A Sad Note - the death of who was perhaps the first online librarian

A Sad Note - the death of who was perhaps the first online librarian - Michael Hart

Michael Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg and who started with ebooks by typing up the US Declaration of Independence into a computer and sharing it back in 1971, has died this week. From that first document we today have Project Gutenburgs around the world in multiple countries. Today his project, Project Gutenberg, has over 36,000 ebooks available in 60 languages. The number at PG isn't the real impact though, by his leadership in creating the free public domain online library we now actually have over five million ebooks available online.

Early this year Michael wrote: “One thing about eBooks that most people haven’t thought much is that eBooks are the very first thing that we’re all able to have as much as we want other than air.” So as you see people with Kindles, Nooks, or other e-readers you are seeing the impact today of what that first ebook created back in 1971.

So as we say goodbye to Michael Hart, we should also say thank you, you will be missed.

Comments

Auto Summarization

In dealing with textbooks and students with disabilities, one of the most common things that we would do is to get the textbook in a digital format, as an ebook. By doing this we were able to use a number of tools based on the need of the student. I've had students who could not lift their physical printed textbook, but would be able to access though a laptop installed in their electronic wheelchair, for students with vision issues we could boost the font size or use a text-to-speech tool to have the book read aloud to them. One tool that I used with a number of my students who had issues was the Auto Summarize tool in Word. The tool works well with textbook, but wouldn't work for other texts, such as novels. I used this to reduce the amount of text that they had to read, the "cognitive load" of the text, but would still enable be able to get the information. Word did a great job, and depending on the student I would reduce the text to about 66% for facts and support

Ebooks as Textbooks - Part 2 - Highlighting

Highlighting can be a very effective tool in reading and learning no matter the kind of text being read: from novels to textbooks. Most textbooks or other forms of information text will usually used text features along with graphics to help organize information presented in the text. These elements are done to help focus attention on important or key concepts and provide additional information. The text organization itself can include structural elements such as heading, subheading, index, glossary, paragraph spacing, bulleted or numbered lists, sidebars or side boxes, italics, underlines or bold for words or even sections. Graphic content can include the use of symbols, colors, illustrations, pictures, diagrams, charts, and graphs. Poor highlighting design - too much text has been highlighted. The act of highlighting is less time consuming and much easier than note-taking ( to be discussed in an upcoming posting). To be effective in highlighting it should be a kind of meta

Art Project - adding ebooks to art

I'm beginning a new project to update some classic art that involves books to incorporate ebooks. Here are the first two that I have gotten done so far: Jean-Hanore Fragonard's A Young Girl Reading (a Sony Ebook) John Singer Sargent - Simplon Pass Reading (a Nook Color), 1911

eBook News

Search This Blog