I believe there are 3 needs in modern literacy that we cannot ignore as educators. Digital literacy is not an "option" anymore. Most of the texts that we read each day appear on a screen, complete with embedded media, advertisements, and hyperlinks. Navigating these spaces is required to function successfully in modern society. We should immerse our students in these mediums, and provide them guidance to maximize their learning. Digital texts foster curation and recall. When I read texts in hard copy, I often annotate using words and images. This helps me to make meaning of the text in the moment that I'm reading it. However, when I read digital texts, my annotations and sketches are automatically added to my intellectual database in Evernote. My database is fully searchable by content and tag. Therefore, when I need citations, information, or ideas to guide my writing, I most often return to the digital sources, ideas, and phrases captured in my database. In short, texts in hard copy make an impact, but digital texts shape my thinking and writing more often. Teachers need to teach students to digital and hard copy texts equally. Existing resources coupled with teacher comfort levels often reduce the amount of instruction that students receive regarding digital texts. In fact, a teacher recently told me that "you just can't get the same experience from a Kindle as you can from a hardback book." Really? We need to get comfortable with digital texts ourselves and share the process meaningfully with students.

"Transform your institution to reap the benefits of the digital age. With Adobe's industry-leading portfolio of technologies and services, you can help faculty, students, and staff deliver standout digital experiences that promote excellence campuswide."

"Today we're please to announce that Google Docs has been integrated into Edmodo. This highly requested feature allows you to sync your Google Docs with your Edmodo Library so you can easily access and share your Google Docs with your Edmodo groups."

"VSU partnered with Flat World Knowledge, a start-up publisher that produces exclusively written e-books with "open" content that can be modified by professors. In a trial with 14 business courses, students would be required to pay $20 and receive a Flat World e-book and digital learning supplements. (The university and a local grant have been covering the cost, so far.)"

"The project is designed to help CSU campuses evaluate, select, and implement eTextbook products that are as accessible as possible for students, staff, and faculty. Emphasis will be placed on developing and disseminating authoritative guidance, information, and resources (e.g. templates, evaluations) so that campuses can successfully tackle the rapidly-growing accessibility challenges associated with eTextbooks. "

Courseload's seamlessly integrated platform delivers course materials through any web-enabled device (computers, laptops, iPads and Android devices, smart-phones, etc.) allowing all course material to be located in a single place. With digital tools that enable search, highlighting, annotating, and creating links to online content, the technology is easy-to-access and simple to use. And, it costs one-third the price of traditional textbooks - the same textbooks sourced from the same publishers that you use today.

Carl says that we should familiarize ourselves with Courseload, the digital textbook Indiana uses.

"White said that UD faculty have three basic options for dealing with such situations: Faculty members can contact the UD General Counsel's Office and request assistance in sending a "take-down notice" to the offending website; Faculty members can send a take-down notice on their own; or Faculty members can include in their syllabi a notice to the effect that their lectures and other course materials are copyright protected and that students are not authorized to commercialize the notes they take down in class, the test questions they answer or any other course related materials. Students violating this rule would be subject to discipline under the code of conduct in UD's Student Guide to University Policies."

"CourseHero.com, a Web site that allows students to post exam questions and homework solutions, has raised legal issues for professors and faculty, causing the university's lawyer to take action against the potential misuse of copyrighted intellectual property."

"The problem is the idea that the price of digital books will be 50 percent of the new price. That's not holding. We're seeing anywhere from 35 to 42 percent off."

Robin is a new faculty at UD, from Penn State.

"The Villanova University Technology Expo is an opportunity for the regional education community to see the latest technology from leading vendors, learn from informative keynote speakers and connect with peers to find solutions and best practices. "

Might be worth it, even if it's only to see Michael Welsh.

Apple is aggressively moving to make the iPad cheaper and cheaper to build while eyeing the situation where tablets in general, and iPads in particular, are nearly ubiquitous. When you understand these trends, the iBooks Author / iBooks 2 / iTunesU App strategy for education makes a lot more sense.

"We told the publishers, 'We'll go to the agency model, where you set the price, and we get our 30%, and yes, the customer pays a little more, but that's what you want anyway,'" Mr. Jobs was quoted as saying by his biographer, Walter Isaacson. The publishers were then able to impose the same model across the industry, Mr. Jobs told Mr. Isaacson. "They went to Amazon and said, 'You're going to sign an agency contract or we're not going to give you the books,' " Mr. Jobs said. The Justice Department believes that Apple and the publishers acted in concert to raise prices across the industry, and is prepared to sue them for violating federal antitrust laws, the people familiar with the matter said.

There can be no uniform pre-test. There can be no uniform post-test. MOOCs make a loud point about the fact that they don't teach anything in particular. No one is supposed to learn anything in particular. Consequently, there are no broad outcomes to measure. Ergo, it is difficult to say anything about MOOCs from the perspective of whether or not they succeed in facilitating learning, at least under the traditional group "learning gains" paradigm of educational research.

"After all we (as a society not libraries) did not get the first sale doctrine out of the goodness of someone's heart, it came from a court case. Maybe we need to stop asking. It wouldn't be the first time."

A good summary of the state of the ebook business and libraries.

The new company, named Rafter, has also introduced a free online database that provides real-time and historical views on economic trends, adoption patterns, and reviews for more than 11 million textbooks. 

"Readium, a project of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) and supporters, is an open source reference system and rendering engine for EPUB publications. EPUB is the industry-standard open format for eBooks and digital publications. The latest version, EPUB 3, is based on Web Standard technologies such as HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, SVG, and the DOM. The overall aim of the Readium project is to ensure that open source software for handling EPUB 3 publications is readily available, to accelerate adoption of EPUB 3 as the universal, accessible, global digital publishing format. Readium is built on WebKit , the embeddable open source Web content engine."

An open source rendering app to promote epub as an ebook standard. Works as a Google Chrome extension.

Last month at the Digital Book World conference in New York, Kelly Gallagher, VP, publishing services at R.R. Bowker, revealed that 74% of book buyers have never bought an eBook. To help make the transition smoother, we've put together a list together to demystify eReaders.