Love it or hate it - the Kindle is acting a bit like a bow wave on the e-book front. This post from Crave lays out some of the specs of a new
reader from Netronix. Why is it that I think that as Jeff Bezos continues to apologize for Kindles being sold out, that these other companies are looking at this demand and reacting? The iPhone changed the discussion and I think the Kindle is doing the same.
(link)
"In the many studies of games and young people's
use of them, little has been written about an overall "ecology" of
gaming, game design and play--mapping the ways that all the various
elements, from coding to social practices to aesthetics, coexist in the
game world. This volume looks at games as systems in which young users
participate, as gamers, producers, and learners.
The Ecology of Games (edited by Rules of Play author
Katie Salen) aims to expand upon and add nuance to the debate over the
value of games--which so far has been vociferous but overly polemical
and surprisingly shallow.
Contributors:
Ian Bogost, Anna Everett, James Paul Gee, Mizuko Ito, Barry Joseph,
Laurie McCarthy, Jane McGonigal, Cory Ondrejka, Amit Pitaru, Tom
Satwicz, Kurt Squire, Reed Stevens, S. Craig Watkins.
About the Editor
Katie Salen is a game designer and interactive designer as well as
Director of Graduate Studies in Design and Technology, Parsons School
of Design. With Eric Zimmerman, she is the coauthor of Rules of Play (MIT Press, 2003) and coeditor of The Game Design Reader (MIT Press, 2005)."
**You really can't go wrong here for $13..
Yes, I am a book-loving geek. Even worse, I like bookstores better than I like libraries because I like to write in my books as I read and dog-ear pages and in general, rough them up a bit as I read them. I'm also usually working on two or three books at a time, not because I'm that smart but just because I usually have one staked out in a couple of different locations.
So I was just wondering, there must be other book lovers out there and I hope (especially on this blog) that there are people who are reading books about learning. My question then is "what are the books you are currently reading or that you think people should clearly read on the topic of learning?"
Books like Flow, Emergence and How Computer Games Help Children Learn are on my list that I have read and that I think are generally valuable for anyone to read.
Now I got like 8 comments so far on my "this doesn't look good for MSFT" post, which was a bit surprising, so let's here it out there...what are the books that you have either read or have in your "To Be Read" pile on the topic of learning?
Tom Crawford rebutted my defense of his rebuttal of my original post. Phew. While Tom again, makes some cogent points, I'm compelled to point out a couple of my own.
First, he describes my original post as "overly-ambitious praise of Amazon's new e-book reader." Now I went back and re-read my post and I used phrases like "maybe" and not bad and the tone just doesn't strike me as being over-the-top but maybe that's just me. To clarify though, I haven't even held one of the darn things but when as dominant a player in a market like Amazon comes out with an e-book reader, I do think that demands our attention.
To my point about wanting textbooks to be available on the Kindle, Tom says that he thinks that it may be a long time before we see that. I think though that we are in violent agreement here and that I actually make that point as well in the original post. Tom argues that there are two operant biz models, sell the device at a loss and make money off the books or discount the books and pop people for the cost+profit on the device. I think that is a largely correct but incomplete assertion. I think that book publishers could heavily re-vamp their production and cost models, eliminate costly physical distribution channels and greatly increase the margin on books that would sell substantially below what their paper cousins go for now. I also think that publishers could look to develop new value chains to derive revenue from new sources- access to authors' archives, notes, etc - almost like the 'special edition' of a DVD.
As to the flaws in the device design and my kinda lame defense of "its first gen" - Tom is right in that this isn't the MP3 player market - it seems that Amazon could have done some more refinement of the device before setting it loose. On this point though, I think I'll lean on the fact that with such a high profile device from such a high profile company - I think they will have both the money and willingness to make significant design changes in 2 or 3 gen devices - Bezos has a lot of ego points riding on this...
Finally...Tom.....Happy Holidays! :-)
Recently a fairly rare thing occurred and Tom Crawford an I disagreed about something - and it wasn't who's turn it was to buy the round - it was about my post on the Kindle. That was/is a discussion about a specific device and how I think it can be best used. I did want to point out however, a paper that does something that I haven't really seen done before in comparisons of e-book readers (or really reading on a screen in general) vice reading from paper.
William Powers, media critic for the National Journal writing for Harvard's Shorenstein Center, has penned a powerful article entitled "Hamlet's Blackberry: Why Paper Is Eternal." As an anthropologist concerned with the interaction between culture and technology, this is one of my favorite quotes from the piece:
"There are cognitive, cultural and social dimensions to the human-paper dynamic that come into play every time any kind of paper, from a tiny Post-it note to a groaning Sunday newspaper, is used to convey, retrieve or store information. Paper does these jobs in a way that pleases us, which is why, for centuries, we have liked having it around. It's also why we will never give it up as a medium, not completely. For some of the roles paper currently fulfills in our media lives, there is no better alternative currently available. And the most promising candidates are technologies that are striving to be more, not less, like paper. Indeed, the pertinent question may not be whether the old medium will survive, but whether the new ones will ever escape paper's enormous shadow."
I think this distinction of paper as a technology versus paper as a cognitive medium is a powerful one and one that deserves more attention (forgive me if that attention has already been I am simply ignorant).
So the pressure is on. Everyone knows that Week Two, Stop Two is clearly the most critical stop on a blog book tour. ;-) I am following some great bloggers like Tom King, Tony O'Driscoll, and Cammy Bean. (as an aside, since a couple people bring up how they read they book, and as a recovering grad student - I thought I'd link to a post I did on "inspectional reading" that still gets a lot of hits - evidently that's what they call it at MIT...we called it 'gutting a book'. :-))
Actually, the cool thing is that no one knows that but we're giving it a shot - or rather Karl Kapp is helping us take a shot. I love the idea of a blog book tour and kudos to Karl for both the book and this idea. The LCB Big Question and this exercise I think really demonstrate the virtual collective that we have out there in the ether in some virtually concrete ways.
Karl's book Gadgets, Games and Gizmos for Learning is a great read and I can say that with some authority. A whole back I got on the list to serve as a reviewer for Pfeiffer (the publisher) and occasionally I get an email asking me if I'd like to review a book that is been submitted and so it was I came to meet Karl's book. I will add this insider's note...this was a happy meeting...some books, well let's just say you'd rather not meet them.
Karl though, I think got a bit of a surprise from this reviewer. Usually they (the publisher) asks for something like 4-5 pages of notes; I think the Word doc I sent back in was something like 18 pages! Karl really touched a nerve! So trust me folks, I've been through this book with a fine tooth comb and have had great discussions with Karl over it and can heartily recommend it. That being said, I wanted to recap a few of the notes I took (excerpted from the document I sent back to Karl - page numbers are probably off since these would refer to galley pages). *the trick being, you kinda need the book to make sense of the notes ;-)
Honestly, if you haven't heard the name Andrew Keen yet or heard the title of his recent screed, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing our Culture" - count yourself lucky If you have the stomach for it, he does publish an excerpt of his book on his site). I'm sorry to bring up this bad piece of flawed logic and sloppy writing but just as surely as I was one of the ones named by Time as Person of the Year, then I am just as surely one of the ones Keen feels is destroying our culture and I feel some small obligation to join my fellow amateurs in railing against this bad, bad book and by doing so, I'm sure, confirm some of Keen's worst fears and probably but some poor critic out of a job somewhere.
Here is what Keen sees when he looks at the Internet "I mostly see cultural and ethical chaos. I see the eruption of rampant intellectual property theft, extreme pornography, sexual promiscuity, plagiarism, gambling, contempt for order, intellectual inanity, crime, a culture of anonymity, hatred toward authority, incessant spam, and a trash heap of user-generated-content (whew, what a mouthful!). I see a chaotic humans arrangement with few, if any, formal social pacts." The blogosphere is an "echo chamber of digital narcissism." That is a dark world that Keen lives in isn't it?
Want to know what can fix such a horrible thing? Keen is ready with "we need laws, a series of social contracts, to constructively regulate our behavior on the Internet."
But what Keen really wants is for the VAST majority of us to just shut the hell up..."And we must (re)learn the ability to be silent, to listen to others more learned than ourselves, to value the wisdom of the expert." Here is the heart of Keen...we are killing of all the experts - I wonder if Keen read this article from the Onion and thought it was real? Or maybe this piece of fictional legislation is what he really pines for.
I really want to tear into this myself but being an amateur...I'll just toss it to the pros.
From the professional New Statesman: "Many of Keen's gripes in The Cult of the Amateur are reasonable; but, like his target, they dissolve in a miasma of polemical generalisation and frenzied verbiage. There is no irony in his use of phrases such as "deviant instincts", "intellectual kleptomaniacs" and "the disappearance of truth". It is as though postmodernism, let alone poststructuralism, never happened. Sometimes his soundbites are deeply amusing in their unintended perversity. I particularly liked the reference to Jorge Luis Borges, rendered simply as "a half-blind Argentine" (one who - Keen would have done well to remember - claimed that "to speak is to fall into tautology")."
...and from the professional professor and noted lawyer Lawrence Lessig (hmmm, Keen has neither a professorship nor a law degree - it would seem then by his own argument he should shut his flapping pie hole and "listen to others more learned than ourselves"): "But what is puzzling about this book is that it purports to be a book attacking the sloppiness, error and ignorance of the Internet, yet it itself is shot through with sloppiness, error and ignorance. It tells us that without institutions, and standards, to signal what we can trust (like the institution (Doubleday) that decided to print his book), we won’t know what’s true and what’s false. But the book itself is riddled with falsity — from simple errors of fact, to gross misreadings of arguments, to the most basic errors of economics."
Almost forgot to include another great review by Clay Shirky..."The hallmark of revolution is that the goals of the revolutionaries cannot be contained by the institutional structure of the society they live in. As a result, either the revolutionaries are put down, or some of those institutions are transmogrified, replaced, or simply destroyed. We are plainly witnessing a restructuring of the music and newspaper businesses, but their suffering isn’t unique, it’s prophetic."
....anybody care to provide a review of this book?
Henry Jenkins of MIT has written a book entitled Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. While I am still working through the book myself (I posted noted from Henry's recent Serious Games Summit talk here), Ian Bogost of Water Cooler Games has posted a wonderfully dense yet readable review of the book and has situated it within the larger context of the topics that Henry touches on. It is worth the read.
In the same vein (Jenkins that is) the good folks over at the Terra Nova blog have posted links to Henry's installment plan posting of his white paper entitled "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century."
While clearly the white paper can stand on its own, the comments on the Terra Nova posting do add some additional context.
I'm a big fan of books in general and of reading lists - they are the artifact records of our literary wanderings. Thanks to elearningpost, I was pointed to this list over at McGee's Musings. James McGee says that the list is intended to provide some books that would be helpful in a quest to become a better knowledge worker. In between my typing now on Amazon.com as I order some of these (some I already have), I am inclined to agree with him. Got any additions?
