‘The Power of Social Reading’: Success story from rural New York school district
“The idea was simple, re-introduce reading to students as a social activity by providing them an online space where they could review books and share their thoughts with teachers and peers. To accomplish this, we built a book review site using the powerful open source content management system, Drupal.” - Christopher Harris in Infomancy.
The TeleRead take: Alexander Central Schools, a rural system in Western New York state, used Drupal’s book review module. Perhaps people there could experiment with OSoft’s dotReader, which is open source, lets comments be appear in books, and has a Drupal creation module (not the same as the book review module). Meanwhile, here are more details from Chris, director of the district’s library system–which just might be a role model in certain respects for the One Laptop Per Child Project:
“Over the course of this pilot year, the roughly 60 students in the Alexander 6th grade (the single pilot grade) submitted almost 600 book reviews! While some teachers adopted the book review site and used it for a class assignment as a way to track reading (there is a 25 book a year requirement in NY state), most of the reviews came from students who just loved the new system. We actually ran into some backup issues because the site was unable to lock the database for copying at 1:00 a.m. as there were students writing book reviews at that time.
“So, what made this project successful? One of the biggest factors for success is the excellent librarian at Alexander (K-12), Kristie Miller. In addition to the book review site, Kristie Miller developed a reward and recognition system that highlighted successful readers and reviewers. Based on reading habits, students would be welcomed to participate in a bi-weekly button ceremony. Like reality TV shows, who know that tapping into the primal power of ceremonies evokes an instinctual reaction in our sub-conscious brains, the libraries button ceremonies turned small, homemade buttons with yellow and green geometric shapes into the most desirable object in the school. One of the biggest attractions was that in this combined building with Middle and High Schools, only the 6th graders could earn this buttons. Even seniors were quite jealous, and ended up having to barter with 6th graders as the only way to get a button. Talk about placing value on reading!”
Notice? This system could work with e-books, p-books or a mix. What matters less than the medium is to get the students reading, period.
Related: School Library: A Conversation with Christopher Harris, in ALA Tech Source, the source of the photo.
June 5th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
It would be interesting to know why the school decided setting up their own site versus using some already available book review site?
Is that the sense of control and ownership?
Would there be benefits of rather joining a bigger site - such as discovering new books and “reading pals”?
clarification:
the Drupal book review module is totally different from the dotReader export module. The latter is useful if you are using Drupal’s collaborative book authoring module (pretty close to a wiki) and want to export the book into dotReader format.
June 5th, 2007 at 12:46 pm
Hi, Tamas. Never said the dotReader creation module and the review module were the same. dotReader is significant in that you can embed comments in books. I’ll tweak the post to include that directly, in case others are confused. As for a central review site, the district probably wanted local control—in terms of which reviews the kids could see; that’s my guess. The idea is to keep things local. Thanks. David
June 5th, 2007 at 1:23 pm
Hi David!
re: comments in books
this feature is appearing in most reading platforms, not only dotReader.
Sophie and Adobe PDF also supports this feature.
Unfortunatelly this is something that the IDPF failed to standardize in their new .epub standard.
re:control
Bigger sites can provide ways to form smaller groups.
I don’t know if any book review site does this…
Though I understand the ease and the benefits of setting up a small independent review site - in this case for educational puposes - I think isolation is not the way to go.
Maybe microformats (which if I remember corretly the book-review module supports) and one day semantic web can provide seemless integration of these kind of “islands of information”.
June 5th, 2007 at 1:40 pm
The others support annotations, Tamas, but dotReader works with Drupal-based creation tools—the reason I focused on it. Sophie and Adobe have their own advantages in various situations. But (1) Sophie isn’t as far along as dotReader (even though dotReader isn’t there yet either). (2) Adobe software isn’t open source, which I suspect is Chris’s preference.
Great observation re the IDPF standard. Major flaw! And this on top of lack of certainty over whether there’ll be DRM interoperability in the near future! One more reason for Jon Noring to comment on the IDPF standard. OpenReader was supposed to watch out for such things.
Agree with you on the limits of local sites. But I suspect they’re more interested in local interaction right now. Best approach would be options.
Thanks,
David
June 5th, 2007 at 2:08 pm
Excuse me… I have to strongly disagree about your comparision of Sophie, dotReader and Adobe PDF.
dotReader content creation is non-existent. Their module only packages what Drupal’s built in book creation module spits out. And that module is far from perfect.
You’re better off using Google Docs or ThinkFree for collaborative web-based authoring, saving the files in RTF format and using Sophie to bind stuff together.
Sophie is much further along than dotReader. It’s getting ready for the first release this summer. It has ideas and ease of use that dotReader does not have.
It’s a subjective personal opinion of course but I have to say dotReader is just ugly as hell whereas Sophie has some great ideas and is just way better.
Just think about how easy it will be to pull text, images and video together to provide a “next generation reading experience” and then host the whole thing on the web as a networked book.
PDF is an ISO standard - unlike the IDPF glorified HTML and Zip files it has great implementations - and there are free, open source reader implementations - not that it matters to a school to have the source code IMO. The Acrobat Reader is free (as in beer) and has great collaboration features.
Oh… and Google Docs can save in PDF format too.
conclusion:
The value in dotReader’s content creation module is zero
If you need web based collaborative authoring tool use Google Docs.
Save the document on Google Docs in either PDF, HTML or RTF depending on the reader software/platform
June 5th, 2007 at 2:32 pm
dotReader-readable books can be created via a Drupal module if nothing else, as you yourself note. Sophie? I’m rooting for it along with others options for e-book-lovers, but based on my experience a few weeks ago with the beta, Tamas, I think you’re being optimistic. If they’ve made progress since then, I’ll be very happy! Google Docs is a collaborative content creation tool, but that’s as far, far cry from an e-book reader with annotation capabilities for use in everyday reading. As for Digital Editions, the new Adobe reader, Adobe is talking about including ads in the free version. Hey, keep commenting, Tamas. This is useful stuff. Anyone out there who can verify your statement that the IDPF specs even now lacks annotation capabilities? This is a valuable find. Hello, Jon N? What gives? - David
June 5th, 2007 at 2:54 pm
Sophie readable books can be created with… err…
Sophie
Sophie works in editor mode and reader mode - something that none of the other apps have - a built in editor mode!
According to their mailing list they will create a standalone reader application that cannot do editing - much like Acrobat Reader - but you’ll still have the option to get the editor/viewer combo.
However, the strength of Sophie is in binding resources together, so I’d expect the text documents to come from just about anywhere. There are lots of ways to create RTF documents…
“Google Docs is a collaborative content creation tool, but that’s as far, far cry from an e-book reader with annotation capabilities for use in everyday reading.”
Is it? Not if I could use it on a tablet…
The ideal ebook reader would be a tablet that you can write on and would then use text recognition to process your notes and send them electronically to others.
I think you raised an interesting question though: Where is the borderline between note taking, annotation and collaborative authoring?
June 5th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
I love the built-in editor idea, Tamas, but when I tried it, the thing just wasn’t ready for a typical user. I agree that binding resources could be nice. With Google Docs, it won’t be as easy to create annotations on the fly–if you’re offline.
Totally agree re the border observation. With dotReader-style stuff, at least the lines are clear. Not so perhaps with Google Docs. This means a LOT to publishers and writers. Books are not Web 2.0. Thanks. David