I’ll post sooner than later (yet this weekend, certainly) about Thanksgiving at home this year, but in the meantime, it’s time once again to post a ton of links to stuff open in my browser that I want to and/or need to come back to sooner than later. In no particular order here:
- “The Nookcolor and the Future of Textbooks,” and “The Evolution of the Digital Coursepack,” both blog entries on Inside Higher Ed from Joshua Kim. I agree with the point he’s trying to make here and to me, digital textbooks/coursepacks in the form of things like Nooks, Kindles, iPads, etc. are a no-brainer. But whenever I bring this up with my students– first year students and grad students– they give me feedback that suggests that the teachers are a lot more ready for this stuff than the students, I guess because students are thinking about the costs, about how they will be able to highlight and/or otherwise take notes, and how much they’ll get for selling it back.
- “38 Ways to Write about Writing,” from way back in mid-October from Traci Gardner. A nice list of stuff. Speaking of which, there’s “Five Ways to Write Magnificent Copy.”
- From guardian.co.uk, “Class blogs: A better way to teach?” Why, yes, yes they are. This is actually more about elementary/middle school settings, so kind of cool.
- “A Model for Open Textbook Sustainability,” which is about just that. I’m quoted in here, so I guess that makes it something worth linking to…..
- From Lifehacker, “AppMakr Helps You Create Your Own iPhone App for Free, No Coding Necessary.” Learning how to do some coding for the iPhone/iPad is one of those “maybe someday” sort of things for me, so I want to keep track of this.
- From guardian.co.uk “A renaissance rooted in technology: the literary magazine returns,” which is about how there’s a whole new series of literary periodicals emerging online. Maybe useful for Writing for the World Wide Web.
- DEVONthink is apparently the organizational software that Steve Johnson favors. I dunno, but I think what I need is a motivational/stay disciplined software and/or medication.
- “How Handwriting Trains the Brain” from WSJ.com. I actually bought a book/notebook on practicing handwriting, thinking it is something Will and I could do together. I still haven’t gotten around to it though, and now I’m not sure where that book/notebook is.
- “Smarthistory: a multimedia web-book about art and art history” is a super-cool web site/”textbook” of the sort you’d use in a gen-ed art history course or something. Lots of neat stuff here, and an interesting model for folks in other disciplines (writing, perhaps?) to imitate.
- Monster Tire Video, Detroit, MI. I didn’t realize this that that big tire was a Ferris wheel at the World’s Fair.
- “Change Up Your Digital Writing.” Karl Stoley has had a couple of great blog posts/links to things lately; here’s one of them, something I will almost certainly include in 444 this winter. And here’s another post about HTML 5 from Karl.
- “Copying Right and Copying Wrong with Web 2.0 Tools in the Teacher Education and Communication Classrooms.” I haven’t read this yet, but it looks potentially useful for 444 and 516, not to mention some of the courses taught by my colleagues in English Education.
- “Facebook Comprises Nearly 25% of Page Views in the US,” at least that was what was reported here on Read Write Web. I find that to be a somewhat disturbing statistic, actually.
- “iBendXL– The Thinnest Stand for the iPad” from PadGadget. I dunno, but this looks like something you could make yourself with a piece of posterboard. Maybe a project for later.