The E-Text project seeks to integrate and extend the best features of paper textbooks, while simultaneously taking advantage of the electronic medium to extend reading in new ways. Many electronic book projects seek to replicate the experience of reading from paper. While we believe that being "backward compatible" with paper is important, we don't believe that doing so will provide much motivation to change to electronic texts. More importantly, we believe that stopping at replicating paper does a great disservice to the educational opportunities made possible by storing the content and reader annotations electronically.
We have implemented an application called the eTextReader to test whether the enhancements afforded by an electronic text can help students learn more. Written in Java and run on the Tablet PC platform, the application was deployed in a year's offering of our Introductory Computer Science course (with funding from the National Science Foundation). Based on feedback from students and knowledge gained from that offering, the e-textbook will be used in the fall 2004 offering of the Programming Languages course here at Hope College (thanks to funding for new hardware from Hewlett-Packard's Teaching with Technology Initiative)
The E-Text project is headed by Ryan McFall, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Hope College.
A report on the current progress of this project can be found here.
Mike Jipping of the Hope College computer science department is participating as a consultant on handheld software and hardware. Many students have contributed to the research and development efforts of the project.
More information about the project participants can be found on the participants page.