Digital textbooks and student e-memory
Wednesday, June 24, 2009 at 7:31AM In California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is advocating digital textbooks. E-texts are a great idea, for many reasons. No more heavy backpacks stuffed with books. Texts could be easily and frequently updated. Language text books could play audio clips. You could e-highlight and quickly re-find key passages by searching. E-texts could also include hyperlinks, so that when you are looking at a new math topic you would have a quick link back to an older supporting topic you had forgotten about.
Once students are carrying e-text devices to every class, there is a unique opportunity to take learning to the next level. After all, that e-text device could easily record audio, pictures, video, and typing - and should support pen-based input, too. It should become the ultimate digital student notebook as well, recording everything they ever learn. Lectures, chemistry labs, articles – they can all go in the student’s e-memory.
The governator’s idea is even more powerful than he realizes.
Hat tip: East Bay Homework Blog
california, student, text, textbook in Learning
Reader Comments (2)
Apart from picking up information, we also need to organize it efficiently and so that we can always reach it from any starting point. Relating bits of information as 'entities' or 'objects' can bring us far, as the internet and mind-mapping programs show, but we cannot truly call that learning. For organizing also means integrating, synthesizing information into knowledge or even wisdom, that can shed light on any unforeseen circumstance. Wouldn't that be a true present for anyone interested in us even after we are long gone? It means that people must be enabled to build their own repository knowledgebases out of objects they pick and name themselves, and rename as they see fit whenever they want. I am working on such life-long-learning software for a long time now, and hopefully one day, it will be really fruitful. I am using it myself each day, in the beginning primarily to store my notes ('tweets' in modern lingo) but now to organize them from different pov's.
Maybe we could approach along the following trail:
Terry Eberhart wrote: (29-08-2009 03:28)
”I am asking the following question in a few forums and to a some of my connections, including you. I believe you may be able to add to the list of ideas and suggestions. I am trying to encourage idea generation and exchange as I believe the scenario below is a real risk in many of the classrooms across the country this fall. I would appreciate any ideas you have, however out of the box they may seem. In turn, I will do my best to share them with the educational community at large.
What steps and actions can be taken to keep delivering education this fall should they face a situation like an outbreak of H1N1, causing unusually high absenteeism or classes to be canceled for some time? I really see three (maybe four) groups this could be broken down into. They would be:
What can college faculty do?
What can college administrators do?
What can public school administrators and teachers do?
Note that this scenario is about classroom based courses (not scheduled online courses), there is not time to feasibly install new course management systems, or make structural changes.
I am re-editing a reply:
Pupils Personal Diary
A possible emergency measure, should pupils be quarantined from school attendance would - to the extend they will have access to a Personal computer - consist in endowing them with a freeware program, fit for their maintaining a daily diary, autonomously and to their own discretion keeping track of their activities and thoughts, around the clock, around the day, around the weeks of their quarantine.
Such a program, which could be made downloadable, could - without professional programming - to some extent be fitted to the schedule and topics on their curriculum, maybe even suggesting that they maintain more or less specified time allotments for autonomous studying, - practiced, solo or in small friend-pairs.
Now the prototype diary - for a given class - can by the teacher(s) be prepared:
They can equip the basic "My Cyberspace" compartment of the diary of each and all pupils with basic links to the www-sites, which to the teachers, seems most relevant: : Google, Wikipedia, Google earth, general national state, city and neighborhoods public citizen sites, Local library,, Dictionaries for the languages, which are on their curriculum, and a (relatively closed) class LinkedIn group, where they all are free to label and open discussions and comment to each others discussions.(. A teacher could open the group, and suggest - or nor suggest - rules for the interplay) And the pupils could be stimulated to expand and enrich this first common base of site links in their My Cyberspace compartment of their diary with personally selected (preferred ) links, labeled by themselves. . (All use of these links automatically time-indexed in their diary.)
The address book of the diary could be pre-equipped with a card for each of teachers and each of the co-pupils in the class: Names and e-mail addresses. (e-mailadresses will be links to p-to-p email.) And report to diary when e-mails are sent.
The diary, open for pupils to label accumulating thematic memofields
can by the teacher(s)also be pre-equipped with a core of thematic memofields for the subjects (else) to be taught in the class.
Now: the general idea of this approach is to lend the pupils a role as autonomous citizen researchers, equipping them with a basic toolset for an empirical time-indexed documenting of the events (including thoughts, feelings and associations) of their own lives, across study and leisure, layering as a biographic Ariadne thread , serving the sedimenting coherence of their personal knowledge management, and a safety net in their life-journey and their lifelong e-learning expedition.
This - if nothing else - should push upon them some first degrees of understanding of the attainable information galaxy 2009 - and the creative powers within reach for a growing person, in their part of the world, and with the privileges, they have.
The advantage of this "Pupils Diary" endeavor is, that it wouldn’t cost a penny, because an”almost open source” freeware program (both for windows, Mac and Linux) already is publicly accessible and distributable.
The original source is a fundamental prototype, of no value to target groups like these.
But the construction of the program is such, that users, without technical programming, over time can personally "furnish" and "inhabit" it according to their changing and evolving preferences.
As the program is freeware, it is possible for teachers (or groups of teachers) to perform a pedagogical pre-furnishing, tailored to the needs of a specific class, (along the lines suggested above) and distribute it, on DVD's or as downloadable from the website of the school.
Teachers, who will be interested in such electronic diary group-targeting and possible pedagogical social experiments with it (which could be initiated irrespective of quarantine or no quarantine), are invited to discuss it in a provisional LinkedIn group: The electronic diary
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1987669&trk=hb_side_g
Electronic diary keeping has been discussed at length in the LinkedIn group Metacognition: learning to learn.
http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&gid=1790369&discussionID=4084773&sik=1257255668863&trk=ug_qa_q&goback=%2Eana_1790369_1257255668863_3_1
The site of the prototype is www.phenomenalog.dk.
_____________________________________________________________________________
I posted (October 30, 2009 )) a comment to Gordon Bells Saturday, June 20, 2009 at 4:42PM answer to the question
“Why did you start recording everything? “ :
http://totalrecallbook.com/blog/2009/6/20/why-did-you-start-recording-everything.html#comments
Maybe that reply could help clarifying some more perspectives.
I would very much like to review and perhaps preface the book in a hopefully planned Danish translation.
Could someone bring me in touch with relevant Danish publisher?
Best regards
Kresten Bjerg
Kresten.bjerg@psy.ku.dk’ My personal senior site is www.bjerg.psy.ku.dk
Three recent publications are most relevant from my viewpoint:
Kresten Bjerg:
"Empowering Citizen self/documentation: Re/inventing the Diary",
Presented at the COST298 international meeting on "The user and the future of information and communication technologies” in Moscow, May 2007
Observatorio (OBS*), Vol.2, No 2 .www.obs.obercom.pt/index.php/obs/article/view/198
Kresten Bjerg:
"Personal Electronic Journaling"
Presented at the Cost298 international meeting on "The user and the future of information and communication technologies" in Copenhagen, May 2009.
http://miha2.ef.uni-lj.si/cost298/gbc2009-proceedings/papers/P155.pdf
Kresten Bjerg:
Self-care, telemonitoring and multidimensionality in person-to-person interfacing
A new angle on self-management in chronic disease
Presented at the Cost298 international meeting on "The user and the future of information and communication technologies" in Copenhagen, May 2009.
http://miha2.ef.uni-lj.si/cost298/gbc2009-proceedings/papers/P154.pdf