whole, editing is a process for confirming convention and reinforcing norms, which may not always be what’s needed. By making the publication process realisable, it was Bookleteer that empowered me to remain consistent to the theme without compromise.

A number of ideas prop to mind when I think of using Bookleteer in education. The part I like most is that it’s not restricted to one age bracket. From younger children to older kids in secondary school an eBook can be used in many ways.

For example, for the younger age group, I have created an alphabet book. This can be customised to the child’s preference, such as using their favourite cartoon characters on each page as a visual stimulant. Of course this is where the older brother or sister or parent come in use, to actually create the book on Bookleteer. Or a blank eBook can be printed and with the guidance of parents, children can help draw and stick each letter onto each page, a fun learning activity all rolled into one!

As for the older kids, Bookleteer can be used as an alternative way of presenting coursework, projects, art projects or even as a revision tool or a diary format to keep track of their revision timetable/schedule.

Using Mandy’s artistic ability, I made a mock up of what the alphabet eBook could look like if it was made.

Log onto Bookleteer to see where it can take you…

To help CCI widen the audience for their work we’ve posted 7 eBooks on our diffusion.org.uk library and will be making others available there as they are created. All are welcome to download and share eBooks from the Library of Traces.

students on their way to school

So, what sort of reaction did the eBook receive? Simply put, its reception, both in Khartoum and in the rural farming village of Dangeil, exceeded expectations. We produced 500 English copies and 500 in Arabic, the local language. We ran out of the latter. In retrospect, we should have produced a greater number of copies in Arabic. Copies were given to the local school and arrangements were made so that every household in the village received a copy.

Unloading eBooks and textbooks at the school

Although our eBook takes the form of a more traditional and perhaps somewhat static publication, its impact cannot be underestimated. The Dangeil villagers, and indeed university students and antiquities staff in Khartoum, viewed the publication as written for them, about them, and in their own language. The eBook has served not only as an educational tool, but has empowered the local community and created a sense of pride and proprietary ownership of the ruins and their history.

Julie Anderson
Assistant Keeper
Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan, British Museum

Having walked around the library taking pictures, looking through leaflets and flyers, peeking into learning labs and flicking through some books in their library section, I realised that the Idea Store was definitely the ‘mega library’ of East London. Because the Idea Store has so much going on already, I left feeling slightly overwhelmed and wondered how, if at all, bookleteer would fit in to an already thriving library service. However, after some research, I realised that there were two areas that bookleteer could further help the Idea Store, and this was through advertising and user experience eBooks.

The Idea Store could advertise and promote courses, events, and services through bookleteer by creating mini information eBooks, providing a new and modern way to advertise what’s on offer. Allowing the thousands of people who use the store to create user experience eBooks to map out what they’ve learnt and what they’ll take away from using the Idea Store’s services would help both staff and visitors explore ways of improving services and document their experiences at the same time.

Download my ebook of ideas about using bookleteer in the Idea Store

After I was introduced to some of the teachers, a class of year 5 children quietly walked into the classroom where Giles would talk to them about how bookleteer and eBooks worked, and also how this would tie into their current project, a project based on Antarctica and the effects global warming. The children were curious about who we were and what we had to say, and as Giles began to explain that we were going to help publish their school project by turning them into eBooks, some of the children shouted ‘yay!’ and everyone seemed to became even more interested. After Giles demonstrated how eBooks were made, the children were more than ready to get going and make their own.

We then began to upload the children’s work onto bookleteer, with the children standing close-by, often asking us about how bookleteer worked and what they thought about their Antarctica project. After a few near glitches with the schools computers, we began to finish uploading and naming the year 5 eBooks. Almost immediately after we waved the children goodbye, year 6′s entered the classroom with the same amount of wonder as to why me and Giles were standing at the front of the classroom. This time around, however, uploading the children’s eBooks was much faster and easier to do after having uploaded year 5′s eBooks moments before. Then came the task of printing off and making up the children’s eBooks – (a skill that Giles was clearly much faster than me at!) After proudly handing all 32 eBooks to the children’s teachers, Claudia and Matt, our work at Soho Parish was done for the day.

some of the 32 eBooks created by Years 5 & 6, Soho Parish Primary

Following our work with with the children (and lots of help from the staff!) Giles and I had lunch with the head teacher, Rachel Earnshaw, discussing possible projects and ideas for the new term ahead. After how promising my first day was at the school, I can confidently say that I am looking forward to going back to the school after the Christmas holiday and collaborating on other creative projects with the children – and also exploring bookleteer in a school setting.

Having visited the Museum of Childhood regularly during my time in school, it was interesting to revisit this popular Museum as an adult and after refurbishment. Roaming around for only a short amount of time, I quickly remembered why I enjoyed going to the Museum so much as a child. The open space filled with different toys, displays, galleries, colours, materials, shapes, and images, inspired me to think about how we could collaborate on an education project with the Museum using bookleteer. This led me to research into what teaching projects the Museum ran and how this could be incorporated with our software to help aid and promote diverse, new and interesting ways of learning.

After identifying education projects that the Museum are currently running, I have created an eBook that describes how bookleteer can make a difference in the Museum’s education programme. Given that bookleteer makes a range of different kinds of shareable literature, I identified project notebooks and eBooks as good ways to support the Museums ongoing education projects, allowing students to document their work as they go along and then create an eBook of their experiences of that project – children will be able to use new software to write, self publish, and be encouraged to learn in new ways with the help of bookleteer.

Though this is my first education based eBook, I’m sure it will be a good one!

In our interview, Niharika told me that she first used the eBooks on part of the Perception Peterborough project. She and Alice used the eBooks to document a cab ride around Peterborough using illustrations as a way to explore the different kinds of communities and systems that were embedded in the city. For Niharika, this early way of using the eBooks functioned more as a support for personal reflection. Although she would show the results to others, the eBooks she created felt more personal:

“It is shareable, but that is not the intent in which I created it. It was more like a personal log.”

Although she continues to be interested in this kind of approach, she has also used the eBooks as part of a more extensive project which I want to examine in greater detail:

Sample project: Articulating Futures

Proboscis commissioned Niharika in 2009 to design and deliver Articulating Futures. The project was a series of workshops held in New Delhi, India between the 17th and 21st November 2009. The work took place at the Chinmaya Mission Vidyalaya. Both she and members of Proboscis had been interested in exploring the pedagogical applications for eBooks and these workshops represented just such an opportunity.

The workshops involved pproximately 20 sixteen year-old students. As part of the workshops, students were given a “pack” with various materials including a number of pre-designed eBooks and StoryCubes. Niharika emphasised that she was working from within in a traditional Indian schooling system, a system that I was completely unfamiliar with. She explained to me that notebooks were used in a very different manner in this Indian school than in the manner that I was familiar with. Each notebook was apparently designated for particular subjects and students were given a standard format in which to record information in the classroom.  They could not personalise their notebooks in any way. They could not write down what their thoughts were. They could only copy material from the board or what their teacher teaches:

“the whole project was located in a very structured school institution, in a very structured classroom space where notebooks are a very sort of different medium. When you write down [something it] has to be right or wrong versus more creative. So notebooks are associated with a very different way of exchanging or recording information or knowledge”

Niharika saw the eBooks as a way to transgress this kind of approach. For her, the level of tactility in making the eBooks and their flexibility meant that students could express themselves more freely in the classroom context. The workshops included four different designs of the eBooks given to the students at four different times in the workshops. These included:

An eBook of Ideas- to note one’s personal thoughts and moments of inspiration

An eBook of search and research- to write down responses to specific questions discussed through the day

An eBook of storytelling- to help students think more creatively using methods and techniques of narrative and story telling

An eBook of Future- to use as a personal log to create the final future scenarios

In other words, the eBooks were used as a tool to enable students to develop their ability to be reflexive. As she states in her final report:

“Students were encouraged to reflect upon their daily activities by writing in their eBooks of ideas and research. They were also asked to write down a ‘thought of the day’ based on what they liked or disliked during the daily course of the workshop. Each days activities were explained to the students so that they could understand and comprehend why they were participating in it. Through discussions they were also linked to the proceedings of the following days as well to their academic curriculum. This enabled them to make sense of the workshop, meaningfully participate in it as well as make it relevant to their context.”

In the end, Niharika felt that the eBooks offered three specific advantages as workshop tools for this particular project:

Multiple languages – Probosics had recently introduced the ability to use multiple languages which meant that she could design the eBooks in Hindi or other languages.

Pedagogical context – The eBooks flexibility allowed students to develop critical and reflexive skills.

Engagement – The uniqueness of the eBooks ensured that students would be interested get involved in the workshop activities.

Once the workshops were completed, Niharika scanned all of the eBooks as part of an archive of the event. She then keeps the originals in a Paperchase box. You can find versions of Niharika’s eBook design here.

Challenges, recommendations and suggestions

Having extensively worked with the eBooks in the past, Niharika felt that she had not fully grasped the importance and significance of making the eBooks – that is folding and cutting them into the final version – until she worked with the students in India. Sadly she only came to this realisation after she had pre-folded and cut the eBooks for the students. She felt that, had the students made the eBooks themselves, it would have added “ another layer of ownership and I think it’s also far more engaging and makes it more personal”.

Niharika still uses the eBooks to make personal logs. She is also looking forward to potentially designing an eBook as her own artist’s portfolio which she could handout to people interested in her work.

CCI uses the eBook in all sorts of ways with all sorts of people. You can find a number of examples of their designs as part of their Recent Publications on their website. The following is a brief outline of some of the work she is currently doing with the eBook.

Sample project: Trail of Imagination and Curiosity

One example of how CCI has used the eBooks is the project titled Trail of Imagination and Curiosity that took in the spring of 2009 in Mill Road Cemetery, Cambridge.

CCI was commissioned by the Cambridge Folk Museum to explore how the people living and working around the Mill Road Cemetery, particularly the families of children attending St Matthew’s Primary School, Brunswick Nursery and ACE Nursery, could find ways to engage with the space in a more meaningful way.

The project was initially developed using the metaphor of a “trail”. The eBook was redesigned to function as a sort of scrapbook of ideas to help visitors to play in the cemetery and to provide potential visitors with traces of how others had used the site. Two creative facilitators who worked with CCI, Deb Wilenski and Filipa Pereira-Stubbs, organised a series of workshops in the Cemetery with different family groups linked to the local organisations. CCI brought the families in and played with them, listened to their stories about the area and tried to notice how they engaged with the space. This part of the project was reflected in a design by Susanne Jasilek along the top of the eBook available for download. The other half of the eBook was designed so that families who would also like to use the eBook as a part of their visit to the cemetery and trace their own play and discoveries. The key objective of the project as defined by Ruth was to provide the families with a way to begin to find their own way through the cemetery.

For Ruth, this project was a great example of how to gather and publish information as part of CCI’s activities while avoiding dull and formulaic resources such as A4 worksheets. The eBooks could easily be made available as a free, downloadable resource for the potential visitors.

One thing that Ruth would have liked to do with this project, had there been more resources available, was to find a way for families who use the eBooks to exchange their ideas and work with the eBooks over the website, to maintain a dialogue between the families.

Why the eBook?

Ruth’s first encounter with the eBooks was on the Diffusion website where she had a look at a number of Proboscis’ projects. Although she had tinkered around with the material online, she felt the only way she could determine whether or not these tools would be useful as part of her work was to attend one of the free Pitch-up-and-Publish sessions in Proboscis’ studio in London in the autumn of 2009. Although she didn’t know most of the people attending, she was able to get fairly familiar with the eBooks thanks to the presentations there.

Ruth was initially interested in finding new ways of documenting ideas and events within CCI’s workshops so as to make them visible to the participants in the workshops so that they could see the value in what they had done even after the workshop was over:

“If what you value is the process, how do you make that visible? [...] It’s a way of trying to make learning visible and special: through our eyes, but using their voices and as much as possible”

CCI now uses the eBooks and StoryCubes as a way to record what goes on in every session they run. They then offer this documentation back to the participants after the session. Ruth attributes part of CCI’s success in using the eBook as part of their workshops it being an open-ended and low-tech tool rather than something more “threatening”. She explains:

“It’s not big. You know, you can write two or three things, or some people wrote essays. Some people wrote just one word. It feels that you can come at it any way that you want to [...] It had a scope for people to respond to it in a way that they liked.”

Challenges, recommendations and suggestions

One of the resources that Ruth feels makes the eBooks particularly easy to use are the videos available online such as “How to make: Book Portrait Diffusion eBook”. CCI now provides a link to this video whenever they post one of their eBooks. This is a great resource for people who are unfamiliar with how to make the eBooks from scratch. Ruth also recommends using a bone folder for making the books.

After examining my own eBook, the eBookObserver, she cautioned me against using the sketchbook format if I was planning to use it without a flat surface to write on because in such cases, you rarely end-up using both sides of the pages.

Some of the artists she has worked with have also wondered whether it would be possible to generate an online eBook template that would enable the person printing out the eBook to choose the order of the pages before printing.

Earlier this year, in a Pitch Up & Publish event with We Are Words + Pictures, the eBooks were used by a couple of writers to create simple portfolios of their work to show prospective clients/commissioners. Over the years Proboscis has also used both the eBook and StoryCubes formats to create publications that present our work in a similar way. We’ve now come up with two ideas for using bookleteer to create highly personal eBooks about who people are and what they do, Pocketfolios and MeBooks.

Pocketfolios
We began by thinking about how we remember work by art, design and architecture students at graduate shows (often by collecting business or postcards) and how, looking back, sometimes it can be hard recalling why we might have collected someone’s details without a connection to what caught our interest in the first place. But what if there was a way for the students to give away something like a mini portfolio of their work? What if they could use bookleteer to create simple, yet beautiful, ‘pocketfolios’ with more details about them and their work?

Niharika has designed posters which we’re sending out to colleges to invite students to test out bookleteer for creating highly personal ‘pocketfolios’ – we’re also offering a 10% discount (using the discount codes on the physical posters) for students who want their pocketfolio(s) printed via our PPOD service. We have also developed another set of posters which we’ll be sending out to studios to invite makers of all descriptions to explore bookleteer and the Diffusion eBooks as a way to create personal or product-based pocketfolios.

MeBooks
A couple of weeks ago I took part in a meeting at Islington Council for employers participating in the Future Jobs Fund where there was very positive feedback about the young participants gaining in skills and confidence. However the mentoring and follow-on advice being offered seemed to lack inspiration for much else beyond CV writing skills.

It occurred to me that bookleteer could offer something quite different – an adaptation of the Pocketfolio idea that could be made relevant to people from all walks of life and in different job types and sectors than the arts or design. A personal narrative about them – their story, or MeBook – that could act as a portfolio of their skills, experiences, ambitions, hobbies and interests, what they’ve achieved and what inspires them. Something that helps them describe and share what they feel is the best of themselves that a CV simply couldn’t cover.

We’ve been brainstorming how we might do this (also with input from Karen Martin, resident bookleteer and Proboscis associate) and hope to have a workshop piloted in the next few weeks. I’ve recently met with staff from Islington Council as well as Judith Hunt and her team from Get More Local to hear their feedback on how this could benefit other young people on the Future Jobs Fund and other schemes. Watch this space for further announcements!

We would love to hear from anyone else involved in similar schemes who’d like to offer the MeBook idea to their placements/interns/trainees. Please get in touch to find out more.

My name is J.-Thomas Maillioux, and I’ve been working as the librarian for the collège Evariste Galois middle school since 2005. I’ve recently started to use the bookleteers to create “adventure books” for our first-year pupils’ library orientation program in a format both convenient and original. The flexibility of the Bookleteer publishing platform has also allowed me to quickly and easily implement the modifications suggested by my own observations, or advice from the students and teachers involved in the orientation program.

Download A4 | US Letter PDF 486Kb

I’ve also been able to sit down with small group of students to discuss what they would do with the Bookleteers : they suggested uses both for school (custom booklets for note taking on school trips, tutorials or HOWTOs for specific activities in sciences and technology classes, reminders while giving presentations in front of a class) and home (grocery shopping, tasks listing, books and stories writing or games) that make me think that, with the correct amount of support from their teachers in acquiring and supporting the necessary skills, they should be able to make the Bookleteers and the publishing platform their own relatively quickly : a good way to reconcile them not only with the printed word, but also with their printed word – that what they write, too, can be and deserves being made into a book with very little hassle.

We’d love to hear more testimonials of how bookleteer, the eBooks and StoryCubes are being used – please send your feedback to us at bookleteer at proboscis.org.uk