Mark Greenfield

I was interviewed for an article for Campus Technology on the impact of the Amazon Kindle on college textbooks. The End of Textbooks? explores the pro’s and con’s of using eReader’s to replace the traditional printed college textbook.

This is a huge paradigm shift for most people, much greater than when the music industry went digital. The problem is that people think of a laptop computer when they think about eReaders and all the inherent problems with reading from a laptop. TheKindle and other eReaders solve most of those problems. Reading from a Kindle is very similar to reading from paper with excellent resolution and no backlight that causes eyestrain.

So what’s your take on the Kindle? Will it ever replace college textbooks?

Related Resources:

• Books Aren’t Dead - They’re Just Going Digital - (Newsweek Cover Story from November 2007)
• The Coming Death of Paper as an Information Storage Medium
• Steve Jobs Was Only Half-Right: People Do Read - Even Kids - They Just Do It Online
• Move Over Kindle: Here Comes the Chinese E-Book

The 2008 Horizon report was recently released and as always contains valuable information on the latest technology trends impacting college campuses. The Horizon Report is a collaboration between the New Media Consortium and the Educause Learning Initiative and identifies emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching and learning. As in previous years, the report identifies six emerging technologies that will likely enter the mainstream within three adoption horizons:

One Year or Less

• Grassroots Video
• Collaborative Webs

Two to Three Years

• Mobile Broadband
• Data Mashups

Four to Five Years

• Collective Intelligence
• Social Operating Systems

Among the critical challenges outlined in the report, one really struck a chord with me:

“It is critical that the academic community as a whole embrace the potential of technologies and practices like those described in this report. Experimentation must be encouraged and supported by policy.” (emphasis mine).

And finally, the report lists seven metatrends that extend out beyond the five year horizon:

1. Evolving approaches to communication between man and machine
2. The collective sharing and generation of knowledge
3. Computing in three dimensions
4. Connecting people via the network
5. Games as pedagogical platforms
6. The shifting of content production to users
7. The evolution of a ubiquitous platform

I was happy to see that this report maps well to my ideas about the top web trends. And be sure to check out the report’s extensive use of del.icio.us tags for additional information.

For most people, when you mention web content they automatically think of words, perhaps augmented with pictures. But with the recent growth of Rich Media, web content now includes audio, video, animation and other interactive elements. As computer performance continues to improve and broadband access becomes ubiquitous, delivering rich media via the web provides a more compelling experience for users. Witness the popularity of Podcasting (the New Oxford American Dictionary Word of the Year for 2005) and the explosive growth of Youtube.

Using Rich Media to reach millennial students is very effective. They are very comfortable with both creating and consuming all forms of rich media. Rich media also greatly improves training materials. Teaching students how to use web based tools such as web registration has always been a challenge. Using a combination of text, diagrams, and screen shots had limited effectiveness. Now we are using Adobe Captivate to create screencasts with great success.

One big challenge with Rich Media will be accessibility. As much as I like YouTube, I don’t see how someone with an auditory disability could use that site. I’m hoping that everyone involved with the tools that are used to create and use rich media will focus on improving accessibility.

Previous Top 10 Web Trends

• Web Trend #10 - The End of Print
• Web Trend #9 - Everyware
• Web Trend #8 - Virtual Reality
• Web Trend #7 - The Web as Platform
• Web Trend #6 - Syndication and the End of the Web Page Paradigm
• Web Trend # 5 - E-mail is So Dead

E-mail has been hijacked by the forces of evil. Spam and misuse have caused many people to declare e-mail bankruptcy, something that I may do in the near future. And now the millennial generation is here and they prefer to communicate through IM, text messaging and the communication tools built into social networks making e-mail almost irrelevant to students today. I know there is a problem when e-mail sent from the president at my university is automatically sent to my junk e-mail folder - by filters set up by the university.

While I’m not advocating that everyone stop using e-mail, I would recommend exploring other communications channels, especially those of you who work directly with students. The good news is that there are now numerous alternatives that can augment and even replace e-mail.

Further Reading

• Kids say e-mail is, like, soooo dead
• Report: Spam Accounts for 90-95% of All Email
• E-Mail Reply to All: ‘Leave Me Alone’
• The death of e-mail
• Email is broken
• E-Mail Is So Five Minutes Ago

Previous Top 10 Web Trends

• Web Trend #10 - The End of Print
• Web Trend #9 - Everyware
• Web Trend #8 - Virtual Reality
• Web Trend #7 - The Web as Platform
• Web Trend #6 - Syndication and the End of the Web Page Paradigm

Conceptually, most people think of the web as a collection of sites with each site containing individual pages. The page is the atom of the web, the smallest unit of the web. Sites and pages are connected by creating hyperlinks between pages. This basic paradigm has been evolving over the past few years.

Syndication - sharing content across multiple web sites - has been around for a long time. It offers many benefits including:

• Improved efficiency because content is only being produced once
• Better version control because all sites are updated simultaneously
• Mitigate the risk of inaccurate content

RSS has made syndication simple. It provides an easy way to share content and this sharing is not done at the page level, but at an even smaller level. Related sites can now be connected through syndicated RSS feeds rather than links.

RSS has enabled the growth of the read/write web. For content creators, it provides a simple standard to free your content. For content consumers, it provides an easy way to keep up with dynamic content.

A new paradigm is required that moves beyond the page. Web analytics can no longer rely on the “page view” as a basic web metric. Assistive technology needs to adapt to AJAX and other technologies that break the page paradigm. Syndication and micro-content is the future. In the words of Adam Green -

“Web content is external rather than internal. Instead of a website being a “place” where data “is” and other sites “link to”, a site is a source of data to be remixed collectively both internal and external to a given “site””.

Related Links

• Home Alone? How Content Aggregators Change Navigation and Control of Content (by Joshua Porter - from Digital Web Magazine)
• Content in Motion: What iTunes Can Teach Us About Managing Web Content
• Is Home Page Design Relevant Anymore?
• The Copyright Debate & RSS

Previous Top 10 Web Trends

• Web Trend #10 - The End of Print
• Web Trend #9 - Everyware
• Web Trend #8 - Virtual Reality
• Web Trend #7 - The Web as Platform

For many, the concept of web as platform really defines what Web 2.0 is all about. Today we now expect instant access to all of our digital information no matter where we are and what device we are using. We increasingly want to share it with others and combine it with other data in interesting ways.

We are seeing the death of the desktop. Digital information will be moving online, not locked away on some remote hard drive or server. In the near future I see myself using Zoho instead of Microsoft Office for much of my work.

The web as the platform has numerous benefits over the desktop application paradigm including:

• Central storage of data
• Easy sharing and collaboration
• Hardware and OS agnostic

I have been reinvigorated in this new world of API’s, mash ups, widgets and Office 2.0.

Further Reading

• What is Web 2.0
• The Death of the DeskTop
• From Web Page to Web Platform
• The Web is the Platform
• The State of Office 2.0 and its Future

Previous Top 10 Web Trends

• Web Trend #10 - The End of Print
• Web Trend #9 - Everyware
• Web Trend #8 - Virtual Reality

In Jason Frand’s article “The Information Age Mindset“, one of his 10 attributes is “Reality is No Longer Real.” Spend time with any teenager and you will be amazed with the amount of time they spend in virtual worlds playing massively multiplayer online role-playing games ((MMORPG). A generation who grew up with World of Warcraft are now college students and there is tremendous opportunity to engage these students in virtual worlds.

My experience has been that virtual reality is the most difficult emerging technology for college administrators to understand. Second Life has received a lot of publicity in the last year, both good and bad. While many see the value of creating online virtual tours and conducting classes, especially distance learning classes, in Second Life, they are concerned about development costs and the dark side of this environment (crime, sex, etc.). I’m hoping for the day when an open source MMORPG platform specifically targeted at higher education comes along.

Further Reading

• Education Meets Virtual Reality
• The Ultimate Distance Learning - New York Times
• Digital Life vs Life Digital: Our Inevitable Digital Future
• Teachers, college students lead a Second Life - USATODAY.com
• Educators Are Split About the Viability of Second Life - Chronicle.com

First we had software and hardware. Soon we will be entering the age of everyware. Everyware (The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing) was written by Adam Greenfield (no relation) and describes the move from the desktop computing paradigm to where the technology is embedded in our environment and becomes virtually invisible in our lives.

This idea is also referred to as the World Network. A USA Today article titled “Next big thing: The Web as your servant” detailed how the convergence of the Internet, GPS, cellular networks and RFID will make this possible. The article quoted web creator Tim Berners-Lee who said “The Web can reach its full potential only if it becomes a place where data can be shared and processed by automated tools as well as by people.” Motorola CEO Ed Zander added “The big change is going to be when the Internet follows you, not you trying to follow the Internet.”

We are now seeing the idea of everyware and the world network being implemented in interesting ways in higher ed:

• MIT has introduced iFind which allows “you and your buddies can instantaneously exchange your locations on campus, talk to users nearby, and microcoordinate more effectively.”
• Esuds is an online laundry system that gives students the ability to check the availability of washers and dryers and be notified that their laundry is finished via text message or e-mail. Google e-suds to find links to numerous colleges that are using esuds
• GPS systems are being added to campus buses and shuttles that allow their location to be tracked in real time via cellphone. I would love to see this at UB where we have two campuses and very cold and snowy winters.
• Rave Wireless has a service called Guardian that takes campus safety to the next level by allowing students to set a timer on their cell phones if they feel unsafe (i.e. if they are crossing campus alone late at night). If the student doesn’t deactivate the timer, campus police are notified with the student’s GPS location and personal profile.
• NJIT’s Smart Campus Project which will will allow NJIT students to locate their friends or find how many people are currently using the library or computer labs in real time.

This is the first in a series of posts on my top ten web trends. We will work our way from #10 down to #1.

Trend #10 is the end of print. The web has always provided many advantages over print including greater efficiency, quicker publishing cycles, wider availability, and substantial cost savings due to the elimination of print and distribution costs. That being said, most people continue to print longer web pages because of the difficulty of reading from a computer screen.

The tide is turning. E-reader technology has matured over the past few years. The Sony E-reader was introduced last year and helped revive interest in e-books. Recently Amazon unveiled the Kindle which adds internet connectivity to the equation. The cover story of the November 26, 2007 edition of Newsweek magazine is called “Books Aren’t Dead - They’re Just Going Digital”. Jeff Bezos states “Books are the last bastion of analog… Music and video have been digital for quite some time, and short-form reading has been digitized, beginning with the early web. But long form reading really hasn’t.” Bezos hopes the Kindle will be the beginning of Book 2.0. This article provides an excellent overview of the issues and impact in digitizing books.

Time will tell if the Kindle will become the IPod of reading. I’m a voracious reader, a trait not shared by a growing segment of our population. The recently released NEA report “To Read or Not to Read” reaches a simple, alarming conclusion - that Americans area reading less and their reading proficiency is declining at alarming rates, especially among teens and young adults. Maybe the Kindle can reach this generation using technology that they understand and help reverse this trend.

Related Articles

• Amazon Sets eBook World Alight with Kindle - Finally, Time For Read/Write Books!
• Envisioning the Next Chapter in Electronic Books
• NY Times publisher: Our goal is to manage the transition from print to internet
• Faculty Members Prefer Digitized Texts