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Hugh McGuire, the founder of LibriVox.org, the terrific crowd-sourced audiobooks service.  We'll talk Web 2.0, books, learning, and more in the context of thinking about education.

"I do bookish R and D on the web. I build webby things, and find out if people like them. I also write and speak often enough about media, publishing, the web, technology, mass collaboration, online community-building, open culture, copyright, in places like Huffington Post, Forbes.com, and O’Reilly Radar. I’m also editing an O’Reilly book about the future of publishing."

One final comment, a funny one.  On Monday, in my "Twenty-First Century Literacies" class where laptops are required for a whole range of experiments and inclass collaborative work, I caught one of my students with his laptop open and with a book propped secretly inside it, reading away in his book when he should have been paying attention.   So maybe that's the next class, "Should Professors Allow Students to Use BOOKS in the Classroom Devised for Computer Learning?"   I'm being facetious but that's the point.  A book is a technology too.   How and when we use any technology and for what purpose are the questions we all need to ask.

Do you see the difference?   "Computer learning" doesn't exist.   In 2011, it exists less than it did a decade ago and, in a few years, that phrase won't exist at all.   Students learn.  Computers are tools for all kinds of things, from checking the Facebook page, to making notetaking easier, to being fact checking or calculating devices that can take a class to a more sophisticated level to interactive social networking devices that can either distract a class or allow for new forms of group collaboration.   There are many other uses as well.   The point is that most profs have (a) simply "adapted" (as a colleague told me recently) to computers without understanding the intellectual and pedagogical changes they can enable; or (b) resigned themselves to their present, gleefully or resentflly; or (c) made them into a pedagogical tool; or (d) all of the above.    

books—shelved in a four-floor spiral connected by gently sloping ramps—were given pride of place in the design

many assumed that physical tomes would soon go the way of the card catalog and the cassette tape.

More than a decade later, however, demand for the printed word—and its place in libraries—remain strong.

need to move beyond the heavy reliance on text.

lot of digital books floating around, being hailed as amazing advancements in teaching and learning. Although I know the majority of materials currently available to students on their portable multimedia consumption devices are still primarily text-based, maybe including a static image or two (see Figure 3, a color, static digital page with a Venn diagram that is no different from the same page in the printed book5),