Learning From Experience

When I learned on the first day of class that we would be curating an ebook and then actually publishing I almost could not believe it. But Dr. Burton our English professor had proof that the impossible had been done by a previous class in their ebook, Writing About Literature in the Digital Age. So from their example we began our own process to publishing our own ebook Becoming Digiliterate.

We had a prompt to write about a piece of literature and relating it to what we find on three digital literature platforms: the Kindle, Goodreads, and Amazon. We blogged about those ideas that we had, and then we each individually further developed the best ideas into chapters.

Then came one of the harder parts, putting all of our ideas into a working table of contents through this blog. This was useful for ideas, but eventually during class we were able too discuss our two chapters and decide on which part of the book it fit in: Find, Read, Connect, and Create. This seemed to be most effective.

At first we were doing most of the writing and blogging from our own separate homes and other than the blog we had no communication amongst us until class time. We all downloaded the WhatsApp app, and we were able to send text messages to a group text. We also had been using the Google docs and been sharing those files under folders as one of our classmates compiles the ebook. Google drive
was mostly effective, but there were some glitches in sharing.

Overall I would say that the ebook is worth the price. Through the writing process I was able to learn so much more about the three platforms we wrote about, and also To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee that was my focus of my two chapters. My whole opinion on digital literature has changed, and our ebook can also help other students and avid readers feel the same.