EduKindle

Since the first days of the Kindle, readers have been somewhat undone by the absence of page numbers in the text of their Kindle “books.” Reactions range from bemused to outraged. Some purchasers claim to have sent their Kindles back because of this formatting peculiarity, er, innovation. Others say, no big deal; they seem to be fine with progress bars and percentage completed figures instead of eyeballing how far you have to go until the end of the book.

From those same early days, though, it occurred to me and to many others that academic customs and conventions regarding citation of works and of a passage in text would be turned on their heads by Kindle’s adherence to a new form of locating passages within a text by calling them, well, locations.  Much of the discussion among teachers and students about the use of  these newfangled mileage markers in text in schools has focused on the question “How do I check a citation if I don’t have a Kindle?”

Why do people struggle so? I think the hang-up has to do a little bit with the word book itself. Books have pages. And these pages are numbered. Right? If we go down this path in thinking that you are reading a “book” on your Kindle, then we would have to call it a book without page numbers. But that picture changes quite a bit if we posit that what you are reading on your Kindle is not a book, but a file.

Once we make this little shift in vocabulary, the problem gets a lot easier to deal with. The MLA has rules for citing electronic texts that are not paginated books. The following (from the Seventh Edition of the MLA Handbook) seems promising:

Rule 5.7.18.  A Digital File (MLA membership required for online access)

For example, when citing a file, which a Kindle book most assuredly is, the citation might look like this:

Stephen, Levitt D. Freakonomics. Rev. and Expanded ed. New York: Harper Collins, 2006. Kindle file.

The APA even took up this issue in a blog post from last year, saying in part:

For the reference list entry, you’ll need to include the type of e-book version you read (two examples are the Kindle DX version and the Adobe Digital Editions version). In lieu of publisher information, include the book’s DOI or where you downloaded the e-book from (if there is no DOI):

Gladwell, M. (2008). Outliers: The story of success [Kindle DX version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com.

The Chicago Manual of Style keeps it pretty simple as well:

Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck, The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business (Harvard Business School Press, 2001), Kindle e-book.

Of course, there is no reason not to help the person who would like to find the source of your citation by including location numbers, or, as the APA suggests, using those structural features of the text itself that do not change by format, such as sections or chapters:

To cite in text, either (a) paraphrase, thus avoiding the problem (e.g., “Gladwell, 2008″), or (b) utilize APA’s guidelines for direct quotations of online material without pagination (see Section 6.05 of the manual). Name the major sections (chapter, section, and paragraph number; abbreviate if titles are long), like you would do if you were citing the Bible or Shakespeare.

Gladwell’s book has numbered chapters, and he’s numbered the sections in the chapters. An example direct quotation might be this:

One of the author’s main points is that “people don’t rise from nothing”  (Gladwell, 2008, Chapter 1, Section 2, para. 5).

It is interesting what happens to the problem of proper citation in a Kindle book when you call it by its proper name: a file.

For today’s students who are acclimated to high speed browsing, the experimental Kindle browser will seem impossibly awkward and slow. Longer web pages are displayed and accessed using the “next page” button, and sites with sidebars or any kind of fancy formatting will display in a seemingly helter skelter way on the Kindle browser. (It is somewhat amazing but only fair to note that the current situation is quite a bit better than it used to be!) And I have heard good things about the move to a better browser platform with the 3rd generation Kindle, but we will have to wait to see.

But what the Kindle can do with the internet is not really limited to the browser. Consumers know that they can order and download books in the much vaunted “60 seconds” without ever going to the “Experimental” link in the menu screen and launching the browser. So, how will internet connectivity (if not the browser itself) on the Kindle assist you, the teacher, in the classroom?

One, students will not be tempted to use the Kindle as an entertainment or social networking device during class. Too darned slow. (With all the talk about colleges banning certain internet-connected devices during lectures because professors don’t want to look out at a sea of students updating their Facebook status, the slow-moving Kindle might be the right kind of connected device for the classroom.)

Two, with built-in searches on Google and Wikipedia, information can be accessed more quickly than it could if you had to open the browser and find it yourself. How to do this? Use the 5-way to highlight something you want to look up and hit the space bar (super secret short cut!), which will populate the search box at the bottom of the page with the term you want to search on. With the 5-way move three spots to the right (past the “find” command, which will just look up other places in the text where the term is used, to the little pointer to the right. Three nudges of the 5-way to the right will do it. That will open a menu with choices like “store” (what else with Amazon!), “google,” “wikipedia,” “dictionary,” and “note,” in case you want to add a note about the highlighted word(s). Highlight “wikipedia” and push the 5-way. Voila! A wikipedia page listing all the Wikipedia pages about that term appears. Navigate to the one you want with the 5-way and push. Count to ten (slowly), and here comes your article!

Three, the internet connection will also allow you to click on live links in the text and fly (er, amble) to the linked URL. Say that you have downloaded a book or article like this one on Differentiated Instruction, and you wanted to visit this cool link about the “Dimensions of Differentiated Learning” that is referenced in the work, you just use the 5-way to get to and click on the link and the browser will launch itself and take you there.

Four, and finally, the live internet connection will allow you to post highlighted passages to Twitter or Facebook. With synchronization turned off, this offers a good way for students to post highlights and notes directly to the web where you and classmates can view them for comment or discussion. More on how to do this in an upcoming post!

Few pieces of educational equipment have achieved the kind of rapid and widespread adoption in schools from middle school to college as the graphing calculator. Introduced by Casio in 1985, the device has been showing up on school supply lists for quite some time, and as a parent I have personally purchased several for my kids. A bit too expensive for schools to provide to students, most schools simply require the student to provide his or her own, perhaps in the same way that, in an earlier era, math students had to supply their own slide rules for class. In recent years, Texas Instruments has become the most visible manufacturer of the calculators on the shelves at Office Depot and Wal-Mart. In fact, you can get a TI-83 Plus at Wal-Mart today for about a hundred bucks. Or, you can get a TI-Nspire calculator at Office Depot for $139.00. Remember that price.

These calculators became a fixture in our schools, at least for the higher level math and science courses, because they made the process of performing certain calculations much quicker and easier, so that less class time had to be spent on graphing complicated equations manually and more could be spent on teaching and learning about the math behind the graphs. In short, graphing calculators became indispensable because they empowered each student to operate on a more equal footing and they allowed the teacher to spend more time teaching. Nowadays, they are just an expected part of the educational landscape, a $139 appliance that pretty much every serious math student owns and even rushes out to replace if lost or damaged. You just gotta have one.

Since the beginning (and that would be 2007), I have felt that the Kindle or some ereader would achieve a combination of features and price that would make them the graphing calculator of the 21st century. I just didn’t think it would happen so soon.

With its announcement of a next-generation Kindle that connects via wifi and offers improved screen resolution and a bunch of features I still need to read up on, that moment is upon us. You can get a Kindle for the same price as a graphing calculator. Is $139 the ultimate magic number? I don’t know. But I do know that it is a number that has worked for a generation of math students; why won’t it work for this generation of readers? In fact, there is more reason to adopt an ereader like the Kindle because it serves a wider swath of the student population. The graphing calculator supports the curriculum at one, fairly specialized level in K-12 education; the Kindle supports multiple subjects from the least to the most advanced levels. I just don’t think folks have connected the dots on this one yet. And $139 is within shouting distance of the $99 price point that market pundits and the general public agree will ignite mass adoption of the devices.

Bezos and company seem intent on making the Kindle the device at the center of that mass adoption and, with the head-spinning rapidity with which they are lowering the price and adding options, I think that they might just be on to something.

The first hint of the problem started popping up at the end of the school year in May. Kathy Burnette, a member of the Kindle Educators Group over at the Ning, summed up her problem in a post:

ARGH! We are not allowed to purchase gift cards using our purchase order accounts and that means I have no way to purchase the Kindle even though I have money. We received the check but it’s made out to our school. This means it must go into a school account and we must use a purchase order. Not quite sure what to do next…

She needed what I am beginning to call a “Kindle Workaround” to purchase her Kindles, and, a few days later, the absence of said workaround let to her next post, entitled We Had to Get Nooks!: ” Our Purchasing Department does not want us to use Amazon and they are in control of the Grant Funds.” So Kathy is now blazing the trail of using the Barnes and Noble Nook as the ereader at her school.

So, what is the “Kindle Workaround” that Kathy needed to purchase those Kindles? That’s the topic of today’s post.

First, you need to find a link at the Amazon website that, while not hidden, certainly isn’t obvious to the casual user. That is the link for “Corporate Accounts,” toward the bottom of the left sidebar on the main Amazon page. Diane Bushman, the board secretary for the Seneca Grade School (Seneca CCSD #170) outside Chicago, tells me that once you find this link, setting Amazon up as a vendor is pretty much the same process as setting up any other vendor for your district. The steps in the process are as follows:

1. Click on Corporate Accounts link at Amazon.com
2. Scroll down to Corporate Accounts by Segment
3. Click on the box labeled K-12 Schools
4. Below the intro you will see “Purchase Order Payment: Apply for an Amazon.com Corporate Credit Line to pay by PO”
5. Click the link “Amazon Corporate Credit Line” to set your school up for purchase using a P.O.
6. On the application page, you will be offered the chance to apply for a “Pay In Full” line or a “Revolving” line
(Note: Dianne opted for the “Pay In Full” line as she planned to pay for the Kindles in full once she got her invoice)
7. Once you select the type of line you want to apply for, you will be asked to log into Amazon
(In Seneca’s case, Dianne used the account associated with the purchasing card that they typically use for Amazon purchases)
8. Set up your corporate account and provide the application information required on the following screens

Dianne mentioned that approval for a $5,000 line of credit was painless and took a couple of days to complete. (Note that the Amazon.com Corporate Account Credit Line is issued by GE Money Bank, so you are dealing with a third party provider when you put in your app.)

BUT, since Seneca was interested in purchasing 80 Kindles, the $5,000 line of  credit was insufficient. This triggered a more involved but straightforward process of getting an adequate line approved, which involved providing GE Money Bank with the district’s financials. Again, Dianne found this part of the process took a bit more time and a call or two to the help line (number provided on the site), but was straightforward. In a few more days, SGS received approval for the appropriate line and then received its 80 Kindles just a few days later. (And that’s when I showed up to participate in the Kindle set-up procedure with Kathy, as detailed in my earlier posts.)

So, aside from the relative merits of purchasing Nooks rather than Kindles (and that is a reasonable debate–see Kathy Burnette’s comparison of the two devices here), no one has to feel that they can’t purchase their Kindles with a purchase order. You can. It’s just that your business office will have to cooperate and jump through Amazon’s hoops to set up an account. I believe that one reason schools that buy Nooks do so is that they already have a corporate account set up with Barnes and Noble. No problem! the news here is that you can do the same with Amazon.

(And now that it looks like the price war between Kindle and Nook will squeeze out many smaller players in the ereader manufacturing and sales arena, getting an account set up with both of these mega-vendors may be the best idea of all.)

I had the pleasure of spending a day with Kathy Parker last week to learn how she sets up all the Kindles the district purchased for Seneca Grade School’s entire eighth class for the coming school year. It is quite a process! I have noted in many previous posts that the Amazon Kindle is first and foremost a device designed for individual consumers, and the ways in which Amazon’s focus on the individual consumer limits the use of the device for academic purposes. For example, those of you who have commented on the post Page Number versus Position on the Kindle know that creating footnotes that reference specific places in the text of an ebook on the Kindle presents a hurdle. In addition, students who used the Kindle DX in university trials this past year generally gave the device low marks for academic use, mainly because it is difficult to flip pages to find a passage quickly and accurately, and because the device has limited note-taking functionality. What the college students liked about the Kindle were the same things that consumers like: the portability, the congenial e-ink screen, and the ability to access books wirelessly in an instant.

Well, Amazon’s consumer bias also makes setting up multiple devices a chore for folks like Kathy. The system is designed to work with a single device, or a few that a family might have on a single Amazon account. So, setting up 80 Kindles at a time involves repeating a process that a consumer might do once eighty times in a row. And that’s before you even start downloading books to the devices, another serial process that must be repeated 80 times for each book you want to put on all the Kindles.

But all of this didn’t seem to disturb good-natured Kathy, pictured above with the author, near the table where a dozen of the new Kindles were receiving their first charge. Kathy immediately starts the charging process once she gets the Kindle boxes open so that she can tell right away if there is a defective Kindle among the bunch. So far, on this shipment, she has only found one, which Amazon will quickly replace.

As she sets the Kindles up for charging, Kathy also numbers the Kindles with a sticky note. This step accomplishes a few things. First, it creates the first identifier that Kathy will use to record the Kindle in her district inventory. Second, it tells Kathy where each Kindle stands in the queue to be registered in her Kindle account at Amazon. Linking the physical number of the Kindle to the name that the Kindle will ultimately hold in the Amazon system (e.g. “Kathy’s 52nd Kindle,” visible at the top of each device’s Home screen) is key to managing content on the individual Kindles once they are in the hands of students.

But I have gotten a step ahead of myself. You can’t get to this stage until you have opened up each Kindle’s packaging by pulling the little tab across the end of the tight little box the Kindles come in. (Anyone remember the big, white book-like enclosures for the first generation of Kindles?) Kathy’s assistant in the process, husband Steve (himself principal of a nearby school that is using Kindles), showed me what a chore that is, since the tabs don’t really sit up where you can pull on them. For this batch of Kindles, at least, a fingernail couldn’t quite do the job (and I tried it myself!). Steve discovered that some kind of implement is required–a letter opener or pocket knife–to lift the tab so the sealing strip can be pulled off and the Kindle liberated for use. This seems like a small thing but, repeated eighty or a hundred times, it adds a significant step to the batch processing of Kindles for student use.

Once the Kindles are opened, labeled, and charged, they are ready to be registered with Amazon. The details of that procedure will follow in Part 2 of this post.

As a blogger on a topic tied to a specific device, the Kindle, it has been easy to overlook the real hero of the ebook revolution, and that is the digital text itself. The virtues of ebooks for schools reside not in the features and benefits of a specific reading device, despite what the pundits prattle on about as they compare the virtues of the Kindle or the iPad. Whether you turn the page with your finger or your thumb, whether you can read better in the light or the dark, whether a thousand or a million titles are available in one store or the next, whether the cool factor is high or low–these are ephemeral to the reasons that digital text can make a difference in the education of young people.

Should I get a bunch of Kindles for my school? It’s a question the answer to which is up in the air. A bunch of iPads? Still in doubt. Here’s the real question: should I be taking advantage of the properties of digital text in my teaching? The answer to that one is unequivocal, and the answer is yes.

OK, you say, digital text has been around for a long time. What’s the big deal right now? The answer to that one is easy, too: the emergence of dedicated mobile reading platforms, like the Kindle and the iPad (and the iPhone, and the Sony Reader, and the Nook). Digital text has been available for a long time in one form, primarily, and that is formatted as HTML and viewed on a computer monitor. (In fact, it is indicative of this history that 50% of ebooks today are read on a computer, even with the proliferation of choices in mobile readers.)

So what’s different now? For the first time we have devices and software that are dedicated to taking advantage of the virtues of digital text. My quick list of those virtues includes:

• variable text size
• variable type face
• distribution of text electronically
• availability of free text
• storage requirements for digital text
• amount of the world’s knowledge already captured in digital text
• user control of digital text
• the sustainability of digital text
• fresh formats for prose enabled by digital text

In this and the next few posts, I am going to discuss  these virtues and link them to what we know about how students learn. First up, variable text size.

Digital Text: The Advantage of Variable Font Size for Reading

Something that has been widely reported is the pleasure that a lot of people take in reading text on the Kindle at a larger font size than is typical for them. That is certainly true for me; I am a declared lover of Kindle Font Size #4 which, as it turns out, is roughly equivalent to a 14 point font. In an unscientific survey I conducted on this blog a while back, 70% of the participants indicated a preference for Kindle Font Size #3 or higher. While this was a very small sample, the preference for larger font sizes was clear.

In the meantime, students have put their thoughts on the record about font size, and bigger is certainly preferred by the middle school students polled by Kathy Parker at Seneca (IL) Middle School, where Kathy has run a Kindle pilot program this past school year. They like the largest font size, period. They say it helps them read better.

Recently, a blogger in the UK noted that reading text on his iPhone was easier than in books or other settings. Why? A bit of investigation told him that larger fonts reduce the amount of print on the page; words are less jammed together. The blogger, it turns out, is dyslexic, and receives this diagnosis of the situation validated by a prominent neuroscientist, who comments that “Many dyslexics have problems with ‘crowding’, where they’re distracted by the words surrounding the word they’re trying to read.”

I did a little research myself on the “crowding” phenomenon, which has been carefully studied by researchers here and abroad, especially as it affects the reading rate of “normal” and “dyslexic” readers. The findings across many studies are clear:

• all readers benefit from increasing text size up to a maximum, after which increased reading rate associated with the larger text flattens out
• the optimal font size for “normal” readers is larger than average, but not as large as it is for dyslexic readers
• much of the reading rate difference between normal and dyslexic readers can be mitigated through increased font size

In a Research Brief I wrote recently on the subject, I provide an overview of “crowding”: “In the research, crowding specifically refers to “the difficulty in identifying a letter embedded in other letters” (Chung, 2007). Studies have shown that the crowding effect impacts reading rates in both the horizontal and vertical proximity of text, so that larger font size creates more space between adjacent letters in the text, and may increase line spacing as well, reducing crowding.”

I have also summarized the findings of a number of studies. For example, a 2009 study conducted at the University of Rome, Italy, tells us that for both the control and experimental groups, “…the reading rate increased with print size up to a maximum. In dyslexics, the fastest rate was obtained at a significantly larger character size than in controls” (Martelli, DiFilippo, Spinelli, and Zoccolotti, 2009).

You can read or download a copy of the study in PDF format right here.

And if the research doesn’t persuade you, maybe the words of the middle schoolers who have reported on their Kindle-enabled reading will:  “The font that everyone prefers to use with the Kindle 2 is the largest font size.”

There are some very important abbreviations in the print publishing industry that I have learned in the past few years. These are OS, OSI, and OP. The terms are related, with OS often leading to OSI, and OSI often a harbinger of OP. In booksellers parlance, these abbreviations stand for “out of stock,” “out of stock indefinitely,” and “out of print.” They chronicle the slow death to which print books are subject as time dampens interest in them.

Sometimes, just sometimes, there is another state for a book to be in. We have all encountered this state while standing at the help desk at Barnes and Noble or Borders when we are told by the associate, “That book isn’t in the store, but we can order it for you, have it here next week.” The book is simply “unavailable,” at least in any terms that are meaningful to me when I want to read it. OS, OSI, OP, and “unavailable” are extremely reader-unfriendly statuses. They each tell a reader that he/she won’t be reading the desired material, at least any time soon. (Maybe the publisher will reprint–check back in six months. Or, the publisher is considering a reprint–check back in a year. Or, there are no plans to reprint–try Google Books or the public library.)

OK, well, that’s what happened to me recently. The conversation turned to Diane Ravitch’s new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System. My wife had heard Ravitch interviewed on the radio, and the commentator mentioned that the new book was so popular that it was widely unavailable, even after a couple of printintgs. No way! I thought. A relatively niche book on the history of education, unavailable? Impossible. But a quick check of Amazon told the story. Ravitch’s book, the Amazon page told me, “Usually ships within 10 to 12 days.” (Please note: The publication date for the book is March 2, 2010.)

I thought for a moment about where the demand for this niche title was coming from, and then I did the only thing that I could do in order to cut through the systemic inefficiencies that had rendered this title momentarily “unavailable.” I scolled down the page and ordered the Kindle edition of the book. I was reading the first chapter a few minutes later.

(Epilog: The notice about the book being available in 10-12 days stayed on the Amazon page for just about two weeks and, oddly, never changed. As of this writing, a truck full of books must have hit the Amazon warehouse, so the book now ships, once more, within 24 hours.)

What’s the moral of this little tale? That innovations which close massive inefficiencies in production and delivery systems transform the industries in which they occur. So, all the controversy over the price of ebooks? Tempest in a teapot. The battle of competing mobile reading platforms? Preliminary rounds. The fate of publishers who fight to lock in profit by propping up inefficient systems? The scrapheap of history.

This takes me back to the first few orders I ever placed with Amazon. Once I decided that I would take the risk with my credit card on the web and the delivery service, it occurred to me that I could order books that I wanted but had never found in book stores. It is hard to imagine, but in those days, ten or fifteen years ago, I had a list of books in my head that I always checked for in book stores I visited. It was a lucky day when I found one. In fact, I tended to hoard the books I found because I really didn’t know when I would have a chance to get them again. Never thought of ordering a book. Wasn’t really sure how to do it, back in the old days. So my first few orders from Amazon contained books that I had been carrying around on my mental checklist; what a mindbender it was to finally be relieved of that list and of the whole issue of how I could get the books that I wanted.

Furthermore, I tended to know only about those books that I had physically seen somewhere or read about in a magazine or newspaper; there really wasn’t a very efficient way to spread the word about books before the advent of the internet.  After that first order from Amazon, the company started making book suggestions based on the books I had already ordered. What I preferred had cognates in other peoples’ experience, and the Amazon database just had to match like with like. I now had a hyper-efficient way of finding out about other books that might interest me, on top of the hyper-efficient book distribution system created by Amazon in the first place.

My experience with the Ravitch book is just another milestone a bit further down the same road. Publishers just don’t run out of digital copies of a book. A digital copy is never in the wrong bookstore or the wrong city. A digital copy is never OS, OSI, or OP. And with the Google book project, books that have been OP for years will never be OP again. Pretty soon, “out-of-print” won’t mean much, except in the history books. Does it really seem like something worth preserving?

Got a great note from Zev Lowe, one of the intrepid Kindle folks who are taking the Kindle to places unimaginable in order to help kids learn to read. Currently, Zev’s organization, WorldReader.org, is running a Kindle trial in a village in Ghana. When the WorldReader team discovered that the Kindles’ batteries were almost dead, and only after a couple of days of use, they were puzzled. Further investigation revealed that the wireless option had been enabled, and the Kindles had drained themselves searching for a signal in the remote region where they are located. So the team scooped up the Kindles and topped them off just before class by drawing on the 12-volt car batteries in a shed near the windmill that charges them. Read the whole story right here.

When I got my first Kindle two years ago, I could see a time when loads of books could be delivered to readers in remote places by shipping them via Kindle. WorldReader is doing that today. Their “mission” statement, from the top of their blog, is simple:

Worldreader aims to put a library of books in the hands of families worldwide, using e-reader technology.

The organization’s website goes a bit further:

Worldreader.org is developing the systems and the partnerships to get e-readers — and the life-changing, power-creating ideas contained in e-books — into the hands and minds of people in the developing world, where profit-seeking entities are not focused.

You can learn a lot about the project trial from the blog. Zev writes:

These kids are amazing — they’re aged from 11 to 14, many of them are orphans and new to reading, but they’re already hooked on Magic Treehouse and Curious George. Most recently, our blog covers how the people in the village of Ayenyah, Ghana – from the chief to the kids – reacted to the Kindle.

To get into the spirit of things, I created a couple of eReadUps for the kids: one on Curious George, its author, its publication history, and more, and one on the Under-20 Football Team in Ghana. Click on the titles to download these eReadUps in Kindle format to read for yourself, if you like.

Here’s hoping that WorldReader will achieve its goal and “give kids in developing countries access to a whole library of books using e-reader technology.” Of all the gifts to bring young people, the gift of reading may be the most significant for the future of the planet. Bravo!

For all the users of Kindlepedia over the past year, I am delighted to announce that, in partnership with Joshua Tallent and the “talented” folks at eBook Architects, we are launching a new Kindle content tool called eReadUps. Like Kindlepedia, eReadUps builds Kindle-formatted books based on articles from the largest open source provider of information on the planet, Wikipedia.

But eReadUps goes farther, a lot farther.

At eReadUps, you can build multi-article books using the first few results from Wikipedia for free, always. And once we emerge from the “beta” period in a few weeks, you will be able to sign up for a premium membership and enjoy many other features that the site has to offer, like:

1. Access to every every source on our growing list
2. Ability to build eReadUps from as many articles as you like
3. Free storage for all your eReadUps in your own personal My Stuff page
4. Access to more articles in other languages
5. Choice of article format: .mobi for the Kindle and ePub for most other readers
6. A free book just for signing up, and free content every week on the site

The free book currently offered to members is Wikibooks’ extensive guide to First Aid, a handy reference to have on board for Kindle lovers.

So, if you like to grab information that interests you or that you need, get it formatted especially for the Kindle, store it online, and have the option to add it wirelessly to your Kindle library, give eReadUps a try! To request a beta code, just click on Join Now and send us your email address. We will send out invitations as they become available.

(Special thanks to Len Edgerly and the Kindle Chronicles for featuring eReadUps in the TKC Podcast #83, which also contain Len’s interview with Kindle guru Stephen Windwalker, author of the Kindle Nation blog and several books about the Kindle. Well worth a listen!)

There is interesting coverage over at Ars Technica of a recent development in the federal government’s program to support technology purchases in schools, known as the Universal Service Fund’s “E-Rate” program. Congressman Edward J. Markey (D-MA) introduced H.R. 4619 on Tuesday, called the E-Rate 2.0 Act. The goal is to update the “successful” E-Rate program, introduced as part of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, that has resulted in 95% of American schools gaining access to the internet today. According to Congressman Markey, “with the expansion of the scope of technology, students need more than just Web access at school, and our E-Rate 2.0 bill is intended to reflect those expanded needs.” Read the complete press release here.

The new bill has three key provisions. First, the bill would instruct the FCC to initiate a pilot program to provide “vouchers to enable low-income students to purchase residential broadband service.” Second, the FCC would also initiate a pilot program to “extend funding for broadband equipment and services to selected community colleges and head start facilities.”

It is the third provision that interests us here at Edukindle. Under the bill, the FCC would initiate a pilot program that would allow applicants serving particularly low-income students to “apply for significantly discounted services and technologies for the use of e-books.” That idea could prove a tremendous boon to those schools who see a future in ebooks for their students, and who want to leverage the sustainability, the affordability, and the “update-ability” of ebooks on behalf of these children.

Leave aside the fact that the device manufacturers should already be providing educational discounts to schools, as I argued in an earlier post entitled “Should Educators Get a Discount on the Kindle?” Of course they should. And if the E-Rate 2.0 legislation becomes law, you can bet that there will be a tsunami of discounts offered by equipment makers who want to get in on the billions of dollars offered under the program. (Oh, yeah, the bill also seeks to raise the current cap of $2.25 billion on E-Rate spending to adjust for inflation.)

Where this proposed legislation gets interesting, though, is when viewed in the context of other events driving the world of education right now. In recent months, large entities like the State of California have initiated programs to support the use of “open source” texts to replace traditional textbooks in the schools in order to save money and take advantage of the growing movement to create high quality materials at no cost to the user.

Just last summer, the Democratic Leadership Council floated a proposal entitled “A Kindle in Every Backpack” (which you can download here in Kindle format), arguing in part that “the ‘Kindle in every backpack’ concept isn’t just an educational gimmick—it could improve education quality and save money.”

Bringing ebooks into classrooms effectively and pervasively, though, will require more, a lot more, than funding for devices. The state of the art right now in terms of materials that can be used right away in classrooms is pretty much limited to novels and nonfiction texts–whole books, that is, where reading from one page to the next is the required activity.

For educational texts that require charts, graphs, and images, a device like the Kindle has a long way to go, and I mean more than simply adding color. Reference works like textbooks require different chunking or configuration when they are displayed on an ereader. Anyone who has attempted to read a PDF document, even on the Kindle DX, can tell you that formatting and navigation tools are not yet up to snuff.

Don’t get me wrong. Once money starts to flow to ebook resources and devices, the marketplace will work this out. But it will involve more heavy lifting than anyone imagines.