"textbooks" entries

Four short links: 22 January 2013

Four short links: 22 January 2013

Open Pushing Innovation, Clear Intentions, Druids vs Engineers, and Reimagined Textbooks

  1. Design Like Nobody’s Patenting Anything (Wired) — profile of Maker favourites Sparkfun. Instead of relying on patents for protection, the team prefers to outrace other entrants in the field. “The open source model just forces us to innovate,” says Boudreaux. “When we release something, we’ve got to be thinking about the next rev. We’re doing engineering and innovating and it’s what we wanna be doing and what we do well.”
  2. Agree to Agree — why I respect my friend David Wheeler: his Design Scene app, which features daily design inspiration, obtains prior written permission to feature the sites because doing so is not only making things legally crystal clear, but also makes his intentions clear to the sites he’s linking to. He’s shared the simple license they request.
  3. The Coming Fight Between Druids and Engineers (The Edge) — We live in a time when the loneliest place in any debate is the middle, and the argument over technology’s role in our future is no exception. The relentless onslaught of novelties technological and otherwise is tilting individuals and institutions alike towards becoming Engineers or Druids. It is a pressure we must resist, for to be either a Druid or an Engineer is to be a fool. Druids can’t revive the past, and Engineers cannot build technologies that do not carry hidden trouble. (via Beta Knowledge)
  4. Reimagining Math Textbooks (Dan Meyer) — love this outline of how a textbook could meaningfully interact with students, rather than being recorded lectures or PDF versions of cyclostyled notes and multichoice tests. Rather than using a generic example to illustrate a mathematical concept, we use the example you created. We talk about its perimeter. We talk about its area. The diagrams in the margins change. The text in the textbook changes. Check it out — they actually built it!

Top stories: January 16-20, 2012

The perils of SOPA and PIPA, a survey of Hadoop products, and common mobile UI mistakes.

This week on O'Reilly: Tim O'Reilly explained why SOPA and PIPA are bad for the Internet and bad for business, Edd Dumbill offered an extensive survey of Hadoop solutions, and we looked at the most common mobile interface mistakes.

Does digital text create a cognitive gap?

A study finds electronic text may disrupt learning techniques.

Students and professors have anxiously anticipated the replacement of analog textbooks with digital options. As it turns out, however, current technology might actually hinder learning.

iPad 3G and the vacancy of the connected textbook

The iPad 3G takes a small step toward fulfilling the promise of connected textbooks, but there's a lot more work to do.

The 21st-century textbook

Future textbooks could improve update cycles and create feedback loops

With new technologies constantly coming on-line, and with states like California, Texas, and Oregon allowing digital curriculum to replace printed curriculum, the question arises: what will textbooks look like in the coming years? Here's a few clues.

TOC Preview: The Future of Digital Textbooks

Technology is driving change in the way people teach, learn, and create. The impact of technology on teaching and learning in K-12, higher education, and professional learning has been profound, and, while no one can predict the future, it's safe to say this transformation has only just begun. At next week's Tools of Change for Publishing conference, a session titled…

Mobile as New Medium

While prepping for my talk tomorrow on mobile publishing at the Digital Publishing Group in New York, I was also popping in and out of a related ongoing email conversation about textbooks and iPhones, and couldn't help but weigh in on the question of how to handle some the issues like cross referencing and annotations on the iPhone compared with…

Report: Large-Form Kindle to Target Textbooks and Newspapers

The Wall Street Journal says a large-form Kindle — rumored to make its debut tomorrow — will be partially targeted at the textbook market: Beginning this fall, some students at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland will be given large-screen Kindles with textbooks for chemistry, computer science and a freshman seminar already installed, said Lev Gonick, the school's chief…

Digital Textbooks are for Professors, Not Students

Alex Reid says digital textbook publishers are targeting the wrong customer: it's not about students — they don't like textbooks in any format — it's about professors. From Digital Digs: The person you need to sell is the professor. S/he's the one who orders the book. Then it's up to the professor to explain to the students why they…

Open Source Textbook Adoption Grows

Inside Higher Ed notes the slowly growing open source textbook movement: Colleges and individual faculty members continue to experiment with putting course information and material online, and "open textbooks" typically are licensed to allow users to download, share and alter the content as they see fit, so long as their purposes aren't commercial and they credit the author for…