There is a party and you are not invited!
The currently available Amazon Kindle app for mac doesn’t play nice with 10.5.8 and there doesn’t appear to be a download to previous versions.
Transformation: making a ruckus
There is a party and you are not invited!
The currently available Amazon Kindle app for mac doesn’t play nice with 10.5.8 and there doesn’t appear to be a download to previous versions.
Despite having been around for years, ebooks are still very underutalised in education. There are two types of ebook to consider. Firstly, those books made available from the publishers and other writers. Secondly, self-published books that you produce yourself. I am not sure how much we can shape the path that the academic publishers are on at present so will focus on self-publishing of digital books.
There are plenty of uses for print books in education and currently the main driver for education ebooks is to replicate existing print books in digital form.
For the most part this means simply scanning print books and using Adobe PDF as the ebook file format. The scans are often of poor quality and do not take advantage of the power features of the format.
This underlying theme will continue but the most exciting area will be finding new uses for books that take advantage of what being digital can offer.
The growth of commercial ebooks led largely by the ease with which we can now distribute and view ebooks on our mobile devices (laptops, phones and dedicated readers) has shone a light on applications for education.
There hasn’t been much recent research on producing digital books for eduction so I hope posts like this and the work JISC will be doing this year will contribute to the start of something bigger.
ebooks can be accessed and read across multiple platforms:
In a future post I will explore the unique opportunities that digital books can offer.
JISC – Digital monogragh technical landscape study
JISC Digital Media – Introduction to ebooks
JISC Digital Media – Getting started with ebooks
Craig Mod – Post-artifact books and publishing
Susan Weinschenk gave an evening talk to the Bristol Usability Group on “The Top Ten Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People“. These are 10 things from her book 100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People. Below are my highlighted notes:
Stu Church from Pure Usability ran a full day workshop talking and demonstrating the benefits of a user-centred approach to JISC funded projects. Here are my notes:
Fresh, new, and free…… Listen/download
Music to code to
In Expressionengine, if you want to make a custom field work as a URL / link instead of plain text, under channel preferences for the required channel ensure ‘Automatically turn URLs and email addresses into links?’ is set to NO.
Otherwise the link on the page will add the URL of the page you are currently on e.g example.com/url-of-custom-field which of course won’ t work.
This catches me out often enough that I need to document it here.
Yesterday, 1st April 2012 I competed and successfully completed my first ever half marathon.
I felt good throughout the race and each step past eleven miles was the furthest i’ve ever run.
My time was 2hr 2mins and 35 sec (the winner was 1hr 14min) and my running partner Stephen managed 1hr 59mins 25 sec – not too shabby !
Having run several pretty tough cross-country races including the Slaughterford 9, I wonder what challenge we’ll attempt next?……
The University of Gloucestershire is recruiting for two e-learning posts:
Learning Technologist (Reusable Learning Objects)
Learning Technologist (Remote Learners)
Deadline is 18 April 2012
Every now and then I find a useful plugin on Github to use on a project. However sometimes when I grab the plugin it won’t work with the expressionengine CMS and I could never figure out why, until now.
It might just be me but when I see the plugin folder on github (illustrated below A) I assumed this was what I needed. Grabbing the files and then installing them caused the plugin area of the control panel to fail and return me to the github page – i then delete the plugin from the server in order to get the plugin area to work again.
I completely overlooked the ‘zip’ button which gives me the correct folders/files and work…. (illustrated below B).
Problem solved,