Experimenting with iBooks Author

I recently took the step of dipping my feet in the Apple pool, much to the surprise of many people that know me and my preferences. There were a few reasons that I decided it would be a good idea, but one of them was the opportunity to experiment on my own time with iBooks Author.

I’ve tossed around the idea of writing a book. A few ideas for topics have been bouncing around, one being one in which the concepts of mathematical thinking are explored through programming. Given that all Mac computers have Python installed automatically, not to mention the ease that it can be installed on other platforms quite easily, Python is a perfect fit.

Now that I’m set up with my Mac, I’ve spent the last couple of days playing with it and getting to know its quirks. It does have quirks. I spent a couple of hours today battling a mystery white box that covered anything that slid into it, and that remained even after saves, restarts, and reboots. Eventually I got rid of it (though I’m not totally sure that I am sure how) and put together an activity I plan to have some independent study students work through this year.

The quiz options are nice ways to make things interactive, but they have all the same downsides of multiple choice questions. If there was a fill-in-the-blank option, I could very easily see putting together my own self-guided lessons along the lines of Udacity. That’s really what I’m looking for. The really powerful thing to have would be an HTML5 Python interpreter, and I haven’t yet looked to see if something exists that would work with the interface.

I found out late in the process that images placed in landscape mode only show up in the portrait orientation if they are set to be ‘inline’ instead of floating or anchored. Backsliding ensued.

On the whole, it’s a nice free publishing platform, including for nice PDF files. I didn’t have much multimedia material to throw in, and my attempts to do so would have been for exercising features, not for enhancing the book as a learning opportunity. As many have noted previously, iBooks author offers quite a bit of horsepower for generating flashy multimedia textbooks, but the extent to which it revolutionizes education isn’t quite there. Opportunities for interfacing with others reading the same content through chat, messages, or something like that would be a step in that direction.

For what it’s worth, feel free to check out the final product below. While the text is written as if it’s a finished book (“More information on this can be found in the Appendix”), it very much isn’t. Just an experiment to fill my hours battling jet lag back in China.

Mathematical Reasoning with Python