Amazon has entered the textbook market swinging with their new large format Kindle DX. They’ve partnered with three of the biggest textbook publishers (Pearson, Cengage, and Wiley) and with several universities (Arizona State, Case Western, Princeton, Virginia) for early implementation. No specifics on pricing, but if this is handled well, it could seriously mean the end of traditional textbook publishing.

http://tinyurl.com/newkindledx
http://live.gizmodo.com/

From Age of Empires to Zork: Using Games in the Classroom | Academic Commons: “With the remarkable growth in the gaming industry in recent years, educators have begun looking at games as a way of reaching students in this new digital world. While games have certainly been the target of criticism and even vilification in the popular media, many do possess qualities beneficial to education, such as the presentation of scenarios, problem solving, collaboration, and metrics.”

Amazon To Target $5.5 Billion Textbook Market With New Kindle?

I was just telling a colleague yesterday that this would seem to be a match made in heaven. Someone must have been listening…

Students Who Use ‘Clickers’ Score Better On Physics Tests: “Hand-held electronic devices called clickers are helping college students learn physics, according to a series of research studies.”

Purdue has set up a streamlined service that allows lecturers to record their lecture from the standard smart classroom podium and have it automatically processed for online streaming and podcasts.
BoilerCast: Classroom Audio File Access

I always seem to be most creative when I don’t know what I’m talking about, so here goes…

What if you were to utilize the subscription capabilities of RSS and combine them with some mechanism to allow people to create a unique/variable path among a range of choices?

A couple of ways this might be implemented:

Less complicated: What if you had a “word of the day” sort of feed that allowed the subscriber to begin with WORD 1 whenever they subscribed? The next day, they get WORD 2, while their associate, who subscribes a day later, gets WORD 1, and so on…

More complicated: What if, instead of simple vocabulary, the daily feed were components of a tutorial? Then, at the end of a concept, what if the entry for that day included a quick assessment that could be “submitted” from within the feed? In addition to immediate feedback (redirected to a web page?), what if the quality/correctness/etc. of the answer dictated what post the subscriber received the next day?

I know that it is probably difficult to accomplish while maintaining RSS code that is clean enough to validate, but shouldn’t there be a way to make it happen?

From an instructional perspective, are there types of knowledge/experience/practice that would be well-suited to this sort of consistent delivery of small chunks of…whatever?

The idea occured to me as I was thinking about RSS, but couldn’t the same functionality be accomplished with email?

I can’t quite tell if this idea has any merit at all, but it feels like it’s almost something…

I’d love to see others’ ideas about how something like this could be utilized to piggyback on the ever-increasing infrastructure behind social software like weblogs, wikis, etc.

Finally, over the past week it has occured to me that media files could be delivered as a part of this process, potentially in two directions, using the delayed delivery capabilities of podcasting. I get a recording of today’s French lesson and it is accompanied by a voice recorder widget that allows me to record my practice or my answer and send it to someone who can listen to it (in context?) and help me to improve…

Anything to this?

Cornell News: New mind model

“The theory that the mind works like a computer, in a series of distinct stages, was an important steppingstone in cognitive science, but it has outlived its usefulness, concludes a new Cornell University study. Instead, the mind should be thought of more as working the way biological organisms do: as a dynamic continuum, cascading through shades of grey.”

[via elearnspace]