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"I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle."

""Textbooks are expensive," noted Peter Tsigaris, professor of economics at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia. "And almost all the information is available online. If something else exists that is almost a perfect substitute, and is much cheaper, why would you buy something that is a lot more expensive and outdated?" The tipping point for Tsigaris came two years ago when he determined that available online material was "just as good" as any textbook. He experimented with the idea, using resources such as MOOC content in place of a required text. "MOOCs help organize the information for you," said Tsigaris. "For the students' textbook, I use the Saylor Organization, which is based on the Creative Commons [license], and you can take the material without any copyright issues. Plus I added the Khan Academy to my lectures, and PowerPoint slides, so the students had quite a bit of information.""

Simply put, yes. Yes they can. And should!

"This post is part of a series of 11 posts in which we're sharing the syllabi for all 11 courses in the Instructional Technology and Digital Media Literacy (IT&DML) program. Please keep in mind the materials we're sharing here are the documents and specifics as approved when we initially launched the program. The "real" implementation of these courses is a bit different as we embrace new digital texts and tools."

"One of the key components of the IT&DML program is that we're big believers in "open" and to that end as much of the content of our program is open, and available online for your use. The rationale for this is two-fold. I believe this helps us adapt and react to changes in the industry and classroom. I also believe that if our materials are open and online, then anyone can use them…but also they can be critiqued and reviewed by anyone. To that end, I have been, and will continue to reflect on the texts and tools, and the components of the program here on this blog."

"Keeeb allows you to clip, collect and organize any valuable content, that you find online. From entire web pages to images, videos and text, while remaining fast, intuitive and clean. If you are content curator, researcher or information librarian this is a must have app to keep in your toolkit."

"Smart machines are an emerging "super class" of technologies that perform a wide variety of work, both the physical and the intellectual kind, said Sondergaard. Machines, for instance, have been grading multiple choice for years, but now they are grading essays and unstructured text. This cognitive capability in software will extend to other areas, including financial analysis, medical diagnostics and data analytic jobs of all sorts, says Gartner."

"FOAM is the movement that has spontaneously emerged from the exploding collection of constantly evolving, collaborative and interactive open access medical education resources being distributed on the web with one objective - to make the world a better place. FOAM is independent of platform or media - it includes blogs, podcasts, tweets, Google hangouts, online videos, text documents, photographs, facebook groups, and a whole lot more."

"From 1. Documenting (video, audio, text, images, embedded content,manage online work, curated content) to 2. Reflecting (meta-cognitive, connected, goal oriented, as an assessment) to 3. Sharing (published, transparent, making learning/ thinking visible,  to teach others and contribute to a network) on to 4. Connecting (for authentic feedback, collaboration purposes, finding mentors and to gain perspective)"

"Google Forms makes peer evaluation possible and simple. I collect the names and email addresses of both students: evaluator and evaluatee. I use the "grid" style question type to allow peers to rank each criteria on a scale of 1-5 against the rubric. I can include a URL to the grading criteria in the help text, so all students have access to the standard assessment guide. "

"Scapple is an easy-to-use tool for getting ideas down as quickly as possible and making connections between them. It isn't exactly mind-mapping software-it's more like a freeform text editor that allows you to make notes anywhere on the page and to connect them using straight dotted lines or arrows. If you've ever scribbled down ideas all over a piece of paper and drawn lines between related thoughts, then you already know what Scapple does."

"With deep learning, computer scientists build software models that simulate-to a certain extent-the learning model of the human brain. These models can then be trained on a mountain of new data, tweaked and eventually applied to brand new types of jobs. An image recognition model build for Google Image Search, for example, might also help out the Google Maps team. A text analysis model might help Google's search engine, but it might be useful for Google+ too."

"What Anbar has in mind is something he calls "active OER." That's taking the standard digital textbook and expanding it with the addition of digital resources, including simulations that are both interactive and adaptive. "The learner doesn't just move something around in the simulation but actually gets prompting feedback that guides them to success," he explained. That's where Smart Sparrow comes in: The company produces aero, a learning platform that allows the instructor to pull together lessons from a set of templates that can include text, tests, assessments, virtual labs and field trips, and other digital components. For the purposes of the consortium, those elements would be pulled from OER materials."

"Digital networks, websites, and services are a necessary component of the toolset required to build and utilize digital and media literacies. Appropriate policies, procedures, and guidelines are necessary to protect the developers and administrators of these texts and tools, as well as the users of these spaces. These documents often fail to provide users with the freedom needed to expand their skills, while still creating safe and appropriate boundaries for use of the Internet and all it has to offer."

"these days when we say "textbook" we seldom mean textbook. We mean course materials. As the Vox article makes clear, the book is not always (not usually?) the hideously expensive part of the deal - the online access codes and other ancillary materials are. Certainly, there are amazingly expensive books out there that get assigned in classes (I hear law books are hundreds of dollars, I know some economics books are, some science books, etc. Even in Literature, a relatively inexpensive field, big anthologies can be pricey). But often - and maybe even usually - when we complain about the cost of books, we're complaining about the cost of supplemental media, password-protected websites, and other items that may include text but are certainly not books. The term "Open Educational Resources" recognizes this. It's a strange habit of language that has kept us from parallelism, though: What OERs oppose is not textbooks, but CERs, Closed Educational Resources."

"It's also one piece of evidence that changing the college trajectories of America's low-income students will require efforts more extensive than low-cost "nudges." "It's a good lesson in thinking about the limitations of these kinds of interventions," said Lindsay Page, a University of Pittsburgh researcher who has studied text messaging reminders to students. "Be cautious of the long-run benefits from $6 solutions.""

"One of Dr. Mayer's primary research interests is multimedia learning. In his work, he applies basic findings from cognitive psychology to practical questions in learning, teaching, and communication, most notably: How can individuals effectively design visual content (e.g., PowerPoint presentations) to accompany their verbal presentations and written text?"

"You can use Twitter Archiver to save tweets for instance, for brand mentions, tweets from a specific person, trending hashtags, geotagged tweets, and even to back-up your own tweets. Besides the actual tweet text mentioning your keywords, Twitter Archiver also captures other data related to the tweets include: details about Twitter user (e.g. their name, number of follows and followers, location, bio, profile image, verified or not), a link to the original tweet, date and time of the tweet,  the app from which the tweet was shared, number of retweets, and many more. 'The add-on is free though you can upgrade to premium edition to capture more search terms. The premium version also includes supports and polls twitter more frequently (every 10-15 minutes) to download new tweets."

"A handbook for faculty interested in practicing open pedagogy by involving students in the making of open textbooks, ancillary materials, or other Open Educational Resources. This is a first edition, compiled by Rebus Community, and we welcome feedback and ideas to expand the text."

"The results are in, and the top landing pages are heavy on content and light on color. At Crayon, we recently analyzed the top 1,000+ landing pages from our web design inspiration site Crayon Inspire. We looked at how they used text, video, and colors, and we even dug into the structure of the most popular landing pages of the last year."

"Mammoth is designed to convert .docx documents, such as those created by Microsoft Word, and convert them to HTML. Mammoth aims to produce simple and clean HTML by using semantic information in the document, and ignoring other details. For instance, Mammoth converts any paragraph with the style Heading 1 to h1 elements, rather than attempting to exactly copy the styling (font, text size, colour, etc.) of the heading."