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Darrin Schumacher

Book Project - 71 views

acrosstheglobe.wikispaces.com/About+our+Project

english

shared by Darrin Schumacher on 04 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Darrin Schumacher on 04 Oct 10
     
    We are looking at setting up an online book review where the students read a book and then do an electronic book review. If you would like to be a part of this project please email me on schumacherd@gsis.sc.kr One of the aims of the project is to see what books students are Reading around the world and to encourage others to read a book that interests them. 
A Mommy

untitled - 16 views

readingeggs.com

education teaching children school

shared by A Mommy on 08 Aug 15 - Cached
  • A Mommy on 08 Aug 15
     
    Reading Eggs makes learning to read interesting and engaging for kids, with great online reading games and activities.
Trevor Cunningham

Rewordify.com | Understand what you read - 22 views

rewordify.com

reading literacy comprehension ELL

shared by Trevor Cunningham on 27 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Amy Roediger on 27 Aug 13
     
    Rewordify.com is powerful, free, online reading comprehension software. It helps people understand difficult English faster, and helps them learn words in new ways.
  • Trevor Cunningham on 24 Sep 14
     
    Decreases the reading levels of articles from various online publications.
Christine Padberg

Diigo featured prominently in my Digital Literacy Toolbox - 13 views

As part of my sabbatical project in which I explored the topic of "reading in the digital age," I looked at web tools that are useful in helping students (particularly college students) with their ...

online reading reading online tools web tools digital reading digital literacy

started by Christine Padberg on 03 Jun 13 no follow-up yet
serausch

Reading A-Z: The online reading program with downloadable books to print and assemble - 22 views

www.readinga-z.com

Interactive Reading

shared by serausch on 06 Sep 16 - No Cached
    • serausch
      serausch on 06 Sep 16
       
      This is a great resource for students to use at home or at school for practice with listening to reading, reading, and answering comprehension questions about their reading
brianarusso410

Storyline Online - Where Reading Is Fun! - 39 views

www.storylineonline.net

Reading Stories PLN literacy books

shared by brianarusso410 on 11 Apr 12 - Cached
  • Stacy Olson on 11 Apr 12
     
    A collection of stories read by actors - could be used as a reading center, an alternative to read alouds, or a home alternative for students.
  • Mark Gleeson on 15 Feb 13
     
    A website made in conjunction with the Screen Actors Guild thaf has famous actors reading a range of picture story books with accompanying pictures from the book. Includes activities to do in class as well.  Needs Flash but you can just go to the YouTube channel to access the stories themselves. http://www.youtube.com/StorylineOnline
  • brianarusso410 on 02 Mar 16
     
    Storyline is a website that brings stories to life, it helps that each one is told by a great storyteller.
webExplorations

Disrupting College - 3 views

www.americanprogress.org/...disrupting_college.html

education ctl

shared by webExplorations on 25 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Using online learning in a new business model focused exclusively on teaching and learning, not research—and focused on highly structured programs targeted at preparation for careers—has meanwhile given several organizations a significant cost advantage and allowed them to grow rapidly.
  • Using online learning in a new business model focused exclusively on teaching and learning, not research—and focused on highly structured programs targeted at preparation for careers—has meanwhile given several organizations a significant cost advantage and allowed them to grow rapidly.
  • Using online learning in a new business model focused exclusively on teaching and learning, not research—and focused on highly structured programs targeted at preparation for careers—has meanwhile given several organizations a significant cost advantage and allowed them to grow rapidly.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Recommendations for existing institutions of higher education also emerge from an understanding of disruptive innovation. These colleges and universities should: Apply the correct business model for the task. These institutions have conflated value propositions and business models, which creates significant, unsustainable overhead costs. Drive the disruptive innovation. Some institutions have this opportunity, but to do so, they need to set up an autonomous business model unencumbered by their existing processes and priorities. They can leverage their existing fixed resources in this autonomous model to give themselves a cost advantage over what to this point have been the low-cost disruptive innovators. Develop a strategy of focus. The historical strategy of trying to be great at everything and mimic institutions such as Harvard is not a viable strategy going forward. Frame online learning as a sustaining innovation. Institutions can use this new technology to disrupt the existing classroom model to extend convenience to many more students as well as provide a better learning experience.
  • webExplorations on 25 Mar 11
     
    An article showing how online learning is a disruptive technology. Shining [the challenges of today's higher ed] through the lens of these theories on innovation will provide some insights into how we can move forward and a language that allows people to come together to frame these challenges in ways that will create a much higher chance of success. This report assumes that everyone is adept at online learning. This is not the case and students will have to be trained on how to be effective online learners. Courses will also have to address multiple learning styles and not just the read/write that most online courses currently are programmed for. Despite this missing piece, this is a very important article that focuses on some very key issues of our current higher ed system. The recommendations at the end of the article for policy makers are very apt. Highly recommended reading!
  • Jason Finley on 26 Mar 11
     
    Are high schools preparing students for success in college and careers when what we do is so very different from what they will experience when they leave our little boxes?
Betty O'Connell

Five Common Pitfalls of Online Course Design | Faculty Focus - 102 views

www.facultyfocus.com/...tfalls-of-online-course-design

teaching learning online

shared by Betty O'Connell on 07 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • days could more accurately be described as the electronic version of class hand-outs. These courses usually consist of a course description, a syllabus, lecture notes, reading lists, and assignment checklists. In other words, whatever materials a student might have viewed on paper in the past are now read onscreen, and whatever presentations a student might have watched in the classroom are now observed on their screen
  • Online Course Design Pitfall #1: Upload your course materials, then call it a day.Reading your course material on a computer screen does not make for a memorable learning experience. Step back and take a fresh look at your content in the larger context of the world and the Web
  • Online Course Design Pitfall #2: Let the course management system drive your thinking.Course management systems (CMS) are usually preconfigured with a course template that instructors are expected to populate with their course description, syllabus, assignments, and announcements. Often these templates
Randolph Hollingsworth

Ariz State Univ - Service Learning syllabus (USL410 Indep Placement) - 7 views

servicelearning.asu.edu/...10

shared by Randolph Hollingsworth on 07 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • Randolph Hollingsworth on 07 Sep 12
     
    COURSE OBJECTIVES: This is a graded internship that allows you to integrate your own coursework with a hands-on service learning experience. The central objective of this course is to provide students with community experiences and reflection opportunities that examine community needs, the importance of civic engagement, and social justice issues affecting ethnic minorities and marginalized populations in contemporary American society. Students dedicate 70 hours at a pre-approved site (including Title I K-12 schools, youth programs, health services, social services, environmental programs, government agencies, etc.) directly serving a population in need or supporting activities that contribute to the greater good of our community. A weekly seminar, course readings, discussions, and reflection assignments facilitate critical thinking and a deeper understanding of cultural diversity, citizenship, and how to contribute to positive social change in our community. The course is also designed to provide "real-world" experiences that exercise academic skills and knowledge applicable to each student‟s program of study and career exploration. STUDENT LEARNING OBJECTIVES: Student will be introduced to essential skills associated with their baccalaureate studies to actively serve the local community. While completing this in-depth study of cultural diversity, citizenship and social justice issues facing our community, students will gain an understanding of the value of Social Embeddedness and the importance of incorporating civic engagement into their collegiate careers, as they strive to become civically engaged students. Students will be introduced to inequalities, discrimination, and other community issues facing ethnic minorities and marginalized populations, as well as the correlation with greater societal issues. INTERNSHIP RESPONSIBILITIES:  Service hours - 70 hours of community outreach (spread throughout the semester in which you are enrolled in the course)
Don Doehla

Small Byte #2-Scrible | Fluency21 - Committed Sardine Blog - 21 views

fluency21.com/...small-byte-2-scrible

web3.0 semanticweb linkeddata internetofthings computer edtech education technology

shared by Don Doehla on 11 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Don Doehla on 11 Jun 13
     
    Scribble is a great tool for preparing web-based readings for engaging students more attentively in their inquiry. Great tool to support close reading and CCSS. Scrible is a free online tool for saving, organizing, annotating, and sharing websites for online research projects and web quests. It saves a copy of each page you annotate in your personal Scrible library, so that even if the original web pages you've made notes on go down, your saved pages and your notes still exist. You can post your work on Facebook or Twitter, and you can also share your Scrible pages with short links that you generate with the click of a button. Check it out for yourself at www.scrible.com.
Tamara Connors

Educational Leadership:Reading to Learn:Can't Get Kids to Read? Make It Social - 85 views

www.ascd.org/publications/educational_leadership/mar10/vol67/num06/Can't_Get_Kids_to_Read¢_Make_It_Social.aspx

diigo research

shared by Tamara Connors on 19 Mar 10 - No Cached
  • Can't Get Kids to Read? Make It Social William M. Ferriter
  • One great tool for creating social reading experiences is Diigo (www.diigo.com), a free online application that allows users to add highlights and comments onscreen to any Web-based text. These comments can be seen by anyone using Diigo and are identified with the commenter's user name. Diigo also enables users to bookmark and "tag" with keywords any online articles that they find fascinating. Classes studying topics together can share their reading. Articles tagged by one user become instantly available to another, providing a source for continued study and ongoing conversations. The best news is that creating secure student accounts in Diigo is easy. Teachers can form a classroom group that enables students to see only the articles bookmarked and the annotations shared by their teachers and peers—instead of the comments of the entire Diigo community.
  • ttp://digitallyspeaking.pbworks.com/Social-Bookmarking-and-Annotating
  • Steve Ransom on 19 Mar 10
     
    Explains how Diigo is used in the classroom to make solitary text-based reading social.
Katie Akers

COPPA and Schools: The (Other) Federal Student Privacy Law, Explained - Education Week - 4 views

www.edweek.org/...index.html

shared by Katie Akers on 24 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • In a nutshell, COPPA requires operators of commercial websites, online services, and mobile apps to notify parents and obtain their consent before collecting any personal information on children under the age of 13. The aim is to give parents more control over what information is collected from their children online.
  • This law directly regulates companies, not schools. But as the digital revolution has moved into the classroom, schools have increasingly been put in the middle of the relationship between vendors and parents.
  • In some cases, companies may try to shift some of the burden of COPPA compliance away from themselves and onto schools
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • “That is not without risk, and COPPA has a whole lot of gray area that gives school attorneys pause.”
  • Less clear, though, is whether COPPA covers information such as IP (internet protocol) address, device identification number, the type of browser being used, or other so-called metadata that can often be used to identify users.
  • some school lawyers have taken the FTC’s previous guidance to mean that their districts must get consent from every single parent, for every single product that collects information online from young children.
  • First, according to the FTC, schools can grant consent on behalf of parents only when the operator of the website, online service, or app in question is providing a service that is “solely for the benefit of students and the school system” and is specific to “the educational context.”
  • How are schools supposed to determine if a website or app is strictly educational?
  • will any information collected from children under 13 be used or shared for commercial purposes unrelated to education? Are schools allowed to review the information collected on students? Can schools request that student info be deleted? If the answers to that second group of questions are, respectively, yes, no, or no, schools are not allowed to grant consent on behalf of parents, according to the FTC.
  • Many vendors also allow third-party trackers (usually related to analytics or advertising) to be embedded into their sites and services.
  • How do schools notify parents and get their consent under COPPA?
  • Often through an Acceptable Use Policy or similar document that is sent home to parents at the beginning of the school year, said Fitzgerald of Common Sense Media.
  • Even better, Fitzgerald said, is when schools provide a detailed list of exactly what websites/online services/apps students will be using, and what the information practices of each are.
  • some privacy experts say that a one-time, blanket sign-off at the beginning of the school year may not be considered valid notification and consent under COPPA, especially if it doesn’t list the specific online services that children will be using.
  • responsibility for deciding “whether a particular site’s or service’s information practices are appropriate” not be delegated to teachers.
  • Many districts do in fact have that kind of review-and-approval process.
  • One is “click-wrap agreements.” Often, these are the kinds of agreements that almost all of us are guilty of just clicking through without actually reading
  • Herold, Benjamin. (2017, July 28). The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. Education Week. Retrieved Month Day, Year from http://www.edweek.org/ew/issues/childrens-online-privacy-protection-act-coppa/
Deborah Baillesderr

Smart Science New Era in Science Education - 45 views

www.smartscience.net/...SmartScience.html

science labs education STEM online

shared by Deborah Baillesderr on 06 May 14 - Cached
  • Deborah Baillesderr on 06 May 14
     
    "Smart Science® online hands-on labs provide outstanding science education. Inexpensive and efficient STEM education. Built-in scientific inquiry facilitating student discovery of science. Online hands-on real experiments, not simulations. Online lab reports, easy to write and grade. Archive of lab reports obtained with a simple mouse click. Retention of lab reports and all student work for 5 years. Differentiated reading levels" Wow, pretty impressive and just might be worth the money. Do the lite demo they provide and see what you think.
Marsh Feldman

Online Education - Introducing the Microlecture Format - Open Education - 4 views

www.openeducation.net/...ducing-the-microlecture-format

microlecture teaching lectures pedagogy

shared by Marsh Feldman on 10 Mar 09 - Cached
  • in online education “tiny bursts can teach just as well as traditional lectures when paired with assignments and discussions.” The microlecture format begins with a podcast that introduces a few key terms or a critical concept, then immediately turns the learning environment over to the students.
  • “It’s a framework for knowledge excavation,” Penrose tells Shieh. “We’re going to show you where to dig, we’re going to tell you what you need to be looking for, and we’re going to oversee that process.”
  • It clearly will not work for a course that is designed to feature sustained classroom discussions. And while the concept will work well when an instructor wants to introduce smaller chunks of information, it will likely not work very well when the information is more complex.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • the microlecture format similarly requires teachers to get the key elements across in a very short amount of time. Most importantly, it forces educators to think in a new way.
  • 1. List the key concepts you are trying to convey in the 60-minute lecture. That series of phrases will form the core of your microlecture. 2. Write a 15 to 30-second introduction and conclusion. They will provide context for your key concepts. 3. Record these three elements using a microphone and Web camera. (The college information-technology department can provide advice and facilities.) If you want to produce an audio-only lecture, no Webcam is necessary. The finished product should be 60 seconds to three minutes long. 4. Design an assignment to follow the lecture that will direct students to readings or activities that allow them to explore the key concepts. Combined with a written assignment, that should allow students to learn the material. 5. Upload the video and assignment to your course-management software.
    • Marsh Feldman
      Marsh Feldman on 11 Mar 09
       
      Good luck! Some of my (upper-division college) students don't even read the handouts I give them about assignments. Instead, they come during office hours and ask me to tell them how to do the assignment. When they do read things, like a textbook commonly used in 100-level courses, they misinterpret concepts through their own preconceptions. For example, the textbook says, "In this field there are these eight schools of thought: ...." So one student writes, "All eight schools are good ways to understand. There's no right way." (Even though each school is highly critical of the others.) The rest of the class comments, with things like "Good insight, Oscar." The textbook is about the field, so it doesn't go into any detail about the schools' criticisms ot the others. I can either tell the students or give them additional reading they probably won't do. Unless you can anticipate every student misunderstanding and have time for microlectures on every one of them, I think you'll need to do things the old fashioned way. At least this way you can make a valiant attempt at helping them understand the material correctly.
Ed Webb

Web-monitoring software gathers data on kid chats by AP: Yahoo! Tech - 0 views

tech.yahoo.com/...s_tec_internet_monitoring_kids

privacy datamining children online news

shared by Ed Webb on 05 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Parents who install a leading brand of software to monitor their kids' online activities may be unwittingly allowing the company to read their children's chat messages — and sell the marketing data gathered.
  • Software sold under the Sentry and FamilySafe brands can read private chats conducted through Yahoo, MSN, AOL and other services, and send back data on what kids are saying about such things as movies, music or video games. The information is then offered to businesses seeking ways to tailor their marketing messages to kids.
  • a separate data-mining service called Pulse that taps into the data gathered by Sentry software to give businesses a glimpse of youth chatter online. While other services read publicly available teen chatter, Pulse also can read private chats. It gathers information from instant messages, blogs, social networking sites, forums and chat rooms.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Parents who don't want the company to share their child's information to businesses can check a box to opt out. But that option can be found only by visiting the company's Web site, accessible through a control panel that appears after the program has been installed. It was not in the agreement contained in the Sentry Total Home Protection program The Associated Press downloaded and installed Friday.
Tracy Tuten

Reading and the Web - Texts Without Context - NYTimes.com - 28 views

www.nytimes.com/...21mash.html

sme NYTimes technology Web 2.0 critic mashup

shared by Tracy Tuten on 08 Apr 10 - Cached
  • In his deliberately provocative — and deeply nihilistic — new book, “Reality Hunger,” the onetime novelist David Shields asserts that fiction “has never seemed less central to the culture’s sense of itself.”
  • Mr. Shields’s book consists of 618 fragments, including hundreds of quotations taken from other writers like Philip Roth, Joan Didion and Saul Bellow — quotations that Mr. Shields, 53, has taken out of context and in some cases, he says, “also revised, at least a little — for the sake of compression, consistency or whim.”
  • It’s also a question, as Mr. Lanier, 49, astutely points out in his new book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” of how online collectivism, social networking and popular software designs are changing the way people think and process information, a question of what becomes of originality and imagination in a world that prizes “metaness” and regards the mash-up as “more important than the sources who were mashed.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Mr. Lanier’s book, which makes an impassioned case for “a digital humanism,” is only one of many recent volumes to take a hard but judicious look at some of the consequences of new technology and Web 2.0. Among them are several prescient books by Cass Sunstein, 55, which explore the effects of the Internet on public discourse; Farhad Manjoo’s “True Enough,” which examines how new technologies are promoting the cultural ascendancy of belief over fact; “The Cult of the Amateur,” by Andrew Keen, which argues that Web 2.0 is creating a “digital forest of mediocrity” and substituting ill-informed speculation for genuine expertise; and Nicholas Carr’s book “The Shallows” (coming in June), which suggests that increased Internet use is rewiring our brains, impairing our ability to think deeply and creatively even as it improves our ability to multitask.
  • Steven Johnson, a founder of the online magazine Feed, for instance, wrote in an article in The Wall Street Journal last year that with the development of software for Amazon.com’s Kindle and other e-book readers that enable users to jump back and forth from other applications, he fears “one of the great joys of book reading — the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author’s ideas — will be compromised.” He continued, “We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.”
  • Tracy Tuten on 08 Apr 10
     
    Highly insightful and developed argument for how Web 2.0 is changing how we process information, learn, and develop opinions. 
Stan Golanka

Reading and the Web - Texts Without Context - NYTimes.com - 49 views

www.nytimes.com/...21mash.html

shared by Stan Golanka on 08 Feb 11 - Cached
  • It’s also a question, as Mr. Lanier, 49, astutely points out in his new book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” of how online collectivism, social networking and popular software designs are changing the way people think and process information, a question of what becomes of originality and imagination in a world that prizes “metaness” and regards the mash-up as “more important than the sources who were mashed.”
    • Stan Golanka
      Stan Golanka on 08 Feb 11
       
      Core discussion topic? From this, I see a few discussion issues: 1. Do we prize "mash-ups" more than original work? Who is "we" in this? 2. If the answer to #1 is "yes," then the next question is: is this good or bad? 3. Finally, if the answer is "bad" to #2, what place do "mash-ups" have, and how do we help our students see the value in original work?
  • Web 2.0 is creating a “digital forest of mediocrity” and substituting ill-informed speculation for genuine expertise;
    • Stan Golanka
      Stan Golanka on 08 Feb 11
       
      How do teachers help students rise above this "digital forest of mediocrity"?
  • Mr. Johnson added that the book’s migration to the digital realm will turn the solitary act of reading — “a direct exchange between author and reader” — into something far more social and suggested that as online chatter about books grows, “the unity of the book will disperse into a multitude of pages and paragraphs vying for Google’s attention.”
    • Stan Golanka
      Stan Golanka on 08 Feb 11
       
      If Johnson's predictions are true, is this necessarily bad? How much of this concern is "nostalgia"? What would be lost from an academic p.o.v, and what migh be gained?
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Instead of reading an entire news article, watching an entire television show or listening to an entire speech, growing numbers of people are happy to jump to the summary, the video clip, the sound bite — never mind if context and nuance are lost in the process; never mind if it’s our emotions, more than our sense of reason, that are engaged; never mind if statements haven’t been properly vetted and sourced.
    • Stan Golanka
      Stan Golanka on 08 Feb 11
       
      Should teachers "fight" this, or embrace it? Can summaries/sound bites ever be appropriate for academic discussions?
  • And online research enables scholars to power-search for nuggets of information that might support their theses, saving them the time of wading through stacks of material that might prove marginal but that might have also prompted them to reconsider or refine their original thinking.
  • Digital insiders like Mr. Lanier and Paulina Borsook, the author of the book “Cyberselfish,” have noted the easily distracted, adolescent quality of much of cyberculture. Ms. Borsook describes tech-heads as having “an angry adolescent view of all authority as the Pig Parent,” writing that even older digerati want to think of themselves as “having an Inner Bike Messenger.”
    • Stan Golanka
      Stan Golanka on 08 Feb 11
       
      Can teachers moderate this attitude? Does our (adults) use/non-use of technology help breed this attitude?
  • authors “will increasingly tailor their work to a milieu that the writer Caleb Crain describes as ‘groupiness,’ where people read mainly ‘for the sake of a feeling of belonging’ rather than for personal enlightenment or amusement. As social concerns override literary ones, writers seem fated to eschew virtuosity and experimentation in favor of a bland but immediately accessible style.
    • Stan Golanka
      Stan Golanka on 08 Feb 11
       
      Does this ring true to educators? Are social concerns and literary conerns opposites? How does web publishing affect "literary" publishing, as opposed to "non-literary" publishing?
  • However impossible it is to think of “Jon & Kate Plus Eight” or “Jersey Shore” as art, reality shows have taken over wide swaths of television,
serausch

Interactive Learning and Reading Activities for Students in Grades PreK-12 | Scholastic... - 26 views

www.scholastic.com/...student-activities

Interactive Reading

shared by serausch on 06 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • Story StartersGrades: PreK–K, 1–2, 3–5, 6–8This interactive tool creates quick writing prompts to help young students delve into creative writing.
  • Immigration: Stories of Yesterday and TodayGrades: PreK–K, 1–2, 3–5, 6–8Take a tour of Ellis Island, explore an interactive immigration timeline, and meet young immigrants in this online activity!
  • Science ExplorationsGrades: 3–5, 6–8, 9–12With the help of audio, text, photos, and video, students thoroughly explore six science topics, from the Galapagos Islands to giant squid.Read more >
  • qmbneddo on 06 Sep 16
     
    The Science Explorations link doesn't work.
Ed Webb

Dawn of the cyberstudent | University challenge | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...cyberstudent

news resources review tools web2.0 pedagogy

shared by Ed Webb on 27 Jan 09 - Cached
  • students often have more experience of using new technologies than many university managers — even if they need guidance in using them effectively
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 27 Jan 09
       
      And there's the rub. Students can often read, too, in the basic sense. But our job as higher educators is to get them to really read, to read critically and do something with that reading. So, too, with the affordances of web2.0.
  • the research process is likely to become much more open
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 27 Jan 09
       
      We can hope
  • a balance that suits them, which may lead to more varying degrees of face-to-face and online contact,
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • "If you are in Second Life listening to a lecture, your ability to fly through a bush isn't that relevant,
  • All this will put added pressure on university staff, with increasing demands to respond to students 24/7. Read suggests one answer could be for universities in different parts of the world to share the load so that, as often happens already in industry "the work moves around with the sun".
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 27 Jan 09
       
      Interesting concept. Dickinson and other internationally-connected institutions would be in good shape to innovate here.
  • learning culture
  • Ed Webb on 27 Jan 09
     
    Guardian on how higher ed will have to adapt. Not sure the revolution is here quite yet.
  • Ed Webb on 27 Jan 09
     
    "Cyberstudent" is a hideous term.
D. S. Koelling

5 Myths About the 'Information Age' - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Ed... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...127105

education myths information age books

shared by D. S. Koelling on 20 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • 1. "The book is dead." Wrong: More books are produced in print each year than in the previous year. One million new titles will appear worldwide in 2011. In one day in Britain—"Super Thursday," last October 1—800 new works were published.
  • 2. "We have entered the information age." This announcement is usually intoned solemnly, as if information did not exist in other ages. But every age is an age of information, each in its own way and according to the media available at the time.
  • 3. "All information is now available online." The absurdity of this claim is obvious to anyone who has ever done research in archives. Only a tiny fraction of archival material has ever been read, much less digitized. Most judicial decisions and legislation, both state and federal, have never appeared on the Web. The vast output of regulations and reports by public bodies remains largely inaccessible to the citizens it affects. Google estimates that 129,864,880 different books exist in the world, and it claims to have digitized 15 million of them—or about 12 percent.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • 4. "Libraries are obsolete." Everywhere in the country librarians report that they have never had so many patrons. At Harvard, our reading rooms are full. The 85 branch libraries of the New York Public Library system are crammed with people.
  • 5. "The future is digital." True enough, but misleading. In 10, 20, or 50 years, the information environment will be overwhelmingly digital, but the prevalence of electronic communication does not mean that printed material will cease to be important. Research in the relatively new discipline of book history has demonstrated that new modes of communication do not displace old ones, at least not in the short run.
  • I mention these misconceptions because I think they stand in the way of understanding shifts in the information environment. They make the changes appear too dramatic. They present things ahistorically and in sharp contrasts—before and after, either/or, black and white. A more nuanced view would reject the common notion that old books and e-books occupy opposite and antagonistic extremes on a technological spectrum. Old books and e-books should be thought of as allies, not enemies.
  • Last year the sale of e-books (digitized texts designed for hand-held readers) doubled, accounting for 10 percent of sales in the trade-book market. This year they are expected to reach 15 or even 20 percent. But there are indications that the sale of printed books has increased at the same time.
  • Many of us worry about a decline in deep, reflective, cover-to-cover reading. We deplore the shift to blogs, snippets, and tweets. In the case of research, we might concede that word searches have advantages, but we refuse to believe that they can lead to the kind of understanding that comes with the continuous study of an entire book. Is it true, however, that deep reading has declined, or even that it always prevailed?
  • Writing looks as bad as reading to those who see nothing but decline in the advent of the Internet. As one lament puts it: Books used to be written for the general reader; now they are written by the general reader. The Internet certainly has stimulated self-publishing, but why should that be deplored? Many writers with important things to say had not been able to break into print, and anyone who finds little value in their work can ignore it.
  • One could cite other examples of how the new technology is reinforcing old modes of communication rather than undermining them. I don't mean to minimize the difficulties faced by authors, publishers, and readers, but I believe that some historically informed reflection could dispel the misconceptions that prevent us from making the most of "the information age"—if we must call it that.
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