Communication is the foundation of education. Nurse educators and students who maximize both the quality and quantity of communication will be more successful in applying the art and science of nursing. Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) can augment traditional learning modes by allowing students to read material from their PDAs. To start, PDAs offer ready access to reference materials on drugs, diagnostic tests, procedures, disorders, and signs and symptoms. Recently, nurses rated quick access to current drug database and nursing reference books as being the most significant benefit of PDAs.1
Nurse educators may be able to use PDA technology for providing information to students in the form of a PDA eBook. For example, syllabi, schedules, clinical assignments, handouts, lecture notes, text excerpts, glossary, procedures, and poetry are all well suited to the PDA eBook format. Educators will save time and money because eBooks are paperless and may be distributed by e-mail attachment, Web site download, or on-the-spot infrared beaming. Students will save time and money because they can read eBooks almost anywhere and any time. Instead of carrying and shuffling through binders of papers, students can access well-organized class information on their PDAs. eBooks provide text that is searchable, interactive, and extremely compact. Students can read the text in total darkness and in the font they prefer.
Educators are naturally concerned about copyright issues since PDA eBook technology allows books to be copied and distributed with little regard to the authorship. However, copyright law does apply to PDA eBooks and should be included within the text body when applicable. As always, nurse educators should include full citation to references.
It is important to note that the main purpose of PDA eBooks is to extend the availability of information, maximizing the possible exposure time and hopefully the assimilation of information. Educators should be aware that PDA eBooks present a paradigm shift in literature. In 2004, Doctorow redefined literature with his view that "the book is a 'practice'-a collection of social and economic and artistic activities-and not a 'object.'"2 Readers' ability to interact with text requires authors to understand that option and to use it to expand the literary experience.
Table 1 provides a list of Web resources that are helpful in understanding the PDA formatting process. To format a PDA eBook, one needs a personal computer with recent version of Microsoft windows, hard drive memory space of at least 17 MB, and conversion software (Adobe or Palm eReader).
The steps in the formatting process are as follows:
* Enter text
* Edit text
* Create interactivity with an outline and internal links
* Enhance appearance by controlling font, adding images, inserting page breaks, lines, and symbols
* Make the book
* Edit the book
* Experience Formatting PDA eBooks
Personal Experience Formatting PDA eBooks
I became interested in PDA eBook formatting because I was looking for a medical surgical certification review that I could carry around on my PDA. I figured that I would be able to study when I had a minute or two at work or when I was traveling. I have read eBooks on my laptop computer and on my PDA. I like reading from the PDA best because it is so easy to carry around and I do not need to worry about lighting conditions since the text is backlit. However, there were no certification materials formatted for PDA use. I decided it would be interesting to find out how easily text could be made into an eBook, and so I started looking up information on the Internet.
The 2 leaders in eBook formatting were Adobe and Palm eReader. I settled for the eReader software because I could afford it ($29.95) and I preferred reading on the Palm eReader. I liked how I could move around in the text, the way it saved my place when I turned the PDA off, and how easy it was to scroll from page to page.
I kept track of the time it took me to download the instruction manual and the software, to read the instruction manual and keep notes, and finally to make my first PDA eBook. All this took a little less than 8 hours.
It was relatively easy to transfer electronic text to the eReader text format. The text needed to be in plain text format. This was accomplished by saving the material with a file extension of .txt. This file was then dragged and dropped onto the eReader desktop icon. The actual text editing was similar to Microsoft Word text editing although there were differences in tabs, fonts, and page breaks. I created an interactive outline by highlighting the text headings and assigning a heading level to them. I made some internal links by assigning anchor status to the destination (eg, a glossary item) and then highlighting the words I wanted to link and assigning an anchor to that set of words. This was all done with a few clicks. I changed the images and graphics I wanted to insert to a smaller size and the portable network graphics (PNG) format in my Microsoft Photo Editor. I made my book about writing text for PDAs and had fun reading it.
Summary
New PDAs come with both the Adobe and Palm eReader preinstalled and so student nurses will be able to read from either the Adobe format or the eReader format. Although PDA eBook technology is just getting going, there are thousands of eBooks available and thousands of eBook readers. Nurse educators who take advantage of this technology will be early adopters at this stage. This is not without risk of change or failure but does save time and money as well as maximize exposure to textual information.
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