Every year for the past dozen or so years the Department of Information Sciences at UCL have organised a meeting on ebooks. I’ve only been to one of them before, two or three years ago, when the big issues were around what publishers’ DRM requirements for ebooks meant for libraries. I came away from that [...]
I went to a meeting for stakeholders interested in the eTernity (European textbook reusability networking and interoperability) initiative. The hope is that eTernity will be a project of the CEN Workshop on Learning Technologies with the objective of gathering requirements and proposing a framework to provide European input to ongoing work by ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC36, [...]
The joint CETIS and UKOLN Observatory has just published a report “Preparing for Effective Adoption and Use of Ebooks in Education” written by James Clay. My CETIS colleague Li and I wrote the foreword for this report, which I’ve reproduced here but really you would be better going to the observatory and downloading the whole [...]
Yesterday I was in London, along with a group of people with a wide range of experience in digital resource management, OERs, and publishing for a workshop which was part of the Challenge of eBooks project. Here’s a quick summary and some reflections.
To kick off, Ken Chad defined eBooks for the purpose of the workshop, [...]
There were two themes running through this workshop organised by the Strategic Content Alliance: technical potential and legal barriers. An important piece of background is the Hargreaves report.
The potential of text and data mining is probably well understood in technical circles, and were well articulated by JohnMcNaught of NaCTeM. Briefly the potential lies in [...]
About 15 years ago, when I was first starting to promote the use of resources for “computer aided learning” the message was fairly clear: reading text off a screen is problematic so don’t use computers for this, use them for what they are good at. For me, in physical sciences at that time, they were [...]
Ramlet, or Resource Aggregation Model for Learning, Education and Training (which is working group 13 of the IEEE Learning Technology Standards Subcommittee) is an ongoing piece of work which aims to define a conceptual model that includes an ontology and a nomenclature for enabling the interpretation of externalized representations of digital aggregates of resources for [...]
