EduKindle

One of the most active Kindle implementations that I know of in a school is taking place in Seneca IL under the supportive leadership of Kathy Parker and her “Kindle Crew.” Kathy’s unabashed enthusiasm for kids and reading has found another object in the Kindle. In addition to her enthusiasm, Kathy has been incredibly willing to take the time to share her experience and that of her colleagues and their students as they begin their Kindle journey. Her blog posts at the Ning make for interesting reading for anyone who wants to see the Kindle through the eyes of a middle schooler.

I want to share some of the information here because I think it is incredibly valuable for those of us who see a future for ereaders in education. I have long felt that font size and clarity play an important role for many students in becoming proficient readers. Over a year ago, I wrote about this and my thoughts at the time were these:

Research that I have seen over the years suggests that font size also plays a part in students’ ability to access text. We certainly see larger text supplied for very young eyes in picture books and early readers. What we don’t know about how the size of print affects older students’ reading is astounding. That is another reason to investigate the Kindle for educational purposes.

The first student reports bear this out:

We are 7th grade students at Seneca Grade School and enjoy using Kindles in our RTI class. One reason we like Kindles better than using a book because we can change the font size. We like the largest font because it makes us read faster.

There is so much concern today about the fact that most eighth-graders in this country do not read at a proficient level. In response to this concern, there are a ton of reading remediation programs to address this need, and many different theories about its cause. I guess I think that being able to see the text clearly is a pretty good starting place. The Seneca students are clear about their preference in font size, given a choice:

The font that everyone prefers to use with the Kindle 2 is the largest font size.

Um, that’s a 20 point font, far larger than what they encounter in their textbooks. So, a summary of this admittedly informal bit of research is that 1) kids naturally select the largest font available because 2) it makes them read faster. Hmmm, pretty encouraging stuff for literacy directors to consider as they plan for ways to get their struggling and resistant readers reading again.

I love the students’ comment that “when you go to the next page, the “flash” on the screen, doesn’t bother our eyes.” Take that, Nicholson Baker and your ilk! The ominous, untoward flash that has led many reviewers to recoil in indignation quite simply “doesn’t bother” their eyes.

The kids even comment on what is really the game-changer embedded in the Kindle: books come to you and follow you around:

…another feature is we like the fact we don’t have to carry around alot of books because the Kindle has a variety of titles downloaded onto it.

In Len Edgerly’s interview with him, the headmaster of Cushing Academy said something to the effect that being able to have in his bag a device that holds the greatest literature of western civilization is “thrilling” to him. Yes, that’s the scholar’s view of the Kindle! It is also something that matters a great deal to young readers–access to material that they want to read. Lee Ann Spillane in Orlando has noted that her high school students liked it best when she had books like Twilight loaded onto the Kindle. It provides tons of reading in a very portable package.

Finally, these kids have conquered the gnarly problem of position versus page number on the Kindle. Because their Kindles are shared, synching to the furthest page read can be a disaster! I mean, whose furthest page are we talking about? So the Seneca students and their teachers have a simple fix:

We keep our place/location using the Kindle 2 by writing it down the location number. This way when we use the Kindle 2 we can search by location number.

There you have it, the secrets to Kindle success from the inventive students of Seneca IL: grab a Kindle, load it up with a lot of good books, crank the font, and jot down your location number. Pretty simple, and pretty effective! Thanks Alex M., Alex H., Ashley, Thomas, and Kale (and all the others who helped) for helping us grown-ups see the road ahead.

Amazon released in beta this week its Kindle for PC application, and educators will welcome this development. Even though you have heard me rant a bit about the anti-education direction the company has taken in the development of the Kindle ereader (loss of SD card slot, loss of replaceable battery, loss of external Whispernet on-off button, and so forth), I have been generally more positive about the development of the online and now software tools that the company has created to support the use of the device: Kindle for iPhone app–great, addition of ability to view notes and marks online–fabulous, and now, Kindle for PC–not bad at all.

Ereader software for computers is one area in which Amazon has NOT led the way; many, many companies have created ereader software for devices from the Palm Pilot to the netbook. These providers have contributed to the current plethora of formats for ebooks, and each has tried, in its own way, to lock readers in to a particular format, all the better to lock in business with them. This is a game that Amazon knows well and has played aggressively with its closed system and its proprietary format.

Adding a desktop app that integrates with your Kindle library and, of course, the Kindle Store, can be construed as just another tactic in the battle for business. But for educators, “this time we win!” (to quote Brad Pitt’s line from The Mexican). Why? Well, let’s start with the fact that, while there aren’t a whole lot of Kindles in schools these days, there sure are a heck of a lot of computers! Now, any student who goes to the library to study or who fires up the computer at home can view content in the format exclusive to the Kindle. With the popularity of the Kindle and the “cool factor” that it brings, this may be the way that schools and educators begin to think about making academic reading content available across their networks. Kids “get” the idea of a Kindle, and now that idea is readily available at every school in the country.

Could kids have been reading ebooks at school before Kindle for PC (KFPC)? Sure they could have, but in fact they weren’t. Now there is a model in place for a “anywhere, anytime reading” that includes the PC on the desk over there and the ereader device in my bag (and the iPhone in my pocket). Could this arrangement have been cobbled together before KFPC? Sure it could, but it wasn’t very convenient. Now it is. A win for the consumer mentality applied to the schoolhouse.

David Rothman at TeleRead has a nice review of KFPC from an ebook reader’s perspective that I don’t need to repeat here. The software is very basic, with a plain interface, and very few tweakable options that allow you to customize the interface. No two-page reading pane, that sort of thing. Can’t make notes while reading (a limitation for educational uses that amazon is working on correcting). But teachers like simple, teachers like things that don’t crash. So, for me, I think this app is a solid step forward for doing business with Amazon in an academic context.

And what is even better, maybe, for folks like Kathy Parker and her Kindle Crew out there in Seneca IL, is that a PC station qualifies as one of the six devices onto which most Kindle books can be downloaded and viewed. The minute I loaded the app and connected with the mother ship, a new mobile device popped up in my list of such devices on the “Manage Your Kindle” page: “William’s Kindle for PC”, right there next to “Will’s iPhone.”

Educators should not be confused by others’ confusion over whether KFPC will display books not obtained form the Amazon Kindle Store. It absolutely will. In fact, once you open a “free” book that you got from Project Gutenberg in the Mobipocket format that the Kindle prefers, it will appear in your onboard KFPC library unless you remove it. In fact, all the books on your computer that are formatted a Mobipocket files will take on the KFPC icon image shown here. If you look quickly, you can watch the transformation take place. This makes it easy to check a file, a position number, a Table of Contents–whatever–on your PC before you view it on your Kindle. Handy.

For example, I created an article from Wikipedia using the Kindlepedia tool about the Berlin Wall. You can download it here. Once it is on your desktop, the icon will look like the book above, and it will go into your onboard library (NOT the library at the mother ship) and open up for reading. Note that this version of the article appears in full color and nice, sharp resolution on the screen. And if you don’t finish reading it in KFPC, just pop the file onto your Kindle and read up on this topic later. Really handy.

So its a big thumbs up for Kindle for PC from an educator’s standpoint. I will look forward to comment from other Kindle-curious educators about KFPC and the ways it makes ebook reading a reality in schools.

Kindle for Mac, anyone? (Amazon says it is on the way.)

As you can tell, I have been expanding my consciousness of the ereader world beyond the Kindle. I have a Sony Pocket Edition, an Aztak Pocket Pro, a Cybook Gen-3, and am sorely tempted to purchase a Nook, should one ever become available. But I was Kindle born and raised as an ebook reader, and I still think (along with others) that the Kindle 2 still represents the best value out there.

One of my reasons for thinking so has to do with the Kindle’s almost seamless connection with the mother ship at Amazon. When the Kindle came out I was struck by Amazon’s brilliant step forward with the ereader by making it a part of a business system. The unexpected addition of the wireless lifeline to the world’s biggest bookstore brought the value proposition of ereaders and ebooks into crystal clarity for me in a heartbeat.

But that very same tethering of the device to Amazon’s cloud of convenience poses what some see as a “darker” side of the device. In several lucidly argued posts, Ted Striphas raises the concern:

I’m rather taken with the idea of a right to read given the ways in which new e-book systems, such as the Amazon Kindle, tether reading to corporate custodians who in turn mine the machines for intimate details about how people read.

Striphas’s concern is one that resonates even more powerfully in the age of the Patriot Act:

The [Kindle] automatically archives detailed, even intimate, information about what and more importantly how people read on the Amazon server cloud.  This kind of information [...] can instead be subpoenaed by prosecutors who are anxious to dig up dirt on suspects.  The question I raise in the speech, and the question that also seems to emerge in the case of Google Books and the coming Editions service, is, what happens to a society when privacy is no longer the default setting for reading?

That’s a little bit scary, and gives me pause. (Not that I am reading anything I shouldn’t be. Really.)

It’s just that we have so many examples of how centralized control of media historically reverts to commercial or political exploitation. A hegemonistic book authority could easily limit or control people’s reading for its own purposes. Look, for example, at the situation in medieval Europe before Gutenberg hit the scene, or at what happened last summer when, for all the best corporate reasons in the world, Amazon remotely deleted a book from its customers’ Kindles without asking or even warning them.

If it is reasonable, and I think it is, to see Amazon as the “custodian” of our books and our reading history and our notes and our marks and our highlights, then we may have a problem, since we depend on the idea that the interests and intentions of our custodians are benign, at least, and certainly not pitted against our own. And yet the relationship with this corporate custodian is that of a vendor and a customer, two roles that overlap in certain areas but certainly not in all. Trusting that free market forces will reign in abuse–well, that premise is somewhat out of favor these days.

Striphas summarizes his concern:

As these devices become more prevalent, I worry about the effects they might have on how people practice and conceive of reading.  Until now it was relatively difficult to monitor closely how and what people read.  What will become of reading, and people’s relationship to it, once that freedom is definitively diminished?  Indeed, a right to read seems to me of paramount importance in a context where someone is looking over your shoulder every time that you open an electronic book or periodical.

Yes, I guess we do have a problem.

Anyone interested in the Kindle is surely aware of Len Edgerly’s excellent weekly podcast at The Kindle Chronicles. This past week, Len interviewed Michael Koenig, director of MBA operations at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, one of six universities across the country doing a Kindle DX pilot this year in some of their classes.

Darden has taken a very specific direction with the Kindle. It is being used in several MBA-level classes to support the school’s distinctive “case study method.” The school describes the method in this way:

Students are exposed to over 500 cases in a variety of industries and functions during their time at Darden. In each class, students contribute their own viewpoints to the business situation at hand, while building a strong frame of reference and broadened perspective from the classroom discussions. If you are able to visit a Darden class, you will see that Darden students do most of the talking.

At Darden, Koenig tells Edgerly that the Kindles are used exclusively for students to read the cases assigned for class. This pilot does not involve textbooks, a use that observers have anticipated ever since Amazon introduced the DX with its native handling of PDF files and larger screen. Rather, the Darden use seems to fall into the “sustainability” category that other university pilots are focusing on. Millions of sheets of paper are used to print supplemental reading materials like case studies for classes across the world, and one of the most promising uses of ereaders in education will address this expensive problem.

I found a couple of interesting points in the interview. First, Koenig describes the use of the Kindle’s wireless capability to  “push” the case studies onto the students’ Kindles. He notes that the lack of a folder system to organize materials on the Kindle makes navigation through the hundreds of cases students read in a year more difficult. Listing cases by date should help, but it is clear that ereader devices used for academic purposes will require some form of onboard folder system.

Koenig also makes it clear that the Kindles are relatively invisible during class time. He implies that the emphasis on lively discussion in class means that fumbling around with the five-way controller (or flipping pages for that matter) just doesn’t work. To me, this also reflects a thoughtful acceptance of the Kindle for what it can do really well–make it easy to carry and read a bunch of documents or books anywhere. In some ways, the Kindle and other ereaders suffer from a set of expectations created by other devices meant to do other things, like laptops. Where’s the color? Where’s the video? Where’s the animation?

But that’s not what the Kindle is about. As James Fallows writes in The Atlantic:

Amazon should work on making the Kindle the preferred long-form reading device for all the stuff that’s long enough that it gets tedious on computer screens and is awkward on small iPhone-type displays — texts you otherwise want in physical print (either book or printed-out document) but that aren’t so dependent on a visual experience (loaded with graphics, photos etc) that only physical print or a large, high-quality computer display will do.

This is the point that I made in an earlier post on why the Kindle may just be the “perfect learning appliance.” It won’t be doing the same things as a laptop or an iPhone anytime soon, nor should it.

Darden has it pretty much right, in my opinion. Their model comes closer to foretelling the near future of the ereader in education than anything else out there.

Why not? It is an accepted practice that hardware and software vendors offer reduced pricing for educators. I mean, even Microsoft does it, and these guys are not known for leaving money on the table. So why not Amazon and why not the Kindle?

The practice is not all generosity of spirit for Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and a slew of other very wealthy technology magnates; there is a bit of self interest involved in discounting as well. The reasoning goes something like this: giving up margin on your products for a narrow segment of your business like education can be a win-win if your marketing and publicity folks are worth their salt. Not only are you embedding your technology and your brand into a very large group of organizations that, at one time or another, touch every single American alive, but you are also permitted, in doing so, to put phrases like “Microsoft Loves Teachers” and “Building America’s Future, One Mac at a Time.” And because you are still charging good money for these goods and services, while making it look like you are giving them away, the impact on the bottom line is only mildly rather than insanely lucrative as it is in your other markets.

Giving a discount to a good cause also validates the prices you are charging your other customers. Nobody expects to pay what teachers pay, so paying more seems quite reasonable. Voila! Maximum exposure to rising and future generations, good citizen awards all around, and a buttressing of your pricing power. It’s the trifecta!

So, Mr. Bezos, how about a break on the Kindle for educators who want to experiment with your remarkable device? If you think they are, as a group, too small for such consideration, just look at what they did for Apple in the past thirty or so years:

Apple’s sustained growth during the early 1980s was in great part due to its leadership in the education sector, attributed to an implementation of the LOGO Programming Language by Logo Computer Systems Inc., (LCSI), for the Apple II platform. The success of Apple and LOGO in the education environment provided Apple with a broad base of loyal users around the world. The drive into education was accentuated in California by a momentous agreement concluded between Steve Jobs and Jim Baroux of LCSI, agreeing with the donation of one Apple II and one Apple LOGO software package to each public school in the state. The arrangement, (eventually replicated in Texas), established a strong and pervasive presence for Apple in all schools throughout California, that ignited the acquisition of Apple IIs in schools across the country. The conquest of education became critical to Apple’s acceptance in the home, as parents supported children’s continued learning experience after school [emphasis mine]. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.)

You might have heard the story. In the midst of the big “kerfluffle” over Amazon’s pulling back of the illegally distributed copies of 1984, student Justin Gawronski awoke one day to discover that all the notes he had taken on the book as he read it on his Kindle were rendered useless. Not gone, just useless, despite the news reporting that he had “lost all his notes and annotations” from sources like the New York Times.  But we Kindle folk know that’s not entirely accurate.

Education Week gets it right when it reports that “his notes remain saved on the Kindle, [but] he says they’re useless now that the text is missing.” Correct! Amazon didn’t “steal” his notes; they just removed the text to which those notes are linked. It is a novel but predictable version of the problem that all academe will have with ebooks in the very near future: how can you identify a spot in the text so that others can find it? Jason has his notes, but the connection to the text is gone. (Everyone interested in other versions of this issue, such as how we will be making scholarly citations to ebook passages in our work, should read the comments to my post Page Number vs Position on the Kindle.)

In my comment on the EdWeek article, I noted:

In fact, the file that contains his notes can be deciphered, but he would need to go back through the text and find the spots that match up with the notes. He is in better shape than if he had lost the physical book (notes and text gone), and would have suffered little harm if these locations in the book were easily found in another copy.

And then I made a suggestion:

For Jason, a little bit of elbow grease should allow him to reconstruct the assignment. I’d even vote that he be given an extension, and Jeff Bezos would probably agree.

That’s right, an extension. And then maybe some of the folks who care so passionately about the Kindle and its prospects to revolutionize reading could assist Jason in getting those quotes back on track with the text. With all the advantages of digital text at our disposal, couldn’t we crowdsource this thing, grab his “notes and marks” and figure out where they actually belong, and let Jason get about the business of turning them into a top notch assignment?

C’mon, Kindle Nation, this could be our finest hour! And I am serious about the extension.

The *New* Democratic Leadership Council recently published a white paper by Thomas Z. Freedman that details the rationale and the economics of deploying Kindle ereaders to schoolchildren across America. In a thoughtful approach to envisioning the cost, the method, and the timeframe for getting a Kindle into every backpack, Freedman says

We shouldn’t wait a decade or two to begin to achieve what is inevitable — an education system where each American schoolchild has an eTextbook, like Amazon’s Kindle, loaded with the most up-to-date and interactive teaching materials and texts available. The ‘Kindle in every backpack’ concept isn’t just an educational gimmick—it could improve education quality and save money.

If you are curious about this proposal, and want to read it (yes!) on your Kindle, you can follow this link to download the report from the DLC site. EduKindle proudly provides the Kindle-formatted report to the DLC and its readers.

When I saw the news about the lawsuit filed at Arizona State University concerning Kindle accessibility issues, I think I had a quick negative reaction to the upshot of the suit, that providing Kindles to sighted students creates a disadvantage for blind students. A journalism major at ASU, a plaintiff in the suit, sums up the argument:

“Not having access to the advanced reading features of the Kindle DX—including the ability to download books and course materials, add my own bookmarks and notes, and look up supplemental information instantly on the Internet when I encounter it in my reading—will lock me out of this new technology and put me and other blind students at a competitive disadvantage relative to our sighted peers.“

My reaction was, wait a minute, how can we expect every new innovation leap fully formed from the mind of its inventor and accommodate the needs of every user on its first outing? I can think of a lot of gadgets brought to market in the last decade that were not readily usable by everyone in the population. In fact, the new Kindle sports a helpful feature, onboard text-to-speech functionality, that seems to be right up the alley of those who have trouble reading the print for themselves. Making an ereader device that offers many advantages to blind as well as sighted students appears to be a step forward, rather than “unconscionable discrimination against and callous indifference to the right of blind students to receive an equal education,” as claimed by Dr. Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the Blind, one of the plaintiffs in the suit.

Then, as I thought about this a bit more, I began to be persuaded by the merits of the suit.

This same Dr. Maurer, in a more reasoned and less inflamatory section of his statement, makes a lot of sense when he says:

“Given the highly-advanced technology involved, there is no good reason that Amazon’s Kindle DX device should be inaccessible to blind students.  Amazon could have used the same text-to-speech technology that reads e-books on the device aloud to make its menus accessible to the blind, but it chose not to do so.“

You know, the guy has a point. Is it possible that Amazon didn’t see this coming? Any school administrator worth his or her salt would have noticed that the very feature of the Kindle that addresses the needs of the blind highlights the limitations of the device.

Welcome to the world of publicly funded education and Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, wizards of business!

But this is the kind of thing that Amazon, with its laser focus on the consumer experience, isn’t really thinking about as it proposes the Kindle as an academic device. The company has already redesigned the keypad almost out of existence, and seems not to have considered that its commitment to pdf handling bypasses the value of its text-to-speech technology altogether, meaning that neither the sighted nor the blind will be able to have a textbook in pdf format read to them on the Kindle.

So, I am forced to side with the plaintiffs in this case. Amazon and its partners (the universities themselves) should have seen this coming. As one commenter on this situation observed,  retrofitting the bathrooms in your building to accommodate folks in wheelchairs doesn’t really cut it if you don’t build a ramp to ensure that they can get into the building.

This week I created a “partner” site for EduKindle called Kindle Educators Group. The idea is to build a discussion around ideas and experiences related to the use and/or potential use of the Kindle ereader in the classroom and as a “learning appliance” (see my post on this topic here).

This forum is built on the popular “Ning” software that many educators are already using. A great example of what a Ning can become is Jim Burke’s English Companion Ning for ELA teachers. Jim has attracted over 5,000 members in just a few months, demonstrating how effective this kind of professional community building can be for folks trying to improve their teaching and their kids’ learning.

You can post to your own blog at the site, start a discussion, add an event, comment on colleagues’ posts, and much more. I just started a discussion on what people think about the potential of the Kindle to improve struggling students’ reading skills.

It is a fine, bright Saturday morning and I think that today I will clean up my Kindle. What I mean is, clean up all the content that has been chewing up space in the onboard memory. I knew it was time when I recently received the message that I could read my book but that there isn’t any space left in memory for highlights or notes. Yikes!

How did get into this pickle? Well, I am one of those who downloads every book that is offered through the Kindle Store for free; I mean, how could that hurt? I am also a big fan of Kindle’s “sample” feature–I just love getting those pages to read before I have to buy (even if some of them barely get me past the dedication). And I am also one who lets the periodicals stack up. I have a virtual pile of Wall Street Journals that’s taller than I am. Gotta do something with all of them.

My first step for content cleanup with my Kindle (an original Kindle, not a 2, although all of these suggestions should work with both) is to connect the Kindle to the computer with the USB cord and backup my complete “documents” folder by copying it to my desktop. Then I rename it something like “kindle backup 060609″ and tuck it away somewhere on the hard drive or my thumb drive. Then I ruthlessly delete a bunch of the old newspapers and other detritus from the folder that is resident on the Kindle itself. Why start this way? Because these are the items that account for pages and pages of items when I fire up the “content manager” in the menu to delete items individually.

Why not make all my changes this way? I could. But when you look at the documents in the folder, each with its own .mbp file, the picture is not as clean as it is in the content manager or in the main menu of titles itself. So I disconnect the USB and use the content manager on the Kindle or the menu list of titles in the Kindle 2 and I identify the titles I don’t need handy and delete them from the device.

I am comfortable in doing so, of course, because I backed up the whole folder before I started. No deletion will, in fact, be permanent because of this step. This is important to remember since files that you put on the Kindle yourself, or had sent to your Kindle via wifi after emailing the document to Amazon, won’t be available later from your media library at Amazon. These items are NOT archived by Amazon and it may be that they only exist, in their .azw format, on your Kindle. (Of course, the original Word doc or pdf may well still exist on your computer.)

Finally, just to be safe, I turn on the wifi and synch the Kindle, so that everything can remind itself where it is: on the Kindle, at Amazon, or safely resting in my “documents” folder backup waiting for me to miss it and drag it back onto the Kindle where I can read it again.