A homeschool mother is raising her children on classics downloaded from Project Gutenberg--the same treasure-trove that a public school teacher uses with stellar results among low-income children in New York Meanwhile a disabled student has relied on electronic books for most of her reading for American Lit. And from a fifth-grader in Texas, the creator of a science fair project on textbooks and back strain, comes evidence that wired libraries and the right hardware could reduce the wear and tear on young backs. The majority of the above facts reached me in July 1999 after I asked members of five mailing lists for tips and observations on e-books. Below, more or less in the order received, are the messages in almost unedited form. Opinions are other people's and not necessarily mine. Let me make it especially clear that in reproducing some vendor-supplied information, this page is not endorsing any products. My thanks to all who helped out. And a big thanks in particular to Gutenberg Director Michael Hart for circulating the queries--on the Gutenberg Volunteers list--that elicited many of these messages. Questions also went out on the WWWEDU list for Web-oriented educators, the eBook List, the Ebook Network list, and the NCTE-talk list of the National Council of Teachers of English. Also, major thanks to Ted Nellen of the Murry Bergtraum High School for Business Careers, a public school in New York City. He and I actually have been in touch for several years about the use of e-books in schools; and, by reading the Nellen section of Wired Libraries for Kids and Parents, you'll find out why and how Ted has been so effective. Also see Liz Cushman Brandjes's case study of Ted. I won't quote Ted here; let the spotlight here be on those who kindly responded to my queries. Enjoy! - David Rothman, rothman@clark.net, coordinator, TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home. She's Raising Her Kids on Classics from Gutenberg (July 6, 1999) I am a homeschool mom. Our schooling relies almost exclusively on classic books, many of which are out of print and/or difficult to find. I have read my sons etexts of John Ruskin's King of the Golden River, Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies and The Heroes, Nathaniel Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales, some of Plutarch's Lives, Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare, Aesop's Fables, Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales, Andrew Lang's Arabian Nights, George MacDonald's At the Back of the North Wind, and lots of poetry. We could not homeschool as effectively without the access to great books that we find with etexts. Most of these books are not available at my local library, and I could never afford to buy these books at antique book dealers. I have homeschooling friends in foreign countries who do not have English-language libraries and would not find books if it were not for online texts. Also, as a way of educating ourselves as teachers, some of us homeschool moms have started an email "loop" dedicated to reading great literature together. Many of us would not be able to participate without the free availability of texts that PG provides.All of our books are available online. We are currently reading and discussing Ivanhoe and Silas Marner, and we plan to continue with Eothen, Faust, Shakespeare, Spenser's Fairie Queen and an Isabella Bird travel book. This kind of "teacher education" would not be possible without etexts. Leslie Laurio Note: While Leslie Laurio uses e-books in homeschooling her sons, the same material from Gutenberg is available to teachers and parents of children in public school. That is one of the advantages of Net-based libraries of public domain books--or those covered by a national digital library fund proposed in the TeleRead plan. Most everyone can or could benefit regardless of educational approach or income level. See Wired Libraries for Kids and Parents for a detailed look at how Ted Nellen uses e-books in a high school with 3,400 students and an annual textbook acquisition budget of just $10,000. -David Rothman. Tips on E-Book Readers (July
6) You should also note that as of the April 15 software release you can import ASCII and HTML files into the Rocket eBook. Having said that, let me point out that HTML works a lot better. NuvoMedia, the makers of the Rocket eBook, has created a web site, Rocket-Library.com, for their customers to exchange books, and there are now over 500 titles available. As you might expect, most of these are Project Gutenberg files converted to HTML and imported into the Rocket eBook format. Several companies are using this as a showcase for their electronic publishing capabilities, and one of them, MesaView, says that they have converted the entire Project Gutenberg library and will make it all available soon. For now, ebooks are still a bit costly and the lack of electronic texts of textbooks will prevent their wide spread use in schools. However, the potential is there and it may be that within the next 5 years they will be a commonly used substitute for text books. I hope you'll find this information useful. Sincerely, Richard Fane Gutenberg Books Help Disabled College Student
(July 6) I was taking an American Lit course and found most of the required reading from the PG web site. For me it was easier to download the texts than to go to the Library. (I am physically disabled). So as a person who has read more e-texts for classes, I can say that it is a very big help. I can only imagine what an asset the texts are to children in K-12. The title searches are easy to use. With the features in WordPerfect and Word, you can easily find paragraphs and phrases in a search. I hope this has helped. Do you know about the Georgia Tech site for public school teachers?
It's on the home page of the School for Literature,
Communication and Culture. It might have some things you could use. Kate Hayles. (Forwarded via Deena Larsen Note: Teachers in Georgia might also drop by the home page of the Department of Languages, Literature and Communications at Augusta State University in Georgia. The site includes text that students can download. Alas, the material is password protected. But maybe arrangements can be made for public schools to have access if the material is of potential use in K-12--perhaps in advanced-placement classes.-David Rothman E-Books in Australia (July
6) Module B, Critical Studies of Text covers work in a wide range of genres including Jane Eyre, King Lear, Citizen Kane, one of the Cataline Orations, and "I Have A Dream." Samplers from (Eastgate http://www.eastgate.com/catalog/Samplers.html) and the ATSIC website (http://www.atsic.gov.au/main.htm) form a multimedia section. Here, "students explore ways ideas are represented... They identify and question the effects of devices that define the borders and the paths through the texts and consider how these shape meaning." Module C, Language and Values has three sections, nonfiction: Alberto Manuel's History of Reading, fiction: Fay Weldon's Letters to Alice and Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, and multimedia: (Patchwork Girl. (Eastgate http://www.eastgate.com/catalog/Patchwork.html) In this elective, students "consider how language shapes the relationships between readers, writers, and texts." Mark Bernstein, Eastgate Systems, Inc." (Forwarded via Deena Larsen Schools Lack Enough Resources for Online Reading
(July 6) My son was in 8th grade this last year and the class was required
to purchase books such as Tom Sawyer in order to mark them up with comments and
notes. If there had been an easy way to handle this electronically, I'd have pulled copies
off Project Gutenberg in a flash. Unfortunately, schools are not provided with sufficient
resources to support online reading, editing and annotating. E-Book Available on Y2K (July 6) To help K-12 schools and colleges around the world prepare for
the new millennium, Hard Shell Word Factory and I are giving away free copies of my
e-book, Y2K Run to Save Your PC from the Year 2000 Bug. We're also
including a free site license so that schools can load the 145 page Good luck with your interview. E-Journal Experienes (July 6) I can't help you with Ebook but I suspect they would be interested in Ejournal stuff. In Indiana we make a fairly large suite of magazines available to every citizen of the state who has access to the net. This is used heavily by kids in school and in their homes. They do their homework using this resource. It is so successful that some teachers are beginning to specify that some of the citations in their paper must not be from INSPIRE (the name of our system). We are currently downloading about 1 million pages a month. We expect to average nearly 2 million pages a month by the for the whole year 1999. Most of the usage is from colleges but K-12 is growing (as is home and business use). We have created a special kids interface for K-8 grades. You can look at it by following the INSPIRE links at http://incolsa.palni.edu/. We plan to give this interface away to anyone with a Z39.50 server capability. We have databases online of journals that appeal particularly to kids in primary and middle grades. We also have a general encyclopedia, an encyclopedia of animals and a tree identification database. We are expanding this year as our state funding has increased from $1million to $1.5million. Hope that helps. Millard Johnson -- INCOLSA -- http://incolsa.palni.edu/
Multimedia Authoring Tool for Macs (July 7) E-Books Are Great for Children's Backs (July 6) Everybook, Inc, was contacted by an elementary school student who was researching the use of electronic book as a method to reduce physical injury to students who carry too much in their backpacks. Jennie Knight is an 11-year-old fifth grader from Dulles Elementary School in Sugar Land, Texas. She decided to focus her project for the School District Science Fair on this hypothesis: if a backpack should not weigh more than 10% of body weight, most students carry too much weight. Why this topic? Jennie stated, "I saw an article regarding heavy backpacks and how they hurt students for the rest of their lives." Over a period of eight weeks, Jennie developed her hypothesis, conducted research and finalized her report. Intercept surveys were done on school campuses prior to school. Three hundred students in fifth through twelve grade completed a questionnaire asking what items they carried in backpacks in addition to books and notebooks. She sought advice from a chiropractor and an orthopedic surgeon in developing the survey to identify potential problems. The survey asked them about any pain they experienced such as headaches, tingling hands or back, shoulder or neck pains. One-third of the respondents reported pain. Additionally, the students were weighed wearing their backpacks and without backpacks. This helped to calculate weight of backpack and percentage of bodyweight. Research found that about 50% of students carry backpacks that are too heavy. The average textbook weighed approximately seven pounds. Students who never visited their lockers carried five to six textbooks, which equals 35 to 42 pounds! Research indicates that children should never carry more than 10-15% of their weight and this research concluded that students were carrying an equivalent of up to 20% of their weight. Jennie then identified other alternatives including technology…to lighten the load. Jennie's solution to the problem is an electronic book. Her choice within the market is the Everybook Dedicated Reader™. Her reasons included size of the book, color, and dual screens. Jennie won first place in her Science Fair. She met with principals in her school district to share her research and try to convince them to use electronic books. They were shocked at the number of students who carried too much weight and concerned about the students who reported pain. The high school principal acknowledged the fact that students do not go to lockers. His interim solution was to investigate relocating locker assignments near student’s mid-day classes. Educational administrators were interested in the electronic book as a way of eliminating the weight problem. However, they realize that student use of an electronic reading device would need to be done on a districtwide basis. Interestingly, Governor George Bush had expressed an interest in a pilot-program in a local school district. This project is something that Jennie wants to revisit in middle school. Everybook Inc. is ready to visit her school and hopes to meet in the near future with the school superintendent to discuss what health benefits the Everybook Dedicated Reader™ may offer students. Sincerely, E-Books as Compact Spreaders of Knowledge and Understanding (July 7) Good Morning, David. Sorry to be so late [with a reply to the query on e-books]. We have a new baby--well, I don't but my dearest friends in the world do, and since he can't stand pain, I was the coach. She's 9 lbs. 7 ounces of the most beautiful baby girl. Now, about E-books. They are ecologically sound, no paper, it's great. I use the Internet as a library, with the World Wide Web; and while there's a lot of junk on it, there's more junk in the physical world. Basically I love e-books because they are extremely portable, and they don't take up much room. I can't find space in my tiny apartment for one more book to add to the 5,000 I already have. Also, e-books afford me the luxury of reading without wondering how to return them on-time when my need for the information is delayed by several months. They're convenient I'm a computer science/informations/communications major at Three Rivers Community-Technical College in Norwich, CT. That means I spend inordinate amounts of time trying to study, absorb, write papers for classes, and produce materials to teach people over 30 how to navigate in the cyberworld, and it helps to store as little as possible on paper. The result? I use all of my textbooks in e-form, when they are available, and scan those that aren't so that I can carry them with me all of the time. I study when and wherever I can, and I have e-books so I don't have to lug 50 or 60 pounds. of text around with me. Zip disks are gifts to students from a Higher Being, that's for sure. It's absolutely normal for me to be sitting at school studying one subject--let's say, accounting--and have someone from my networking lab or lit-and-comp class interrupt with a question or need for help. It happens all the time, and when I need to refer to the text, click, click, click, it's there. I don't have to waste time hunting for marked pages in the books. On the Web the books most readily available include dictionaries (http://www.m-w.com/ and http://www.dictionary.com/), syllaba and white papers on almost any topic. They can be found through the Infoseek (now Go) and Altavista search engines. I stay away from the meta search engines since they spew out too much nonsense. When I search, I'm looking for definitive subject matter--I'm not after a word-search adventure. E-books save time in note-taking. I can copy and paste the pertinent sections into a new document, so I don't have to re-read all of the material; I create my own "reference"' from the book. I don't have to go out late at night, or be away from home, except for classes, and social events. Do you know where your kids are? My Mom does. So much for the present. What about the kids and future? The single thing we need to teach our children is to think critically; analyze what you need to do and then plan how to accomplish it. The rest, the mathematics, grammar, punctuation, (the foundation 3-Rs), is becoming even more important. Also, e-books will provide kids with exposure to cultures and histories that we could not possibly provide otherwise. Won't it be great when we just accept the value of other human beings because we know about them? Fear of the unknown is the greatest single detriment to cultural community on this planet. In addition, e-books save money. An Internet connection is expensive, but the information that can be accessed is so much more than we as taxpayers can afford to purchase, to have in the school library, and then to get the kids home on time. Diane M. Donle |
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