Posted on 9th February 2011 by Judy Breck in Findability | Mobiles | Next
ebooks, iphone, project_gutenberg, stanza
The iPhone pictures above are from a video by Lexcycle, the makers of the iPhone reader called Stanza. Anyone who cares about doing right by students should watch this video — or in some other way get a real idea of the ease and power with which books can be placed in the hands of learners by letting them read books on their handheld devices. Mashable described Stanza and four similar readers in an article last April titled 5 Fantastic Free iPhone E-book Reader Apps.
Reading on phones is not all that new. As far back as four years ago, reading novels on phones was making headlines: Big Books Hit Japan’s Tiny Phones.
In recent months, digital publishing has been maturing. It is revolutionizing the publishing industry.
Availability of books is proliferating. Venerable, wonderful Project Gutenberg remains true to its original philosophy by now offering free ebooks:
Project Gutenberg is the place where you can download over 33,000 free ebooks to read on your PC, iPad, Kindle, Sony Reader, iPhone, Android or other portable device…. Over 100,000 free ebooks are available through our Partners, Affiliates and Resources.
Today the Chronicle of Higher Education describes how ebooks are reconfiguring citations. The conclusion of the article quotes an expert who “. . . looks forward to a time when most reading is done digitally, and electronic links replace long descriptions of how to find each reference.”
If someone had predicted in that past that all students anywhere could hold virtually any book in their hands and read it there, that person would have been dismissed as a cockeyed optimist.
Yet we now know that virtually any student anywhere can read virtually all books on his/her phone — as soon as we get it done. What are we waiting for?
Posted on 30th January 2010 by Judy Breck in Equality | Mobiles
ipad, iphone, same_page, tablet, web_browser
What smartphones, tablets, netbooks now have in common is putting the open internet in your hand. For all the varieties of configs and features, it is the web browser that equalizes learning. This world-connecting, world-changing cognitive denominator is in the process of doing two fabulous things:
- Bringing everything know by humankind into the hands of each member of the young global generation,
- Bringing that knowledge to each of them equally — quite literally from the same virtual page.
Prompted by all the iPad chatter this week, Michael Malone has posted an interesting article today called “Tablet Dreams” in which he traces the techie decades old dream of creating hand held tablets. Malone muses as to why the dream has persisted:
Perhaps it’s because they harken back to the natural human tendency to write and draw on the nearest flat wall or stone or scrap of wood. Or maybe it’s a kind of cultural memory from the days of cuneiform writing on slabs of drying mud, or marking with chalk on a piece of slate in a one room schoolhouse. Whatever the reason, the dream of a smart, interactive tablet is almost as old as electronics itself.
As these techie dreamers diddled with digital chalk and chisels, something else — something wonderful — happened. The serendipity is something Stuart Kauffman might call an “adjacent possibility”: the array of dream tablets has in common that you can touch them to display, lo, nothing less than the accumulated knowledge of our species. That, folks, is quantum leaps beyond marking with your finger in a wet tablet of mud, or for that matter, with chalk on the boards in schools.
