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If only ….
@wood
@Wood is Gary Atwood - Reference Librarian, tech enthusiast, and relatively nice guy.
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ebrary + app = meh
Wouldn’t it be great if you could look up and read books from ebrary on your iPhone/iPad? Well, maybe, but I doubt that a lot of people are going to find out given how many steps it takes to their new app working.
Ask anyone who knows me and they will confirm that I’m not too good at reading directions so I’m more than willing to admit that another, more patient, person probably won’t run into all of the issues that I did, but I was just stunned at everything I had to do. Downloading the app was no problem, but then I couldn’t log in. Apparently, we don’t have a “standard” ebrary sign in, but rather a “custom” sign in, which meant that I had to sign in via Facebook. So off I went to Facebook to connect the two (supposedly, all your ebrary activity doesn’t show on FB) and then I tried to log in again. This time, I discovered that I needed an Adobe ID. What’s that? On the surface, it just looks like a marketing gimmick to me, but I guess I need it in order to download and read Adobe PDFs in ebrary. So, off I went to Adobe to create that. Now I can get connected right? Wrong. Something wasn’t syncing right so I backed all the way out of everything and then tried signing in again. Success (finally, I’m sure all of my library patrons will jump through all of these hoops as well).
Now that I’m connected, how does it work? Actually, not too bad. I’m trying it out on an iPhone, which I’m sure detracts from the experience a little, but my searches seemed to go through pretty quickly and books seemed to open right up. I need to play with it more to really get a sense of how it works in a more real world situation.
BTW, you can find all of the support posts on the app here. Image credit goes to ebrary and Apple.
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Information Overload?
Selection of tweets related to Wikipedia’s blackout in protest of SOPA. As we all predicted, there were people who needed to do “research” that were shocked to find Wikipedia blacked out. I’m hoping they took the time to look it up, presumably on Wikipedia the next day, and find out what the fuss was all about.
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Apple's education event is getting seriously over-hyped
As a Mac user, I am used to the hype that comes with a big Apple announcement. Apple, in fact, carefully orchestrates these events to generate hype, but the older I get the more I’m starting to think that this isn’t always such a good thing. As this article points out (assuming that it’s correct), there is a lot of misinformation pumped out by the media - all seemingly done in a rush to be first with news. Consumers aren’t well served by this and I don’t think that Apple is either. Whatever is announced this Thursday, you can bet that there will be a bunch of stories lamenting how the actual product or service or whatever Apple announces doesn’t live up to the hype. Speculating about the upcoming announcement is fun, but going crazy about it just leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth.
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ScribblePress - Imagine Create Publish
This is awesome! Imagine kids doing a little research on something and then using it to create their own book!
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Free Technology for Teachers: An Excellent Set of Mobile Learning Activities
Richard Byrne’s blog is an awesome source for things related to education and technology and this ebook is no exception. I’m looking forward to reading it soon!
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January Apple event to focus on two ‘large projects’ relating to education, iTunes
Man, it didn’t take long for the first media freak out over an Apple announcement to hit.
On a more serious note, though, it will very interesting to see if this announcement does have something to do with iTunes and education. It certainly seems like it’s long overdue for Apple to reassert itself in this sector.
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The World of Social Media 2011 - VideoInfographs.com (by videoinfographs)
