What’s an ebook anyway?

Jeremy Brueck, an Akron, OH-based pioneer in children’s digital reading research, spends his days grappling with the cacophony of questions raised by children’s ebooks. With help from grants from the U.S. Department of Education, he’s examining how electronic materials should be used in early childhood programs, including Head Start.

He’s urging librarians, teachers, and parents to pause to get a handle on exactly what they mean when they say “ebook” in the first place. “We have to get out of saying ‘ebooks,’” argues Brueck, who codirects Akron Ready Steps, an early literacy program, and is a doctoral candidate at the University of Akron. “It’s just too broad.”

At one end of the spectrum, there are PDFs of printed titles, while on the other end are electronic resources with animated characters, interactive quizzes, and online games that accompany texts that can be “played” while each spoken word is highlighted on the screen. With such a range of possibilities, “there is not enough known yet to know what best practice is,” Brueck says. Akron Ready Steps is now developing a “quality rating tool” that can help identify the features in an electronic title that will help children learn and become engaged with a story—and which ones are merely bells and whistles. Brueck often targets vendors of ebook subscriptions. “It’s frustrating to see people put money into developing something that isn’t sound from a pedagogical standpoint,” he says.

Brueck is still collecting data, but he’s already concerned about the quality of what’s commercially available. In ratings of nearly 100 ebooks, his research team found very few titles with high marks for their ability to support emerging readers. “Good ebooks for the purposes of literacy instruction for young children are hard to find,” he wrote in a recent post on his blog, Raised Digital.

Towards an e-Book Quality Rating Tool for Early Elementary Literacy Instruction
Jeremy Brueck (@brueckj23)
I was thrilled to find out that Jeremy Brueck is from Ohio.  His research is critical to the things I have been thinking about lately. I haven't found many people who are really looking at ebooks for young children and learned so much from this session.  Jeremy Brueck is focused on not only rating ebooks but also to understanding what this means for young children and literacy. Although he stated early that he did not come at this from a literacy background at first, he has a strong sense of young children and their literacy development.   We spent time in this session examining ebooks on several iPads and iPods that Jeremy brought. We discussed the things that made them worthwhile, etc.  He shared several resources and much of the work he was doing with local Head Start programs there.  His presentation and resources are on his blog. Resources included an e-book Quality Rating Tool, a List of Early Elementary ebooks iOS Apps and more.  I hope to spend a great deal of time exploring these resources over the next several weeks.

Ruling Allows ‘Jailbreaking’ of iPhones

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: July 26, 2010

Filed at 11:46 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Owners of the iPhone will be able to legally break electronic locks on their devices in order to download software applications that haven't been approved by Apple Inc., according to new government rules announced Monday.

The decision to allow the practice commonly known as ''jailbreaking'' is one of a handful of new exemptions from a 1998 federal law that prohibits people from bypassing technical measures that companies put on their products to prevent unauthorized uses. The Library of Congress' Copyright Office reviews and authorizes exemptions every three years to ensure that the law does not prevent certain non-infringing use of copyright-protected material.

In addition to jailbreaking, other exemptions announced Monday would:

-- allow owners of used cell phones to break access controls on their phones in order to switch wireless carriers.

-- allow people to break technical protections on video games to investigate or correct security flaws.

-- allow college professors, film students and documentary filmmakers to break copy-protection measures on DVDs so they can embed clips for educational purposes, criticism, commentary and noncommercial videos.

-- allow computer owners to bypass the need for external security devices called dongles if the dongle no longer works and cannot be replaced.

 

 

 

DemoGod

Pssst!.. This page is Secret - it can only be seen if you give people the URL

Bad news for iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad users who were using ScreenSplitr & DemoGod free apps to enable desktop mirroring of device on desktop

To my disappointment, I discovered that DemoGod no longer supports ScreenSplitr on my iPod Touch. After a little further investigation what I've discovered is that DemoGod (the Mac desktop software) is no longer available for free use. Instead, Plutinosoft has rolled DemoGod into a new app called iDemo, which is regularly $9.99, but currently on sale for $8.99.

Given the glitchiness of the DemoGod and ScreenSplitr that I have experienced over that past 4-6 months, I'm not sure I'm ready to invest $8.99 on the software at this time. I have had numerous problems using the Demo/Screen combination at conferences and meetings where public wifi is available. At home, on my own wifi network, the duo functions flawlessly, but out in the field, it can't be trusted.

For now, I will stick to DisplayOut and iPad VGA dongle for onsite presentations. Not sure where I'll go for creating screencasts of apps.