Sound stupid? Sounds like the future to me. Textbook publishing is a racket. Publishers extort billions from students bi-annually (or more often) by selling them required texts for their classes. Flat World comes in with a proposal that’s downright equitable. You can read this textbook online for free, or you can order a printed copy for a reasonable price, and you can buy additional materials, like audio books, study-aids and individual chapters if you need or want them. One of the optional purchases is a unencrypted, un-DRMed PDF file of the book, which can be read on any device that can read PDFs. This is useful for offline access and of course for Kindle and e-reader access.
Additionally, most of the materials are updated frequently and include appropriate links and media, all of which can be customized by individual professors for individual classes. This is smart. And it’s why I’m not at all surprised that this effort came from outside the traditional publishing industry.
Big news! The other day my good friend Howard Rheingold flipped the switch and the public web site for our project, the Social Media Classroom went live to the world!
The free (open source, no cost) software is combination of social media tools for use in education. It is designed to install right on top of Drupal, a popular open-source content management system.
I did a good deal of research and wireframing of many of the interfaces and interactions that happen in the software. It was a valuable educational experience for me design wise.
I did not have as much time as I would have liked to donate to the project. My day job, grad school and my new baby boy all made my time scarce. I feel there’s a lot more I could do for the project, design wise, if I can find a little time… oh, time.
Just stumbled upon this impromptu interview of John Seely Brown by Ulrike Reinhard (via Valeria Maltoni). It’s about 7 minutes of trademark Seely Brown brilliance. Enjoy.
The last month has been incredibly busy for me. One of the things that was keeping me busy was working on this video/screencast introducing the Social Media Classroom to the world. And now, just after making this video, we have a working name for the software component. We’re calling it “Colab” (or possibly “Co-lab”) which is inspired by the collaboration we hope it helps to foster in a student’s work, and the term “collaboratory,” which according to William Wulf’s definition is a,
“center without walls, in which the nation’s researchers can perform their research without regard to physical location, interacting with colleagues, accessing instrumentation, sharing data and computational resources, [and] accessing information in digital libraries”
We’re continuing to develop the core of the system, a site to host it on, and a framework of support materials, as well as Howard’s Social Media curriculum, which was the original genesis of this project. Check back here for a post when we have a public site!
