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Originally Posted by Alexander Turcic
Good luck, and let the party begin!
PS: We'll have some extra surprise prizes for those who come up with the most original reasons for winning this contest.
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I'd like to enter and hope to win because I'm dying to find out how ebook readers can be used in the digital textbook sphere besides the obvious. Reading books is great, but we expect students to learn now the same way they did when Gutenberg was rolling off his first prints. But most of us are social animals; we crave dynamic, socially connected *experiences*. Imaging a textbook that shared your annotations with your peers! That enabled you to discuss content as you read it through forums! That *encouraged* derivative works to aid in learning! And these are just the obvious ideas...
Despite the huge potential market for these devices, manufacturers are reluctant to give educators the time of day. They lock down their books with DRM fearing piracy, and restrict the cost of devices not realizing an ebook reader is like an xbox - subsidize the device and they'll come flocking for the content.
If given a device, I would work to prototyping these ideas with the aim of demonstrating there is *another way* we can learn from interactive books, and that there is a *business model* that would support this.
Neil Stephensons "A Diamond Age" doesn't have to be science fiction, we can create an interactive illustrated primer...
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