EduKindle

Happy New Year to all Kindlers! I have been checking out some of the best edu-bloggers over the holidays and want to make a few recommendations for the new year. These should be exciting times in education with a new administration in Washington and tough economic times around the country. Maybe the time is right for the inherent economies of the Kindle to catch on…;-) (Seriously, there will be many, many more Kindles at work in schools by the end of 2009 than there are today–you heard it here first!)

So, as an educator, what blogs should you fire up on the Kindle? First, I am going to recommend a blog that you can access through the Kindle Store, meaning that each time a post is made you will have it formatted and sent wirelessly to your Kindle to read at your leisure. The blog is called “Think Again,” and it appears in the New York Times blogs every Sunday. The author is Stanley Fish, a fellow whom I came to read as an undergraduate when I studied Milton. The book is named Surprised by Sin, and you can tell from the title that Fish is a bit of an iconoclast. He’s a good writer, too.

His posts range from dealing with customer service at ATT to a new “prose” translation of Milton’s Paradise Lost (done on the premise that the poem is so dense that readers need a translation from the poem’s original language–English).

But Fish’s primary target is the topic of academic freedom, and, in a series of posts last fall, he took up the issue of whether or not professors and other teachers should be allowed to wear campaign buttons to class, or display political bumper stickers on their cars. Does the title of Fish’s latest book–Save the World on Your Own Time–give you a hint as to Fish’s opinion?

This is Kindle blog-reading at its best.

Recently I noted that there are some blogs that format for the Kindle beautifully and that carry content worth paying for. Stanley Fish’s Think Again blog in the New York Times is a good example.

But I found that, even with this erudite and text-driven blog (as compared to Street Use, which makes its point through images), I needed a “computer assist” to access an important part of the blog–the comments.

Major bummer. If you are going to write a substantive and relevant blog post, people are going to comment on it, predictably. So, in order to experience the richness of the blog, I must fire up the ol’ PC and read the comments online.

To be honest, the pictures at Street Use look better in color on the ol’ PC as well, but that’s not the point. Blogs like Think Again should show the comments inline, so we can take advantage of the Kindle for the whole experience, not just part of it.

After canceling out of the blogs I’ve been reviewing before the “free trial” ended, I signed up for another batch.  One I find to be very interesting, Stanley Fish’s blog Think Again from the New York Times.  It looks like Fish, a professor at Florida International University in Miami, and whose book Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost I read as an undergraduate, posts once a week to this blog, which carries the subtitle “Stanley Fish and the Analysis of Reasoning.”

When I fired up the Kindle this morning, the first post that appeared was Fish discussing a question of genuine interest to educators: should teachers be permitted to wear campaign buttons while they are at work?  The New York City Board of Education, apparently, says no.  In Illinois, college professors are banned from displaying bumper stickers that signal political preferences.

As seems to be his habit, Fish deconstructs the issue point by point.  It is worth the read just to see how he juxtaposes first amendment claims against the right of an educational institution to “maintain good order and discipline” in their schools.

More to the point: the reading is even better at font size #4 in my big comfy chair rather than sitting at the computer, thanks to the Kindle.

I have been loading more periodical content onto the Kindle lately, with The Wall Street Journal, at ten bucks a month, being the best of a bunch of very good deals.  Currently I have Newsweek and U. S. News and World Report downloading wirelessly for a couple of bucks a month each, ditto Slate.  But what about blogs?  Amazon offers scores of them, and I have been evaluating them as “Kindle-worthy” for the last few weeks.

First, lots of folks disdain the idea of paying anything for content that they can access for free over the web, even if it is a buck a month.  Fair enough.  Others, who like to do their reading on the Kindle whenever possible, have come up with work-arounds using RSS aggregation services like Bloglines to scoop up the content and then access it using the basic web browser built into the Kindle.  Again, not a bad idea.

But what I like about reading a blog on the Kindle is that the offerings, for the most part, provide full text posts rather than links, and, as with all things Kindle, that content is resident on the Kindle so that I can read it on the airplane or anywhere else when I want to, whether a web connection is available or not.

Some of the blog offerings that interest me the most, though, do not necessarily display very well on the device.  The Data Mining blog, for example, uses lots of charts and graphs, which seem to be a weak spot for Kindle’s display (text too small, colors in the original image muddy when shown on the e-ink screen), and the number of links the blog provides in posts always makes me feel like I am missing something.  (I certainly don’t want to have to fire up the browser to follow them–too slow and clumsy.)

My favorite blog to date is the Street Use blog, which has very short posts accompanied by amazing pictures of “street” improvisations from around the world–wooden bicycles, military applications for the Segway, kids improvising “steerable” toy trucks in Cameroon and Gabon.  The photos seem to display better than the muddy charts and graphs.  the only problem with this blog is that it hasn’t been posted to since August.  I guess that can’t be blamed on the Kindle!