This week I acquired a Kindle and have begun to read my first e-book on it, and so I’m venturing into thinking about how an e-book reader might be used in education.
I do not want to get into arguments about whether I have chosen the right e-book reader, or about the fact that Kindle is basically attached to Amazon (although you can upload other items to it), but I am interested in whether there are already examples of how e-book readers are being used in education, and whether Australian institutions are considering their use.
I have done some preliminary research on mailing lists I belong to and the response has been varied.
Judy O’Connell, Head of Library and Information Services at St Joseph’s College, Hunters Hill, is one person I know who has been working with a Kindle, and she has posted her thoughts online. This post is also worth considering.
e-books are a topic I seem to keep returning to on my blog.
So far with my Kindle I have managed to
The International Kindle, which is the one available here in Australia, does not have the internet browsing enabled, that its US counterpart has. That may be a good thing if all you are wanting to do is use it for reading e-books.
The 6″ Kindle which is what the International version is called, is fine for reading text, but in the pdf I uploaded there were a couple of diagrams which were just too squidgy. That made me think that if you were using the Kindle as a text book e-reader then you probably want the 9.7″ one (US A4 size) which is the Kindle DX, not yet available in Australia.
What I am really looking forward to is travelling with the Kindle - it is small and light, will slip easily into my bag alongside my 9″ netbook computer, and able to contain several books to replace the bundle of 6-8 books I tote along with me.
I’ve set up a Google Alert so I can monitor news stories about the Kindle.
An article that came through today called Kindle for the Academic basically says what I was beginning to suspect: “Let’s face it: at heart, the Kindle is designed to let you read mystery novels, not academic books.” The rest of the article is worth reading too. He makes this alarming statement: “I think the book as an artifact is already dead…… the e-book feels like the nail in the coffin.”
Alex Golub concludes: “It is too early for academics to shift much of their workload over to e-book format — although that day may come sooner than we expect. So if you, like me, are going to spend a lot of time traveling or just away from bookstores, it might be the time to try one of these devices. While they are not ready for prime time yet, they are still great places to outsource our pleasure reading and reference libraries. And soon they might be good for even more.”
So tell me where you stand on e-books. Are they as Alex says right at the beginning of his article in the category, for you, of “Extremely Complicated Handheld Devices Our Students Understand“, just one more thing to get your head around, an expense you don’t need, or can you see a niche for one in your life, your classroom, your teaching and learning?
Some other links for you to check:
8 Comments
Here’s another great link people may like to use:
http://www.bookbee.com.au/#
I’ve tried a few of the first breed of ebook readers 7 years ago and hated them. I’ve had some success using an EEE PC but most enjoy reading on my iPhone or my laptop. The new Adobe reader is much improved. You can turn you laptop sideways and read booklike, quite nice really if you have a small laptop.
Kerrie,
My comments are here http://readingpower.edublogs.org/
Cheerio,
Anne
Hi Kerrie,
I’m looking forward to having a play! Lynley
Wouldn’t want to leave it in the seat pocket on a plane, as I did the other day
When i found out that the Kindle has a built in dictionary AND can read the text to you I wondered if it might be something that could be useful for students with literacy issues. It might be a way that these students could access the materials that their peers are accessing.
Im following your articles very interesting. Do you have any articles on students using utube? I want to set up a school account next year and upload students multimedia presentations. Besides getting permission from parents can you think what other issues are involved in this?
Thankyou
Jeanie Axton
Jeanie, in using YouTube, I think there are bigger issues. You may find the school’s internet filter may be the biggest, and I would check that first.
Hi Kerrie,
We haven’t been lucky enough to see a Kindle yet, but Peter Spicer-Wensley of Swanview SHS in Western Australia wrote a history of ebooks for our Fiction Focus journal this year. It’s available to read in a very raw format at:
http://www.det.wa.edu.au/education/cmis/eval/downloads/fiction/Book2.0.pdf
Cheers,
Jill Midolo and the CMIS team
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[…] Read more at http://blogs.educationau.edu.au/ksmith/2009/11/05/e-books-is-the-kindle-relevant/ and http://heyjude.wordpress.com/2009/10/26/kindle-ling-discussion-about-learning/ […]
[…] http://blogs.educationau.edu.au/ksmith/2009/11/05/e-books-is-the-kindle-relevant/ […]
[…] Read more at http://blogs.educationau.edu.au/ksmith/2009/11/05/e-books-is-the-kindle-relevant/ and http://heyjude.wordpress.com/2009/10/26/kindle-ling-discussion-about-learning/ and compare e-readers at http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/collection/1985/.html […]
[…] Read more at http://blogs.educationau.edu.au/ksmith/2009/11/05/e-books-is-the-kindle-relevant/ and http://heyjude.wordpress.com/2009/10/26/kindle-ling-discussion-about-learning/ and http://www.drscavanaugh.org/ebooks and http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10379125-1.html and compare e-readers at http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/collection/1985/.html […]
[…] e-Books - Is the Kindle relevant? […]
[…] Nearly a month has passed since I first reported the arrival of my Kindle. I’m still not sure how widespread its adoption will be in Australian education but I just thought I’d share some of my experiences. Quite a number of people commented and linked back to my earlier post, and I hope you’ve seen Jude O’Connell’s post Kindle-ing Discussion from late October which talks about her initial reactions. In it Jude has also listed some great resources for getting free or near free books for the Kindle. I’d encourage you to read her post because in it Jude does describe some of the features of the Kindle that she finds attractive. […]
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