eBooks and entrepreneurs.

eBooks are a great way for entrepreneurs to get noticed. Here's an update on what publishers have learned, and it's news you can use.

Have e-books turned a page?. Steady growth suggests that the publishing industry may finally have a grip on what readers want from electronic books. [CNET News.com]

9:30:25 AM    

I like what Evan has to say about collaborative learning; that in many 'real world' contexts collaboration is not encouraged and a reliance on collaboration can be a hindrance. It's a fair comment, and an experience I think most of us will have had. It's also a bit sad. But isn't this where education has a real opportunity to impact on real life... or are we blindly, collaboratively, heading down the wrong path?

9:09:50 AM    

Various webfeeds I follow link to an interesting post by Evan on the blog.IT blog in which she asks When do we need independent rather than collaborative learning? In South Africa outcomes based education has been official policy for a good number of years now - long enough for there to be a backlash against its perceived weaknesses, amongst others the emphasis on group work. So I fairly frequently hear students and others complain about being sick and tired of groups. The most common complaint is "I do all the work and the others are just passengers" - often voiced by several members of the same group. Half of me knows exactly what they're on about and wants to join them in their crusade against groups, but the other half knows that they've got it very wrong. Problem is, I struggle to explain why they're missing the point. Now Stephen Downes has come to my rescue in a comment on Evan's post, which is really so good that I have to quote it in full:

"This is the difference between being told to work in groups (and given a group to work in) and being able to work as an autonomous agent seeking and using collaboration on an as needed basis.

In the former, collaboration is determined to be, like trigonometry, something that is good for you, and so you approach it in a textbook fashion with all the steps mapped out.

Such preparation, as this item demonstrates, doesn't really leave a person prepared to collaborate (or to use trigonometry) in the real world. The knowledge needs to be accessed and deployed when needed, which means that you have to be able to determine for yourself when and how to access colleagues (or sine functions).

Certainly, in today's connected world, there is no case in which it is not possible to collaborate. Even if the job or the dissertation committee does not provide a nice structured environment, a person's skills in developing and working within a network ought to be sufficient to facilitate the support and learning structure necessary."

So I think I'll just print copies of that on index cards and dish them out next time I hear complaints about group work. Thanks Stephen (and Evan, and the other people who commented on her post).

9:08:35 AM    

Unfortunately, I am aware that my free, non-threading, 100-character limit commenting system is not designed for a discussion (I'm not pleased with what blogger is providing right now), so I'm pulling out comments from the previous post.

Stephen writes (emphasis is mine):

"This is the difference between being told to work in groups (and given a group to work in) and being able to work as an autonomous agent seeking and using collaboration on an as needed basis.

In the former, collaboration is determined to be, like trigonometry, something that is good for you, and so you approach it in a textbook fashion with all the steps mapped out.

Such preparation, as this item demonstrates, doesn't really leave a person prepared to collaborate (or to use trigonometry) in the real world. The knowledge needs to be accessed and deployed when needed, which means that you have to be able to determine for yourself when and how to access colleagues (or sine functions).

Certainly, in today's connected world, there is no case in which it is not possible to collaborate. Even if the job or the dissertation committee does not provide a nice structured environment, a person's skills in developing and working within a network ought to be sufficient to facilitate the support and learning structure necessary."

9:05:09 AM