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Textbook app offers access to a catalog of 70,000 college- and university-level electronic textbooks from major textbook publishers. Kno reported it will offer books at 30 percent to 50 percent off list prices through the Kno Store. Other e-learning features of the Textbooks for iPad app include: A social networking feature called Words to Friends that connects students via Facebook and Twitter; Text highlighting; Sticky notes; Chapter previews; and Support for downloading and reading PDFs from the Web.

John Dolan sent me a note about this as well. He said that Stuart is interested in the Kno, but may not have a lot of time to examine it. John said that he would contact the other people involved with the Digital Research group in Liberal Arts. I have downloaded the app, but haven't used it yet.

I'd like to play around with it a bit to see what is has to offer... was thinking for Stuart's projects in particular. Maybe I'll bring it up with Stuart and Michael at our meeting next week. I guess the next step is seeing if the texts we use are even available.

I hope that lifelong access becomes the new norm. I keep hearing publishing companies talking about online textbooks with access that would be limited to a set period (a semester or six months). That's fine if you're taking a single course that you don't really care about - but I don't want students to feel that way about their learning. Courses build upon each other. Good reference materials should serve a purpose for years, not months.

I returned many of mine, but kept the foundation books that I'd need for other courses - calculus, mechanics, chemistry, etc... Many of them were used for more than one course (e.g. Math 140 and 141). I'd hate to have to buy the same book twice and then not have it afterward for other courses.

I think that's typically what these students do in the focus group, but it was all about 'having the option' to keep the book at the end of the course. Might be some sort of perception of options thing going on here. The other popular comment was "I look at computer screens all day, I definitely don't want to look at a computer screen to read fine print another 1-2 hours a day". A couple students really bashed their profs about the quality of PDFs they are putting online, meaning that profs are STILL photocopying PDFs from journals, that cut words from a column and are angled funny in the PDF. Claimed these were unreadable online and they had to print them out to 'guess' at some of the words and fill them in by hand.

story about release of new platform from one of david wiley's projects.

I read this yesterday and was sort of blown away by the idea. Given the drama I've watched here in our school district over buying iPads for students I can't imagine seeing something so bold. I do think it is a great idea.