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In the Comments
You have to learn to let go. The idea that books, magazines, databases or any form of information source can and should be kept for perpetuity is laughable. Items in a library need to be weeded and space is the major reason why. I know all of you want to keep your precious books, and I do to. But who’s going to pay for it, you?... — the other me
Library Protesters to Ohio State U.: Digital's OK, but Save Our Books!
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June 19, 2009
Brigham Young U. Suspends Kindle-Lending Program
Brigham Young University’s library will no longer let professors check out books on Kindles — at least, not until it receives written permission from Amazon, the company that makes the e-book readers.
To meet the high demand for popular new books, the library had purchased Kindles and used them to lend out digital copies. Campus officials said the university had received verbal consent from Amazon, but Brigham Young decided to put the program on hold until it received written consent.
“I understand the Inter-Library Loan Department had a few Kindles, and they set up a system to check them out as a test,” Rogen Layton, a university spokesman, told The Chronicle in an e-mail message. “Being a library, we will follow the rules and until the rules are clear we will wait.” Amazon has not responded to the university’s request for written permission, Mr. Layton said, but he did not offer further explanation of why the university had suddenly halted the program.
Library Journal reported that the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s library has been lending nine Kindles for more than a year without any argument from Amazon.
“We do not see a violation of the terms of service agreement,” Joyce Neujahr, the university’s director of patron services, told the publication.
Ms. Neujahr said the library did not feel that it needed to ask Amazon for approval. “We have purchased the content on the Kindle, and loan the Kindle just like we loan a hardcover, print book,” she said. “Whether it is on a shelf, or on a Kindle, we have still purchased the title.” — Marc Beja
Posted on Friday June 19, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [7]June 18, 2009
At College Fairs, Recruiters Turn to Swipes and Scans to Attract Students
While swiping his credit card at an airport check-in station to get his boarding pass, Joe Manning got an idea.
Mr. Manning, associate director of admissions at James Madison University, figured a similar system could be used at college fairs to obtain prospective applicants’ information electronically. Instead of students’ wasting time by filling out information forms by hand, he hooked up a laptop computer and a bar-code scanner and had students swipe their driver’s licenses or learner’s permits.
As The Chronicle’s Eric Hoover reported, the National Association for College Admission Counseling has introduced similar bar-code scanners at 15 of its annual college fairs, and it expects the service to be available at all 50 annual events by 2012. With the new system, students get their own printable bar codes to take to the fair that give recruiters their contact information and areas of academic interest electronically.
Recruiters hope that the new system will increase the number of students interested in their college, and that receiving more accurate information electronically will help recruiters spend more time talking to students.
The scanners allow college representatives to spend more time looking prospective applicants in the eye, “rather than students standing there with their heads down,” Gregory A. Ferguson, NACAC’s director of college fairs, said. —Marc Beja
Posted on Thursday June 18, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [2]June 15, 2009
Why a Tablet PC Beats Your Whiteboard
Hewlett-Packard’s Jim Vanides has 11 new reasons why tablet PC’s are better for teaching than whiteboards, Smartboards, and overhead projectors.
HP makes the tablets — laptop computers that let you write on their screens with a stylus — so the company has a stake in tempting professors to buy the gadgets.
But Mr. Vanides, who is responsible for HP’s higher-education grants, draws on the experiences of grantees to make his case for the tablet PC and digital projector in a new list on his blog.
He argues that, in contrast with a whiteboard, you don’t have to erase to keep going — helpful for students who aren’t fast note takers. You can also teach while facing your students, the better for managing them. —Marc Parry
Posted on Monday June 15, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [22]May 22, 2009
Indiana U. Signs Blackberry Deal With AT&T, a First for the Company
The budding scribes get iPhones. The future CEO’s get Blackberrys.
Indiana University will offer its 2,200 business graduate students discounted deals on Blackberry smartphones under a new pilot program with AT&T, the first agreement of its kind between the company and a university.
The arrangement comes on the heels of a minor kerfuffle over the University of Missouri’s plan to require that its journalism students buy either an iPhone or an iPod Touch. Before you get worked up over the evils of mandating this or that device: No one at Indiana University is forcing these phones on anybody.
The business benefits to AT&T are obvious. For Indiana, the program will help the university as it works to “mobilize” services like its course-management system and registration, said Sue Workman, associate vice president for support.
“Instead of planning our applications to be looked at on a 19-inch monitor, we’re looking at a 2-by-2 screen,” she said. —Marc Parry
Posted on Friday May 22, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [12]May 14, 2009
2 Prominent Technology Scholars Cast as Extras in Latest 'Star Trek' Film
Henry Jenkins, co-director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Comparative Media Studies Program, thought it was some kind of joke when he got an e-mail message from a Hollywood casting director asking him to be an extra in the latest Star Trek film (which opened last weekend). But a few weeks later he was getting fitted for a Klingon costume, as the professor describes today on his blog.
“I had to do it, even though it meant postponing some significant meetings, ducking out early from academic conferences, and taking a series of red eye flights, not to mention spending several thousand dollars,” Mr. Jenkins wrote. The scholar is a life-long Star Trek fan, but he also pioneered the idea of studying fan culture, so he’s written about Trekkies. He posed for The Chronicle holding a Klingon weapon for a profile story we did in 2007.
Mr. Jenkins said in an e-mail interview that his scene ended up getting cut from the film in the end, but that he is hoping that the scene might be an extra in the DVD release.
Star Trek’s director, J.J. Abrams, also invited another scholar to appear in the film — Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon University computer-scientist who became a celebrity after he delivered a “last lecture” in 2007 about achieving his childhood dreams. The professor was dying of pancreatic cancer (and he has since passed away), but his remarks on life drew more than a million views on YouTube. According to a press release by Carnegie Mellon, Mr. Pausch appears in the new Star Trek film and even has a line: “Captain, we have visual.”
Mr. Jenkins said that he was not in the same scene as Mr. Pausch, so the two did not get to meet on the set. —Jeffrey R. Young
Posted on Thursday May 14, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [6]May 12, 2009
Physicist Set to Unveil 'WolframAlpha' Web Site, a New Kind of Research Helper
What if you could ask your encyclopedia to not only spit out facts, but to perform an analysis with those facts or compute the answers to a math problem for you? A free Web site set to go live this month promises to do just that, potentially becoming a virtual research assistant for professors — or a new way for students to cheat on their homework.
The new site, called WolframAlpha, seems bound to be a useful — and possibly controversial — tool on college campuses. The service will present users with a simple search box, as Google does. But WolframAlpha won’t just point to Web sites about what the user types; it will attempt to compute an answer based on its vast collection of facts and statistical-analysis software.
The hype for the service has been building all week, after a New York Times article called it “one of the most anticipated Web products of the year.”
The site is the brainchild of Stephen Wolfram, a scientist and entrepreneur who is best known for creating Mathematica, number-crunching software popular with engineers and mathematicians.
The product is so new and different that the best way to get a sense of it is to watch a demonstration. Thankfully, Mr. Wolfram presented a sneak peek to researchers at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society late last month. A video of the talk is available online.
Professors at the event asked tough questions about the service. There are plenty of scientific issues that are unsettled, one attendee said, so how will the Web site deal with those? Mr. Wolfram said that the site would return footnotes on how it reached its solutions or might even offer users choices of which assumptions they want to use to get an answer.
Another asked who is the audience for the service — students working on homework or serious scientists? “The goal is to make expert-level knowledge accessible to anyone anywhere, anytime,” Mr. Wolfram said. —Jeffrey R. Young
Posted on Tuesday May 12, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [6]May 8, 2009
U. of Missouri's Journalism School Will Make iPod Touch, iPhone Mandatory for Students
Yet another institution is touting the education-changing potential of yet another device. This time the college is University of Missouri’s Journalism School, which now plans to require that students purchase either Apple’s iPod Touch or its iPhone.
Students are supposed to use the gadgets to review lectures. The university chose the devices as the required media players because students are already used to them, Associate Dean Brian Brooks told the Columbia Missourian.
“Lectures are the worst possible learning format,” Mr. Brooks was quoted as saying. “There’s been some research done that shows if a student can hear that lecture a second time, they retain three times as much of that lecture.”
Missouri doesn’t get to blast off one of those we’re-the-first-university-in-the-nation press releases, though. Last year, Abilene Christian University announced plans to give away iPhones and iPods.
And not everyone is cheering at Missouri. Journalism student Elizabeth Eberlin created a Facebook group against forcing students to buy a particular brand, according to the Missourian. Its title: “Rotten Apple.”—Marc Parry
Posted on Friday May 8, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [29]May 6, 2009
Amazon's New Kindle Is Unveiled in Hopes of Capturing the Textbook Market
This morning Amazon’s chief executive, Jeff Bezos, held up a new, wider model of the Kindle loaded with a biology textbook — marking the company’s official entrance into the electronic-textbook market.
The news had been widely leaked all week, and the rumors turned out to be true. The screen on the new version of Kindle is 9.7 inches across — much bigger than the other Kindle, which will still be offered. And the company has set up pilot projects this fall at six higher-education institutions — Arizona State University, Case Western Reserve University, Pace University, Princeton University, Reed College, and the University of Virginia’s business school.
New details included the price: $489. And the publishers involved with the pilot projects: Pearson, Cengage Learning, and John Wiley & Sons.
I offered my take on the announcement’s possible impact this morning in an article in The Chronicle’s online edition.
What’s in it for the universities? Case Western’s president, Barbara R. Snyder, said concern over the high price of printed textbooks was a primary motivation (electronic versions of textbooks are typically half the price of their printed counterparts). “Our students are definitely interested in learning of ways to reduce the cost of what they have to pay for their course materials,” she said. But will buying a $489 device lead to savings? “You have to look at the total cost over the course of four years,” she said. The university plans to give Kindles to about 40 students in three courses, and give an equal number of students paper books as a control group to see which group reports a better experience.
For Princeton, the goal is to save paper — and therefore trees. “Over 10 million pages were printed last year by students” in campus computer labs, said Serge J. Goldstein, associate CIO and director of academic services at Princeton. He said that as the university has made more library books available on electronic reserve, paper usage has soared. The hope is that the Kindle, which uses a different kind of screen designed to be easier on the eyes, will lead more students to read on the screen rather than hitting “print.” Princeton’s pilot will involve three courses with about 50 students total. Princeton’s project is expected to cost about $60,000, with the university paying half and Amazon picking up the rest of the tab, said Mr. Goldstein.
College officials first volunteered for the project back in the fall of 2007, at a meeting with Amazon officials during the annual conference of Educause, the higher-education-technology group. “They approached a number of universities and were interested in how they could take their current device, the Kindle 1, and make it responsive” to the college market, said Mr. Goldstein. He said he and other officials offered some suggestions — including making the screen bigger — and were eventually invited to participate in a pilot project with the new devices. —Jeffrey R. Young
Posted on Wednesday May 6, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [14]May 5, 2009
Amazon Expected to Unveil New Kindle for Textbooks
Rumors are buzzing this week that Amazon is set to unveil a new, wider-format version of its Kindle e-book reader in the hopes of making it a platform for electronic textbooks.
Amazon has invited journalists to a news-media event tomorrow morning at Pace University for a big announcement, and though officials from Amazon and Pace refused to talk to The Chronicle, anonymous sources told The Wall Street Journal that the company will unveil a bigger model of the Kindle and describe a pilot project with six major universities to try textbooks on it. The company will announce new deals with magazine and newspaper publishers, the newspaper said.
But a previous effort to use e-book readers in the classroom bombed, and it’s not clear how Amazon will do any better.
In an experiment last year at Northwest Missouri State University with another e-book device, made by Sony, students and professors quickly asked for their printed books back. Students were excited by the devices at first, but they became frustrated by how difficult it was to quickly flip through the digital textbooks or make annotations.
In the end, the university’s officials, who remain excited about the promise of e-textbooks, decided to continue their pilot program using laptops instead of dedicated e-book devices. In surveys, students have shown much greater satisfaction reading e-books on their computers than they did on the Sony Reader. Interactivity — the ability to annotate and take notes — were the main factors cited by students, rather than the size of the devices. —Jeffrey R. Young
Posted on Tuesday May 5, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [9]May 1, 2009
India Changes Course, Orders 250,000 Laptops From One Laptop Per Child Program
After disparaging Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child program as too expensive, the Indian government has caved in. Following the embarrassment over its own $10 laptop — which turned out to be a computing device with a hard disk for storage — the nation signed an agreement to buy 250,000 OLPC laptops for distribution across the country, reported efytimes.com.
In turn, the struggling OLPC program — which has run into problems after large companies refused to cooperate with it — will get a much-needed financial boost from India’s contract. Intel resigned its membership from the project in January 2008, citing Mr. Negroponte’s request that the company stop selling its Classmate Personal Computers below cost.
The One Laptop Per Child Association is a non-profit organization set up to oversee the creation of an affordable educational device for use in the developing world.
In 2006, India’s ministry in charge of education rejected Mr. Negroponte’s initiative, saying it was “impossible to justify an expenditure of this scale on a debatable scheme when public funds continue to be in inadequate supply for well-established needs listed in different policy documents.” Instead of using the OLPC machines, Indian officials planned to make laptops available to schoolchildren for $10 each.
Earlier this year the Indian government released the eagerly-awaited laptops, which were designed by students at the Vellore Institute of Technology, and scientists at the Indian Institute of Science, in Bangalore, and the Indian Institute of Technology, in Chennai. The $10 laptop prototypes weren’t laptops at all, but rather computing devices that came with hard disks to store store e-books, e-journals, and relevant educational material.
So now nearly 1,500 Indian schools will end up getting the OLPC’s latest batch of laptops, according to some reports. —Shailaja Neelakantan
Posted on Friday May 1, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [6]