More on electronic textbooks

The first post on this blog was about ‘alternative’ ways for students to get textbooks.  Since then it seems like I’ve seen/heard variations of this discussion in several places.   Three articles came to my attention that I would like to discuss further.

Facebook & Privacy

Yesterday we had a new blast of anti-Facebook sentiments as the site’s new terms of service was unveiled. For me, and a lot of other people, it was a reminder of how we must all be vigilant about protecting our personal information online.  (Facebook has since reverted to their old terms of service and are taking input from users for the next revision).

Facebook is a bear of a site to try to manage for newbies because of the vast array of contacts that you can have – friends, family, and professional contacts. You may not want all of these people to have the same access to your personal information. For example, you might want your friends to have your cell phone and personal email, but might not want your professional contacts to have that information.

Here’s an example from the Chronicle of Higher Education about a professor at Dartmouth who left her profile to more people than she intended.

Here are some more humorous examples of pictures that should never have been made public (not all on Facebook) from Dan Tynan at PC World.

Of course, these privacy can be managed with a 10-20 minute investment in tweaking the privacy settings in Facebook.   I won’t need to recreate the wheel of telling you how as Nick O’Neill of AllFacebook.com as done a wonderful job (click to read more).

For those of you not on Facebook, I would encourage you to check it out.  Look for a Facebook 101 podcast from CIT coming in April/May.

Newspaper content – anytime, anywhere… mostly free

Two sites have recently come to my attention Newseum and Newspapers.com.  Both sites work in distinctly different ways, but are similar in the way that sort of aggregate newspaper content for users to find easily.

Newseum

Someone sent me a link to Newseum’s Today’s Front Pages site. It is an amazing tool that allows you to look at the front page of countless newspapers from around the world.

Dangerous Technology

Let’s not act afraid of new things… many times we’ll end up looking like fools.

Delivering classroom content without textbook costs

This post is really not the ideal first real post for the blog, but the topic has come up several times in various news venues and among colleagues: delivering classroom content without the textbook costs.

I was looking at a history professor’s new Kindle (I’m so jealous), and he was telling me how he had downloaded several texts that are relevant to his current teaching load and that are in the public domain (Common Sense, Federalist Papers, etc).  He had downloaded the texts from Project Gutenberg and transferred them to his Kindle so he can take them to class easily (and for free).  He lamented about what a shame it was that students didn’t have ebook readers, but instead had to print the texts from a website or buy them from the bookstore.

Hello world!

Welcome to TeachNTech- a blog all about Instructional Technology.

The purpose of this blog is to inform interested parties in happenings in instructional technology in higher education, especially faculty and administrators at Berry College. We will also discuss copyright issues, and other relevant issues regarding higher education.

We will also use this method to keep members of the Berry community updated on workshops, seminars, and developments in Berry’s CIT department.  We want to find the best way to get information to faculty, so please let us know what method you prefer.

Any feedback regarding this blog- criticisms, suggestions, praise- is welcome.