ENTRIES TAGGED "academic"

Neat TOC-Inspired Videos on the Future of Learning

Last May, Rutgers Univeristy English Dept. Chair Richard E. Miller sent in a nice note about how the 2008 TOC Conference had inspired him and his colleague, Paul Hammond: The conference that my collaborator, Paul Hammond, and I attended in New York this winter was transformative for us. We returned to the university with a very clear sense of…

Vanishing Paper in Higher Education

Christopher Conway has a thoughtful essay at Inside Higher Ed on the seemingly inevitable trend towards digital text consumption: It is becoming increasingly easier to put together affordable 'readers' or anthologies culled from existing print material without bypassing rights and fees and without overloading students with unnecessary expense. If this wave of the future takes hold and becomes the…

To Chunk or Not To Chunk?

This is excerpted from a column I wrote for the most recent issue of The Big Picture, my free newsletter about technology and the book industry. As we're proceeding with Start With XML, I'm thinking a lot about chunking. Chunking, at least as we're talking about it, means carving up your content into chunks and distributing those discrete pieces of…

College Bookstores to Offer Ebooks through Kiosks

Seven college bookstores will soon offer movies and ebooks through in-store kiosks. From the Chronicle of Higher Education: Movies will be the first product offered at the kiosks, which are scheduled to appear at seven stores next month. The plan is to add digital textbooks to the kiosks starting next summer, says Charles Schmidt, a spokesman for the association….

News Roundup: Sony Reader Arrives in UK, Google Scanning Newspaper Archives, Blanket Copyright Licenses vs Fair Use

UK Reaction to Sony Reader Release Sara Lloyd discusses the impact of the Sony Reader's recent release in the United Kingdom: Anecdotally, Waterstones store staff report a great deal of interest from customers, and the rumour mills (or well-planned leak??) put a 6 figure number on the Sony Readers sold by the morning of Thursday 4th September. As I'm sure…

Colleges Weigh Blanket Copyright Licenses vs Fair Use Rights

The Copyright Clearance Center is extending its offer of blanket licenses to larger universities. In a 2007 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required), some school administrators expressed concern about the implicit waiver of fair use assertions: But some librarians are ambivalent about blanket licenses, Mr. Rehbach [Jeffrey R. Rehbach, the library-policy adviser at Middlebury College] says,…

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…

Game Re-creates Lost Oakland Neighborhood

My hat's off to the release of a superb project out of the UC Berkeley Journalism School that re-creates a "lost" and once vibrant neighborhood of Oakland, 7th Street: There's much more to be done — developing a curriculum so grade school students can use the game to learn about 7th Street and the blues and jazz scene (we got…

Survey Results: Students Rely on Digital Tools for Research

Results from Ebrary's 2008 Global Student E-Book Survey show that students working on research projects use digital reference tools more often than print materials. From Publishers Weekly: Respondents say they use Google and other search engines as well as e-books more than print books for research assignments; online encyclopedias and Wikipedia are only slightly less used than print books,…

Local Focus through Community Newspaper Book Reviews

Sanford Thatcher, the departing head of the Association of American University Presses (AAUP), advises his colleagues to go local by way of the review: It seems to me that there is likely to be no better market for the general-interest titles that we all publish from time to time than the college towns in which many of our presses…