Reinventing the Book: The eZoomBook Platform

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“eZoomBook” is a project-based pedagogy and an associated platform for the structuring and development of multi-scale documentation: the platform makes it possible to create interactive multiple-scale documents through a Wiki-like collaborative system of construction. The educational perspectives of eZoomBook are highlighted by three experiments carried out at Ecole Centrale de Nantes: the first in the context of a literature course, and the second in the context of a “reading club” and the third in the context of an English class with engineering students in an apprenticeship program. This paper analyzes the value proposition of the eZoomBook platform which allows us to implement an innovative pedagogy made possible by the eZoomBook tools and to create a library of crowd-sourced reading material called eZoomBooks. The eZoomBook project-based pedagogy leads us to reflect on blended learning as well as the balance between e-learning/classroom learning and collaborative/individual work. The fully-functional eZoomBook platform is now accessible to a large community in a beta testing mode. This opens new perspectives for linking our new eZoomBook tool with the range of ICT-in-Education tools (Intranet, blogs, etc.) as well as existing open-learning platforms.