We Will be on Stage!

An Autumn Morning

E-books and the Reading Debate

Check out this great NY Times piece which gives voice to several sides of the debate around reading and the influences of e-books:

Right now, networked digital media do a poor job of balancing focal and peripheral attention. We swing between two kinds of bad reading. We suffer tunnel vision, as when reading a single page, paragraph, or even “keyword in context” without an organized sense of the whole. Or we suffer marginal distraction, as when feeds or blogrolls in the margin (”sidebar”) of a blog let the whole blogosphere in. - Alan Liu, English Professor

Paper retains substantial advantages, though, for types of reading that require flipping back and forth between pages, such as articles with end notes or figures....The reading speed reported in academic studies does not include delays induced by clicking away from the text to see the new email that just arrived or check out what’s new on your favorite blog. In one study, workers switched tasks about every three minutes and took over 23 minutes on average to return to a task. - Sandra Aamodt, Editor

For my greatest concern is that the young brain will never have the time (in milliseconds or in hours or in years) to learn to go deeper into the text after the first decoding, but rather will be pulled by the medium to ever more distracting information, sidebars, and now,perhaps, videos (in the new vooks). - Maryanne Wolf, Child Development Professor

I assume that technology will soon start moving in the natural direction: integrating chips into books, not vice versa. I might like to make a book beep when I can’t find it, search its text online, download updates and keep an eye on reviews and discussion. This would all be easily handled by electronics worked into the binding. Such upgraded books acquire some of the bad traits of computer text — but at least, if the circuitry breaks or the battery runs out, I’ve still got a book...The tools (as usual) are neutral. It’s up to us to insist that onscreen reading enhance, not replace, traditional book reading. It’s up to us to remember that the medium is not the message; that the meaning and music of the words is what matters, not the glitzy vehicle they arrive in. - David Gelernter, Computer Science Professor

I wonder about young people, who do not know of a life before the Internet, and who, growing up “digitized,” might not prefer reading online where they are the pilots of their own information pathways. More and more, studies are showing how adept young people are at multitasking. But the extent to which they can deeply engage with the online material is a question for further research. - Gloria Mark, Informatics Professor

DE Announces Student Video Contest

To get students invested in their education, President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have announced a new video contest, asking students to "inspire" them with their stories. Advocates for educational technology say the contest is a great way to reach the digital generation and help students develop key 21st-century skills.

Check here for more details.

Digital Storytelling Update

Digital Storytelling Webinars

Free Digital Storytelling Webinars will be offered by TechSoup as follows:

Event Schedule:
9/30: Event Day 1 – TechSoup forums event discussions and expert webinars

10/1: Event Day 2 – TechSoup forums event discussions and “How to Create a Digital Story” webinar

10/1: Digital Storytelling Challenge kickoff webinar

10/1-10/16: Digital Storytelling Challenge submission period.

10/19-10/20: Challenge submissions judging

10/21: Winners announced and movie screening party in the virtual world of Second Life and live from San Francisco at the TechSoup headquarters

Storybird is “collaborative storytelling for family and friends.” From further investigation, I found some interesting features. In addition to a number of extraordinary online story books, Storybird helps you create a tale with an intuitive book-like interface and a selection of artwork, which are high-quality images from some of the most talented but less well-known children’s illustrators today, like Irisz Agocs and Victoria Usova. The whole story creating process only involves picture selection and text making, which is suitable to younger children to start a trial of digital storytelling.

Based on previous exploration of this topic, I have created the following "glog" to map low-cost tools which can be used in classroom:

Future Publishing: E-Book Builder Trials

I have been trying several e-book building tools at the EdLab this week, including formal online publishing tools and informal personalized tools.

I want to pull them out here to initiate some comparisons.

MagCloud -- The above four-page trial magazine was created via MagCloud, incorporating partial material from the TC Assets Project. It is actually an online magazine converter, via directly uploading your PDF documents to the website. The PDFs must be created according to certain page formats it requires (e.g., templates in Adobe InDesign). It costs nothing to publish a magazine on the website. It only charges for printing and delivery. It is a nice website to publish and promote a magazine. Potential readers/buyers can see a preview of the magazine on the website.

formatpixel -- It is a formal online publishing tool which enables users to design the book online from scratch compared with MagCloud. However, it only offers 512k to free users, so I am not able to further try it out after uploading two pictures.

Sophie -- As said in a previous post, it is a promising tool for publishing multimedia book, with the function of embedding audio and video files. Originally developed by the Institute for the Future of the Book, the development of Sophie has been continued by University of Southern California which owns an avant-garde digital academic journal named VECTORS. Sophie currently is used by Carnegie-Mellon University’s ETC Press and the Computers and Composition Digital Press at Utah State University. Sophie is not easy to use during my trial, because it is a relatively complex and professional tool which needs the devotion of time to get familiar with, like the Adobe design series. It is a free open software and Sophie 2.0 will be issued in mid-October! Currently, I am exploring how it can be embedded online.

SmileBox -- It is a popular tool suitable for informal personalized publishing. Its products include photo albums, crapbooks, calendars, and e-cards, with hundreds of templates. A lot of schools use it with lower graders to design school-life books with simple pictures and texts. This software is also completely free and can be posted online.

ComicLife -- It is also a popular tool, with users such as teachers and students. Compared with SmileBox, it is more like a book builder and it involves more design work without temples provided. Its focus is comic book. See here if interested in knowing more about what a comic book via ComicLife might look like. This tool is not free. It offers a one-month free trial.

Adobe InDesign -- This is probably the most commonly used book design tool known to the publishing field. Its functions are definitely more refined than any of the above tools. MagCloud, formatpixel, and Sophie all have the online publishing function. It seems to me so far that a book/magazine designed via InDesign can only be published via MagCloud.

Latest New Yorker Issue

Enlightened by today's EdLab seminar on digital publishing and Prof. Siegel's class about Teaching Literacy in the Early Years, I explored the digital (beta) edition of the latest The New Yorker. Currently, the online registration is free and every newly-registered online viewer is given four issues (the latest September issue and the next three to come) for free, as one of the magazine's promotion strategies.

The magazine's web version also offers multimedia content supplementary to its hard copies. For example, the following is additional multimedia content of the current issue:

Audio: The Texas execution that may change the death penalty debate.
Video: David Grann discusses the flaws of the Cameron Todd Willingham investigation.


The cover presents a compelling cartoon image about a child teaching a class of grandpas and grandmas "new literacy". How many words on the blackboard do you know? The types of literacy in the contemporary world just keeps updating. Teaching of literacy shifts from the elder generation to its younger counterpart. What's the next step? The blackboard in the image looks traditional, but a lot of public schools in New York are installed with SmartBoard. Would it be possible that in the near future our younger children are going to produce a multimedia story on their own and show us what meanings they want to convey?

As teachers and educators, let's just turn our lifelong learning on, communicating with avant gardes in our field and constantly learning from peers and also from our students.

Digital Storytelling Tools

The following is a "glog" about potential tools for a DST trial at a local elementary school in the fall.
Click each tool for details.

Book Trailers: Moving toward the Future of Digital Publishing

Have you ever seen a book trailer? Nowadays, the traditional book selling activities such as book talks in multiple cities are not very attractive. Instead, with the advances in technology and the belt-tightening economy, publishers and authors are actively looking for web alternatives to promote their books.

Especially in the world of children's literature, things are changing fast.

Award-winning storyteller Dianne de Las Casas has created a Ning community for sharing and discussing kidlit book trailers. Authors can post their trailers and other videos (such as activities with children during school visits). Bibliophiles can discover great reads by watching those videos.

Here’s a gorgeous one from the site: Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by author/illustrator Grace Lin.

Textbooks Go Digital in California

As reported by eSchool News, California State has approved a new initiative on digital textbooks, which aims at encouraging all public schools in California to use free, open digital textbooks.

The recent state report tells that the main subjects covered in this initiative are math and science (e.g., geometry, biology, chemistry, earth science, etc.) for high school students. The main publishers selected include CK-12 Foundation, Pearson Education, Curriki, Connexions, Dr. H. Jerome Keisler, etc.

The report doesn’t mention how the state will apply those textbooks in public classrooms, in the aspects of available devices, technologies or web resources involved, teaching methods, and curriculum development. In my opinion, this initiative will first of all demand “one desktop/laptop per child” in the classroom, which will definitely cost a lot.

I also wonder how the state will expect teachers to use “static” digital textbooks in various grades. I have a few questions in mind:

• Can students manage the readings on a computer screen?
• Is it appropriate to demand teachers use textbooks to teach math and science instead of showing students hands-on examples/experiments in classroom teaching?
• Will those textbooks be accessible to other states?
• How can teachers track students’ readings of digital textbooks?
• How can students make notes of their readings?
• Will the digital textbooks bring a radical change (see the picture above) to the physical environment of classroom?
• ...
  

The books will be issued in the coming months and the state officials are also going to review potential digital textbooks in other subjects (e.g., English literacy?) as reported.

Under the current information age, it is a good strategy for schools to keep updated with technology. However, as for digital textbooks, is the current technology mature enough to bring the engaging literacy experience, activities, and processes of thinking that teachers and educators expect?

Smilebox: A Tool for Online Publishing

I want to introduce Smilebox, which is a terrific tool for personalized online publishing. Compared with Sophie which I blogged about before, Smilebox has several differences: (1) the system can "intelligently" display the photos/videos within the electronic "book". You can upload all the photos and videos at a time, select the background, and then the system will generate a designed book for you. You can further adjust the design and add texts; (2) While Smilebox doesn't have the function of getting feedback from readers, it offers more publishing formats (e.g., online book, online album, e-card, etc.) with various background choices. It can also be sent out via email or posted onto blog.

You can take a tour by clicking the yellow bar on this page.



The website says that over six million people have downloaded the software. The software is free. The process of uploading/inserting videos, audios, and texts as well as linking to the web space makes personal publishing become more creative and promising.