Friday, January 20, 2012

What Online Teachers Need


Steve Jobs continues to revolutionize education from beyond the grave.  The iAuthor function should shake up the exploitative textbook market.  Turning a reading packet into a anthology of your authorship just got a lot easier.

http://www.apple.com/ibooks-author/

Now if someone would develop a platform for teachers to deliver courses online.  I am still using an amalgamation of online services to deliver my courses.  Moodle requires vast resources and exceptional skills to use, and a company that recognizes this and attempted to help teachers out now founders.

http://www.keytoschool.com/about-us/

Check out the "forum" page, where last I checked it was clogged with complaints regarding reliability issues.

It was brought to my attention that game dynamics (not game theory) might be added to online courses for better results, and social media was the medium for adding this.  I was hoping google+ would lend itself to this, but no...

http://gamification.org/wiki/Game_Mechanics

In any event, it seems to me that WAOE might create a website that lists freely available tech from the ever expanding universe of options, and links thereto, that teachers may employ for delivering courses.

Of course, this assumes that teachers desire to secede from the closed systems that their schools offer (or require) that teachers rely upon.

The #1 online educator by far is Sal Khan, at khanacademy.com ...  which is no school at all.  That may be the future for online teaching.

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Apple Has Done It

I had considered developing a version of the kindle which allowed a person to create a book on the device. Apple has done it, with their iPad 2.

As expected, Apple also launched a new app to write and publish books, called iBooks Author. You don't have to just be a textbook writer, however; you could write cookbooks, novels, or children's books. Any kind of book you can think of, you can build with iBooks Author. With a simple drag-and-drop interface, text is easy to place and alter, and it automatically wraps around media like pictures and movies, which you can resize on the fly. If you wrote your original document in Microsoft Word, iBooks Author quickly scans the pages for style and automatically lays out sections and headers for the book.

This will not only serve up textbooks, but allow instructors to create their own.  Keep this in mind for your first book, the anthology, and how easy it will be to publish it immediately.


From the grave Steve Jobs is still making the world a better place.  One big scandal in education is the cost of textbooks, a renown rip-off.  


Today in Hong Kong almost no one talks politics, because there is so little government interference in peoples lives.  Talk is about businesspeople and leaders of those other mediating institutions in society.  Once upon a time it was just so in USA, too.  Steve Jobs does more good even dead than any politician will ever do alive.