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Barbara Lindsey

2010 Horizon Report » Electronic Books - 0 views

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HorizonReport ebooks

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 28 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Readers of electronic books may be reading more, as well. Kindle owners, according to Amazon, buy three times as many books as they did before they had Kindles; Sony reports that Reader owners download about eight books per month ⎯ as compared to fewer than seven books per year purchased by the average American book buyer in 2008, according to a New York Times article.
  • The convenience of having an entire library of books, magazines, and newspapers — each remembering exactly where you left off the last time you looked at them — and all in a single, small device is one of the most compelling aspects driving electronic reader sales.
  • a larger format version of the device expressly built for academic texts, newspapers, and journals, is being piloted at Arizona State University, Ball State University, Case Western Reserve University, Pace University, Princeton, Reed College, Syracuse University, and the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. Northwest Missouri State University and Penn State have embarked on pilots using the Sony Reader. Johns Hopkins is piloting the enTourage eDGe, which combines the functions of an e-reader, a netbook, a notepad, and an audio/video recorder and player in one handheld device.
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  • In a pilot program, Seton Hall University’s Teaching, Learning & Technology Center found that students appreciated the ability to store and review a semester’s worth of material in electronic form.
Barbara Lindsey

The Device Versus the Book -- Campus Technology - 0 views

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ebooks campustech

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 05 May 10 - Cached
  • reading for learning is not the same activity as reading for pleasure, and so the question must be asked: Do these devices designed for the consumer book market match up against the rigors of academic reading?
  • Each school ran its pilot in courses that used texts without color graphs or complex illustrations, so that the known limitations of the devices’ E Ink grayscale electronic-paper display wouldn’t be a hindrance in the students’ learning.
  • There were qualities of both the Kindle DX and Sony Reader that the students felt showed promise, and that made them enthusiastic for the day when e-readers’ functionality as an academic tool becomes a reality. These features include the easy-to-read E Ink screen; the size, weight, and durability of the devices; and the long battery life. But students encountered limitations in the devices that made them inadequate for reading academic texts.
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  • students need to be able to highlight important passages, make notes in the margins of the text, and quickly skim through passages to refresh and compare information. In all three pilots, the students felt that e-readers were not yet ready to meet these academic needs.
  • the Kindle’s small keyboard makes the annotation process very labor-intensive
  • Because the keyboard is so small, and because there was a significant latency between typing the note and the note appearing on screen, a lot of students found that they were overtyping. Many of the students got fed up with the keyboard, so they would just read on their Kindle and make notes in a separate notebook.” Also, the Kindle allows readers to make annotations only in e-book-format files, meaning that students couldn’t insert notes on any PDF-format files that were on the devices. “I think the first [e-reader] manufacturer that figures out how to make a PDF that you can also annotate is going to snag this market,” Temos predicts.
  • He is hesitant, though, to say that this problem is primarily because of a deficiency in the device, when it could just as easily be that the students need to adapt to using a new technology. “[ASU is] going to look at whether this is something that students get used to in the second semester of the pilot and eventually prefer, or if it remains consistent that they continue to prefer paper,” he says. “I think we don’t know that yet.”
  • Highlighting text with the Kindle was not much easier or more satisfying for Princeton students. Much of the difficulty was due to the inability to highlight in color on the grayscale E Ink screen. “The highlighting on the Kindle isn’t actually highlighting; it just makes an underline,” Temos explains. “The students want something more emphatic than that.” Students also found it awkward to highlight long passages using the trackball. “Highlighting over a page break on the Kindle is a real feat,” Temos laughs. “If you actually extend your highlight from one page to the next you feel a real sense of accomplishment.”
Barbara Lindsey

2010 Horizon Report » One Year or Less: Mobile Computing - 0 views

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HorizonReport mobiles

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 28 Jan 10 - Cached
  • In the developed world, mobile computing has become an indispensable part of day-to-day life in the workforce, and a key driver is the increasing ease and speed with which it is possible to access the Internet from virtually anywhere in the world via the ever-expanding cellular network.
  • The mobile market today has nearly 4 billion subscribers, more than two-thirds of whom live in developing countries.
  • These mobile computing tools have become accepted aids in daily life, giving us on-the-go access to tools for business, video/audio capture and basic editing, sensing and measurement, geolocation, social networking, personal productivity, references, just-in-time learning — indeed, virtually anything that can be done on a desktop.
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  • For many people all over the world, but especially in developing countries, mobiles are increasingly the access point not only for common tools and communications, but also for information of all kinds, training materials, and more.
  • At Franklin & Marshall College, sixteen faculty in the year-long mLearning Pilot Project are using iPod Touches to explore ways mobile computing can be used in teaching, learning, and research in disciplines like history, psychology, religious studies, world languages, government, classics, and more.
  • students noted increased time spent accessing course materials as well as higher levels of collaboration with classmates.
  • San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Mobile Tours http://www.sfmoma.org/events/1556
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