Social Informatics

This article is on the editorial process of putting together David Foster Wallace's unfinished novel, which was several hundred pages of manuscript without a clear order. I thought this was interesting: ___ "It's my version of the novel," [Michael Pietsch, editor of the novel] admitted, adding that he talked to Little Brown's e-book staff about creating a version that would enable the reader to arrange the chapters in any order, but was told that was technically unfeasible. __ This is surprising to me - is the ebook form that inflexible? Or did the publisher not want to deal with the idea of so many versions circulating?

Is the internet an addiction or a passion?

"In general, if a pastime is not classy, those who love it are 'addicted.' Opera and poetry buffs are 'passionate.'"

Review of Kevin Kelly's new book. At the end of the review, there is a comparison of Kelly's optimist view of technology with the dark vision as laid out in Jaron Lanier's "You are not a gadget."

How has the distribution and viewing experience of watching a movie changed in the instant netflix age? "There are moviegoers and probably critics who don't care about the kind of box that images come in, how those images were created and how they are consumed, though it seems important to mark these changes and how they are affecting our modern or postmodern selves. Television and home video shrank movies, turning them into more easily obtainable images that are perhaps no longer (as) sacred. The new 24-hour movie, meanwhile, has brought other changes, filling our eyes and sometimes flooding our heads with an unending stream of visions. "

Good review of the issues with DRM in ebooks.

Jane McGonigal's new book - Reality is Broken - is out. This is an interview with her and some of the users of her games.

Sherry Turkle is quoted in this article that discusses how social media can induce FOMO: fear of missing out.

A former colleague of mine passed this along to me today, and I thought it was interesting in light of our class's discussions on technological trends.

NYU's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World has a new website with their nice collection of digital books.

Design firm IDEO came up with some crazy ideas for the future of the book, one of which is really social in nature. These are some cool ideas/videos.

I'm surprised that this NYT story doesn't have any better reasons for why teenagers are a new surging market in ebook sales. My guess, which I posted on eCollege was that they're used to having tech gadgets in their hands and that maybe a book seems antiquated to them. But that's just my guess.

Like the etextbook story I just linked to, this video on "what is a vook?" shows how interactive ebooks can be. I'm not sure how I feel about all this functionality just yet. It makes sense for certain kinds of etextbooks, but I'm not sure if I want video to go with my "Pride & Prejudice."

This NPR story shows how an etextbook can be more contextual than a standard 2-D book. Imagine being able to watch an example of cell division and not just read about it?

Amazon's Cloud Drive allows you to upload to Amazon's servers your music, ebooks etc, but the content companies don't want you to be able to hold onto the content.

So far, it's mostly being used for students who fail courses, and retake it as "online credit recovery."

The Idaho example is crazy (in my opinion), and private corporations are increasingly trying to get K-12 education money. However, online classes can be appropriate at this level in some situations (e.g., languages).

The Room for Debate section of the NYT looks at this question. Are schools looking to spend less on teachers, or do online classes provide new skills and opportunities?

A nice overview of how DPL differs from other mass-digitization projects such as Europeana and Google Books

I have uploaded other pdf documents at the bottom of one of my pages, but not the Times articles because I thought they would be accessible through the link. However, I don't know whether people notice docs at the bottom of the Google page even though I say "attached below" in the citation. The Times articles are now on ecollege in doc sharing and attached to my discussion reply. I hope that the Economist doesn't block users.

I recently also uploaded the Times articles as PDFs to my second page.

On April 1, 2011 Project Tomorrow released the report "The New 3 E's of Education: Enabled, Engaged and Empowered - How Today's Students are Leveraging Emerging Technologies for Learning" at a Congressional Briefing held in Washington, DC. Their survey revealed that e-textbooks are not yet widely used in the K-12 environment.

Article looks at the ebooks business in Europe, where it is still in its infancy. Not many readers available, and very little content in other languages besides English. There are legal and economic issues for pricing and licensing of ebooks.

I was just going to add this here. I debated whether to cite it on one of my pages. They also mention the example of the music industry.