EduKindle

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.

What sad news to awaken to this morning–the report of the death of Senator Ted Kennedy. I shook Ted Kennedy’s hand once, or rather, he shook mine. Having wandered into the lobby of a Boston hotel in the early eighties, a bit woozy from the dim lighting and libations of the Tiki Lounge, I could tell that something was about to happen and started to get out of the way. Within a heartbeat or two, the doors to the hotel opened and in strode Teddy Kennedy at the head of his entourage. My eyes got as big as saucers as he marched across the lobby, at first in my general direction and then, for the last ten paces, surely, inevitably, inexorably right at me, with a look in his eye like he had just spotted a relative in the crowd and needed to say hi. Which he did. He grabbed my hand, nodded, smiled as I choked out something to the effect of “Give ‘em hell, Teddy,” and then he was gone. I was left with the thought: the energy, the decisiveness, the genuineness, the power. Someone on NPR commented this morning that Ted Kennedy had more impact on his country overall than either of his brothers. And I guess what he said in 1980 has a special meaning today:

For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end.

For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.

For all you Kindlefolk, here is Teddy’s life captured from the up-to-the-minute Wikipedia in pristine mobi-formatting if you want to revisit the scope of the life of this great American: Ted Kennedy from Wikipedia.

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 devices that we use to access content are getting smaller and smaller. One could make the case that the iPod Touch and the iPhone are in fact small pocket computers, and one wouldn’t be far from the truth. (The coming update to the iPhone operating system promises to allow, among other things, the ability to cut and paste text.) In the past couple of years, another type of small computer has made a splash in the marketplace, the Amazon Kindle and its raft of look-alike, e-ink and Linux-driven brethren. This group of “other” devices includes the PRS series of readers from Sony (including the 700 series with touchscreen), the BeBook and its standard and pocket-sized editions, the CyBook, the eSlick, and the Cool-er, all branded versions of the Netronix ereader with e-ink screen but no wifi, web browser, or touchscreen.

Of course, laptops themselves are getting smaller. The Asus Eee and the new wave of inexpensive netbooks challenge ereaders and iPod variants for a spot at the low end of the cost continuum and for space in the user’s backpack. Netbooks are now being offered by wireless providers like Verizon for less than $200, the cost of an iPhone, and well below the cost of any current e-ink ereader. With full operating systems and full internet connectivity, aren’t these devices the best choice for students who require word processing, email, and other services for school?

The answer is yes…and no. Let me tell you why.

However you cut it, the real utility of a learning appliance has to do with two things: its adaptability to academic tasks and its portability. Why does portability matter? If a learning appliance can’t be used at school and at home and at every place in between, it only supports part of the learning process (that part which requires a computer) and none of the others (the parts that require other things, like books, pencils, erasers). The primary obstacle to portability for a laptop computer is its relatively high power requirement. You may get a few hours from your laptop battery but, absent an outlet, the laptop as learning appliance goes dead at some point.

The laptop also gets a knock against it because it is not really adaptable to a primary academic task: reading. It seems like no surprise that as students’ time spent on a computer has risen, their reading skills (and scores) have dropped. [see ACT report, as well as To Read and others] The kind of access to information that students have through computer networks requires a bunch of skills that seem appropriate to living in the midst of an information explosion, but one skill that is not brought into play in this environment is what has been termed “long form” reading, meaning the kind of reading that one does when absorbed in a novel. “Short form” reading, yes, but not its more venerable counterpart.

Why is long form largely excluded when a laptop is the primary learning appliance? Screen fatigue. The backlit laptop screen produces eye fatigue and other kinds of reading ennui that I can’t quite define. Maybe it’s like stting in a motionless Ferrari listening to the radio. It is hard to fully engage with the experience without firing up that beautiful machine and taking off. Maybe it’s also the shape of the thing (the laptop, not the Ferrari), not easy to hold in one hand or cradle on your stomach in the hammock. In any case, it is hard to find anyone willing to make a strong case for “long form” reading on a backlit laptop computer screen.

So where does that leave us? Laptops do more than ereaders, but the power drain is high and a primary academic function, reading, is not adequately supported. Ereaders do less than laptops (or iPhones), but their power requirements are strikingly lower and they do promote long form reading. But how much less than a laptop does an ereader like the Kindle do? (Note that as of this writing, only the Kindle can be used for this comparison. In 12-18 months, however, a whole new generation of ereaders with larger screens and wifi options will make this argument valid for the bulk of available ereaders.) The Kindle does have basic internet access, so live links to internet resources can be utilized, but only in a slow and monochromatic way. The Kindle is no match for the laptop as regards onboard software that supports, well, almost any purpose. You could do the reading for your English or history class on a Kindle, but you couldn’t write your paper on it. Nor could you email it to your teacher, or upload it to a proofreading site, or copy and paste a quote from Churchill into it–none of these. Once you had read the book, you would still have to find a word processor and a printer or email connection to complete and submit your assignment.

But, when you think about it, you have to leave your laptop right now and use another appliance (better known as the book itself) in order to complete the same academic task. So maybe this isn’t an either/or between laptops and ereaders after all. Maybe it is the case that all or most academic tasks require (and will continue to require) more than a single appliance. That it probably the long and short of it.

But if you only had one, which would it be?

My modest proposal at this point is…the Kindle. Why? Because the Kindle supports the ongoing, critical academic function known as long form reading. It supports easy and rapid distribution of content (like the laptop), and it does allow limited access and interactivity with the resources of the internet. It works for days rather than hours in the absence of an electrical outlet. It is small and light. It is designed for onboard dictionaries and lookup functions that support the needs of the reader. It readily supports resizing of text.

It does all these things, but make no mistake, the key to my choice of the Kindle is its support for long form reading.

Poor Anne of Cleves. Or should I say, lucky Anne of Cleves?

This historical character, played by Joss Stone on Showtime’s The Tudors, is one of the most enigmatic of Henry’s wives. She acts as a kind of historical pivot on which Protestantism, international politics, the changing character of Henry VIII, and the ineffabilities of male-female attraction swivel on the television show and in the history books.

Despite a brief appearance, Tudors creator Michael Hirst gives her a couple of classic lines. One captures the dilemma faced by every girl who came Henry’s way: “If I fail to please the King, will he kill me?” And then, with regards to the marital bed, she cites Henry’s relentlessly unhealing leg wound as a bit of a downer in the foreplay department: “It stinks, no?” ‘Nuff said.

So, if you are interested in this woman who went from the King’s wife to the “King’s beloved Sister,” and would like to read about her on your Kindle, head on over to the Tudors download page and drag the article to the documents folder on your Kindle.

And that’s it for another season of the Tudors. Given the speed with which they dispatched Cromwell last night, it looks like one more season will do it!

A recent tweet:

Theres nothing better for a boring class than a Kindle : D

Not exactly what we had in mind for the Kindle in education…(but it works for me!)

Much research highlighted in the past few years indicates the importance of time spent reading as the key factor in reading improvement for students.  One path the debate has taken concerns the amount of reading that kids do on the web.  The New York Times addressed this factor in a recent article.

However, as Lee Ann points out in her comment to a post on this site:

Stephen Krashen (The Power of Reading) has said that access to books is the variable that most impacts students’ reading time, so I would imagine that have an entire library on a Kindle would certainly increase how much students read. Books at their fingertips is always my goal for students and Kindles would accomplish that and much more than what I can supply per table top in the classroom.

If we look at access to books as the key, research clearly states the more the better:

In examining the average 2005 math scores of 12th graders who lived in homes with fewer than 10 books, an analysis of federal Education Department statistics found that those students scored much lower than those who lived in homes with more than 100 books. Although some of those results could be attributed to income gaps, Mr. Iyengar noted that students who lived in homes with more than 100 books but whose parents only completed high school scored higher on math tests than those students whose parents held college degrees (and were therefore likely to earn higher incomes) but who lived in homes with fewer than 10 books.

Of course, this research addresses a number of factors through this single metric: homes in which books are valued usually contain more books.  But the practical outcome of this factor is that kids in homes which value books are exposed to more books, and hence have more opportunity to read.

So, if we sent kids home everyday with a Kindle loaded with 100 books (or more, since the Kindle has capacity for more), would we start to chip away at the impact of homes having too few books for kids to become better readers?

Not an idle question, especially if one of those books were Stephanie Meyers’ wildly popular Twilight.  It’s on my Kindle (and it cost me $6.03)…

The ability to read a book, a newspaper, whatever, at a congenial font size is part of what makes the Kindle such a pleasure to use. The demographics of older readers with aging eyes like my own make this a strong incentive to get involved with electronic (and configurable) text.

But what about students? 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.

Nice post by Matt Asay at CNet:

No, what I really like about the Kindle is the reading experience. It’s wonderful. The only thing missing is a backlight for reading in low-light conditions, but it’s already better than reading a physical book because the screen is comforting to view and the weight/feel of the product is exceptional.

Couldn’t agree more. Yes, you can check your email on the Kindle. Yes, you can check the weather on your Kindle. Yes, you can post to your blog on the Kindle. But I experience what Jeff Bezos once said they were trying to produce with the Kindle: a frictionless reading experience.