Ancient History Ramblings

New E-reader

The e-reader wars continue to heat up. The new, lower priced Kindle has now been answered by the new Nook. Barnes & Noble now has a color Nook available. The new version has a color touch screen and Wi-Fi –(no 3G) and runs on the Android platform. For a preliminary review of it, check out CNET. As the gift-buying season approaches, it ill be interesting to see what else is unveiled.

RSM

Changes coming due to online growth?

The Chronicle has an interesting article (“Will Technology kill the Academic Calendar?”) on how online education is changing the way some programs and colleges offer classes. Since one of the benefits of online education is that it can allow students to work at times that better suit their schedules, some schools have started allowing students to enroll in a class any day they wish (open-entry courses), and then work through the class at their own pace. In fact, the Chronicle describes a student who completed a humanities course by turning in 6 writing assignments and taking 113 quizzes in a 46 hour period. Only 46 hours to complete the class. This type of open-entry course obviously eliminates any interaction between students and makes you question the amount of professor-student interaction. What are the positives to this approach? The only one that I saw in the article was that the adjunct they interviewed who was teaching these type of courses is earning $120,000 a year.

RSM

Digitizing Books

With the advent of better and faster scanners, more people are considering whether to investigate digitizing their own personal libraries. The publicity that Google has garnered for its various scanning projects has made people aware of the possibilities that now exist – there is even a site that explains how to build your own book scanner. The question that this raises is whether scanning books is legal or a copyright violation. The answer depends on who you ask – the book’s owner or the book’s publisher. While Google has had its issues and been in court a bit concerning copyright issues, the question of whether a book’s owner can own it in multiple formats is one that has not been explored yet.

One other interesting article to checkout is “5 more tech movies we’d like to see” – a fun read.

RSM