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Originally Posted by thibaulthalpern
Interesting. The university I teach at doesn't do that. Each time students print to a university printer (essentially those at the computer labs), they are charged 10 cents which appears on their university bill. It's all automatically charged. I think this is a better idea if students are going to be charged a fee at all.
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Although 10c/page is hardly "cost". Wonder why they need to make a profit on that too.
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Originally Posted by thibaulthalpern
If everything were offered only digitally (read the qualifications carefully so one doesn't wildly project what I'm talking about) with the spirit of using digital readers for them, I find that problematic from the standpoint of a student. A student takes various courses at the same time and each course uses several books at the same time. A digital reader only displays one screen which usually means one page at a time. I can't imagine being an effective student and only having one page open at a time. Cumbersome, ineffective, impediment to learning.
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Students don't have to pay for copyright fees where these readers are concerned then? I find that makes up most of the cost of the readers here.
I'm not sure what you're getting at otherwise though. Most courses (undergrad) only use one book, or perhaps sections from 2, but hardly ever two at the same time, as critical reading only seems to start at the upper end of the degree. Anyway, printing doesn't have to cost anywhere near 10c/page. That figure seems more of a deterrent than a realistic amount.
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This is not to condemn digital books. Rather, it's to say that the technology we currently have to interact with digital books is still rather ineffective and probably best not to adopt school-wide/university-wide until we seriously, SERIOUSLY, think about how students learn and how teachers teach instead of the other way around which is usually just goo-goo-ga-ga over a technology. So, instead of going from technology dictating how learning and teaching should occur (which is so often the case when technophiles and technologists think about how to apply technology to education) we should go from thinking how technology can BEST SERVE teaching and learning
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Agreed. Current readers are way too slow to be usable for anything approaching research/comparison of texts/sections. If opening times could be reduced to 1-2s per file (like they are on my desktop), and you could have multiple files open simultaneously (say, having 2 (B5-sized) files open side by side on the DR1000S or something with a similarly-sized screen), this would be workable, though. You might need 2 devices, but that's about it.