The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens. In a viral YouTube video from October 2011 a one-year-old girl sweeps her fingers across an iPad's touchscreen, shuffling groups of icons.
In the following scenes she appears to pinch, swipe and prod the pages of paper magazines as though they too were screens. When nothing happens, she pushes against her leg, confirming that her finger works just fine—or so a title card would have us believe. The girl's father, Jean-Louis Constanza, presents "A Magazine Is an iPad That Does Not Work" as naturalistic observation—a Jane Goodall among the chimps moment—that reveals a generational transition. "Technology codes our minds," he writes in the video's description. Tim Waterstone Predicts eBooks Will Decline. Also, Horseless Carriages are just a Fad. Tim Watersone, founder of the UK bookstore chain, had an old geezer moment at the Oxford Literary Festival last week.
The Telegraph is reporting that Waterstone has predicted that ebooks would decline: The so-called e-book “revolution” will soon go into decline, the founder of Waterstones has said, insisting that the traditional physical book is here to stay.Tim Waterstone, who founded the bookshop chain in 1982, argued that the printed word was far from dead and Britain’s innate love of literature had made books one of the most successful consumer products ever.He added that he had heard and read “more garbage about the strength of the e-book revolution than anything else I’ve known”.
…“I think you read and hear more garbage about the strength of the e-book revolution than anything else I’ve known,” Mr Waterstone told the audience in Oxford. If you go read the original article you’ll see that the Telegraph mentions that the UK ebook market was worth £300 million in 2013. eTextbooks. Why Blended Learning Is Better. Blended learning is a buzz word that’s been thrown around quite a bit lately and brings together the best of both classroom learning and elearning.
In fact it seems to be the ideal solution all-around as it appeals to all learning styles, circumstances, needs and demands. It combines the support of classroom learning with the flexibility of elearning. Blended learning has been defined by Innosight Institute as “a formal education program in which a student learns at least in part through online delivery of content and instruction with some element of student control over time, place, path or pace.”
Proponents of blended learning argue that by incorporating ‘asynchronous internet communication technologies’ into courses a ‘simultaneous independent and collaborative learning experience’ is facilitated, and this contributes hugely to student satisfaction and success in such courses.[1] The Digital Networked Textbook: Is It Any Different? Let's speculate that before this year's cohort of first-year teachers retires from math education more than 50% of American classrooms will feature 1:1 technology.
That's a conservative prediction – both in the timeline and the percentage – and it's more than enough to make me wonder what makes for good curricula in a 1:1 classroom. What are useful questions to ask? Here's the question I ask myself whenever I see new curricula crop up for digital networked devices like computer, laptops, tablets, and phones. Paper vs digital reading is an exhausted debate. The digital revolution is going into a decline, Tim Waterstone told the Oxford literary festival.
Well, it's an attention-grabbing statement, ideally suited to our culture of assertive headlines, but it's probably not true. That's not to say that the rapid growth of digital will necessarily continue, either, certainly not in markets that are already saturated with handheld devices. Why? Because the future is – as William Gibson told us quite a long time ago now – not evenly distributed. In fact, if one thing is ubiquitous these days it would seem to be liminality. Digital will continue to grow for a while at least, and continue to exist, because it is becoming part of the world we inhabit at a level below our notice, no more remarkable than roads or supermarkets. E is for Enhanced: 8 Enhanced Ebooks Worth Checking Out. Ebooks are no longer relegated to just text on a screen.
The books we read on our edevices are changing thanks to enhanced features like audio and video. When the first Kindle came out in 2007, many of us wondered at its ability to fit dozens of books on such a small device. Over the past four years, Amazon and other ebook reader manufacturers, like Barnes & Noble, have continued to impress us with each update. And then, of course, there's the Apple iPad, which changed everything for ereaders when it came along in 2010. Allowing for video and audio playback, the iPad could do things other ereaders could not. Enhanced ebooks can include video, film clips from news reels or major motion pictures, drawings, author interviews, original music, diagrams, photos, and more.
Though still a fairly new concept, there seems to be two sides in the enhanced ebook debate.