Tag: ipad

Real Reading on the Kindle

I differentiate reading for pleasure and reading for work. As an academic reading is a big part of what I do. I sit around and read stuff – books, journal articles, and some web content.

When I read for work, I am reading to understand, but I am also reading as a way to accumulate information for future use. I was never one who could remember names and date so I must generate an external record of what I have read. I must generate an external record of what I think may be helpful to me in the future. In the old days (and with me that means before the Apple II), I used to highlight everything I read and I used to create note cards. The note card would contain a brief summary and the highlighted original would offer greater detail should the comment on the note card indicate the article might be  useful. At some point, the note cards were replaced with some method for storing content on a computer. I still have digital versions of note cards I initially generated on the Apple II and the found a way to pass forward as word files over the years.

My strategy for journal articles has changed a lot. I do not really read the physical journals anymore. I have some journals dating back to when I was a junior in college (1971). I do not get out of my chair to walk across my office to my shelves anymore. I download anything I read from a journal as a pdf. This is how I use the college library – the library offers this service. I store the pdfs using a program called YEP and I annotate them using a program called Skim. I should probably describe this process – maybe a future blog.

More and more I am reading books on a device. I started to do this to see if I could. So, in exploring issues such as whether college students could actually read their textbooks from a device, I decided I should have the experience myself. Between Cindy and I we own a Kindle, iPod Touches, and iPads. I can say I have read at least one book on each. Both the Kindle and the iPad provide very acceptable reading experiences as far as I am concerned. By that I mean the visual experience of reading from the screen and my ability to read for extended periods of time are fine. What has been missing is the opportunity to take a more active approach involving highlighting, annotating AND externalizing for future use.

I realize that highlighting and annotating can be accomplished, what I was looking for was a way to generate what Skim lets me generate for pdfs – the external record. I knew there was a way to do this with the Kindle. Thanks to a post by Will Richardson I learned that the Kindle was capable of some things I had not discovered. I am describing the use of Kindle software on the iPad in this case. It turns out that the Kindle software uploads your notes and your highlights back to Amazon. I wondered how they did that popular highlights thing. Amazon must know what thousands of people have highlighted within a given book. You can access this content. The system as is does not provide a way to download this content, but you can save the web page as a text file. This is not a perfect system, but it works.

Kindle highlights and notes can be found at http://kindle.amazon.com/your_highlights . You log in and you should see your collection of books and related notes.

It did occur to me that there is some danger here. You may not like Amazon storing this content. Amazon may not like you downloading the content as I have described. I have no idea if I could highlight and download an entire book. I have no interest in doing that, but it did occur to me that Amazon should probably limit the amount of highlighted text that can be stored.

It turns out I prefer the iPad to the Kindle for this form of active reading. I find the process of selecting chunks of text a bit cumbersome, but I am getting better at it. The iPad seems never to know quite what I intend – when I am selecting text and when I want to highlight the text selected seems to be difficult for the device to differentiate.

Clearly what I am describing here may be different from what you think of when considering how you read a book. Perhaps reading as research might be a way to label what I have described here. I expect that we will all be looking for ways to use the advantages of technology in solving our personal information problem solving tasks. More and more I am thinking in terms of work flow and how to take ideas from what I read and make them my own.

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iPad Production

I have owned my own iPad now for a few days. Cindy uses her iPad a great deal and I spent time working on her machine, but the experience is a little different when you develop your own collection of apps.

This is definitely a great media consumption device. The experience of browsing, viewing images, reading and responding to email is as good as and probably better than a laptop.

What others want to know is how effectively can you produce content on the device. I think the answer depends on the task and the app. I have no concern with entering text from the on-screen keyboard. I would not want to enter thousands of words or write for hours, but the speed and accuracy are very acceptable. I have used Office2 HD to connect to Google docs. I had some initial concerns that were legit, but a software fix appears to have corrected the initial problems I was having. I must admit that I would be a little nervous working on a long document – it does not seem that this app automatically saves work in progress and this bothers me a bit because weird things seem to happen when I wonder around the a device and do not concentrate on a task for an extended period of time.

It also seems that must work in HTML mode rather than what some of my apps call visual (wysiwyg). I don’t know if this is the result of some technical limitation. The app I am using to generate this post for my wordpress blog is a good example. It appears I would have to code for external links. The capacity of apps to select and then apply a tag or function to the selected text must be a challenge to integrate when creating apps.

I think one of the general problems with apps at this point is that there is no manual and it is not obvious how things work. It turns out the word press app offers a way to generate the code for a link, but you trigger the window to enter the link name and URL by entering http: Does this seem intuitive?

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Reading from various devices (including the book)

A recent comment by researcher Jakob Nielson is likely to generate a good deal of discussion among bloggers (the MacWorld version, Nielson post) and will likely generate some studies from graduate students. The topic of whether a reader benefits equally from processing content presented as a book, on a Kindle, or on an iPad certainly deserves some attention. The short version of the results – the participants read more quickly from a standard book.

Researchers are trained to be critical in considering the methodology of the research they review. We ask questions – do the results follow from the method, how might the method deliver results that could be misinterpreted, etc.

Some initial reactions of this critical nature:

Does the reporting focus on speed and not comprehension reveal anything of importance? Reading speed is quite important because of working memory limits, but the bottom line is really comprehension. The MacWorld version comments that participants “were measured for their reading speeds and story comprehension”, but I found only the data on speed were reported there. The Nielson summary indicates “Our test participants got almost all the questions right, regardless of device, so we won’t analyze this data further here.” Clearly more sophisticated assessment of comprehension is needed. It seems strange to me that a 11% deficit in speed would not be accompanied by a decline in comprehension. Perhaps excluding less capable readers was responsible for the failure to demonstrate an impact on comprehension.

What about an experience bias? What level of experience did participants have with the devices (other than the book)? Do experienced e-book users function at a higher reading rate?

I would regard a reading rate that is nearly 11% slower as a significant concern (the type of concern my wife expresses because I drive 65 on Interstates that allow 75) because time certainly matters in education. I am guessing we will see more on this topic.

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SoundPaper

Offering comment or tutorials for iPad apps would be almost too easy. One could offer several such posts a week for about as long as you could stay motivated. I don’t own an iPad, but I can borrow Cindy’s iPad and I will offer an occasional post when an app seems unique and relevant to my interests.

One of the research topics I pursue concerns college study note taking and how note taking and note using can be improved with technology. About 6 months ago, I described a laptop program (Pear Note) that allowed note taking and simultaneously recorded audio. The idea is that the user would record to a lecture or presentation and simultaneously take notes. The unique feature was the the text notes were linked to the audio. So, the user could click on a location with the text and hear the corresponding audio. In other words, the program time stamped the audio each time the user entered a new segment of text. If the value of this is approach is not apparent, consider that a student probably does not want to listen to a lecture she has already heard repeatedly. What she wants to hear is the parts of the lecture that correspond to a section of notes that do not make sense.

It turns out there are similar apps for the Ipad. SoundPaper does exactly the same thing.

In addition, once the presentation is completed the user can email the audio and text to an email account. I translated the audio I recorded (generated by playing a segment of a recorded lecture from this semester through my desktop machine) from the mpeg4 format to mp3 format to insert below.

Demonstration_1

BTW – the clicks you sometimes hear results from my keyboarding. Actually, I am not certain what you call it when you use the screen keyboard.

This app on and iPad would seem quite useful for college students. The cost – $5.

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Office2 HD

I noticed today that this product has been updated (Apr. 22). I downloaded the upgrade and tried for about 30 minutes the routine that had produced corrupted files previously. At this point I have been unable to recreate the same problem so I am optimistic that the problem has been fixed. The web site did indicate that the file corruption problem had been corrected in the update.

My post on my difficulties using the Office2 Pro app to edit Google docs has attracted quite a few hits. My experience appears to be in contradiction to the experience of others. I feel bad because my report documents the struggles I have had attempting to get this app to work without success and I am unable to explain why others are not experiencing the same problem. I want people to know I have experimented with this app extensively as late as last evening and I continue to have the same problem. The files are somehow corrupted and the app then freezes. The problem seems “random” and as a programmer these are the kinds of bugs that are most frustrating. It may be something as simple as an upload problem (to Google docs) that fails to complete some kind of process within a certain time period leaving the Google doc in a flawed state. My experience has been that if I continue to edit and save a doc to Google docs this will eventually happen. All I can say is that the app/Google doc combination is too iffy for me to trust and if you are using Google docs for “work” I am urging caution.

I have explored other options of this app and have stored documents in my mobileme account. I have done this without problems, but doubt this is a serious solution for many people.

I have submitted my bug report to the company and this morning received the following reply:

The corruption of Google Docs documents is a result of something that Google changed in the last few days that highlighted an incompatibility with the way we write DOC files and the way Google interprets them. We’ve found a solution however and have already submitted it to Apple, so we expect it to be available in a few days time. For more information, including how to recover documents, please see http://www.bytesquared.com/products/office/ipad/google_corruption.asp

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Disregard previous post – there may be hope

I have edited this post multiple times as my experiences with this product and the upgrade to the product have resulted in different impressions.

I noticed today that this product has been updated (Apr. 22). I downloaded the upgrade and tried for about 30 minutes the routine that had produced corrupted files previously. At this point I have been unable to recreate the same problem so I am optimistic that the problem has been fixed. The web site did indicate that the file corruption problem had been corrected in the update.

I am rescinding my endorsement of this product. I am experiencing consistent problems when resaving documents after an initial upload. This issue may be something I am doing wrong, but it seems consistent and I would not want to encourage purchasing of this product until I can figure this out. (Apr. 11). The image below illustrates the problem. My initial text (This seems to work.) seems ironic when saved as part of attempting to add new text to the file. The additional characters seem to be the type of content you see when opening a word processor generated RTF file with a text editor.

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Sooner or later, the answer always seems to appear.

Disregard my previous post indicating you could not edit Google docs from the iPad. A post from from jkontherun described the Office2 Pro app – for editing Google docs and other sources. Works fine.

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