No. 40
December 11, 2001
Technology:
Academic Materials
If I got "downsized" and the only career available to me was that of a sales representative, Academic Materials would be the first company I would send my resume to. I don't know anything about their pay scale or benefits package, but at least I know that I would not have to "bend the truth" when pitching their product to potential customers, and this means a lot to me. This product is an example of a great idea, beautifully implemented, and with an extremely competitive price tag. It is also, as most great ideas, quite simple.
What Academic Materials offers are coursepacks in e-book format. To some degree it is not much different from a service offered by a coursepack-producing copy shop: you give them the articles, illustrations, and book chapters to be included in the coursepack; they take care of the copyright clearance and royalty payments, produce the coursepacks, and sell them to students through their store. However, what your students receive for their money from Academic Materials is not a cardboard-bound stack of black-and-white copies with hard to recognize photos, but a beautiful artifact of the digital age - a downloadable e-book with colorful, high-resolution illustrations and multimedia files, improved accessibility with scalable fonts and text-to-voice converson, flexible annotation tools (bookmarks, highlights, notes, scribbles), word and phrase searching, and the ability to copy-and-paste notes and text from the e-book to other electronic documents.
Strangely enough, all of this comes at a cost significantly lower than a standard copy shop coursebook: Academic Materials charges between 3 and 5 cents per page with no binding fee, while copy shop prices average from 5 to 7 cents per black-and-white page, and reach as high as a dollar per color page, plus $3-$5 for binding. There are no up-front fees and the only cost is that paid by the student when downloading the coursepack from an online bookstore. Did I mention convenience and saving a lot of trees? I almost wish I were a faculty so that I could dazzle my students with a coursepack like that...
Online reading:
Online Communities:
Networks that nurture long-distance relationships and local ties
In January and February 2001 the Pew Internet Project surveyed 1,697 Internet users to "explore the breadth and depth of community online". This report, made public on October 31 and available online both in HTML and PDF format, presents the survey's findings.
Initiative:
BCT Partners
Building Community with Technology
From the company profile: "BCT is a for profit social venture committed to helping non-profits use technology to build community, support community change strategies and improve their organizational effectiveness. We combine our expertise in community development, community building, non-profits and technology to help our customers use technology to strengthen their communities and build social, economic and human capital."
BCT Partners offers Web development and consultation services, as well as CommunityWeb, a subscription-based tool for building online communities. Developed on the Open Source, ArsDigita Community System, CommunityWeb offers a rich selection of features, inluding: discussion boards, file sharing, chat rooms, user directory, polls, events calendar.
Conference:
Second Collaborative Technologies and Systems Symposium
- Held January 27-31, 2002 in San Antonio, TX
- Held in conjunction with the Western Multi- Conference 2002, the symposium is to address, explore and exchange information on the state-of-the-art in collaborative enterprises, their modeling and simulation, design and use, and their impact. Participation is extended to researchers, designers, educators and interested parties in all CT disciplines and specialties.
© 2001 Vlad Wielbut and the Alliance for Community Technology
