iBooks Comes to the Mac in OS X Mavericks

A pleasant surprise revealed in Apple’s preview of OS X Mavericks during the 2013 WWDC keynote address was the announcement of iBooks for the Mac. The lack of an iBook app for the desktop has been frustrating and frankly impedes my productivity. I love reading books on my iPad but I do most of my academic work on my 27″ iMac or Macbook Air. Having my iBooks only available on the iPad or iPhone stymied my note taking and research. I compose most of my work in Pages for Mac and have multiple documents open on my virtual desktop and physical books on my real one. Voice dictation into iOS  Notes with my iPhone lets me easily create notes from  physical books and synched to all devices I use to for work. However, I have not been able to easily move highlights and notes from iBooks between my iPad and iMac. Soon I will because iBooks is coming to the Mac and several new features are squarely aimed at the education market.

Multiple open books is a new feature coming to iBooks for the Mac.

iBooks on the Mac will have the same features as those on your iOS devices — turn pages with a swipe, zoom in on images with a pinch, or scroll from cover to cover. Notes, highlighted passages, and bookmarks created on your Mac, are pushed to all your devices automatically via iCloud.  iCloud even remembers which page you’re on. So if you start reading on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch, you can pick up right where you left off on your Mac. Best of all is the ability to have multiple books open at the same time. When have you ever opened a book, then closed it before opening another to extract notes from, only to close it before moving to the next one? I doubt ever, especially not me. I’ve got multiple books spread out in from of me quite often to move back and forth through. Now I’ll be able to do the same within iBooks. Yes, iBooks in Mavericks puts multiple books on your virtual desktop just like your real one. Highlights, notes, bookmarks and other features are synched in iCloud and ready to use on any iDevice. A Notes pane gives you a list of all your notes and the highlighted text associated with them. The  ‘dynamic textbook functionality’  allows you to  convert notes into handy study cards.

Craig Federighi demonstrating note taking at WWDC 2013

 We’ve got a few more months before OS X Mavericks is released to the public. The new iBooks for Mac is a welcome upgrade that I can’t wait to start using. It will definitely increase my productivity and hopefully yours too.

All media courtesy of Apple Inc.

Suzie Boss on the use of Twitter

Suzie Boss, journalist and Edutopia.org contributor does an excellent job of describing her use of and how educators can benefit from Twitter.

Infographic: Major Ed-Tech Trends for 2013

Please include attribution to OnlineColleges.net with this graphic.

Infographic: The Digital Classroom

Via: Accredited Online Universities Guide

The importance of a creative education

Noted photographer Chase Jarvis is disrupting education with CreativeLive. Watch his presentation at the 2012 PSFK conference in San Francisco.

Undergraduate Students & Technology

Presented By: Please Include Attribution to BachelorsDegreeOnline.com With This Graphic

Tomorrow’s College Will be Free: Massive Open Online Courses

From Dewey To Digital

“Is 2012 the year that e-books and digital content take hold in academe? Or will the textbook continue to reign? Casey Green leads a lively, provocative discussion of the promise, potential, and market realities of moving from Dewey to digital in higher education.” Campus Computing Project

Get over it Deresiewicz

I chuckled through William Deresiewicz’s rant over how capitalism is destroying higher education in the American Scholar. Absolutely nothing new here, with some minor tweaks it could, for the most part, have been written ten to fifteen years ago. Deresiewicz laments over the fact that universities and individual programs are having to carry their weight to justify their economic existence. Wake up Bill, the higher education of today and the future are not going to look like or be the higher education that we knew in the 50′s, 60′s and 70′s. In the eighties, the economic realities of an endless stream of money without much oversight as to the value of the investment made came into play. Blame capitalism or not for our woes, the economics of higher education has changed. Declining or stagnate budgets became a reality for many if not most university systems long before the most recent financial meltdown.

What really caught my attention were his statements about online learning and for-profit universities. Deresiewicz states that ‘ “Online learning” is justified, on bogus pedagogical grounds, for the sake of reducing labor costs.” ‘ Bill, read the literature, you’re so far off the mark it’s sad.  Those of us who have been engaged in online teaching and learning know there is plenty of research that shows online learning to be as effective, if not more so, than traditional face-to-face. Using the labor reducing cost as the only argument is simply silly.  Deresiewicz provides no basis for his statement that for-profit universities are “another massive educational failure”. There are reasons other than, admittedly questionable marketing practices as to why they have upwards of ten percent of higher education enrollments. Perhaps they are offering a service that traditional universities have not been able to.

Deresiewicz also states that “Professors (the decreasing share that’s left) are expected to be miniature entrepreneurs, endlessly selling their courses to students, their research to funding organizations, and their raison d’être to administrators.”  Do you really think this is something new? I don’t know about Yale from which you spent some time, but where I’ve attended and taught in higher education, we have always had to “market” our courses and programs to justify the investment in them. Professors have for many years, especially through securing patents, been entrepreneurs. And in both cases, you and your unit better be productive because it simply doesn’t make economic sense to throw money at underperforming units simply for the sake of providing a liberal arts background to all. Should we be raising taxes as you suggest to return higher education to its past “glory”? Gee, that’d be nice but it’s not going to happen. Sorry Bill it’s the new reality, get over it.

UW-SP offers Tablets to all Faculty/Staff

University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point Interim Vice Chancellor and Provost Greg Summers has announced that all faculty and academic staff who desire will be issued a tablet “in an effort to support innovative methods of teaching and learning”. These will be supplied in addition to their office desktop.

Currently, the only tablet supported by the University’s security policies, such as being able to wipe data remotely in the case of loss or theft, is the Apple iPad. A three-year upgrade cycle similar to the faculty/staff desktop program will apply to the tablet program. In the future, Android or a Windows tablets will become available for those who prefer one of these options. The standard issue configuration will be:

• 32 GB storage
• WI-FI enabled
• folio cover
• Productivity apps such as  a remote desktop app called Jump, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote; and Acrobat reader

The cost of  upgraded storage, cellular options, etc.  will be born by the faculty/staff member’s home department.

Even in this era of tight budgets and declining state support, it’s refreshing to see bold moves by administrators to address the changing landscape of technology-enhanced teaching and learning.

* Note: iPad pictured above is not necessarily the configuration provided.