Month: October 2011

Recognizing the divide

Internet content related to topics that interest me seem to surface in cycles. Sometimes I try to figure our why and sometimes I don’t. The digital divide seems to be trending at the moment. I think this is reactionary – other problems dominate the news and then advocates remind us that some of cuts involved programs that helped people needing help. This is only waste in the way some folks think about government spending.

So, here are some of the sources you might explore.
1) Nice overview from Edutopia – I am likely to use this as a source for other sources sometime down the road. My present annoyance is the short sightedness of the BYOD concept.

 

2) This from the Digital Divide Initiative (new to me). An attempt to explain the long term cost of the digital divide (again the way we address immediate problems keeps setting us back in meeting long term needs). Included are data from some states (Minnesota was the only regional state for me).

3) Finally, there was a recent report from Common Sense media regarding the “screen time” of children before the age of 8. Of course, the topic of screen time goes both ways with both concerns and educational benefits. The report devoted a section to inequities. Check the contrast total media use and technology use by income (you have to explore several sections) – sad – too much passive and not enough active.

OK – there you have it, reading assignments from the “need to share” perspective. Taxes can be good – someone needs to care.

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Highlighting

I have always highlighted the content I read and I have always been interested in highlighting. Way back when, I even tried to do research on highlighting. I have been more successful in publishing studies related to note-taking, but highlighting has many similar characteristics.

Recently, I have found the public highlighting feature of the Kindle app quite interesting. If you turn this service on, Kindle will show you the most frequently highlighted passages in a book. Wouldn’t this kind of feature be of value to students?  What if a similar feature could be enabled for digital textbooks and students could see what other students highlighted and annotated.

It turns out that a service something like this exists. There have been similar ideas (e.g, sidewiki – just dropped by Google I think). Highlighter.com is closer to what I have in mind and offers a service involving “social” highlighting. I am not completely satisfied with the way this works (if you highlight a page, your highlights should be visible the next time you visit), but the concept of group highlighting is being explored and you can access your previous highlights in another way.

A reality check – social highlighting requires the cooperation of the author. I can see both sides of this issue. I guess as an author I would want to have some control when the capabilities of the services allow content to be moved (which is different than taking a collaborator to a site and having previous highlights be visible). I am never certain of the limits. For example, if I highlight an entire chapter on the Kindle will the online page showing my highlights now contain a digital version of that chapter for me to take?

As an author wanting to make highlighting.com available for your content, you have to add a short script to the html above the </body> tag. This will probably scare some people away.

I have added the script to a sequence of web pages I wrote about online safety and responsibility. You can give the highlighting service a try if you are interested. Highlight a section of text and a miniature menu will appear near the content. Also look in the upper right-hand corner of the browser window for a menu that allows access to Highlighter.com.

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