Od „Ala Ma Kota” Do E-Matury slides

These are the slides from my presentation at the Od „Ala Ma Kota” Do E-Matury conference in Warsaw, on 18 April 2012. The talks were 16 minutes long, so this is a fairly condensed deck. As always, my slides are starting points for each idea; there’s about a minute’s worth of elaboration for the key ones. I’ve been asked to write the talk up, and I’ll link to that when it goes public.

Ala Ma Kota conference slide 1
“It’s typography, Jim, but not as we know it…”

Six observations, four challenges, one conclusion, and five predictions…

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Observations
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People run out of time faster than they run out of options
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There’s no such thing as “new media”, only new users
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Internationalisation and geography matter
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The permanent and ephemeral are reversed
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Materials become precious
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The market does not wait for teachers to write lesson plans
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Physical properties are no help in predicting potential uses
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Challenges for designers
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Support for text and typography is not Good Enough
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Support for text and typography is not Good Enough
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Typographers lose the reassurance of familiar, visible, tactile structures
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(A conventional structure is defined by spreads and sequence in the bound object)
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(An e-publication’s structure relies on content sections…)
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(…which are not differentiated without reference to external navigation)
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(…and therefore rely on the root-level navigation for the publication to explain itself)
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We lack great models for integrating inline and immersive content
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Texts are becoming nodes in networks, but typography has been volume-bound 
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(A single of the sections we identified has four aspects that traditional typography has no solution for:) 
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(links within the text to other texts,)
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(annotations by the user,)
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(annotations by other users,)
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(and links within the annotations.)
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(Developments in literature, which is easy to parse, show some ways forward) 
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(uncovering meaningful connections in the text)
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Conclusion
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This emerging typography is traditional at the paragraph level, and potentially innovative at the semantic level 
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Predictions 
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Three to five years of conservative solutions: just ‘digital books’
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Local interfaces will adopt traditional solutions
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Personal aggregators will threaten traditional authorship models
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Knowledge platforms will push beyond ‘digital books’ when trust systems mature
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Authors, publishers, and students will continue to adapt much faster than teachers (and schools, and education authorities)
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Thank you