Rewrite your textbook

The New York Times has a story on Textbooks That Professors Can Rewrite Digitally.

Macmillan, one of the five largest publishers of trade books and textbooks, is introducing software called DynamicBooks, which will allow college instructors to edit digital editions of textbooks and customize them for their individual classes.

I’ve had many a textbook that I modified for my own instructional purposes, but I didn’t do it by rewriting an author’s copyrighted material. I’ve also written a few books that I fantasize are used as textbooks, so I’m wondering how this development is being presented to authors. What control do authors have over changes?

DynamicBooks are presenting themselves inexpensive, interactive, and innovative. Right now they have about 100 of Macmillan’s books that fall into this program. (This deal fairly screams iPad to me.)

Pearson, which is the parent company of Peachpit and New Riders, was quoted in the NYT article.

“There is a flow to books, and there’s voice to them,” said Don Kilburn, chief executive of Pearson Learning Solutions, which does allow instructors to change chapter orders and insert material from other sources. Mr. Kilburn said he had not been briefed on Macmillan’s plans.

While this idea may have the potential to bring improvements to education, I want to know a whole lot more about the details before I endorse it. Right now, the details are hard to find. It could be a nightmare.

Jeffrey Zeldman, who wrote a book recommended for use it just about every web design course in the world, is leading a panel at SXSWi on “New Publishing and Web Content” next month. I don’t think they had this development in mind when the panel was suggested months ago, but I hope editable digital textbooks will be among the things discussed during the session.

Useful links: Hide that app, SXSWi, ChatRoulette

Sandia Mountains

Since I stopped posting the monthly summaries of what I have published at eHow, I’ve stopped showing you my occasional photo. Here’s a photo, apropos of nothing, that shows the mystical Sandia Mountains on a cloudy February morning.

How to Hide Farmville (and such) on Facebook. OMG, this is the best thing I’ve learned in ages!

sxsw interactiveOnly a couple of weeks until South by Southwest Interactive. I’ll be there. I don’t think I’ll live blog as much as I have in the past, but I’ll be taking lots of photos. I didn’t take near enough pictures last year. I intend to make up for it this year. If you see me there, say hello. I’m looking forward to seeing friends, the keynotes, a New Riders author gathering, and I have a whole list of panels I want to see. How many times have I been to this event? Ten, Twelve, Fourteen? I’ve lost count. All those wild nights at SXSWi must be the reason my hair turned gray.

Here’s something new for educators (and parents) to think about: ChatRoulette. apophenia has a description of what it is and her early response to it.

How much sharing is too much?

I’m talking specifically about sharing your whereabouts on social networks. Do you?

The article Please Rob Me: The Dangers of Online Oversharing yesterday got me thinking about this. Sometimes I do promote the fact that I’ll be somewhere, for example if I’m trying to get people to attend something I’m doing at a conference. However, I generally don’t mention going away from home, even though there are people in my house when I’m gone.

Even when you don’t actively push your whereabouts, there are still ways to figure it out. If I update Facebook from a computer with a Texas IP number, Facebook notices it. If I’m tweeting from somewhere in Chicago, Twitter notices it. Even if you think you aren’t oversharing, the horse is already out of the barn on privacy.

I constantly see tweets and Facebook updates announcing specific locations for people: a specific coffee shop, a specific gate at an airport, a specific table in a specific restaurant. How much sharing of where you are is too much?

Useful Links: Digital News, Young Designers

Why the iPad (and kin) is Unlikely to Yield Consumer Savings at Wired Pen puts pen and paper to the math involved in digital distribution of  news by media companies trying to transition from print.

Group Interview: Expert Advice for Students and Young Web Designers at Smashing Magazine was eye opening. And annoying. For one thing, everyone they interviewed was male.

Another problem I had was that I didn’t recognized many of the names of the web design experts they interviewed. Of course, there’s no reason why I should know every web design expert on the planet, but I do stay in touch with this area of knowledge. All the men interviewed had interesting job titles, and are no doubt good at their jobs.

None of the men interviewed by Smashing Magazine were educators. Few of them mentioned formal training for web designers, and when they did, it was all about what happens outside of formal training. They talked about passion and experience, about finding work and freelancing. None of them talked about how their education prepared them to work in the web design field.

As a web design educator, I think the attitudes and comments of the men interviewed in this article deserve careful thought by folks like me who identify as educators of web designers.

Pew Research Looks at Social Media and Young Adults

Pew Research took a look at teens and young adults and the trends in social media and mobile use among the youthful crowd. The catch word to identify this generation is “millennials,” or the first generation to come of age in the new millennium.

Pew first announced their findings on Twitter at @pewresearch earlier this month. Tweeting your research results is a trend in itself, but according to the Feb. 2010 report from Pew, it probably isn’t something a young adult would do.

A summary of the findings, with a link to the full report, is available on the Pew Research Center site.

mobile phone

Mobile is big. The most interesting findings:

  • Blogging and blog commenting has declined among teens by about 10% since the last study in 2007.
  • Almost 75% of teens and young adults use social networking sites. That’s compared with a mere 40% of adults over 30.
  • Facebook and MySpace run almost neck and neck for popularity among teens and young adults. LinkedIn is a minor blip in this age group.
  • Twitter use is low. The most likely to use Twitter are high school girls, but the numbers there only come to about 13%.
  • Mobile wireless is hot, with about 80% of the adults under 30 being wired into wireless. About 75% of teens and over 90% of young adults have a mobile phone and are using it to conduct an array of online activities.

Pew researcher Amanda Lenhart posted a series of charts showing the trends discovered in this study on Slideshare.

Social Media and Young Adults

Additional Resources:

Cross posted at BlogHer.

Useful Links: Peer to Peer, Bill Gates, EVs

Needed: Peer to Peer Twitter (or did Google get it backwards?) at Rare Pattern raises some interesting questions.

Bill Gates: The Most Important Climate Speech of the Year is a TED Talks reported on at WorldChanging. Here’s a teaser. I don’t see the video on TED.com yet.

. . . he acknowledged the only sensible goal, when it comes to climate emissions, is to eliminate them: we should be aiming for a civilization that produces no net emissions, and we should be aiming to live in that civilization here in the developed world by 2050.

Obviously, that’s a big goal. Because he is the world’s biggest geek, to explain how he plans to achieve that goal, Gates put up a slide with a formula (which we can call the Gates Climate Equation):

CO2 = P x S x E x C

While were on the energy and environment, check out New Material Could Act as Both Battery and Body of EVs. That’s some cool technology.

Twitter lists of Women in Tech

I saw this post on Twiangulate at TechCrunch. Looking at Erick
Schonfeld list of who in tech he triangulates with, it occurred to me that he’s only listening to men in tech.

If the men in tech are only listening to the men in tech, it’s no wonder they can’t find any women in tech when they want to host a conference and need some diversity in the speaker’s roster.

Several people offered up their lists of women in tech (or people in tech) on Twitter. There are women worth listening to on these lists. Check them out.

If you have a good Twitter list with women in tech, please drop it in the comments. Thanks.