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

New HP Tablet PC—2710P

Diigo (social bookmarking with annotation capabilities), Mindjet Mindmanager (idea mapping software), and Biblegateway (with Diigo) all make more sense when you are a tablet PC user. I have had my HP branded TC4200 for almost three years now and I still give it high marks for durability and usability. But, here's the interesting news—HP Compaq is going to ship their newest version of the tablet PC in Q3 2007. The following video does a great job of showing some of the features in the HP 2710P.

http://www.brightcove.com/title.jsp?title=823361919

Working the Web Article from "University Business" April 2007 (author: Chelan David)

Working The Web Annotated

I enjoyed this article that was recently posted on the "University Business" Magazine website, authored by Chelan David. You may click the link above to see the entire article, or visit the "annotated" link above that I annotated through Diigo (http://www.diigo.com/). The highlighted quotes, that you could see by visiting the "annotated" link above are extracted for you below:

• The shift toward user-generated content is having a major impact on education
• Educators are taking advantage of photo and video sharing services, podcasting, wikis, blogs, and other social software to instruct learners through the latest in internet technologies
• Key aspects of the movement include web architecture that encourages user contributions, the continuous updates of software and data, and the freedom to share and edit content
• Think of social bookmarking as version 2.0 of the personal bookmarks on your browser
• In contrast to the bookmarks on your computer, social bookmarking sites are available to you from any computer. Also, you can: add tags (free-text keywords) to your posts; see what others are posting and what tags they're using; and sort items of interest by tag, project, or user

Web 2.0 in the Classroom

I just finished teaching a computer ethics course at Judson University--okay, it's still Judson College now, but they will be changing to University this Fall (http://www.judsoncollege.edu/). I used a web 2.0 tool called diigo (http://www.diigo.com/). Diigo is an acronym for "Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff".

It may be that you've heard of del.icio.us which is a very popular social bookmarking tool. Diigo is a social bookmarking tool plus annotation tool. It allows you to read an article, bookmark it, and within the article, make annotations like "highlighting" and "sticky note comments". This makes it an awesome research tool.

In the past I have had students bring articles to class that pertain to the assigned chapters, but this time I made this an entirely digital activity. The students were to find online articles, book mark, annotate, and share them with the group forum that I set up for them. We then, with the group forum on the projector screen, would have each student talk us through their article.

While this tool is still in "beta" the student assessment survey that was taken at the end of the last class seemed to indicate that this activity was well received.

Tags: Bookmarking, Classroom, Learning, Teaching, TabletPC, Web 2.0, Organize