Impress Your Professor: Elsewhere in the Tech World

Tired of iPad news? Your faithful blogger has scoured the Internet for news of anything but Apple's unfortunately-named new release.

* Lest Steve Jobs get all the spotlight this week, Bill Gates and the foundation he shares with wife Melinda have made improving online learning a priority. In his annual letter, Bill Gates ponders the future of e-Learning at every level and wonders who will shape it.

* Before you completely write off the Amazon Kindle, you might want to know that tech company Qualcomm released a video-capable, color screen at the recent CES show, and the buzz is that the next Kindle will use this technology.

* In the midst of all this e-reader insanity, one content format seems uniquely suited to take advantage of it: the comic and graphic novel. eComic reader software Graphic.ly and Longbox recently went into public beta. Some publishers like Marvel, the home of Spider-Man and Captain America, already have their own in-house, subscription-based digital comics readers but nothing yet allows readers (or libraries) to purchase and keep individual volumes.

Sorry! Not entirely iPad-free, but it's still interesting to see how its ripples affect other realms of media technology.

Impress Your Professor: Bookbinding 101

How do you treat your textbooks? Penciled notes in the margins, easily erased? Dog-eared pages, highlighting, and inkblotted underlining? Crumpled corners from daily transport to campus or a pristine cover (likely from lack of use)?

Or do you download it? PDF it? eRead it? Could you if you wanted to?

The state of California has given its colleges and universities until 2020 to make their textbooks available electronically "to the extent practicable." Some of the rationalization given is that it will put more technology in the classroom and teach students valuable technological skills.

This is, of course, doable for bloated freshman and 100-level textbooks constantly in publication, but what about smaller texts with smaller print runs for upper level and graduate courses? What if the book isn't even in print anymore?

This is reasoning behind the "extent practicable" clause, which has led some to question the usefulness of such a law that doesn't seem to mandate anything. Still others question the idea that textbook vendors will encourage or require students to rent their textbooks, not buy them. Again, this may be fine for required courses outside a student's major, but the theory behind a text is that it should serve as a reference throughout a student's career. Many will want to keep their texts, and some observe that students still buy hard copies more often than electronic when given the choice.

I guess they like to highlight!

In my experience, professors have already been assigning electronic texts. Prior graduate courses required downloading digitized primary source texts that were several hundred years old and several hundred pages long from digital libraries. A great use of technology, but I spent as long printing and assembling my "book" as I did reading it.

Will such laws give students the technological skills promised, or will it just give them a lesson in printing and bookmaking?

Impress Your Professor: Lose the Books

NPR has a rather interesting story posted on its website about how a school library is saying goodbye to its print collection. It seems to me like this yet another tipped domino in an increasing move towards digital collections and e-books.

NPR quotes the schools Academic Dean as stating, "Part of our desire to move in this direction is to meet the students where they are most comfortable... And it's our responsibility as well to help students understand the emerging technologies that they are going to be faced with."

But with great new power comes great responsibility. (Oh, Spiderman.) This week, NPR also posted a story about a Vision Group requesting that a school stop buying Kindles until Amazon comes up with better way to turn on the vocal reading option.

So, my question to everyone is, how do we continue to move forward with our digital and electronic tools without leaving people behind?

Hey, at least they're saving trees!

It's not news that libraries are considering digital alternatives to print, but to replace an entire collection with Amazon's proprietary Kindle reader? Today? In the Fall of 2009? Is the future really here, or has Cushing Academy jumped the gun?

USA Today reports that the Massachusetts school began removing its print collection entirely last summer and replaced it with a fully digital collection accessible through Kindle readers and through databases on student laptops. A few books still remain, but those are also slated to be removed.

Format may be less important than content, and getting reliable resources into the hands of the patron is goal number one, but is putting faith in a proprietary system this early in a very competitive game really wise? It's a question for the accountants. Is it cheaper to upgrade this technology if and when it gets outpaced by its (possibly open source) competitors than it is to wait? And from a research standpoint, has content been recreated digitally, or has it simply been replaced by something more palatable to high schoolers?

Whether or not it helps the school's bottom line, it does show that libraries are willing to grow with the culture and embrace technologies that will expand the information and services they are able to offer. It's a bold step forward by a boarding school that, USA Today tells us, was the first in the US to admit both boys and girls.

Impress Your Professor: Google vs. Amazon, Sunday Sunday Sunday!

While the media was drowning in Google Wave's backwash this week, the information behemoth more quietly announced its intent to enter the e-reader market in 2010 with "Google Editions."

An article in Wired magazine details the announcement made Thursday at the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany. Five years after launching Google Books, the company plans to start selling e-books and put itself in direct competition with Amazon's Kindle and Sony's Reader. Editions users could buy e-books from Google directly or from other booksellers such as Barnes and Noble or Amazon and read them on any device with a Web browser, including smartphones.

Will Google Editions books on your phone be the Kindle killer that some expect?