Personalizing textbooks with slicing technologies - concept, tools, architecture, collaborative use

Electronic books are not yet heavily used because they still do not offer sufficient benefits. The Slicing Book approach is a new approach to electronic books offering personalized electronic textbooks for learners. Books are split into slices and the logical relationship between those slices is made explicit, e.g. what slice builds on knowledge provided by what other slices. This knowledge can be matched with a model of the user´s knowledge to provide him or her with a personalized textbook. The paper describes the basic concepts of slicing technologies, tools and architecture and the authoring process and usage scenarios. Slicing technologies have the potential to change books´ roles in teaching. This is demonstrated in the domain of collaborative learning.