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Teeny Tiny Textbooks

This just released by CourseSmart: an iPhone app for reading textbooks in class and on the go. Pearson Education is one of the many (currently 12) large publishers that partners with CourseSmart to make textbooks available for students and instructors to review and use in online formats, and now a free iPhone/iPod Touch application will allow the following features (from www.coursesmart.com):

eTextbooks for the iPhone gives users many unique eTextbook features:

• Enables students to easily browse, search and read thousands of textbooks from their iPhone or iPod Touch.
• Preserves the carefully laid out pages giving students quick and easy access to not only the full text but essential content such as diagrams, illustrations, and charts in the palm of their hands.
• Allows students to “stack” all of their textbooks in “My eTextbooks,” a personal, online library. 
• Students can search for a topic within a single book or across their entire eTextbook stack; view text notes; access the table of contents; zoom in on text, graphs, and scroll through or jump to individual pages.

CourseSmart has (or will have soon) an information page up on their website at www.coursesmart.com/go/iphone.

Has anyone had success with CourseSmart availability in the past? Will your students be likely to embrace textbook access on smartphones like the iPhone, Blackberry, or Pre? How have you integrated student smartphones into the class – or is it still possible to request that students shut them off when they enter the room?

Hello from WPA!

Hi everyone, I’m currently in beautiful Minneapolis attending the Council of Writing Program Administrators meeting. We’ve got a Pearson booth set up and are meeting and chatting with a number of great instructors and professors and admins. Thanks to everyone who stopped by! I’m also collecting a number of new short video clips about being a WPA and the one piece of advice that would help a new or incoming WPA – keep an eye out for them on CompPro. Also, check out the eLectures section for new contributions!

In the News: Trends & Teaching

One of our professional resources, Trends & Teaching in Composition: A Professional Development DVD was reviewed in the Spring 2009 issue of Kairos. It’s a pretty thorough group review by a number of contributors, and you can page through it here. If you’re unfamiliar with Kairos (“A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy”) you may want to browse through the rest of the site as well. You can see more about the DVD in question back at CompPro, and it is available for purchase at www.mypearsonstore.com.

eLectures at WPA – Call for Submissions

Will you be attending WPA next month in Minneapolis? Do you have something interesting to say about teaching, or composition, or trends? (Of course you do – that’s why you’re here, isn’t it?) We’ll be taping some additional eLectures for CompPro at the conference on July 16th, and we’d love to hear from you. If you have an idea in mind, mention it in the comments below and we’ll get in touch to talk further. Looking forward to hearing from you!

Tweet a Text

Here’s a fun project being run by one of our UK sister companies. They’re encouraging students to condense a favorite ‘set text’ (Pride&Prejudice, Animal Farm, Hamlet) into the 140 characters of Twitter. This has been getting some press recently, and I’m glad to see someone putting it to use! Is this something that might work in a Comp class? The link to the contest is below, and it’s only running for this semester. If you’d like to set up a contest for your class, let us know!

Pearson UK: Tweet your set text and win!

A similar project was put together by Perseus Books at Book Expo America in NYC a few months ago. Using Twitter (and Facebook and good old email) they invited authors (‘imposters’) from across the world to submit the first sentence of a sequel to their favorite book. In 48 hours they took the submissions and ran through the entire publishing process, concluding with a completed book in various forms (print, electronic, audio, etc.) Pretty cool, huh? You can read more about it here or check out the book here. What do you think?

I Shmoop, you Shmoop

Here’s a quick link to a press release from Shmoop, which bills itself as “an online study guide for English Literature, Poems and American History. . . a perfect aid for students and teachers seeking guidance with advance study, essays and writing papers.” As of this month and in light of Gov. Schwarzenegger’s call to replace all California textbooks with digital copies, Shmoop is promoting the free titles available on its website. I wonder how useful these are and what the content is like. . . anyone have any experience with these?

Twitter in the Classroom

Keeping with the theme of current trends, let’s talk about Twitter for a second (no, don’t groan, it’ll be fun!) I still come down on the “it’s a fad” side of the fence on this, but some people are putting Twitter to a very real use in the classroom. For example, Monica Rankin, a History Professor at UT Dallas, is profiled in this piece from ReadWriteWeb (www.readwriteweb.com) and is described as using Twitter to gather “comments, questions, and feedback” from students during class. You can read the article here. What do you think about using Twitter (or for that matter, any IM or social networking forum) in class, especially in large first-year courses? Has anyone had any success with this?

The Great eBook Debate

What can I say about eBooks that hasn’t been said already? We all know they’re a work in progress, and that they’re probably the future of both publishing and education (at least the immediate future), and that someone’s going to come up with a really brilliant idea for content and delivery that will make us all wish we’d thought of it first. Anyway, here’s an excerpt from an article at the Chronicle of Higher Education (http://chronicle.com) discussing some of the current pros and cons involved in switching campuses over to entirely digital textbooks:

“Northwest Missouri State University nearly became the first public
university to deliver all of its textbooks electronically. Last year the
institution’s tech-happy president, Dean L. Hubbard, bought a Kindle, Amazon’s
e-book reading device, and liked it so much that he wanted to give every
incoming student one. The university already runs an unusual textbook-rental
program that buys thousands of printed books for students who pay a flat,
per-credit fee. Mr. Hubbard saw in the gadget a way to drastically cut the
rental program’s annual $800,000 price tag, since e-books generally cost half
the price of printed textbooks.

Then the university ran a pilot study with the Sony Reader, a device
much like the Kindle (Sony was more responsive to the university’s calls than
Amazon was). University officials learned some sobering lessons about electronic
books. Students who got the machines quickly asked for their printed books back
because it was so awkward to navigate inside the e-books (though a newer version
of the device works more gracefully). . .”

Read more from the article here. What do you think about the switch to digital content? Are we waiting on a better reader (Kindle, Sony, Cool-er) or is it all about the pricing? Are you considering offering eBooks as an option for your courses and if so, how?

Your Favorite Blogs

Do you know a good resource for reading and learning about teaching composition? Teaching in general? New learning techniques? Mention it in the comments below and we’ll add it to our blogroll. Thanks for your input!