Harvard University senior Drew Robb is so attached to his cellphone that he keeps it by his bedside at night and in his front jeans pocket every day. He uses the Apple iPhone to check email, text his friends and play games, pretty much for everything—except phone calls.
By Joseph De Avila
Readers can modify content on the Web, so why not in books?
In a kind of Wikipedia of textbooks, Macmillan, one of the five largest publishers of trade books and textbooks, is introducing software called DynamicBooks, which will allow college instructors to edit digital editions of textbooks and customize them for their individual classes.
Professors will be able to reorganize or delete chapters; upload course syllabuses, notes, videos, pictures and graphs; and perhaps most notably, rewrite or delete individual paragraphs, equations or illustrations.
By Motoko Rich
Read New York Times
The student newspaper at Abilene Christian University isn’t waiting for iPads to hit the shelves before taking up the opportunity the device holds for print publications. The Optimist has developed its own app for the new platform. “We can’t wait until [the iPad] is adopted by a critical mass of people,” Professor Kenneth Pybus said. “We want to be up and running and there when they’re ready for us.”
By John P Mello Jr
Read Tech News World
Overview | What are the elements of a scene? How does deconstructing scenes reveal meaning? In this lesson, students start to think like film directors by storyboarding an experience from their lives. They then examine the Times Movies feature “Anatomy of a Scene” and develop their own analyses of scenes from film and literature.
Materials | Computers with Internet access and a projector; preselected video clips from NYTimes.com; handouts
By Amanda Christy Brown and Holly Epstein Ojalvo
Read The New York Times
Some colleges that have built virtual classrooms in Second Life—the online environment where people walk around as avatars in a cartoonlike world—have started looking for an exit strategy.
The virtual world has not lived up to the hype that peaked in 2007, when just about every day brought a new announcement from a college entering Second Life. Today, disenchanted with commercial virtual worlds but still convinced of their educational value, a few colleges have started to build their own, where they have more control.
By Jeffrey R. Young
Saint Louis University and its campus in Madrid, Spain, are separated by the Atlantic Ocean, two languages and disagreement on who makes the best tapas. But thanks to video conferencing, the IT and administrative staffs from both campuses work almost as closely as if they were in the same room.
by Wylie Wong
Read Ed Tech Magazine
We’ve seen this before, with individual authors like Paulo Coelho and David Pogue, who both found that as more people were able to get unauthorized copies of their ebooks, their sales actually increased. So, this shouldn’t come as a surprise, but some new research looking at the impact on sales of unauthorized files getting out found a “significant jump in sales” (found via Michael Scott):
by Mike Masnick
Read Tech Dirt
Another episode of As The E-Book Turns wrapped this week, with Amazon locked in a page-turning battle with the publishing industry. The plot twists are many, but here’s a quick outline: Amazon wants to continue charging $10 for e-book versions of most new titles and bestsellers, but the industry’s leading publishers think that price is too low.
By Jeff Bertolucci
Read PC World
Before the iPad, publishers hadn’t much incentive to produce digital textbooks on portable devices. Think about scrolling through your chemistry tome on a Kindle, making clunky annotations on a bland black-and-white screen — it just isn’t as conducive to learning as four-color images and the ability to doodle in the margins. So when software developer ScrollMotion was tapped to create iPad-friendly versions of textbooks, surely students, educators and publishers uttered a collective cheer for the future of digital education. But is the iPad going to make a difference in the world of higher education? Here are five reasons why it won’t.
By Brennon Slattery
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Free online courses aren’t sapping enrollment numbers—in fact, they’re actually helping to spread the word. Those are the preliminary findings out of Brigham Young University, which experimented recently by granting free access to a selection of its distance learning courses. Though further study is needed in order to see whether there’s a significant impact, educators are beginning to see that offering free materials isn’t the end of the world after all.
By Jacqui Cheng
Read Ars Technica