One of the advantages of turning away from old media and analog sources of news and towards digital is the ability to filter news that’s important to you. I’ve done this by subscribing to particular RSS feeds from newspapers, organizations, and blogs that keep me updated through widgets placed on my iGoogle personal web page. But more recently I’ve turned to Twitter to keep me up-to-date with issues that I’m most interested in. Instead of the “I’m out having pizza” tweets, the people I follow are posting links to news articles and offering up tips important to my work as a professor. The problem I’ve found is that once I went beyond following fifty people, my Twitter stream became unmanageable and frankly, a bit distracting. I’ve used search to hone in on important topics, but this narrows my choices a bit too much. I’d like to a better way to get a overview of what the people in my Twitter network are posting. Enter The Twitter Times.
The Twitter Times is your “real-time personalized newspaper generated from your Twitter account”. Twitter Times searches through the people you follow on Twitter, finds the links in their tweets, then publishes them as a custom “newspaper”. Time sensitive content appears in the main “What’s Hot” column and bigger trending stories on the right side of the page in the “Top News History” column . Clicking the headline sends you to the original site or you can clicking the “show all text” button to expand the article in line. A retweet button is also provided. Though it’s billed as a “real-time” newspaper, the content is updated once an hour. You can also read other user’s newspapers. Give Twitter Times a try.
Several content publishers, especially newspaper, are discussing moving away from free online access to paid content. In a recent interview, NewsCorp owner Rupert Murdoch went so far as to threatened to block Google from accessing his properties like the Wall Street Journal and Fox News. Let me say at right now that I am a big fan of Google and use many of its services. Several newspaper publishers have been in a long standing row with Google over its aggregating content to display on its Google News pages without “paying” for it. These companies reap plenty of benefit from their relationship with Google. Google’s news page displays a short teaser but links directly to the originating site driving traffic and potential eyes to newspaper advertisers. To cut this cord, not only threatens the newspapers potential ad revenue, but for academics, it walls off a potential source of information for research and teaching.
Getting fairly compensated for one’s work, whether it’s a newspaper or an academic is indeed important. But removing access to search for potential content, or limiting which search service gets to access it, is a form a censorship. Academics who use online news should watch this debate very closely. To censor search engine access to important news poses a threat to our ability to do our work.
Today’s Inside Higher Education has an interesting piece about “Bookless Libraries“.“Let’s face it: the library, as a place, is dead,” “Kaput.” exclaims Suzanne E. Thorin, dean of libraries at Syracuse University in the article. But is the library dead or is the concept of the library changing as more materials are delivered electronically? I can’t tell you the last time I sat foot in my university library, there’s no need. All the research resources I need are online. I do fondly remember the days as a student of wandering through the stacks of journals, flipping through the archives after I’d already found what I was looking for. But I don’t have to do that anymore with the search capabilities and journal access provided by my university and Google. I’m only disadvantaged but the ludicrous policy of some publishers to delay publishing full-text articles in digital format by months, sometimes a year.
The November issue of Campus Technology addresses the changing concept and design of libraries in their article “A Space for Collaboration“. The article highlights several initiatives to redefine the library space. The Taylor Family Digital Library at the University of Calgary is designed with more work space for students to work collaboratively. Many workspaces will feature digital touch tables and digital globes that use the touch table capability in a geographic context. The Orrade library at Santa Clara University provides “educational experimentation rooms” where faculty try out new learning environments.
It’s not so much that libraries as a place is dead, but their purpose is changing. Do we really need to house print copies of so many books and journals anymore? Probably not. Libraries should convert their spaces into meeting places for research and study. As Inside Higher Education article points out, academics from a number of disciplines are not only going online for the library needs, but are creating new “online environments [that] are, in effect, libraries themselves; they are diffuse, collaborative, non-hierarchical, always changing.” Though certainly true, the immediacy of human contact, especially for student study groups in an academic setting rather than a social setting like a student union building is good. Social spaces provided in student buildings tend, in my opinion, to be somewhat distracting. To have a dedicated space to go to, away from a noisy dorm room or the clatter of an office hallway is a preferable. Libraries can become places to share ideas and provide space for conducting workshops, which come to think of it, was the reason I last visited my university library. And at these new libraries are those who can provide immediate help in finding the resources to conduct our education and research, librarians.
Simplify Your Life with Yoono is the topic of my latest podcast. In it I cover several of the basic features and leave you to explore the rest. Yoono is one of the best Firefox sidebars I’ve ever used.
It’s available on the web here and in the iTunes store.
The first “Digital Professor Podcast” is available here. This podcast is a short demo of ”Process”, a outlining application I’ve found quite useful in tracking the progress of my projects. “Process” can be downloaded from jumsoft.com.
System requirements: Mac OS X
The title of this blog post came to mind as I was reading the article “A Campus-Wide E-Textbook Initiative” in the Educause Quarterly. The article summarizes Northwest Missouri State University’s feasibility study of transitioning from paper textbooks to e-textbooks. The pilot study utilized nine textbooks covering a range of disciplines from business, psychology, mathematics, information systems, to music. The response to one of the survey questions prompted me to write this post.
The survey gathered data how the use of e-textbooks affected reading and study habits. One question asked if students felt they read more when using physical textbooks than they did using e-textbooks. Sixty percent of students felt they read more with using a physical textbook, and herein lies the question posed by the title of this post. How much engagement, not just reading, occurs in an e-textbook in comparison to a paper textbook?
What’s not indicated in the survey is how similar the level of engagement is between the e-textbooks used in the survey. An e-textbook can be anything from just text in a digital format to a highly interactive experience requiring students to actually engage themselves in the content. A well-designed e-textbook engages the user (I won’t say “reader) in ways other than passive reading. Well-designed e-textbooks become learning environments that leverage the advances of publishing in a digital format enable. E-textbooks can engage the student in active learning, allow them to explore linked resources, utilize social media applications for sharing and collaboration, assess their understanding as they proceed through a topic and provide immediate feedback to them and their instructor. Paper textbooks often provide assessment resources, or links to online resources but do students use them? Is the convenience of clicking on a link in an e-textbook or getting immediate feedback to review questions more likely to get students to use these resources?
My point is, as schools investigate transitioning to e-textbooks, they need to pose the right questions. Will e-textbooks engage students better than paper textbooks? Is there added value beyond the cost savings that can accrue through their use? It’s not just a matter of just reading an e-textbook, its using them.
Jose A. Bowen, a dean at Southern Methodist University has removed computers to discourage the use of PowerPoint, “the worst form of technology in the classroom” and challenged his colleagues to teach “naked”. View his ideas on how to effectively use technology provided by The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Link to Chronicle of Higher Education video
TechCruch’s MG Siegler posted an article interpreting Steve Jobs comments in the New Your Times about Apple’s interest in eBook devices. It should be apparent to all from Jobs statements before last week’s Apple music event that Apple has no intention of creating an eBook reader. Only once in recent history has Apple created a single use device, the iPod, for entertainment media. But even the iPod has morphed into a multi-use device, the iPod Touch/iPhone. It would not be in Apple’s interest to build a standalone eBook reader. There are several players in the field already for such hardware. Though garnering lots of press, I wonder as does Jobs just how well they are selling. What Apple would be interested in is selling eBook content through the iTunes store to drive the purchase of a media tablet.
It is a media tablet that is needed for distributing eBook content in the education market, not the standalone reader. Students from elementary through graduate school do not need an additional device to carry around. What they do need is a well-done touchscreen media device capable of performing daily tasks related to their educational pursuits. For most this may mean just a tablet, capable of taking notes in class, reading an eBook, and communicating with their teachers and classmates. The device must be of sufficient size (10″ inch?) to comfortably allow for text entry of notes and playback of most media types. Storage space is not be of great concern due to the advances in cloud computing and cheap external drives for archiving files. A few years ago rumors began swirling about Apple’s potential move into the tablet market, and an announcement seems imminent next year. In January of 2008 a patent for a Mac docking station was released. Such a pairing would be ideal for students.
Mockup of Apple Tablet and Docking Station (Courtesy appletell)
In the meantime, others are testing the touchscreen tablet waters. TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington promised a special press and user event for last July for his “CrunchPad” media though nothing official has seen the light of day. Netbook maker Asus has made a half-hearted foray into the touchscreen tablet field. But we continue to wait for an elegant solution to bring eBooks to life in a truly useful device. Patience grasshopper …
I just downloaded a new and improved version of iTunes. When syncing my iPhone I notice a few new tabs, one of which is labeled “iTunes U”. This is a welcome feature to sort iTunes U content out of the podcast bin. Now you can choose to sync:
- all from all or selected collections
- all unplayed iTunes U from all or selected collections,
- 1,3,5,10 of most recent unplayed all or selected collections
- 1,3,5,10 of least recent unplayed all or selected collections
- all new from all or selected collections
- 1,3,5,10 of most recent new from all or selected collections
- 1,3,5,10 of least recent new from all or selected collections
Most of my previously downloaded iTunes U items were tagged as “Movies”. They can be changed by following these steps:
Ctl + mouse click on the item and choose “Get” Info->
Options->
Media Kind->
Then choose “iTunesU”
This will organize them under the iTunes U item in the Library.
Very handy.
Get iTunes 9 here.
