It looks like another step toward e-textbooks is under way. An app called Inkling just became available that does a great job of translating this genre to the iPad. Inkling does two things wonderfully right: (1) it cuts the spine off the textbook, freeing it from the tyranny of pages even while allowing page number references, and (2) it makes the textbook social, allowing you to not only take notes, but share those notes with friends and colleagues and let them respond.
The books Inkling presents are beautiful, if their sample of Strunk & White is any guide. If anything, they may be a bit too beautiful, since some of the functionality is so “well designed” it virtually disappears, becoming a bit hard to find. Illustrations can be very lively, multimedia can be incorporated, and by sharing notes the marginalia of these books can be shared among a whole study group.
The app is free and a lot of fun to explore, I highly recommend it. I’m not sure what the business model for book content is, or how footnotes would be handled. It would be smart if the format used were open and shared so that open source textbooks and meeting proceedings could supplement the very sparse initial catalog.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) requires that the Librarian of Congress check in every three years with a determination of the kinds of works that should be exempt from DMCA enforcement. Today James Billington made the fourth determination of this sort, and one that has me very excited. After a rulemaking proceeding conducted by the Register of Copyright, he has designated six classes of non-infringing use of DRM (digital restrictions managment) circumvention.
By far the biggest news is that “university professors” and “college and university film and media studies students” may rip DVDs for “educational uses”. This has a direct impact on my household, where we have found we had to do this to support media work by my partner, a college professor. Even better, this kind of use is also allowed for “documentary filmmaking” and “noncommercial videos”! There are limits, but they seem reasonable. Mainly this circumvention of DRM is only allowed “solely in order to accomplish the incorporation of short portions of motion pictures into new works for the purpose of criticism or comment”.
Other interesting classes of circumvention allowed by this rulling…
You may circumvent ebook protections in order to enable software or screen readers to read the ebook aloud.
You may jailbreak and/or unlock your own cell phone.
You may bypass an obsolete dongle that prevents the use of software you still need.
You may test, investigate, and correct security flaws and vulnerabilities in computer games you own.
Google seems to understand the future. I’m afraid Apple may be missing the boat.
Many months back, soon after first starting to use the iPad, Alex and I wrote a simple little program for the pad that got rejected Apple’s App Store. After some back and forth with the App Store I wrote a note to Steve Jobs because I wanted to go on record about the danger of Apple’s tight fisted approach to development and plead for a more open approach. I was particularly worried about the impact on kids.
I am worried that we are making it impossible for kids
to fall in love with the creative side of computing. I believe that computers are instruments, like a cello or a pen, they are tools with which we create, not just consume. I have tried to raise my kids to look beyond the surface of these wonderful devices, to reach in and learn to create with them. My eldest son has come through Lego, to AppleScript, to Cocoa. My younger son has learned to experiment with Scratch. Both love their Macs, iPods, and have had a blast with the iPad.
I lamented the banning of Scratch from the App Store, and the expense kids faced if they wanted to write iOS apps. I never did get a response, but I’ve reproduced the letter itself below the fold in case you are interested.
Meanwhile, last week I started using an Google’s Nexus One phone and started paying attention to Android development options. Low and behold, today I read about Google’s App Inventor for Android project. App Inventor is a visual programming environment to allow kids to write Android apps.
I think Google understands something Apple has forgotten. It is vital that we nurture our kids’ curiosity about the devices they use. The best way to do that is to let them have some agency, to give them tools to create with those devices. Even Nathaniel, the non-coder in our family, has told me he wants to write games for his iPhone. Maybe I’ll have to get him an Android device some day if Apple does not come to its senses.
Yesterday I gave a talk to the wonderful staff of the CSBSJU libraries. I love the setting and the scale of this library, so I knew I’d enjoy the event. Even so, I got nervous as always about my talk. Did I have anything worthwhile to share? Would I keep people awake and thinking or put them to sleep? Was I using my toolkit in a way that enhanced the discussion or shut it down? I think the talk went well, I got some nice feedback from the staff, and maybe I’ll have to courage to do something similar again some time.
Getting up in front of a roomful of (essentially) strangers is something that many librarians confront every day. We are teachers, among other things. Today I came across a very helpful post by Carrie Donovan on In the Library with the Lead Pipe. She talks about being authentic in the classroom:
In his book, The Courage to Teach, Parker Palmer (1998) discusses identity as the evolution of all the forces that come together to form a person, including: background, culture, experience, and anything else that shapes the self. Recognizing that we bring all of these aspects of ourselves to everything we do, including our instructional activities, is key to finding your teaching identity. Librarians have pursued neutrality for a long time in their provision of organized and accessible information and knowledge, but this philosophy does not serve us well in the classroom.
We have to find (and share) ourselves in order to convey the richness of the experiences we want our students (or audience) to grasp. Not easy, but very rewarding when we pull it off!
I love logo, it is such an easy yet powerful language. I was disappointed today to see that N’s teacher was crossing out all the Logo-related assignments in his math homework. What a waste! I wondered how hard it would be to install Logo at a school these days. As I suspected, not hard at all!
There are a number of Logo interpreters written in Java, but my favorite to date is a Logo interpreter written in JavaScript. This should run in just about any modern browser. Joshua Bell, the author of this Logo, also links to Curly Logo written in JavaScript. That one may be more appropriate for kids since it takes the trouble to appear more fun to use. Plenty of Logo without any install. Now I just wish it were being used in N’s school.
The Technology Enhanced Active Learning (TEAL) initiative was underway before I left MIT. Today it got some love from the NYT in an article about the demise of large lectures.
Here’s what it was like:
Squeezed into the rows of hard, folding wooden seats, as many as 300 freshmen anxiously took notes while the professor covered multiple blackboards with mathematical formulas and explained the principles of Newtonian mechanics and electromagnetism.
John Belcher, a space physicist who arrived at M.I.T. 38 years ago and was instrumental in introducing the new teaching method nine years ago, was considered an outstanding lecturer. He won M.I.T.’s top teaching award and rave reviews from students. And yet, as each semester progressed, attendance in his introductory physics courses fell to 50 percent, as it did, he said, for nearly all of his colleagues.
And now:
The physics department has replaced the traditional large introductory lecture with smaller classes that emphasize hands-on, interactive, collaborative learning. Last fall, after years of experimentation and debate and resistance from students, who initially petitioned against it, the department made the change permanent. Already, attendance is up and the failure rate has dropped by more than 50 percent.
Very telling are some of the comments on Slashdot:
Personally I don’t think this is the best approach, but it certainly isn’t forgiving of a student’s absence from class.
As a side note, when I was a freshman, many of my classmates did not find the TEAL lectures to be terribly effective in teaching the material. Frequently they would go back into the video archive after class and watch recordings of the “traditional” lectures from years past to actually learn what was being taught. They just went to the TEAL lectures because they didn’t want to loose their participation credit.
MIT OpenCourseWare to the rescue! Put the old lectures online, take advantage of proximate atoms off line.
Ever since I saw it as a kid, Buckminster Fuller’s dymaxion map (the Fuller Projection) made more sense to me than any other map of the world. We have had a wonderful print of the dymaxion map framed and slowly fading on our wall for decades.
We like to laugh at malformed English around the world, but what if the last laugh is on us? Andrew points to an article at Wired which describes how English is recombining with other languages, particularly asian languages, to form a new global tongue.
Any language is constantly evolving, so it’s not surprising that English, transplanted to new soil, is bearing unusual fruit. Nor is it unique that a language, spread so far from its homelands, would begin to fracture. The obvious comparison is to Latin, which broke into mutually distinct languages over hundreds of years — French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian. A less familiar example is Arabic: The speakers of its myriad dialects are connected through the written language of the Koran and, more recently, through the homogenized Arabic of Al Jazeera. But what’s happening to English may be its own thing: It’s mingling with so many more local languages than Latin ever did, that it’s on a path toward a global tongue — what’s coming to be known as Panglish. Soon, when Americans travel abroad, one of the languages they’ll have to learn may be their own.
Daniel Burd, a high school student in Canada, comes up with a way to biodegrade plastic bags in just months. I wonder what “a bit of carbon dioxide” waste means, though. Still, quite an accomplishment!
Thanks to Peter for a pointer to the Neoformix site. It is full of wonderful experiments in illuminating data, especially written word, though informative visualizations. Really cool stuff, some of it created by the author, other examples gathered from around the world. Here is one example, a “document contrast diagram” for Clinton and Obama’s Super Tuesday remarks.
Update: Infosthetics may also be worth keeping an eye on.
