Geek Books and the Digital World

I have become a fan of books from O'reilly publishing. They are famous for the "Hacks" series and in fact, if I were teaching a statistics class I would strongly consider using Statistics Hacks.

But, that’s not actually what I wanted to talk about. As a tablet pc user I do a lot of reading on my HP Tabletand one of my favorite finds has been O’reilly’s “online books” website called safari. The shelf life of a good technology book isn’t always that long, but with this service I can read the whole book through, and if it’s good enough, I can order the paper based book at a 35% discount (what?? that’s amazing).

I pay 20 dollars a month to be able to have 10 books on my virtual bookshelf. Once a book is added to the bookshelf it has to remain there for 30 days. But, even though I can only have 10 books on my bookshelf (they have to be on my bookshelf, otherwise they can't be read), the search function can find subjects across the entire library of publishers (what?? that’s amazing). If the search turns up a book that's not on my bookshelf, I can add it--that is, if I have open slots on my bookshelf.

The downside if there is one—the bookmarking tool is a bit clunky. But, the good news, use Diigo and not only can you bookmark the page, but you can even store the paragraph clipping for future reference. Because the site is password protected you will need to login to Safari, before clicking your diigo bookmark link.

Tags: Bookmarking, Digital World, Ebooks, Learning, TabletPC

Recent Report from Educause on Students and Their Expectations for IT

Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education - Inside Higher Ed :: Students' 'Evolving' Use of Technology

This article provides a very interesting overview of some observations found in an annual survey sponsored by Educause (The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2007) about how the current college student's expectations of IT enhanced learning is "evolving".

A Concern:

While the "sage on the stage" style of teaching has not been the preferred model for a while now, it is going to be even less effective with the "digital natives" crowd.

A Prediction:

Google Docs and Wiki spaces are going to be increasingly important components of the "learning" toolbox. The price is right for one thing (free) and faculty will increasingly want to be independent of the "controls" placed on them by IT management at our higher ed institutions.

A Recommendation:

IT management teams should take a hard look at what they're doing to support the academic mission. The availability of specific services by outside vendors has changed dramatically. A few years ago it was important for IT teams to provide an email infrastructure to support the academic mission, but now with both Google and Microsoft providing email services it no longer seems prudent. Microsoft's Version Google's Version

Tags: Classroom, Higher Education, Teaching, Email

Cooperation and Collaboration in Higher Education

Google Code - Updates: UW and Google: Teaching in Parallel Annotated

Big Business (Google) collaborates with Higher Education (University of Washington) to teach students about Grid Computing. And that's not all, UW invites other universities to get in on the action. This is a great story with awesome potential.

A list of items that I highlighted from the article--see link at the top of this entry for the article in its entirety (including the full annotated version).

Earlier this year, the University of Washington partnered with Google to develop and implement a course to teach large-scale distributed computing based on MapReduce and the Google File System (GFS).

The goal of developing the course was to expose students to the methods needed to address the problems associated with hundreds (or thousands) of computers processing huge datasets ranging into terabytes

Tags: Learning, Higher Education, Open Source, Teaching, Distributed Computing, Google

Mind Mapping Meets Wikipedia

As a strong advocate for any tool that aids the learning process, I have to give a PG rating (Pretty Great) to http://www.wikimindmap.org. So, let's say for instance that we want to continue our learning on RSS news feeds.

1. Visit the site http://www.wikimindmap.org
2. Set the appropriate language, which if you're reading this you'll probably want to set it to en.wikipedia.org.
3. Enter a topic like RSS

or go directly to the results by clicking below: http://www.wikimindmap.org/viewmap.php?wiki=en.wikipedia.org&topic=RSS

Tags: Classroom, Higher Education, Learning, Teaching, Mind Mapping, RSS, Web 2.0

Can Brittanica Do This?

New Tool Mines Wikipedia Truthfulness Annotated

I happen to really like wikipedia--especially as I'm trying to keep up with the latest "tech" jargon. In the world of academia, however, it has its detractors. And understandably so--mature and wise scholars sometimes can be tricked by the accuracy of an entry, so it is no wonder that young students may get tripped up. A software tool like the one in this article could really help Wikipedia be a more trusted tool in the classroom. As the article states it's not fool-proof, but the reality is that our students, I hope, will be applying critical thinking skills to anything they read.

A list of items that I highlighted from the article--see link at the top of this entry for the article in its entirety (including the full annotated version).

• Because anyone can edit Wikipedia, the Web encyclopedia's reliability varies wildly.
• Now a computer science professor hopes to give users a better baloney detector: software that flags questionable lines in Wikipedia entries.
• he software will color text some gradation of orange if there is reason to doubt its content. The deeper the orange, the more likely it is malarkey.
• by analyzing the reputations of the contributors responsible for each line.
• In general, the less tinkering your work on Wikipedia engenders, the more trustworthy you are deemed to be.
• For example, in an extensive entry on the old Commodore 64 computers - http://tinyurl.com/2dbggk - the Santa Cruz software tags just three lines, each an unfootnoted statement of purported fact.

Tags: Digital World, Higher Education, Learning, Teaching, Web 2.0

A Great Overview of RSS Newsfeeds

I recently wrote a paper in which I talked about the value of RSS newsfeeds. In my blog reading I ran across this video that is a very good (and easy to understand) overview of RSS.

Tags: Google, Learning, Teaching, RSS

Google Books Update

Your Own Google Books Library, and More Annotated

This update is provided by Philipp Lennsen who writes for one of my favorite blogs (Blogoscoped). I continue to be drawn to things that could change the classroom and I really think Google's initiative with Google Books has the potential to be an amazing teaching resource. A list of items that I highlighted from the article--see link at the top of this entry for the article in its entirety (including the full annotated version). your library is RSS-ified for others to subscribe to, and you can export it using another custom XML format listing title, author, ISBN and such. Importing books is possible as well by providing a list of ISBNs.

Google's embed dialog also allows you to directly blog something with Blogger, or add it to Google Notebook.

The Google Books project, formerly called Google Print (project name "Ocean"), continues to evolve aiming to become "the" book search center with an abundance of research options and data mining features, like maps integration, or the new popular passages.

Right now the biggest obstacle for users I see are the often confusing separations between public domain books, partner books and library books.

And why shouldn't I be allowed to clip fair use passages from copyrighted books, for instance?

In related news, the New York Times reports that both Amazon and Google will be entering the ebook market this year.

Tags: Classroom, Digital World, Learning, Teaching, Higher Education, Ebooks