Ebooks at Liberal Arts Colleges

"Brad Miller and David Ranum have opened up their eBook for general use at their new http://interactivepython.org site. This is the book whose use we have been studying for the last year as part of our CSLearning4U effort. It's a great alternative to the Udacity/Coursera model of distance education, to make a book more like a course, rather than capture the course in video. "

Launched: http://gutenberg-technology.com/index.php?page=mybookfactory Cloud-based?

"When Rowe, professor of English at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, and Elliott Visconsi, associate professor of English at Notre Dame, co-designed The Tempest iPad app, they did more than re-imagine a single play, they re-imagined reading."

Nice article. Into the next Future Trends it goes.

"OpenStax College, the nonprofit, open-access publisher out of Rice University, announced the launch of its first iBook text Monday, becoming the latest publisher to try to make the free-with-paid-options model sustainable. The interactive, iPad-based version of OpenStax's free-to-read online College Physics text is available through iTunes for $4.99."

"What often gets lost in discussions about digital textbooks is that most of them are created through processes meant to scale. Frequently, publishing companies take content intended to be printed and put it through some kind of automated conversion that turns the book into an e-text. Often the results are anemic, little more than PDF files with functions such as text highlighting thrown on top. Two professors at tiny Albion College in Michigan have concluded that the results aren't good enough. Neither instructor has a background in mobile application development, but they've each developed an app for their respective courses that is helping their students become more engaged in the content they're teaching."

We should definitely interview these guys.

Nice OECD report on ebook world.

"John William White's First Greek Book was originally published in 1896. The book contains a guided curriculum built around the language and vocabulary of Xenophon's Anabasis. This digital tutorial is an evolving edition that is designed to run on both traditional browsers, tablet devices, and phones. Each lesson includes drill and practice exercises in addition to the text itself. The site also includes tab-delimited files for all of the vocabulary and grammar that can be imported into flashcard programs."

Neat combination of ebook w/inquiry-based learning.

" In this course the students do not have a textbook; in fact, they are forbidden from using outside sources at any time. Instead, they are given the skeleton of a textbook. It has definitions, statements of theorems, some explanatory text, and some problems. They must prove the theorems, solve the problems, and type their work into the empty textbook. By the end of the semester they have created their own textbook."

Great example of collaborative knowledge creation! It would be interesting to replicate in other disciplines or do a seminar with others taking similar approach.

" Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) recently decided to take a novel approach to reducing textbook costs for its students by reworking its contracts not with the companies that sell books, but rather those that control the bookstores."

"49 percent of SNHU students either buy their textbooks someplace other than the campus bookstore or do not buy them at all." - wow.

Open becomes "affordable." Hmmm.