education

"...Cambridge, Oxford, & Sage publishers are filing against Georgia State University and asking the court to issue one of the all-time-detrimental-to-education injunctions in the modern era," in regard to the use of e-reserves for courses.

"The researchers were surprised by the results. They had expected that the intensive multitaskers would have gained some unique mental advantages from all their on-screen juggling. But that wasn't the case. In fact, the heavy multitaskers weren't even good at multitasking. They were considerably less adept at switching between tasks than the more infrequent multitaskers. "Everything distracts them," observed Clifford Nass, the professor who heads the Stanford lab."

Jeff Jarvis unloads during his TED talk about how completely wrong it is for people to be sitting there listening to others instead of collaborating with them. Some excerpts:

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This is bullshit.

Why should you be sitting there listening to me? To paraphrase Dan Gillmor, you know more than I do. Will Richardson should be up here instead of me. And to paraphrase Jay Rosen, you should be the people formerly known as the audience.

But right now, you’re the audience and I’m lecturing.

That’s bullshit.

For nearly 50 years, Educational Technology Publications has been a choice publisher of those doing the finest, most up-to-date thinking in the education field. On its website the company reports having been at the forefront of every important new trend in the development of the field throughout the past five decades.

Now they have jumped to the forefront of the open content trend in publishing. Publisher Lawrence Lipsitz writes to me in an email:

. . . we are now placing all pages of all of our more than 300 books published since 1969, including even the most recently published books, both in-print and out-of-print books, with the GoogleBooks program, available for full-text search and reading. Every page of every book. Close to 200 are “live” now, with Google processing the remainder daily. In the first ten days, there were about 25,000 page views (with only some of the books available for viewing at the time). This is all open and free.