Kindle’s highlighting feature allowing me to store all of my highlights in one central place is sort of a game changer. Given that I can read the Kindle books not just on the readers, but also on the iPads and iPhones, and give that Amazon has a great selection of ebooks, we might just be approaching the end of this war of the readers.
I have bought a couple of Nook ebooks, and I understand that technically, the Nook will do everything the Kindle will. But the Kindle handles so much better. (Amazon probably owns most of my soul by this point.)
I still think the Sony is a better option for loading public domain and personal texts, but the iPad is so much more convenient.
What we really need is a central repository for all of our highlights, regardless of the platform. We need something like Evernote for our reading. Or, better yet, Evernote needs to connect itself to the various readers such that we can send our highlights there and from there, it would send us back to the original text (assuming the platform is handy).
It’s time for a researcher to do a study exploring how people write. How do people use various kinds of technologies? What are the different types of approaches of different types of writers? I would like to see cases presented, for example, of those people who write everything out by hand, those who type everything, those who mix the two, those who use different tools for different tasks. It was a long time ago when Janet Emig first published her groundbreaking research on the composing process, but that was before technology transformed the process.
Someone needs to do an even-handed explanation of the differences between, say, The University of Phoenix and The Ohio State University. What are the competing philosophies? How are the institutions staffed? What are their histories? What do they contribute to culture and society? How do they measure success. How do they view customer service? How are courses and programs delivered?
I don’t really mean for this to be a hatchet job on the private, for-profit schools. If the public universities had been willing to offer non-traditional services, the private schools wouldn’t exist today.
Here’s the premise. It’s like those guys who spend the summer traveling to all of the baseball stadia in America and then write a book about them. Only this time, a person or a couple travels to all of the countries of the world and writes about the immigration/visa process for each one. My hunch is that America would be just about the most difficult country on Earth to enter, even for its own citizens. But this is just a hunch. Someone needs to write this book.
After all of these years, Kerouac’s On the Road is still the best companion out there for late adolescence. And Matt Dillon’s reading of it is one of the best audiobook experiences out there. Now is the time to plan the summer road trips, and this audiobook is required listening.
Someone should write a book outlining what the life of a Division I revenue sport college athlete is really like. I want to know about the women and the sex and the parties. I want to know about all of the ways money is funneled to them around the rules. This book should have been written years ago. It is time to stop wasting so many of our resources on children who play with inflated balls.
Someone write this book, please. We need a well-crafted discussion of how federal education policy has followed the same basic approach for 30 years now, regardless of the party in power. The Republicans place a little more emphasis on bashing teachers’ unions and resisting left-wing values from the public school offerings, and the Democrats spend a lot more money, but the blueprint of standards, assessments, and sanctions has remained the same since at least the administration of Bush I. In fact, education has become kind of like foreign policy, with a common set of goals. The parties fight over surface things like placing warnings in science books or school prayer and the like, but both parties want to vigorously test every student and measure progress against standards developed by consensus.
Both parties talk about accountability, and both parties move forward with the common agenda as if it were the only possible direction for school reform.
Someone should write about this.
Notes on Coffeehouse Napkins.
Thoughts on Amazon’s “My Highlights” function for Kindle books and readers.
Those people can’t be serious, can they? Are the scripts for real, or are they winking parodies that deliberately push the line? How far can they go without offending their fans?
Here’s a possibility: Each post is a description of a book someone should write. Like right now, I would like to see a book detailing how much money ETS has made from education “reform” efforts. How much money does the CEO make? How much has the business grown? How much are they poised to grow in the future?
Here is a “non-profit” company that is sitting quietly in their cubicles on their secure “campus” just waiting to dictate for the “free” world what knowledge is and what it means to be educated.