The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.
~ Mark Twain

Our book club got together last night to discuss a couple of titles; one of these titles was David Moody’s Hater.  The general response from our group was not positive; i would not say any of us were “fans”.  Thus a lot of our discussion focused on: if our whole group felt this way, how could this book be the huge best seller that it was/is?  Why had all of us forked over the money for the hard covered version?  Originally published on a blog Hater blew up on/in cyberspace and screamed up best seller’s lists all over the world.
With our book club’s discussion still on my mind, i walked into work today and glanced over the posts on my facebook page..on one of them was this article:

(reprinted from:  http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-06/st_thompson with thanks to Justin for directing me to it)

Clive Thompson on the Future of Reading in a Digital World

By Clive Thompson 05.22.09

Illustration: Michael Bierut/Pentagram; book: Istock Photo

When McKenzie Wark wrote Gamer Theory—an analysis of why people enjoy playing videogames—Harvard University Press published it as a conventional hardcover. But Wark also put it online using CommentPress. The free blog theme blew the book open into a series of conversations; every paragraph could spawn its own discussion forum for readers.

Sure enough, hundreds dove in, and pretty soon Gamer Theory had sparked erudite exchanges on everything from Plato’s cave to Schopenhauer’s ideas on boredom. It felt as much like a rangy, excited Twitter conversation as it did a book. “It was all because we opened it up and gave readers a way to interact with each other,” Wark says. “It changed the way they read the book.”

Books are the last bastion of the old business model—the only major medium that still hasn’t embraced the digital age. Publishers and author advocates have generally refused to put books online for fear the content will be Napsterized. And you can understand their terror, because the publishing industry is in big financial trouble, rife with layoffs and restructurings. Literary pundits are fretting: Can books survive in this Facebooked, ADD, multichannel universe?

To which I reply: Sure they can. But only if publishers adopt Wark’s perspective and provide new ways for people to encounter the written word. We need to stop thinking about the future of publishing and think instead about the future of reading.

Every other form of media that’s gone digital has been transformed by its audience. Whenever a newspaper story or TV clip or blog post or white paper goes online, readers and viewers begin commenting about it on blogs, snipping their favorite sections, passing them along. The only reason the same thing doesn’t happen to books is that they’re locked into ink on paper.

Release them, and you release the crowd. BookGlutton, a site that launched last year, has put 1,660 books online and created tools that let readers form groups to discuss their favorite titles. Meanwhile, Bob Stein, an e-publishing veteran from the CD-ROM days, put the Doris Lessing book The Golden Notebook online with an elegant commenting system and hired seven writers to collaboratively read it.

Neither move should come as a surprise. Books have a centuries-old tradition of annotation and commentary, ranging from the Talmud and scholarly criticism to book clubs and marginalia. Stein believes that if books were set free digitally, it could produce a class of “professional readers”—people so insightful that you’d pay to download their footnotes. Sound unlikely? It already exists in the real world: Microsoft researcher Cathy Marshall has found that university students carefully study used textbooks before buying them, because they want to acquire the smartest notes.

The technology is here. Book nerds are now working on XML-like markup languages that would allow for really terrific linking and mashups. Imagine a world where there’s a URL for every chapter and paragraph in a book—every sentence, even. Readers could point to their favorite sections in a MySpace update or instant message or respond to an argument by copiously linking to the smartest passages in a recent best seller.

This would massively improve what bibliophiles call book discovery. You’re far more likely to hear about a book if a friend has highlighted a couple brilliant sentences in a Facebook update—and if you hear about it, you’re far more likely to buy it in print. Yes, in print: The few authors who have experimented with giving away digital copies (mostly in sci-fi) have found that they end up selling more print copies, because their books are discovered by more people.

I’m not suggesting that books need always be social. One of the chief pleasures of a book is mental solitude, that deep, quiet focus on an author’s thoughts—and your own. That’s not going away. But books have been held hostage offline for far too long. Taking them digital will unlock their real hidden value: the readers.

Email clive@clivethompson.net.

It seems really familiar to a discussion popular a couple years ago about how musicians would survive in a post-napster world doesn’t it?

I would really love to get your thoughts on this…

Although every man believes that his decisions and resolutions involve the most multifarious factors, in reality they are mere oscillation between flight and longing.
~ Herman Broch

‘Tis the season of school surveys, class surveys, teacher evaluations, and a myriad of different question sets.  In this TED lecture Dan Ariely got me wondering how much of the responses we gather our determined by the question(s) we ask?

If you have issues with the embed (i did):  linked here.

As each day moves us closer to summertime and a chance for teachers make more of their “own” decisions i found this piece incredibly interesting.

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
~ Lao-tzu

The blog is after all called “the journey”:

for credit is like fire; when once you have kindled it you may easily preserve it, but if you once extinguish it, you will find it an arduous task to rekindle it again.
~ Socrates (469 BC - 399 BC)

I like a lot of people i know am really struggling to understand what is going on in the financial world today in an effort to know where it is going.  I am not getting there too quickly to be honest but i thought that this was a nice little visualization that i shared with our Economics teachers:

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Imitation is the sincerest of flattery.
- Charles Caleb Colton

The work that Johnny Lee has done with the Wii controller is simply amazing (see Johnny’s TED talk).  Equally amazing is this “how to” video created by a PT2 student about a project of Johnny’s that he did in Ms. Norman’s class:

thanks for all your hard work on this project PT2 students and Ms. Norman.

“Don’t wait until everything is just right. It will never be perfect. There will always be challenges, obstacles and less than perfect conditions. So what. Get started now. With each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger, more and more skilled, more and more self-confident and more and more successful.”
- Mark Victor Hansen

I do love the simplicity and clarity of the CommonCraft model:

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it.
- Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784), quoted in Boswell’s Life of Johnson

It is another long one; it is (in my humble opinion) very worth it.

thanks to “the bad Mark” for sharing this with me.

“Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.”
- Chuck Palahniuk

A couple of random but powerful links came to me this morning.  As is often the case these links came to me from all over the place; some more surprising then others.

The first was sent to me by the elementary literacy specialist here at CMS.  This was a little surprising as she is an admitted technophobe (and my wife).  It was one of the many posts that my NetVibes had marked as unread.  Take a quick look at the “Seven Stupid Mistakes Teachers Make Using Technology” from the always fantastic Blue Skunk blog.

The Second was this video, which i think does a fantastic job of demonstrating what i believe should be our goal in EdTech:

I love the focus on Personal Learning Networks;  I really feel that this is the term that we should all be using.

Finally this video found itself in front of me this morning (found here).  I find it to be a great little motivator if you are in need of a “pick me up” today.

“My life has a superb cast but I can’t figure out the plot.”
~ Ashleigh Brilliant

The sixth grade English teacher here combined plasticine, digital cameras, QuickTime Pro and the five phases of plot to create a dynamic and interesting lesson that few of her students will ever forget.

Ms. Culligan a new teacher here at CMS approached me a little with some steps to a project that she wanted to try.  She obviously wasn’t entirely comfortable with the process or technology involved and i love it when teachers do this to themselves.  We ran with the project got some help from Bill Farren a middle school technology facilitator … y voila!

Here are some goals and reflections from the teacher on the project:

1. That students would create a story map, applying the five phases of plot that we had discussed in class  (Exposition, Rising Action, Climax, Falliing Action, and Resolution), and would then tell that story by building a 3D clay model and photographing a sequence for a claymation movie.
   They accomplished this goal in the sense that their written plans for the stories showed all the steps of plot; but in the actual movies those steps are really hard to distinguish.
2. That after the project, at least 90% of the kids would get an A on a quiz where they had to identify and explain the steps of plot.
   They accomplished this, so I think the project was effective that way.
3. That they would work together, fulfill the expectations of their jobs, make compromises, and generally be good contributors to their group; consistently adhering to the Tribes agreements.
   This worked out really well actually, for most groups, even with kids who often have a difficult time working in groups. There were two groups out of 28 or so that didn’t finish their movies, but at least they got the chance to do self/peer reflections to decide what went wrong. I did hear a lot of Spanish being spoken during the process of making the movies, because it was difficult for me to monitor with all the activity, so that was a downside of the group work.
4. That the kids would have fun.
   Most said it was their favorite thing we’ve done this year, so I know they enjoyed it.

If you would like a copy of the steps involved in this please contact me.

Great job Ms. Culligan!
Thanks for pushing yourself and your students

“The ability to focus attention on important things is a defining characteristic of intelligence.”
- Robert J. Shiller

How many times have i heard teachers tell me that their students can’t focus?
More than i would like to recount.

Immersion by New York photographer Robbie Cooper is a four minute piece that proves those individuals wrong.  Kids can focus; in fact they can focus so well it can be a little scary.

What are they focussing on?  is the question that i find far more alarming.

Thanks to Bill for sharing this link with me.