Clay's Blog

I just saw a post on TeleRead that mentioned that Book Glutton is up for a Webby award. I’d heard of Book Glutton before, but I haven’t checked it out until now. It’s a really cool idea for a community website.

The idea is that you create an account on the site and then access public domain works or user contributed texts using a slick little browser-based book reader, called The Unbound Reader. The twist is that you can open a pane on either side of The Unbound Reader that lets you chat with other readers of the current book in real-time or make annotations that are stored for your own access or shared with other users. In addition, the community aspect of the site includes reading groups that share interest in particular topics or authors. You can join already existing groups or create your own group, which might include your friends or colleagues.

The idea reminds me of the WordPress theme called CommentPress. These tools are really exciting from an instructional technology point of view. They really allow people to work together in close collaboration on a shared text. And they both provide a mechanism that brings together the strengths of wikis with the close reading of a shared document. There’s some great potential here from an educational perspective. It’s hard to beat this kind of active engagement.

I’m attending another excellent New Media Consortium online symposium. This time the topic is educational uses of mashups. As with any subject covered by academics, there’s been significant effort and time spent in the symposium on defining the topic of the symposium itself. Several of the presenters have spent time trying to put a finger on just what a mashup is.

For the most part, the focus is on new tools and structures that combine data from multiple and sometimes disparate sources in novel ways. Often the product is a visually interesting website or Internet-based tool. But, in its broadest sense, almost any cultural artifact can be seen as a mashup. In a real sense, everything that is a cultural product takes the current cultural landscape as a given upon which it can then build, borrowing more or less from previous cultural artifacts. The movement of mashing up and remixing is transforming how we experience culture and its products. And because educational institutions are situated in culture, it is unsurprising that this movement is being embraced by educators. The topic is fascinating from a technological as well as philosophical point of view.

So far, one of my favorite presentations has been “Confessions of a Mashup Un-Artist” by Brian Lamb of the University of British Columbia. Brian’s presentation was itself a masterful mashup, more a live performance employing images, video, music and text than a traditional presentation. In addition, the NMC folks did something really excellent by having Brian perform in Second Life and then streaming the performance out to the web using Adobe Connect. That setup allowed the performance to be recorded, which is how I was able to experience it because I had a class during the actual time the performance was given. Take a peek at what it looked like:

It was absolutely fantastic. Some of the symposium participants really had no idea what to make of it. And many others really got into and started dancing in the amphitheater. Really great stuff.

At the beginning of last week, I had the pleasure of participating in a workshop hosted by the Innovative Learning Center on Digital Storytelling. The workshop was led by two great facilitators from the Center for Digital Storytelling based in Berkeley, California. Daniel Weinshenker, the Director of the Denver Office, and Jessica McCoy, an instructor based at the Berkeley office, did a wonderful job leading the workshop. If you’re unfamiliar with Digital Storytelling, take a look at the Center’s website. Jessica is also involved with an organization called Stories for Change. Both websites host several amazing examples of digital stories.What I found most valuable in participating in the workshop was the opportunity to see a mature process for helping participants formulate and incrementally improve their stories in such a way that simply engaging in the process in good faith led to a product that was drastically better for having been through it. Participants were asked to come with a written script in the range of 350 words, or at least a set of notes that could be turned into a script. We were asked to gather together as much media as we could, such as pictures, video, sound recordings, and music, that would help to tell the story in more than words.
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Just saw this post in the NMC’s RSS feed. It’s dated for tomorrow (24 February) but the post is up now. This is exciting news. I’ve found my experiences in Second Life to be very rewarding so far, but I have been concerned that Linden Labs has too much power over all aspects of the virtual world to be compatible with the open atmosphere cultivated in American higher education. It’s good that NMC is pursuing alternative open source initiatives while still maintaining their commitment to Second Life. This seems like good news all around. I’m excited about participating in the endeavor.

For the last two days, I have been attending a conference sponsored by the New Media Consortium on the Evolution of Communication. The conference is being held wholly in Second Life.

This is the first time I have spent any amount of time in-world and it’s my first real work being done there. I have to say, I have been very skeptical of the use of Second Life for this sort of thing.

But my experience so far has been spectacular. I am using very high-end computers with massive bandwidth, though.
My colleague David Robinson hasn’t had quite as good of an experience going back and forth among different machines, some of which are not the latest hardware.

All things considered, I am more positive about Tulane’s investment of resources in Second Life to build out our island. Participating in a conference like this one has given me some good ideas about how best to use the tool and how not to use it. The conference has been very enlightening and the presentations have been excellent, as is the norm for NMC events.

Just uploaded a recording of a presentation I did yesterday on eBooks. Here’s the description:

eBooks: Promise and Reality

eBooks have been around for several years and every couple of years the technology is hyped as being ready for mass consumption. We’ll take a look at the current eBook landscape. I’ll demo several hardware solutions, including the Sony PRS-500 Reader System and alternative devices like cell phones and the PlayStation Portable. I’ll demonstrate how to use BookDesigner to convert among formats and other software tools. We’ll talk about sources for eBooks like the Gutenberg Project. We’ll also take a look at newly announced technology, including Amazon’s Kindle eBook reader, Adobe’s new Digital Editions format, and color eInk devices that were shown at SIGGRAPH this summer.

View the Presentation

(Adobe Presenter Flash format)

So I’ve been fooling around more with the Samsung Sync and eBook reading and I’ve discovered a few new bits that might be helpful to anyone who would like to use the device for reading eBooks. I’m preparing for a presentation on eBooks that I’ll be giving on Wednesday, so I’m doing some experimentation with various hardware and software tools. Read more »

The much anticipated Amazon Kindle is finally here. I have to say I was a bit skeptical about the device from early images and leaks of information on the web on various gadget sites. Looking at the videos of the Kindle in action, I think the form factor is better than I expected. And given that EVDO network access for the device is free, $400 does not seem as much as it did when I was thinking about monthly fees initially. But for $400 I’d still take an ASUS Eee PC any day.

There are two serious flaws with the Kindle that I think will really hurt the industry as a whole. First, the eBook format that is natively supported is a proprietary format based on mobiPocket. By not using a format that is readable on other hardware, they will be stifling growth of the market as a whole. Secondly, it looks like the only way to get your own files onto the device is by emailing them to an address provided for you from Amazon at a cost of $.10 per email. The jury is still out on whether you will be able to use the SD card and a PC to transfer files to avoid this fee. As a very astute observer in the discussion of the device on Amazon’s site points out, the device seems less an eBook reader and more a microtransaction system for Amazon sales.

The eBook market is still in its early growth stages, and unfortunately, I think the end result of Amazon’s choices may well stunt that growth significantly. We shall see.

I received an interesting comment on my post about getting video onto my Samsung Sync mobile phone this morning. In the comment, Matt asks if I’ve ever tried to use the Sync to read eBooks. I hadn’t. But being an eBook user and fan, I took it as a challenge. Matt had already tried copying a text file over using Bluetooth and opened it using the Picsel file viewer. The results are unsatisfactory – clunky zoom and the need to pan all over the place to read because the text does not wrap. I suspect the text is being treated as if it is an image and this makes it impossible for the software to understand the document’s text flow. Matt had been on the right track after this initial attempt. He says he tried to open the browser and could not find any way to use the file:// protocol to call up the file in the web browser.

Here’s how I solved these problems and was able to read text comfortably on the Sync:

I took a Word document (it could have been any text format) and saved the file from Word as HTML Filtered. The “Filtered” option in Word 2007 strips out all the nasty Microsoft specific code that might not render properly in the Sync’s browser. I then copied the file to my MicroSD card and popped it into the phone. I navigated to the file using the “My Stuff” file browser and opened the file. Because it was an HTML file it opened directly in the phone’s browser. This result had two consequences that were an improvement over the Picsel file viewer. First, the text was sized properly for reading on the small screen, and second, the text properly flowed vertically and wrapped nicely so that no side-to-side scrolling was necessary. In addition, the browser allows you to resize the text on the page; there are three text size settings: normal, smaller, and larger. I found the normal sized text to be very much readable on my phone, and scrolling down for more text was not too bad.

Thanks again to Matt for asking this interesting question. I still find it really cool that we have these fantastic computers that we carry around everywhere with us and that fit in the palm of our hands. I feel like I’m in a Star Trek episode sometimes when I think about the ubiquity of this kind of technology.

Just read a nice article on New Scientist about work by Microsoft and Mitsubishi on a novel approach to handling the occlusion problem and the “fat finger” problem of current multi-touch interfaces. There’s also a video of a prototype of the LucidTouch device.

The current prototype device uses a camera on a boom focused on the hands on the back of the device. An overlay shadow is superimposed over the image showing the location of the hands without occluding the display. Active finger touch points are shown and a very intuitive method for showing the hand-off of selected items between fingers is also used. It’s a nice glimpse of what’s ahead in the multi-touch arena.