California State University-Dominguez Hills is trying to make students’ lives easier by encouraging them to convert their required reading into audio files.
The Wired Campus – Too Much Reading? Try Listening Instead – The Chronicle of Higher Education
30 November 2009
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Posted by Oscar Retterer
Digital textbooks likely to energize e-book war
30 November 2009As Sony Corp.’s e-book devices vie with the Kindle to win over readers, the real showdown may come later: when a shift to electronic textbooks at schools threatens to eclipse the current market for the products. Sony and Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle are both expanding into the academic world.
Within five years, textbooks will be the biggest market for e-book devices, dwarfing sales to casual readers, predicts Sarah Epps, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass.
[Source: Delaware News Journal/Bloomberg News]
Leave a Comment » | eBooks, Education, Emerging Trends | Permalink
Posted by Oscar Retterer
‘A Virus Walks Into a Bar …’
25 November 2009[Source: Chronicle of Higher Education]
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Posted by Oscar Retterer
Barnes & Noble Says Nook Reader Is Not Ideal for E-Textbooks
24 November 2009Barnes & Noble says its Nook e-book device was not built with college students in mind. “Nook is not designed to be a textbook reader,” said Jade Roth, the companys vice president of books. “Nook is really designed to be an e-reader for pleasure, for relaxation on the go — not really for the educational space.”
Amazon said the same thing about its first-generation Kindle, but a few months ago it unveiled a larger model that it says works well for e-textbooks. Amazon is running pilot projects at seven universities this semester to see how students and professors respond to the devices.
Leave a Comment » | eBooks | Tagged: Kindle, Nook | Permalink
Posted by Oscar Retterer
Hulu adds tagging for movies, TV shows | Web Crawler – CNET News
24 November 2009Movie and TV show streaming service Hulu on Monday added tagging to the mix, allowing users to add up to 30 tags to each piece of content for the sake of organization. These tags also work site-wide, which means that users can see all types of related content regardless of whether it's a TV show or feature-length film.
via Hulu adds tagging for movies, TV shows | Web Crawler – CNET News.
Leave a Comment » | Media Distribution, Web 2.0 | Permalink
Posted by Teb Locke
Introducing Hotseat: Enabling collaborative micro-discussion in and out of the classroom
24 November 2009Hotseat, a social networking-powered mobile Web application, creates a collaborative classroom, allowing students to provide near real-time feedback during class and enabling professors to adjust the course content and improve the learning experience. Students can post messages to Hotseat using their Facebook or Twitter accounts, sending text messages, or logging in to the Hotseat Web site.
Leave a Comment » | Education, Emerging Technologies, Social Media/Networking, Web 2.0 | Tagged: Hotseat | Permalink
Posted by Oscar Retterer
Teaching With Twitter: Not for the Faint of Heart
24 November 2009Teaching with Twitter means students are more involved. And that can take classes in risky directions.
[Source: Chronicle of Higher Education]
Leave a Comment » | Education, Emerging Trends, Web 2.0 | Tagged: twitter | Permalink
Posted by Oscar Retterer
Celebrate Darwin’s Origin
24 November 2009150 years ago, on this date, The Origin of Species was published. This seminal scientific text started a revolution in our understanding of the world around us and generated a storm of discussion. It is a reflection of its idea’s power that it is still causing reactions today.
The book remains a fascinating read 150 years later. The full text is available free from Project Gutenberg.
Watch Darwin’s Lost Paradise, a dramatic reconstruction of the voyages of the Beagle and the origin of Darwin’s theory, in English or in French on Athena Web. Also free; registration is required.
Leave a Comment » | Education, General, Media Distribution, Open Access | Tagged: Darwin, Origin of the Species | Permalink
Posted by Oscar Retterer
I.B.M. Uses Employee-Sourcing for Translation Tool, n.Fluent – NYTimes.com
23 November 2009HOW hard can it be, as the joke goes, to speak Chinese? (Six-year-olds do it all the time.)
Yes, it turns out that learning languages is one of those skills that humans, even relatively young ones, master seemingly magically. It is all enough to make a mainframe computer jealous.
At I.B.M., a team of nearly 100, including mathematicians and software developers, is working on a project to create an automatic translation tool, so-called machine translation, that has the speed and accuracy to be used in instant-messaging between speakers of two different languages.
The project, called n.Fluent, is intended to teach the computer terminology that is specific to I.B.M.’s businesses, and, more significantly, allow the computer to learn what it has been doing wrong. To that end, the company is extracting and organizing contributions from I.B.M.’s 400,000-member work force spread across more than 170 countries, adding a human touch to the project.
via Link by Link – I.B.M. Uses Employee-Sourcing for Translation Tool, n.Fluent – NYTimes.com.
Leave a Comment » | Emerging Technologies | Permalink
Posted by Teb Locke
What is Google Chrome OS?
20 November 2009
Leave a Comment » | Cloud Computing | Permalink
Posted by Teb Locke
Charles Wachira
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Oscar Retterer
Teb Locke
