Eric Baber's blog

What an amazingly ill-informed article. Phil Beadle bemoans the loss of the old-style whiteboard to electronic interactive ones. Some choice quotes:

"But their place at the front of the class means every lesson must have a PowerPoint presentation"

Erm... no. Personally I don't think I've ever used a PowerPoint on an interactive whiteboard. PowerPoints are for presentations; in a classroom of 10 - 20 people I don't do presentations, I do teaching. Interactive whiteboards do not equal PowerPoint presentations.

"The Smart Board's central positioning destroys a teacher's ability to be spontaneous. You cannot come in any more with a couple of board markers and a handful of good ideas."

Erm... no. Turn on the whiteboard and it's blank. Write on it what you will. Go mad. The only thing that limits it is the user's creativity. If you can be creative on a blackboard, or a non-interactive whiteboard, and you can be creative on an interactive whiteboard.

"If I am modelling sentence construction or the semicolon, drawing a map illustrating colonialism in Africa, or scribing arrows outlining connections between ideas, I want to be able to do it quickly: as quick as I think"

You can do all of those things on an interactive whiteboard.

"They have their uses, Smart Boards, but they are a tool, not a teacher."

I completely agree, but precisely the same holds true of a non-interactive whiteboard.

"Their central position gives them primacy."

Again, just like the old-fashioned whiteboards.

"If you have a say, get yours put at the side of the room. Or ask for it to be given to someone more worthy; you'll make do and have your old whiteboard back."

Or ask for some training in how to use it more fully.

An electronic whiteboard is a tool, not a teacher - absolutely. But it does everything a non-interactive whiteboard can do and then a whole lot more. If a teacher feels they have to use a PowerPoint presentation in each lesson they shouldn't t blame that on the board but instead either themselves for imposing that view on themselves, or else on their management that has placed that upon them. That's not the fault of the whiteboard, but of the humans that surround it.

Bloomsbury Academic has launched a new imprint which will make all its publications available for free online. http://www.bloomsburyacademic.com/news.htm and http://www.thebookseller.com/news/66448-bloomsbury-unveils-academic-imprint.html have more info.

Dopplr came to me by way of Max Everingham - thanks Max. It's a site that lets you input your future travel details - when you're going where, basically. You can then share that information with friends, in particular other friends who travel frequently, so you can see if there's any overlap in case you're in the same place at the same time. Great for people who travel a lot and whose friends and family do too - any easy way to check if anyone you know is in the same city as you at the same time.

Finally got round to watchin this video which came to me courtesy of Michael Coghlan via the Webheads. Fantastic video that discusses YouTube and how it reflects humans' sense and use of community. 55 minutes long but well worth the time - MAKE time to watch this.

A good article on electronic books and the devices available to read them. There aren't yet any dedicated readers on the UK market but the first one to arrive will be the Sony Reader, in September 2008. Some interesting quotes from the article:

"While in the US there are an increasing number of new books available online, publishers in the UK have been slow to release their books in an electronic format. "

""The younger generation have spent their formative years reading from screens. We don't really know how they are going to react," says Goss. "

(I can hazard a guess though - they won't think twice about using an e-reader, and won't miss traditional books.)

And, funnily enough I was thinking exactly the following this morning:

"It is perfectly conceivable that in the future we could have something that looks like a book, feels like a book, reads like a book and with separate paper-thin pages like a book, but which uses e-ink instead of the normal kind."

Much of what people seem to think they will miss in an e-reader is the tactile aspect of it - the turning of the page, the feeling of closing it etc. An answer to this is what is described here - an e-reader that consists of, say, 100 electronic pages which display 100 pages of a book. When you get to the end of those and the book is, say, 300 pages long, you go back to the beginning and tell the reader to start displaying from page 101 - 200, and so on.

Having said that, I would see that as being an interim device - something to please that generation which still values the page-turning feeling. For the next generation this is likely to be a quaint concept, much like turning over LPs or cassettes to play side B. Why would you want to do that if there is an easier way?