Interactive Textbooks
Get flash to fully experience Pearltrees
Kobo eBooks – Explore Great eBooks and Read in your eReader, Computer, Smartphone or Tablet - Kobo
If there is a book you do not like from the recommendation list, select "Not Interested". Over time, Kobo learns your book preferences and suggests more accurate recommendations.
Inkling 2.0: When a Textbook Becomes More Than a Textbook | Hack Education
One of the most innovative e-book apps available today, Inkling , has just updated its iPad app, adding new features to make its already-interactive textbooks even more interactive and more social. As I've argued recently , that social element is crucial, particularly in education, as it means that readers no longer need be isolated with just them and their textbooks. Indeed, inside each Inkling textbook now is a study group in which anyone reading the book can participate. The Race to Digitize TextbooksInkling , the San Francisco-based maker of interactive iPad textbooks ( see D9 demo video here ), has raised $17 million in Series B funding led by Tenaya Capital and including Jafco Ventures, Pearson Education and Sequoia Capital. Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis, citing IBISWorld data, noted in a recent interview that the U.S. textbook market was worth $16 billion in 2010 — versus $15 billion for “trade books” (fiction, literary non-fiction, everything else). That’s depicted in the chart below. Inkling has 60 employees and hundreds of offshore workers who help format books, which MacInnis said he expects to increase to thousands next year. Today, Inkling’s best sellers are medical textbooks. The company is eagerly anticipating back-to-school season, especially in a year when many colleges and graduate schools are experimenting with student iPads, MacInnis said.
Inkling Raises $17M for Digital Textbooks - Liz Gannes - Media - AllThingsD
Enter discovery, which is modeled on the Google-style approach of building and then searching a unified index of available resources, instead of searching each database individually. While Google’s general index focuses on publicly available web content, these new discovery tools—including EBSCO Discovery Service and Serials Solutions’ Summon , among others—provide unified indexes of the licensed scholarly publications combined with locally held content (like the catalog). In effect, discovery tools make good on the promise of those earlier search solutions by shifting some of the IT management responsibilities to the cloud, streamlining search, and improving the relevance ranking of results. And users get to enter a single query—à la Google—to search the rich content of the collection with the speed they have come to expect. Still brand new, and in action in only a handful of academic libraries, these tools are expected to transform search as we know it.
The Next Generation of Discovery
How Online Education Is Changing the Way We Learn [INFOGRAPHIC]
Over the past decade or so, the Internet has become a huge source of information and education, especially for those who might be short on time, money or other resources. And it’s not just crowdsourced data collections like Wikipedia or single-topic blogs that encourage individual learning; huge corporations and nonprofits are making online education and virtual classrooms a very formal affair these days. From the first online classes (which were conducted by the University of Phoenix in 1989) to the present day, when online education is a $34 billion industry, more and more students are finding new life and career education opportunities online.
New Florida Law Requires eTextbooks in High Schools in 4 Years - eBookNewser
The Florida State Legislature is considering a new bill that could make lugging heavy textbooks around a thing of the past. The new law, passed as part of the education budget, would require Florida public schools to switch to only using digital textbooks by the 2015-16 school year. It would also require them to spend at least half of their textbook budget on digital content by that time. This measure, while popular with state legislators and the state DOE, isn’t going over too well with all teacher. “In a year when you’re cutting the budget by 8 percent, that doesn’t give you a whole lot of resources,” said Vernon Pickup-Crawford, a lobbyist for several school districts. “It is four years down the road.Connexions - Sharing Knowledge and Building Communities
a place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc . Anyone may view or contribute:
Our application provides real-time copyright clearance and an ever-expanding content library along with the ability to add your own materials and articles from the web. And - peer recommendations from colleagues in your discipline can present new possibilities to enrich your courses. This is one of the slickest technologies I have ever seen! I plan to use AcademicPub in the spring of 2012 for my 3D Modeling for Bio-Engineering course. AcademicPub is easy to use and an extremely quick process to generate an economical resource for students, educators and practitioners. Impressive!
Custom Course Materials for Higher Education
Last year Push Pop Press set off to re-imagine the book. We created a new way of publishing and exploring text, images, audio, video and interactive graphics, then teamed up with Melcher Media and Al Gore to create a new kind of book. The result is Al Gore's Our Choice , which was released earlier this year. The response has been incredible.
Push Pop Press — About Us
An “ OER ” is an open education resource and the most common example is an open textbook . An open textbook is a book, most often electronic, that is licensed in a way that allows re-use, repurposing, editing, and republishing. One of the main advantages in an open textbook, apart from the fact that they are free, is that open textbooks can be edited by the instructor. Some “open” textbooks managed by commercial publishers may not be editable at the sentence level.
OER: The Myth of Commercial Textbook Reliability | College Open Textbooks Blog
NEW! Study Online & Offline. With our NEW Read Offline BETA feature, you can access eTextbooks even without an internet connection!
CourseSmart: Our Products
Edward L. Glaeser is an economics professor at Harvard and the author of “ Triumph of the City .” Will electronic connections make cities obsolete? In the giddy early days of e-mail and the Internet, some prophets proclaimed that humans would no longer bother with the inconveniences of density and would instead retreat, in Alvin Toffler’s phrase, to “electronic cottages.”
Edward L. Glaeser: E-Ties That Bind - NYTimes.com
Change was the theme of this year’s 88th annual National Association of College Stores meeting and Campus Market Expo at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, which ended Tuesday. “If we don’t change, we will not be viable. It needs to be significant change in a significant way,” said Donald “Buz” Moser, executive director of business services for Wake Forest University Stores in Winston-Salem, N.C., at a symposium for campus administrators. Nowhere is change more evident than the NACS’s digital initiative.