e-readers

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Ernest Hemingway Meets “This American Life”: the New English Lit Class

February 10, 2012 | 11:07 AM | By

Getty

College professors are finding creative ways to use tablets in classes.

By Stephen Chupaska

What will e-readers do to the time-honored tradition of scribbling notes in the margins and underlining passages in print books?

Remains to be seen how quickly college students will adopt e-books on a mass scale. Thorny issues over who can use the books when students rent digital versions, how the growing movement of free, online textbooks will be incorporated into college curriculum, and figuring out how to share notes online are just a few important unknowns that are still being hammered out as college students think about using ebooks.

And though students still complain about using iPads (slow, cumbersome typing, for one thing), some English literature college professors are finding creative ways of using its multi-media uses.

Scott Cohen, an English professor at Stonehill Colllege, located about 30 miles southwest of Boston, is in his second year of implementing the iPad into his lessons.

“The iPad really helps move between different kinds of texts and material, visual, cinematic, written, audio, etcetera,” Cohen said. “Students love them, beyond just being a new shiny device.”

Last year, Cohen received a grant from the college’s Center for Teacher and Learning to purchase three iPads as part of a pilot program in his Storytelling in the Age of Information class.

“The iPad really helps move between different kinds of texts and material, visual, cinematic, written, audio.”

Cohen incorporates the popular NPR public radio show This American Life in his classes, and using the iPad allows the class to move between audio clips and an annotated transcript of the story that can be projected on a screen.

Cohen said students can initiate these sequences and bookmark them, efficiently saving them for future reference or emailing them to each other.

The iPad allows Cohen and his students to capitalize on the “improvisational” nature of class, as they can call up passages more quickly or even play a clip from the radio show to counter a point Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Digital Tools, Teaching Strategies, digital textbooks, e-readers, iPad

With Media, Parents and Kids Learn More Together

January 20, 2012 | 11:20 AM | By

Flickr: Andrew Shell

Kids learn with each other while playing games on the iPad.

Most of what we read about kids and screen time revolves around whether or not it’s good for them. But one aspect of media use with kids that’s worth examining closer is how co-viewing affects their experience. Whether kids are watching TV, creating digital media, reading, searching, or playing video games with parents, siblings or friends, consuming media becomes a different kind of experience than when it’s done alone.

Though TV is still the dominant media in most homes, other forms are quickly permeating daily life: video games, apps, and exploring the Internet are woven into most families’ activities. The Joan Ganz Cooney Center calls it joint media engagement (JME), and they’ve just released one of their comprehensive reports, The New CoViewing: Designing for Learning Through Joint Media Engagement, about the phenomenon and its effects. The theory goes that the better we understand how kids use media together, the better designed the media can be, to take the most advantage of how kids work, learn, think, and make things together.

HOW PARENTS RELATE

Perhaps the activity that parents love most to do with their kids — reading — has been vastly transformed by digital media. E-books can be read on Web sites, computer software, products like LeapFrog, and of course tablets and e-readers. And depending on whom you ask, e-books (or print books) are the medium of choice for reading together. The typically tech-cautious New York Times decided that “for their children, many e-book fans insist on paper.”

But the Cooney Center’s own “quick study,” which followed 24 families with kids three- to six-years old reading both print and e-books, showed that most kids preferred reading an e-book to a print book, according to Digital Book World. And maybe just as importantly, “comprehension between the two formats were the same,” though the enhanced e-readers with all the bells and whistles were distracting to young readers.

Still, “If we can encourage kids to engage in books through an iPad, that’s a win already,” said the Cooney Center’s Carly Shuler.

Raise your hand if you’ve discreetly texted your friends or shopped on your mobile phone undercover while watching “Cars 2″ with your kids.

Plenty of studies have shown that kids learn more when they’re consuming media alongside their parents — parents typically chime in and explain what’s going on or answer questions or share their opinions about what they’re seeing, hearing, and doing. In turn, parents can have a better understanding of what their kids are doing and learning and what they’re involved with during their kids’ media use.

And for a lot of parents, this kind of interaction is important. A recent national survey showed that two-thirds of nearly 1,000 parents of 12- to 17-year-olds said they talked regularly with their kids Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Big Ideas, Culture, Teaching Strategies, digital media, e-readers, iPad, Joan Ganz Cooney Center

Did Apple Just Reinvent the Textbook?

January 19, 2012 | 10:57 AM | By

Flickr: wohnai

There’s been speculation for months now — at least since the release of the Steve Jobs biography — about Apple’s plans to take on the textbook publishing industry. And today at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, we finally got a glimpse of what the company has been planning since long before the death of its co-founder.

As Apple’s Phil Schiller noted in his opening remarks today, “Education is deep in our DNA… and has been since the very beginning.” And while that may be true, it was one of the company’s most recent inventions — the iPad — that took center stage today as the ideal learning device, with Apple touting kids’ (of all ages) love and desire for the tablets.

Apple boasted the adoption that iPads have already seen — some 1.5 million iPads already in use at educational institutions, with over 1000 schools having 1:1 iPad programs. Apple also noted the rich app ecosystem that’s been built around the iPad as a learning device — over 20,000 educational apps made specifically for the device.

While the mantra throughout the event was “iPad, iPad, iPad,” the focus of much of today’s event was on textbooks — digital textbooks — and Apple’s insistence that these are “not always the ideal learning tool.” Apple unveiled several new tools that it argued would move the “great content” found in textbooks into a new, interactive, durable, portable format — in other words, move the textbooks onto the iPad.

Reading: Apple introduced iBooks2, an update to its iOS e-book app (which sadly still isn’t accessible on Macs, let alone on Windows machines) that offers a new category specially for interactive digital textbooks. These new e-textbooks contain many of the features we’ve been more accustomed to seeing in interactive e-book apps rather than in the iBookstore — videos, photos, Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Digital Tools, Teaching Strategies, Apple, apps, digital textbooks, e-readers, iPad

The Trouble with Gifting an E-Book

December 19, 2011 | 10:33 AM | By

Flickr: Muffet

By Jenny Shank

Is it possible to personalize the gift of an e-book?

I asked Arsen Kashkashian, head buyer at the Boulder Book Store, if he had any ideas, and he was as stumped as I am.

“I’m not sure what the best way to personalize an e-book would be,” he said.

His store and many other independent bookstores sell Google e-books, which are

usually the same price as e-books available for Kindle, and can be used on multiple platforms. But you can’t use a store gift certificate to purchase them because buying the e-book is a transaction with Google, and Google doesn’t accept indie bookstore gift cards. Currently, there isn’t a way to give an e-book as a gift from most independent bookstores.

It is possible to give a Kindle e-book as a present from Amazon. According to Amazon’s FAQ on the subject, you don’t need to own a Kindle to give someone a Kindle e-book gift: “Kindle books can be given and received by anyone with an e-mail address.” You can schedule the date the e-book gift is delivered to the recipient, and if the recipient isn’t happy with your selection, he or she can exchange it for another.

“Even if people have e-readers, they want to give a physical book, because it’s so impersonal giving e-books.”

As for Barnes & Noble’s Nook books, you can’t give someone a specific Nook book, but you cangive them a Barnes & Noble gift card to purchase Nook books, or you can lend a Nook book from one reader to another. Although you can give a friend specific songs from iTunes, that isn’t possible yet for iBooks — the only way to give an iBook is through an iTunes gift card or certificate. It’s all a little confusing, because each type of e-book and e-reader has its own rules. Last month, Open Road Media launched a website with instructions on how to give e-books from Apple, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and the Sony Reader Store. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, digital textbooks, e-books, e-readers

Blowing Out the Digital Book as We Know It

December 2, 2011 | 1:01 PM | By

Inkling

“There is no future of the digital book — not the way we envision it today,” said Matt MacInnis, the founder and CEO of Inkling, the San Francisco startup that’s re-conceptualizing books for the digital realm.

He’s right. Tablets and e-readers are unraveling the publishing industry as it’s existed until now. More than 12 percent of American adults owned an e-reader as of May, according to a Pew study, and 8 percent owned tablets.

But the books being read on those devices were conceived originally for print. Words and ideas have been designed to fit on the physical page. Even for those books that do include videos or audio recordings, they’ve typically been added as afterthoughts, or as ancillary pieces to the primary content.

“It’s not even close to maximizing the potential of the tablet,” said MacInnis said.

While tablets and e-readers duke it out for the market share, Inkling is working on blowing out the digital book as we know it. Though the company started by digitally rendering existing print textbooks only for the iPad — currently, there are about 100 book titles — it’s poised to become a major player in the publishing industry. But rather than creating content, the tech company will provide the platform that can transcend any device, whether that’s an iPad, a Kindle — or even a laptop.

BEYOND EDUCATIONAL BOOKS

Currently, all of Inkling’s titles are in education, but it’s starting to dabble beyond that market.

“It’s not even close to maximizing the potential of the tablet.”

Inkling engineering is being used to create digital books out of blogs. With licensing from Inkling, Open Air Publishing just released a new cookbook, Food52 Holiday Recipe & Survival Guide, derived from a blog written by former New York Times writers Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs, Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Digital Tools, Teaching Strategies, digital textbooks, e-readers, inkling

E-Readers Help Spread Literacy, No Apps Needed

November 1, 2011 | 10:08 AM | By

Worldreader

We often talk about the power of the Internet to spread knowledge and information globally, to make digital content accessible and affordable. But as we’re also often caught up in the “latest and greatest” gadgetry, sometimes we overlook that broad promise of global education and accessibility.

Such is the case, one might argue, with the news last week from Common Sense Media about the so-called “app gap” — the disparity between children in low-income and higher income families and their access to mobile applications.

There’s little denying that the popularity of mobile devices — Androids and iPhones and tablets — has afforded a concurrent explosion in exciting new educational apps. The touchscreen screens, the accelerometers, the size, and the portability of these devices has enabled whole new genres of software and of imaginative and educational gameplay.

But if we focus on the “app gap” — those who have iPads and those who do not — are we ignoring or obscuring other aspects of the digital divide? Are we overlooking the potential for widespread Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Digital Tools, e-readers, iPad, kindle, Worldreader