The affordable, university-friendly reader ebook reader may be just around the corner

So far, professors and students who wanted to save on their printing whilst not hurting their eyes reading from monitors all day had two options, one high end and the other low end. The high end one involved dishing out a whoping for an IREX 1000, which comes with an extra large 10.2 inch display. Great for those bigger Pdfs and a very nice design, but the target audience was really business professionals. Very hard to convince my students to put more money into what is in the end just a spin on a technology that has been around for thousands of years than most would put in their laptop (although arguably they would save money on the long run). The low end alternative was to go for one of the now many mass-market ebook readers. The problem with those is that they are really made with paperbacks in mind, not academic books, textbooks or articles. Reducing these to show on a 6 inch screen (as in the Kindle) made for very cramped reading.

It now seems that at last a new generation of ebook readers is about to emerge that targets among others this huge intermediary academic market. Both Irex's DR 800 and Plastic Logic's QUE have considerable promise. The QUE has an 8.5 x 11 inch screen, whilst the DR800 boast an 8.1 diagonal. The QUE has a gesture based interface, whilst the DR800 works with a stylus. Both are clearly Pdf friendly, and based on open platforms. Both have wired and wireless capability. The QUE is scheduled to premiere in Vegas on January 2010, whilst the DR800 should be out before Christmas. The QUE is set to be a little cheaper (around 300$) than the DR800 (around 400$), but both are below one psychological threshold (500$) and the QUE at least is just at what the industry sees as the key threshold (300).

By the time these start to appear in the classroom, I suspect it will not be very long before profs and students alike embrace them. I have made the case here before, but students are tired of carrying around bags full of paper, and both profs and students wary of the waste involved in printing thousands of pages a year. There may be some interesting pedagogical effets as well. Right now, a lot of the readings that I or my students do tends to be on the computer. But the computer is a particularly bad place to read, and not only because it is chronically bad for the eyes, not to mention the back. The problem with reading on the computer is that it is the equivalent of reading in a crowded and very distracting room. One is at the mercy of email and chat notifications and the constant temptation of looking things up on the internet. As a result, the quality of our reading experience has gone down drastically. It is urgent for universities to reinvent the act of reading as an act that requires exclusive attention and is not constantly interrupted by the demands of the digital world. As far as I can see, decently priced, highly portable epaper reading devices will create more opportunities for us to detach our reading experience from the computer, consciously decide what we actually want to read and what we can just skim through (because of the decision about what has to be downloaded). It will, on the long run, make for a more balanced digital academic learning experience. Therein lies the simple beauty of reinventing paper.

My first Skype conference

A few months ago, I participated in a conference for the first time via Skype. I definitely wanted to go, but it turned out to be too complicated and costly. I was going to cancel despite having prepared a paper, until I suggested the possibility to the organizer who kindly accepted. This was as new to the host as it was to me, but we decided to give it a try. The conference was an all day event. I was up very early because of the time difference, so we could do a sound and image check with the technician. Set up was easy, and as the conference began (this was a workshop type of event), I was introduced to the other participants as someone who was going to be in the room virtually. Eventually, my turn came, and I did my presentation as best as I could from my office desk with my image projected on a screen via videoprojector (a little Orwellian, maybe).
Overall, this was clearly a mixed experience, although I'm glad I tried it, and got many things out of the conference.

On the good side:

• At least I diid not miss out completely. I could hear other participants loud and clear, and got a clear sense of where debates were going. I almost did not miss a thing.
• The other participants heard my paper and I probably managed to get a few ideas accross

The cons, however, are quite many:

• I was there but I wasn't there. It's not just that I did not get to discover Boulder, Colorado, it's that I essentially missed on all of the things that make conferences interesting and fun. By that I mean the sheer pleasure of meeting colleagues, interacting with them, and learning about their work. Maybe a slightly different configuration could have yielded more in that respect, but I can't imagine the participants carrying the laptop around with them during coffee breaks just to keep me in the loop. They didn't and I don't blame them. Maybe one day if handheld devices can carry a clear videoconferencing signal, but even then.
• There is another problem to not being present, which is attention deficit. Here I was, watching a conference all day, but from the privacy of my office and, subsequently, home. The distractions were many, and it wasn't as if anyone at the conference would have noticed (I suspect after a while the screen saver turned on, and I was just drowned in an aquarium of slow moving sea creatures). It's harder to be distracted at a conference where you will at least occasionally make eye contact with the speaker.
• There were several little technical problems, which turned out to be quite fundamental. One of them is of course that the camera at the conference was static. This was especially frustrating during question and answer sessions, sort of like wearing a virtual corset since I could not look around and see who was asking the questions. That deprives you of a lot of contextuality and understanding of the dynamics at stake. I know logitech has a camera that will track sound or movement, but I think the ideal would be for remotely controlled cameras (after all, I want to be doing exactly what I would normally be doing in a conference which is to gaze around freedly). This sounds really simple, but a thorough Google search yielded no results, so I'm assuming the product doesn't exist, at least not in a mass produced and commercially available way.
• After long periods, Skype will often stop. That created some minor awkwardness. Should I ring into the conference to tell them that I have been disconnected and ask them to accept our video conversation? Is the sound on and will I interrupt the speaker? Then there is the complex etiquette of not signalling that you have been cut off and waiting for someone to realize that is the case. Will people think that I was not interested in listening in the first place, that I was in fact quite happy to be disconnected? I think these questions of virtual etiquette still require some substantial thought.

Anyhow, to conclude, I was reasonably happy with the experience and I would do it again if this was a conference I really wanted to attend but couldn't. However, and quite predictably, this is really no substitute for human presence at this stage, and in fact doesn't come close to a proper conference experience.

More on the backchannel

I have been asked by readers recently what I actually use for a backchannel. In the spirit of keeping it simple, I have found that todaysmeet is probably the simplest tool of its kind at present, although no doubt there is room for improvement. The beauty of todaysmeet is you can set it up in as many seconds as it takes you to type the name you want to give to the "room" where your students will "meet". You do not have to signup or login, nor do they. The room will self-destruct at the time you decide (which can be quite long). All you need to do in class (or before) is communicate the URL to your students. You can also embed todaysmeet in a powerpoint presentation, for example by downloading this little app.

I know that Twitter has fast emerged as a favorite for backchannelling. The only problem I see with using Twitter is that you do make the content of the backchannel accessible to the whole world (potentially, not that it would make much sense to outsiders, or be of much interest). I'm not in principle against knocking down the class walls, but this is not necessarily something everyone wants to do. Let's say that todaysmeet provides you with a modicum of virtual privacy...