Linking the crowd with the cloud
24 November 2011
If you love WordPress you will like this ebook generating tool built on top of it:
PressBooks lets you and your team easily author and output books in multiple formats including: epub, Kindle, print-on-demand-ready PDF, HTML, and inDesign-ready XML.
11 October 2011 1 Comment
For the first time in the core subject called Knowledge and Society I taught this year we used an ebook purchased online for the prescribed textbook. This etextbook was a customised compilation of 14 chapters chosen from suitable printed texts published by Cengage Learning. It was possible for the students to purchase the whole ebook (at about half the price of a single printed textbook) or by the individual chapter.
Cengage published the etextbook using the VitalSource ebook publishing system. This allows the purchased etextbook to be accessed everywhere on the web from a wide range of browsers and downloaded to computers, smartphones and tablets for offline access at any time. Notes and annotations can be made and shared via the web on up to 2 desktops/laptops and 2 mobile devices per student.
Ebooks are one of the topics in the Knowledge and Society subject curriculum and I took the opportunity via a question in the mid-semester written exam to determine the students’ reaction to the personal use of an etextbook for learning. Students were asked to list advantages and disadvantages of using the etextbook when studying for the exam. From 164 scripts students mentioned 14 advantages and 15 disadvantages (my classifications) with 533 occurrences in total.
The advantages were:
Personally I always rate the ability to search within an ebook as the main advantage, so I was surprised to see reading on multiple devices and no extra weight to carry around coming out on top. Environmental responsibility is always up there. Being able to buy the ebook by the chapter is obviously a very minor consideration.
Against this the disadvantages seemed more numerous:
In the past eye strain has always been the top disadvantage so it is strange to see it eclipsed by the need to own and use a working device. The survey of the same students revealed they owned a plethora of devices so the attitude is doubly strange. It is still the case that 1 in 6 students simply prefer printed books. At least bemoaning that ebooks have no second hand value is in decline.
With 313 advantage occurrences as against 220 disadvantages I make the assumption that the class are split approximately 59% to 41% in favour of ebooks. This then allows comparison with similar ebook data from previous years reported in a past post:
From this data it is clear that ebooks have lost a little ground over the last 12 months at least in the minds of these students. This is obviously against the trend of the ebook industry as a whole. As an institution we have some more educating to do in convincing our students that ebooks are the way forward.
1 May 2011 2 Comments
We have the black hand of ERA in Australia, AACSB in my own faculty and REF in the UK stifling all but prestigious academic journal publishing. It is more than refreshing then to see Steve Wheeler @timbuckteeth in his innocuously titled …before the ink is dry article hold out for the benign influences of academic blogging. This creates a digital identity capable of spreading a discourse of ideas well ahead of any journal article ever could achieve. I could not put it better than Steve:
For me, and for an increasing number of fellow academics, publishing in traditional journals is becoming increasingly anachronistic in the digital age of social media communication. We can be our own publishers now. We can build up audiences and loyal followings that are larger than most journals and publishing houses could ever boast. For me, blogging is now the first place I consider when I want to disseminate my ideas quickly, directly to my own community of practice, and in a form that is considered relevant and accessible to those who are engaged in that particular sphere of activity. Blogging is freely accessible, and it is usually concise enough to be assimilated in a few minutes.
I say hear, hear or as those around me probably prefer, good on ya mate.
30 March 2011 2 Comments
This is the next in my series on online tool migrations a trend affecting us all as Web 2.0 services come and go. This is a hard migration both technically and emotionally as Delicious has been my mainstay social bookmarking tool for many years, since 2003 and the del.icio.us days, and has figured in a good many of my posts. I even used Delicious as my browser home page for 2 or 3 years.
From the technical viewpoint the Delicious service has an extensive list of features that have grown over the years. While the UX has been redesigned significantly on a number of occasions I find it now suffers from an undue complexity even though Delicious more than satisfies my bookmark repository needs.
My own collection of bookmarks rose to about 1100 then, after a severe weeding, a more useful 500 or so. Despite my efforts to simplify my tag count reached 600 which by some effort I cut back by about 50%. Apart from personal use I have used Delicious extensively for holding bookmarks for a good many of my classes. I thought I was tied to Delicious with no prospect of change.
When Yahoo insisted on the use of a Yahoo account for Delicious this introduced an ongoing irritation that still persists. It was strangely apparent that Yahoo was putting little or no effort into taking Delicious forward. Furthermore the Yahoo announcement that the future of Delicious hung under a cloud added to my nervousness. Then hearing continually of the Diigo service from several other higher ed teachers finally made me consider a serious change (I had dabbled with Diigo months before and already had an account).
It was the Diigo group facility that seemed the main attractant for my colleagues. From the Diigo graphic you can see groups came in version 3.0 and the last two iterations added features bringing music to the ears of higher ed instructors. Another major stimulus was the Diigo webslides feature which uses Diigo lists discovered by colleague Peta Hopkins. I subsequently used webslides extensively for teaching. (As is the way of Web 2.0 Diigo webslides is now replaced for me by Pearltrees in a further migration.)
Of course the most significant migration effort involves the transfer of the bookmark data to Diigo from Delicious. As you would expect Diigo makes this very straightforward by importing from Delicious export link files. If you can’t bear to abandon your Delicious bookmarks Diigo has a feature to save all harvested Diigo bookmarks to Delicious as well.
First though I needed to spend a lot of time cleansing my Delicious bookmarks. I found many of my older bookmarks were redundant, superceded or had become irrelevant with age. I determined to quarantine all my bookmarks used for teaching. For example the bookmarks contributed by students in my September 2006 class about web applications still exists as http://www.delicious.com/mrees/inft232-063. This URL will be forever branded in our Blackboard learning management system amongst the online materials for that class.
Eventually I reduced my Delicious bookmarks from about 800 to 102, of which 93 are quarantined from past classes. My surprising discovery was that I had only 9 bookmarks likely to be of use in the future and worth transferring to Diigo! Equally disappointing is my remaining tag list contains 78 different tags!
This migration experience has been invaluable in that it shows I need a stricter, more disciplined approach to bookmark storage. Both the Delicious and Diigo browser integrations make it trivially easy to add bookmarks. It is clear from this exercise that I need more strength of will and bear in mind:
Even in a few months my Diigo collection has risen to 275 bookmarks and I’m guessing less than 20% will be used again. Perhaps the golden days of bookmark repositories are coming to an end.
15 March 2011 2 Comments
My colleagues and I were recently asked by our Associate Dean, Teaching & Learning, if anyone was using Prezi for presentations. He pointed us to a video claiming Prezi is a PowerPoint killer. I have been using Prezi on an off for more than a couple of years. My reply to him:
I have used Prezi for a couple of years or so but only for giving special talks. It is easy to use once you master the click and zoom approach and produces smoothly animated presentations in which you can embed media of various kinds. Here is a Prezi I did a couple of years ago:
Another summary talk about Twitter I gave for a lecturer in another Bond subject is at: http://prezi.com/kggkswvvxlnl/
Provided you make the Prezis public you can show them from any Internet machine with a browser but it must have Flash. This excludes iPhone and iPad where you have to use a special app.
For formal presentations which are part of a subject syllabus I don’t find Prezi very useful. It is not possible to tell the students ‘check the information on slide x’ and the student must have an Internet connection to see the Prezi (less of a problem these days).
While I would dearly love a relevant alternative to PowerPoint I don’t think Prezi is it.
At the time of writing this post I notice Prezi is equal 7th on the emerging Top 100 Tools for Learning being compiled by Jane Hart in her well-regarded Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies. The excellent Slideshare presentation repository for conventional slide decks is sitting at 11th and PowerPoint itself is at equal 48 on the list.
After sending the message I reflected further and asked myself the question ‘What would I use rather than PowerPoint for lecture slides?’. Of late I have tried other Prezi-class Flash apps that employ the conventional slide-by-slide model. SlideRocket (especially the Google Chrome app) is one but response times are slow, the free version is limited, and exported slide shows are watermarked.
My current favourite of this type is 280Slides which is snappier, simpler and offers export direct to Slideshare. Exporting to PowerPoint format now appears to work although needs to use the repair option in PowerPoint before the presentation will open properly. Like Prezi these two Flash-based apps will not run on iOS on the iPad and iPhone and require dedicated apps on those devices.
Far and away my favourite ‘replacement’ for PowerPoint is the Presentations component of Google Apps. This is a very simple copy of PowerPoint running in a browser and hence is very easy to learn. The ability to create and insert Google Drawings in a slide makes for professional presentations for only slide shows. Google Presentations display correctly on iPhone/iPad but as yet can’t be edited. Nevertheless Documents (like Word) and Spreadsheets from Google Apps can be edited on the iOS devices and we can expect Presentations to follow soon.
18 February 2011
Chrome is now my browser of choice now that I am weaning myself off Zotero. Not all sites, even some Google sites, are Chrome compatible. For example the mapping page for Picasaweb albums in Chrome always fails for me. So I need to keep Firefox to hand for these cases.
Nevertheless I am surprised almost every day by the effectiveness in terms of productivity gain of the extensions and apps available via the Google Web Store. My favourite of the last couple of weeks is the Readbility extension that has been around for a while but is so useful in its new incarnation for Chrome. In blog posts, news articles and similar, Readability removes all the extraneous header, footer and sidebar contents and just shows you the text and links in the main page content using a readable font family and size.
As an example, the first paragraphs from this page fragment:
become, at a single click in the toolbar, a much more easily read:
Buttons allow you to return to the original page, print and email the readable text.
My only beef is that Readability uses a fixed-width, centred layout which generally wraps some longer lines of text in my favourite 960×1080 (half HD) browser window size. This is a problem that is very easy for Readability to fix so I hope they are ‘listening’.
8 February 2011 1 Comment
It is 3 days since the first issue of the built for iPad newspaper TheDaily became available in Australia and the pattern of the content is beginning to emerge. The content is heavily biased to the prime US audience as expected and the Gossip, Opinion and Sports sections have little to interest an international audience. There are occasional articles in the News, Arts & Life and Apps & Games sections that are worth reading especially for an information technologist like myself. The article on the acquisition of The Huffington Post blogs by AOL was welcome for example. TheDaily is free for 14 days so is well worth a try.
However it is the format of TheDaily and its content types that I find most interesting. So far we see text, static images, image galleries, images with animation and transition effects, audio, video, video galleries and, most importantly, complete sub-apps – apps within an app. The author of each ‘article’ is free to choose from any combination of the content types as each author deems appropriate.
Of course the terms ‘author’ and ‘article’ are no longer relevant. Each content component of TheDaily presumably has a director to manage the combination of multiple media content types within the component. Director’s assistants with the relevant expertise probably take responsibility for their sub-components and work as a team under the director. It is probably too much to ask a director to be expert in all the content types so single authorship, except for the very simplest components, becomes a thing of the past.
iPad navigation between the content components must be extremely simple and TheDaily uses the easy to understand carousel as its model. Additional component categories along the bottom or top of the display split the carousel into 6 areas for straightforward sub-navigation. I have found no difficulty in activating and playing the different content types with plenty of buttons and button hint text to help. I give the UX a big thumbs up.
There are a few expectations still to be met:
I particularly liked the section on iPad apps of course, and enjoyed the embedded crossword and Sudoku sub-apps that you play without leaving the ‘page’.
Nevertheless I am left admiring the efforts of the TheDaily app UX team. This is obviously a major step on the road to how readers will expect all interactive ebooks (again all out-dated terms) to behave as we go forward. Do you read TheDaily or interact with it?
I fancy myself as an author and can string together ‘page’ components with text, images, audio and video content types typified by blog posts. Over the last years I have gained some minimal skills in editing these content types. (My latest mini-achievement was creating and editing a short HD video entirely on my iPhone.) To become a director and approach anywhere near the professional production of TheDaily I am going to require the help of quite new types of production apps that are straightforward to use.
So I call on app developers everywhere. I need:
Not much to ask is it? But the move up to SuperPowerPoint and similar tools will be essential if individuals or small groups are to produce the ebooks of the future.
[My one big disappointment with TheDaily is the price. Why should I have to pay AUD 1.19 per week when the Australian dollar is worth more than the US dollar?]
30 December 2010
Over the last year I have been gradually converted so that ebooks constitute 80% of my reading. The remaining 20% is about equally split between online textbooks (Books24x7 and Safari Online) and real page-turning pbooks. Of the ebooks about 70% are Kindle books and the rest from Overdrive via my local public library. Since my wife suborned my Kindle I read all my ebooks on the iPad.
Overdrive is an excellent borrowing service but the ebook becomes unreadable after 14 days exactly. There is no friendly librarian to cajole into extending the loan or forgiving a fine. Like Cinderella’s coach when midnight comes your ebook turns into a cover thumbnail fit only for deletion. Yes, you can borrow the ebook again but only if a copy is available and not on hold for another person. At best this re-borrow is a fairly tedious process and inevitably causes a gap in the momentum of your reading.
I use Bluefire on the iPad and when showing its library in cover thumbnail or list view there is no indication of when an ebook might expire. You must remember to switch to list view and go the extra step of touching the right arrow to see details of the borrowing period. Even then the information is correct only to the nearest day – not so useful for Cinderella:
Sadly the Bluefire library entries for expired ebooks are not visually different from ebooks that are still readable.
Ebooks from Overdrive can of course be read by the iPhone Overdrive app which does indicate when an ebook is expired without a further step. However knowing an ebook is expired when you haven’t finished reading it is not particularly useful. Also using the Overdrive app on the iPad makes the font fuzzy in 2x mode so Bluefire is much better on the eyes.
At least Adobe Digital Editions on Windows, the ebook reader for PCs, is aware of the expiry problem and its library view shows the remainder of the borrowing period to the nearest hour:
While closer to ideal a better feature would be a customisable push notification message warning the reader of expiry in the near future.
Hopefully Bluefire and Overdrive are listening and will make their ebook borrowing experience even better.
Scholarcast 