Beyond black and white for eReaders? March 17, 2010

Following on to my notes about the iPad, there was a recent article in the IEEE Spectrum magazine about new technologies for the displays for future eReader devices. Noting in a separate commentary that the “perfect” display is always 10 years away, it’s still true that displays continue to get incrementally better.

The iPad’s display is a standard LCD – nothing you haven’t seen before, though of course not in this particular form-factor. Great for some things, like web browsing and perhaps (as others have noted) being the Internet access device that you could hang on the wall, or readily teach technophobes how to use. But for other things, like reading a book, that LCD is alleged to be somewhat hard on the eyes.

Enter the displays like the Amazon Kindle, Barnes and Noble Nook, and Sony eReader, made by a company called eInk. Very low power (for long battery life), high contrast display readable in bright light, and reportedly much easier on the eyes. But, there’s no color – making for a very monochrome view of the world.

Now, reportedly, eInk is preparing to ship its first “newspaper-grade” color displays for eBook reader makers to start integrating. Perhaps next year, we’ll have access to those devices – and then a couple of years later, to “magazine quality” color. All steps in the right direction, waiting for those early adopters to buy them, start to build volume in the market, and drive the price down for those of us who are later in the adoption curve.

Such devices may give new life to newspapers and magazines, getting folks to pull their content “on the fly” whenever they want it, wherever they want it – so they’re no longer tied to reading at a laptop (inconvenient and awkward) or paper (for better or worse, folks seem to be turning away from this medium).

Should be an exciting few years!

Taxonomy for Student Engagement with Technology March 4, 2010

A two-day series of meetings on mobile technology for learning led to the thought that perhaps there might be a taxonomy for engagement with technology for learning. Technologies involved in this discussion included things like mobile phones, e-Readers, Flip video cameras, etc. The motivation for the taxonomy was the notion that some types of interactions with these devices are inherently fairly simple – sending a text message, taking a picture, and the like. Other interactions can be far more complex – taking a picture, uploading it to a PC, uploading from there to a sharing site, and then integrating it into an essay or presentation, augmented with location information about where the picture was taken.

As one ascends this engagement taxonomy (and perhaps it’s not a straight line of ascent), things become more complex and perhaps more error-prone, and also perhaps harder for both faculty and students to manage. Hence, if we can provide a structure with which to think about the ways we want to engage our students with technology, we might be able to help both faculty and students to readily gauge how complex these interactions might be.

As a first-order view of the taxonomy, descending from most complex to least complex (or most engaging to least engaging), I propose this structure, and would welcome your feedback:

  • Integration (taking content from multiple mobile sources and combining it in unique ways or via multiple tools)
  • Collaboration (sharing content with others; using content from others)
  • Publication (making the created content available to some audience)
  • Creation (taking pictures, capturing video, writing text or messages)
  • Consumption (viewing content created by others)
  • No interaction

This is just a first draft, and may go no further. If you have comments on it, I’d welcome them – thanks in advance!