Personanondata has a look at a recent legal decision in Canada’s Supreme Court concerning “fair dealing” (what we call “fair use”) as it applied to music and educational material—similar to the recent Georgia University ruling in the US. One particular point the judge made is that it’s unrealistic to expect universities to purchase entire copies of textbooks to provide to students if they only needed a small portion of the entire work. He also suggested that claims of financial harm from professors photocopying textbooks was spurious, and that many other factors could affect publishers’ income to a greater...

Are you ready for your slice of Raspberry Pi? TechCrunch reports that electronics distributor Allied Electronics is now taking orders for the $35 computer appliance, with the caveat that it will be at least 10-12 weeks before it is actually able to ship them. And you can order more than just the device itself; Allied’s order page has a list of available accessories including enclosures, SD cards, keyboards, mice, and an AC adapter. I’m probably going to hold off on ordering it until the ship time is a little less (and I have a little more money)...

The Innovative Educator has a fairly long blog post proposing a number of ways that schools could use students’ cell phones to increase engagement with reading and writing in the classroom. The piece starts with the startling assertion that texting actually helps students’ grasp of grammar, and goes on to list some interesting ideas for ways cell phones could help kids learn. Some of them have to do with using phones to text notes or journals to themselves, or send text messages to teachers so they can offer feedback without fear of being embarrassed in front of their peers....

Caroline Vanderlip, CEO of SharedBook, has an opinion piece on Inside Higher Ed stating that “going digital” is not a panacea that will automatically bring about lower prices for textbooks. Much as publishers of mass market fiction have been saying, if the costs of producing the material remain the same, the price of the textbook will stay about the same whether the distribution method is digital or electronic. And OER (open educational resources” material will not necessarily change this either, at least for a while—there just isn’t very much of it yet. Vanderlip writes that the best way of...

It seems like Intel keeps jumping on new computing platform bandwagons. When the OLPC was getting so much attention, Intel introduced the Classmate—and now it seems that Intel is working on making its own budget pint-sized box similar to the education-focused Raspberry Pi. Called the Next Unit of Computing (NUC), this 10cm x 10cm computer will probably cost somewhat more than the Pi, but still “not be in the hundreds and thousands range” according to Intel senior product marketing manager Fred Birang. With Core i3 and i5 processors, will also be rather more powerful than the Pi’s 700 MHz ARM....

From the press release (blockquotes omitted): International education cloud company AcrossWorld partners with Delhi-based Go-Tech to launch 7” android touchscreen tablet with free access to cloud-based open educational resources and more AcrossWorld Education, the global SaaS company that developed the world’s first cloud-based platform to transform the learning process by enabling K-12 schools, colleges and universities around the world access open educational resources, has now announced that it will launch in India an advanced touch-screen tablet PC, called ATab, for just Rs.5000/- in partnership with Delhi-based Go-Tech. The ATab will be available in India from second week of...

Remember that $35 tablet from India? Surprise surprise: it hasn’t been doing so well. ZDNet Asia reports that India’s Union Human Resource Development Ministry is looking into upgrading the specifications for the tablet, and also bumping the price to $50. It turns out that users were less than impressed by the $35 device, finding it too slow, its battery life too short, and its resistive touchscreen too hard to use. DataWind, the company that was manufacturing the device, had been supposed to make over a million units, but only 10,000 have been shipped since October. The company complains that...

On FutureBook, Shane Rae wonders if the education publishing industry is failing to innovate as it should. He describes the legacy model of education publishing, which involves prototyping, trial, feedback, and development to make sure that what gets published is completely finished before it sees print or CD-ROM, forms of media with a long shelf-life. The problem Rae sees is that this often leads to trying to match competitors’ products rather than better them—creating the thing that users want now, rather than what they might want down the road. Now, in the age of online applications...

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...