CK-12 Big Winner in CA Free Textbook Initiative
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger today released the first report of California’s free digital textbook initiative – which outlines how high school math and science textbooks submitted under the first phase of the initiative measure up against the state’s rigorous academic content standards. Of the 16 free digital textbooks for high school math and science reviewed, ten meet at least 90 percent of California’s standards. Four meet 100 percent of standards, including the CK-12 Foundation’s CK-12 Single Variable Calculus, CK-12 Trigonometry, CK-12 Chemistry and Dr. H. Jerome Keisler’s Elementary Calculus: An Infinitesimal Approach.
via Gov. Schwarzenegger Releases Free Digital Textbook Initiative Phase 1 Report .
links for 2009-08-13
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Frothy intro to Drupal 6
Hewlett Foundation Awards $1.5 Million Grant for Open Textbooks
The third and last of Monday’s news developments also comes in the digital textbook arena — but from the free, rather than for-profit, perspective. The Community College Collaborative for Open Educational Resources said the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation had given it $1.5 million in new funds to expand its work, which focuses on increasing the number of free, online textbooks and training community college instructors on how best to use such books. Its main resource, the Community College Open Textbook Project, has dozens of college members and seeks to significantly expand the number of freely available digital textbooks it makes available.
via News: Textbook Bonanza – Inside Higher Ed.
Would be really nice if CALI could come up with some grant money to fund development of our open education resources projects including eLangdell and the Legal Education Commons.
Sony Reader Goes EPUB Only
On Thursday, Sony Electronics, which sells e-book devices under the Reader brand, plans to announce that by the end of the year it will sell digital books only in the ePub format, an open standard created by a group including publishers like Random House and HarperCollins.
via Major news: Sony goes EPUB only; scraps its own format!! | TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home.
This is a big deal and puts some pressure on Amazon to open up the Kindle to more formats natively and let its ebooks onto other devices.
links for 2009-08-12
links for 2009-08-10
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Very important to note that in D6 you need to use &$form_state as the first argument in the actual form function, else it won't work. Documentation on this point is thin.
Should e-Books be Dumb?
Universalis is an e-book. It gives psalms, prayers and readings for the seven daily Hours of the Catholic Church, plus Mass readings and a couple of other goodies. These all change every day, so the table of contents is a calendar. Tap on the date you want, select an Hour, and start reading. Obviously an e-book.
The new definition of an e-book is “something that comes in an ePub file” (or .mobi, or AZW, or PDF – it doesn’t change the argument). No-one notices the change, because all e-books come as files anyway, don’t they?
No. They don’t. They can’t. Universalis is the example I know best but I’m sure it isn’t the only one.
via e-books that aren’t | TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home.
This article raises and interesting and important question. Appliances like the Kindle and the Sony e-Readers are really just substitutes for books, presenting a linear artifact in a digital form. Yet there is so much more possible that is just ignored by the Kindle and its ilk. Authors have at their finger tips great power in creating engaging interactive works that can draw a reader into the core of the story (or event, or idea). Simply dumping the latest best sellers into a locked-down markup and loading them on a screen in dazzling gray scale doesn’t really represent what e-Books should be.
For my part, I plan on providing law faculty and, later, students with a tool set in eLangdell that will allow for the creation of highly interactive course materials and case books which will not have direct print counterparts.
links for 2009-08-07
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Sugar is the desktop environment that is used for the "One Laptop per Child" (OLPC) netbooks. It can also be installed on normal computers and even run off of a USB stick (which should have at least 1GB of size). This guide shows how you can install Sugar (the Strawberry release which is based on Fedora 11) on a USB stick.
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Limits the comments number per node per user. For instance, you can set that you want to allow only 3 comments per user for story node type.
You can select on which node types the limit will apply. -
Allow administrators to optionally define Terms & Conditions for each Organic Group, and require that users agree to these conditions in order to access group content.
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Query-Based Views (Q-Views) provides the Views-like functionality of generating reports or content feeds, but starts the process with a raw SQL query. In Views, the query is constructed through setting up configuration, but in Q-Views you supply the query directly. This can be a more rapid, reasonable solution in some situations. Q-Views is very AJAX-y by default, with ajax-based pagination and searching, which also means rapid browsing through data. Views is much more mature, so it's encouraged that you use Views when you can, but Q-Views can provide a lot of functionality with low configuration overhead when you would normally build a feed or report outside of Views.