Raspberry Pi has announced that its first batch of $35 computers will be finished manufacturing as of February 20th, and they will be airfreighted to the UK immediately after that; they should be available for purchase by the end of the month. It has also gotten Broadcom to make available a datasheet about the ARM peripherals in the Pi’s CPU chip—useful for those who want to port other operating systems to the device, or are just interested in the tech specs. As I’ve said before, this device could be quite useful in education and for Internet access in places...

On Hack Education, Audrey Watters has a fairly long look at why Apple’s new textbook announcement may not be as revolutionary as expected. She was not impressed by Apple’s presentation, stating it lacked Steve Jobs’s magic touch, “the kind of thing that made both fans and skeptics say, ‘Yes, (perhaps) this changes everything.’” She points out that Apple is partnering with the three companies that already make up 90% of the textbook industry, and they have already gotten into digital textbooks (to the tune of $3 billion last year by just one of them). One of...

Here’s a clever use of technology to promote reading among kids—taking a cue from speed dating to create “Extreme Speed Booking”. The idea is that kids are given two minutes with each book—they can do whatever they like: examine the cover, read the first chapter, skip to the last page—and then rate how interested they would be in reading more (as well as copy down the author and title of those that do interest them). And the great thing about the e-book age is that this sort of thing is easier than ever without needing to have physical copies...

Written by Doug Ward, an associate professor of journalism and the Budig Professor of Writing at the University of Kansas, here is an article about his students' experience with a iPad over a semester.  From The Chronicle of Higher Education: I had high hopes when I handed out iPads to students in my graduate seminar this semester. I wanted to explore the possibilities of tablet computing and see firsthand how tablets might be used in higher education. I also wanted students to see for themselves where the iPad might fit into their lives and their careers – and into the future...

Author Richard F. Miniter has an article about the revolution in home-schooling that e-readers make possible. His idea is that children can be kept home, away from the faux-egalitarian, inaccurate-propaganda-laden classroom and taught to educate themselves on their own by reading a book a day and writing an essay on it. He brings up the example of a special-education foster child he’d cared for who was essentially unable to read, but who ended up testing at or above his grade level a year later after a course of home-schooling that consisted of daily reading with help on words he...

Our founder David Rothman wrote an interesting column on how to use e-books as part of an educational strategy for encouraging children to read. He suggests that parents should aim for a mix of electronic and paper books, using paper books as “gateway drugs” to get kids interested and e-books for times when paper books are not available or appropriate. He also suggests that developers should look into different ways of using e-book content to make it more effective for learning. The effectiveness of the actual books for children is just one issue. As part of...

From the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog: December 19, 2011 Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 45 (2011): Includes "Data Sharing in the Sciences," "Some Economic Aspects of the Scholarly Journal System," "Toward a Functional Understanding of Fair Use in U.S. Copyright Law" and other articles. College & Research Libraries News 72, no. 11 (2011): Includes "Is Free Inevitable in Scholarly Communication?: The Economics of Open Access" and other articles. First Monday 16, no. 12 (2011): Includes "Achieving Rigor and Relevance in Online Multimedia Scholarly Publishing" and other articles. Journal of Electronic Resources Librarianship 23, no. 4 (2011): Includes "Metadata Dictionary Database: A Proposed Tool for Academic...

This in-depth Wired feature article by Clive Thompson is a few months old, but I ran across it in an old print issue of Wired Magazine today at work and was completely fascinated. It does not have anything to do with e-books directly, perhaps, but is a great example of how new electronic media can be used for educational purposes. Salman Khan, a three-time MIT graduate with a Harvard MBA, was inspired while tutoring cousins in 2004 to begin creating educational YouTube videos along with self-testing software to help students learn from them. Before he knew it, thousands...

Here’s an e-book project to raise money for a cause local to me. GalleyCat reports on a digital anthology project featuring essays by a number of authors discussing how movies have influenced their work. Editor Cynthia Hawkins explains: [Proceeds] will go to the Joplin Eagles Television 14 Program through the Joplin Schools Tornado Relief Fund. The JET 14 Program instructs 160 students each school year in the fundamentals of film production and broadcasting. […] The JET 14 Program lost everything on May 22, their technology center and studio, studio...

As part of its show interviewing Steve Jobs’s biographer, CBS’s 60 Minutes took a good look at the way iPad apps can help autistic people communicate. (We covered this in June of last year.) The video segment is 13 minutes long, but for people who don’t have that much time 60 Minutes also posted the script in the form of an article. The story covers both adults and children, and shows ways that the iPad provides communication tools to let parents and teachers learn things about autistic children that they never knew before. One ten-year-old autistic child was thought...

It looks like the vapor surrounding India’s $35 tablet has congealed directly into a solid. The Aakash tablet is being made by Canadian manufacturer Datawind, and the Indian government is ordering 100,000 of them at at 2,200 rupees per unit ($44.50), though Datawind says that a planned larger order will drop the effective price per unit down closer to $35. In two months, a SIM-slot-equipped version of the device, branded “Ubislate”, will be available to consumers for 2,999 rupees ($60.70). The tablet will have a 366MHz processor, 7” resistive touchscreen, 256Mb RAM, a 32Gb SD card slot, and two...

Fortune reports that Apple has distributed thousands of free refurbished first-generation iPads to members of the Teach for America corps of teachers for low-income communities. While it is not clear how many of the tablets were actually distributed, Teach for America has over 9,000 members and all were eligible to receive a tablet. Katie Remington (Middlebury '10) picked up hers -- a refurbished model that looked like new -- on Sunday and brought it to the inner-city high school in St. Louis where she runs the science department. "So far," she wrote after the first day,...