Here is an interesting post from O’Reilly Radar. This is a slightly different take on the down side of self-selected social media and the dangers in giving information consumers what they want. The consequence – a narrow and perhaps bias supporting perspective.
See also – Cult of the Amateur
Mixed reactions to Apple iPad. It is interesting to carefully review the goals (see below). Listen to the presentation (now available as a link from the Apple site). Jobs attempts to make the case that the goal was to be better at some specific things. If educators are considering the possibility, one approach would be to consider whether the prioritized tasks are tasks that are important for student learning.
One thing I did not see in the demo was the capacity to annotate or highlight ebooks. Is that inherent in the open format Apple selected for the ebooks?
We all should probably wait until tomorrow rather than speculate about the Apple tablet. However, it is difficult to resist. Check this post from AppleInsider that embeds a MSNBC video with CEO from McGraw-Hill. Hope our publisher is watching.
You may remember a “science fiction” video from 1987 proposing a Knowledge Navigator. For many of us, this does not seem that long ago. Now, we can actually do many of the things only proposed at the time. Perhaps, later this week, a device closer to the vision of the navigator will be available.
I have wondered about this issue for some time. Typically, when you write a book, the copyright does not reside solely with the publisher. Both the author and publisher retain rights. The Google process of scanning books is extremely questionable at best, but the individual authors responsible for these works have not be contacted. The “opt out” approach is quite practical for Google and perhaps some might feel like contacting all of these authors would be a significant task. How you even establish that each author understood Google’s intent. How about if the citizens in this community tell me that they would rather I not take their cars. An author has stepped forward to challenge the type of assumptions Google makes.
What kind of a blog title is “PlagiarismToday”? Anyway, this post from PlagiarismToday caught my attention. It proposes the concept of “reverse creative commons”. Instead of the author/developer offering others specific ways in which content can be used by others, the idea of reverse creative commons is a simply way potential users might ask for a specific use of content.
A reverse CC system could fix that by having the user pick out the license that they need/want and then emailing it in the form of a permission request to the rightsholder via email. All the user would have to do is pick the rights they need, enter some information about the work, and then send it.
