News and Musings from the World of Textbooks
We’re not even three weeks into this month and already October has seen the Digital vs. Print Textbooks debate really heat up and some heavy hitters, including Education Secretary Arne Duncan, weigh in with the bold statement “Over the next few years, textbooks should be obsolete.” That’s provocative stuff and there’s a lot more to the story and good points made from all angles. (more…)
As I learn more and more about open educational resources, I have discovered that we need to learn a new language and discover new tools. One blogger, Paul Stacey, has put together a really nice guide to OER in his recent post “Sips from An Open Firehose.” (more…)
Another rush has ended and before we know it the holiday’s will be here. As we end the 3rd quarter I thought I would do another round up of the some of the most-important and most-read Textbook Guru posts. The big update over the past quarter has been the launch of the new blog. Let me know how you like you. www.thetextbookguru.com (more…)
If you think that academic publishers are going to give up any of their content to the public domain in this era of open-source, think again. The website Edublogs.com recently found out the hard way what fewer than 300 words of copyrighted material can do to their ecosystem: shut them down. (more…)
It seems that the race is on to create free textbooks and British Columbia is joining the State of California in making available content for the most popular post-secondary courses.
Similar to the recent bill passed in California, the B.C. government is joining the growing movement of using Open Educational Resources and will look to start implementing its own open textbook policy in the 2013-2014 school year. (more…)
The last time I checked in on the eTextbook platform at Chegg, it was February of this year; what a difference six months has made! While the original system was impressive, the changes are even more so and they are going to help set Chegg apart in the digital arena. Here’s what’s up: (more…)
As the 2012 back-to-school season picks up speed, so do the updates to eBooks and eBook platforms. Tech providers know that now is the time when students decide if they will make the leap to eBooks, and if so, which device and platform they will choose. (more…)
Crowd funding is a term in our new social-media-based society and we should become more comfortable with it and the larger tech-lexicon. Similar to “viral” of a few years back, I am hearing “crowdsourcing” more and more. (more…)
Currently, government funded research can be very costly to access. Sometimes thousands of dollars a year for access to a single journal. Should the public have to pay for this information that our tax dollars have funded? Should universities have to pay millions of dollars a year to access this information? (more…)
