Changing Times & Dr. Who

A couple of weeks ago I had "purchased" a Dr. Who comic book from Amazon (purchased, but free then). And as I was trying out such a book on my Kindle to see how well it works (and it did work fine, although the zooming took a bit of practice). It made me think of a few things, first was that the comic book was based on the last three Doctors versus the "older" Doctors. I had watched one of the older shows from the 1960's just recently with Tom Baker and do enjoy the new ones Saturdays on BBC America.

While thinking of the two and the involved plot points in the modern show reminded me of Steven Johnson's Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter. And I think that this show is another good example that the premise of that book is true. Things today are more complicated that those from that "Golden Age" of television. I think that Dr. Who is an excellent resource for comparison as it is a show that has been in broadcast for the last 50 years.

So to test this I access two of the scripts, one modern Big Bang (2010), and one older The Brain of Moribus (1963). Next I stripped everything that wasn't dialogue and did word counts. The Brain of Moribus was a multi-part episode that was shown on BBC America over three hours, and The Big Bang on the same channel was shown over one hour. Which gives the following (not counting commercials):

The Brain of Moribus: 8454 Words (3 hours) = 2818 words/hour = 46 words/min
The Big Bang: 4641 Words (1 hour) = 4641 words/hour = 85 words/min

The world has changed and us along with it. Today's students, their reading, behaviors, and such are different that previous generations, as I'm sure that those were also different from before, but lately we have been changing pretty fast. Just something to think about while reading or enjoying some TV.

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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.
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 metacognitive approach of sifting or filtering to identify the important content…

Ebooks as Textbooks Part 6 - Taking Note

The process of taking notes, makes reading that much more of an active process and will aid in comprehension and retention. The addition of your own personal notes are usually easier to understand and remember than textbook material. As a student reads the textbook, he or she may not remember all of that they read when they have finished - this is especially true of very dense texts. But, if a student reads the information and also writes down notes about what he or she is reading at the same time, then that extra step reinforces that information and improves retention. So one of the best ways to retain information you are reading it is to take notes while you are actually reading it, for print books these notes were usually written in the margins of the text and so were called margin notes.

The taking of margin notes is a strategy that focuses your attention on important information from the textbook, novels, or articles that you are reading. Because it involves tagging key words or …

Google Maps

An exciting time today, as I was riding my bike to work, I saw the Google Maps Car driving by. You may be wondering what the Google Maps car has to do with ebooks, but often books have maps and Google Books has lots of books with Google Maps developed from extracting the locations from the text. This kind of mapping got me so excited that myself and Jerome Burg wrote a book on using digital mapping with books. But the car reminded me that these maps are out there just waiting for you to start using them. For example if you go to Google Books, and you are reading Vern's Around the World in 80 Days, look in the About this Book section, and then scroll down to see if the book has a Places mentioned in this book... component.

In one class I copied the map from Google Books and then we put it on the wall, so that as we read the book, we tracked where we were in the story on the wall map. One warning though, for some reason the books with maps in Google Books seems to randomly change fr…

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