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,...

Economist David Harrington has an article looking at anti-plagiarism service Turnitin, discussing how effective it is, how easy it is to fool, and how it can actually help students conceal evidence of their plagiarism. One of the points Harrington makes is that Turnitin can’t scan the whole web. Using the example of a book that read like it was in large part cribbed from New York Times articles, he found that Turnitin wasn’t able to index the Times articles because the site’s archives are behind a paywall. And another point is that the service offers a tool...

Remember the Raspberry Pi, the $25 computer intended to promote first- and third-world education one game developer is launching? The Raspberry Pi foundation has posted a video of a standard alpha board Raspberry Pi unit playing Quake 3 at 1920x1080 resolution. Though the computer isn’t intended as a gaming platform, it is a great way to demonstrate just how capable the little ARM-powered Linux gadget is with a decently-demanding graphical game. “I remember spending 250, 300 pounds on a graphics card that couldn’t render it this fast,” founder and designer Eben Upton says during the clip. If...

Here’s some more intriguing e-textbook news from Kno, who recently released a survey showing that the majority of college students would give up sex to avoid carrying heavy textbooks, and who also released an HTML5-based app that allows students to read textbooks through Facebook and the web, Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch has an interesting piece looking at some new interactive features in Kno’s e-textbook iPad app. One such feature is a form of 3D modeling that can convert chemical notations showing how atoms bond together into 3D models that can be enlarged and rotated so students can get...

This fall, four school districts in New York will distribute 3G/Wi-Fi Kindles to students in high school English classes as part of an experiment to see whether the ereader is a viable classroom tool. The program, called the 8-Ounce Backpack Project, was funded by a foundation grant and will pay for teacher training and 84 Kindle devices, which will be loaded with reference materials as well as novels. Read the full article at the Syracuse Post-Standard. Via Seattle PI (Photo: John Berry / Syracuse Post-Standard) ...

SFGate took a look at all the ways today's student can purchase access to a textbook—buying the latest print edition, buying used or older editions, and buying or renting digital editions—and found that thanks to high pricing and inflexible rental periods, going digital is only occasionally a good solution: Each textbook will have a unique set of prices for its different versions, so it makes sense to consider e-textbook rental on a case-by-case basis. However, for the time being it appears that e-textbook rental will only save students money when having a new edition of a textbook is important, and when...

Inkling, which develops digital textbooks for the iPad, has been around for a couple of years now, but this year its been steadily building up steam (or at least cash) as it prepares to dramatically expand its offerings this fall. Earlier this year it secured funding from Pearson and McGraw-Hill, and today it announced a second round of funding from several investors. Inkling's approach is to augment textbooks with interactive, social, and annotation features, then sell them by the chapter for $3 each. The approach may or may not be cheaper--CEO Matt MacInnis says it can end up costing a...