Discussions started by Richard Schwier

Clint Lalonde offered up a great observation yesterday that I'd like to explore. What are your thoughts? Is the metaphor of book not appropriate for ePublications? Should we be looking for new ways to express the essential features of enriched reading environments? 

Clint said:  "I was thinking this exact thought with the hoopla with the Apple announcement last week. The whole book paradigm seems like such a holdover from another age - like a transitory metaphor. Kind of like the file folder metaphor on a computer. A digital manifistation of an analouge form that really doesn't apply to a web world. Why do we even need to hold on to this whole notion of a "book"? Is there value in having a "book" other than it gives publishers a way to package content?"

And Scott Leslie agreed with Clint (or was it the other way around?):  “I am really interested; my personal take is that "eBooks" are a combination of hangover from an older age and marketing ploy by both booksellers and hardware vendors, and that when you take the covers off it just looks like a bit of the web bundled up so it can sell. But maybe I am really missing something that is special to eBooks and eReaders?”

Hi there.  It's going to be an exciting couple of weeks!  Thanks, Sylvia, for inviting me back, and thanks to Scott Leslie for having my back! Hida and Diana will be frequent participants here too, and they are going to be contributing a great deal to what comes out of this conversation.

I've put together

for you that explains what we are up to and what may happen in the next two weeks.  I hope you'll take the time to have a look at it -- it's only 5 minutes long.

So thanks for being here, and I'll enjoy spending time with you between now and Valentine's Day!

I hope you'll take a couple of minutes (3:30 to be exact) to let me say "So long, and thanks for all the fish" in this video. It has been a great three weeks, and with your advice and support, we have moved the thinking along a great deal.

Now it's time to roll up our sleeves and get to work on this. We need three kinds of things as we move ahead:

Advice (please -- keep in touch and tell us what you think)

Stuff (links, archival material, photos, videos, interviews, virtual tours, old newspaper clippings, etc.)

Help (we need people who are willing to take on support roles as we move the project forward)

All of this will be managed, for the time being, on a wiki that the Learning Technologies Centre at University of Manitoba set up: http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/histedtech/ Thanks George!

Sylvia has already added some content on the main page, and created 2 more pages:

1. Acquisitions - A place to add your links to artefacts, stories, interviews, biographies, timelines, etc. I've mined a few tidbits from our SCoPE discussion.

2. Volunteers - A place to add and sign up for jobs To create an account just click on "create account" at the top right of the main page. Thanks, Sylvia!

A wiki that summarizes our discussion from the past three weeks.

http://scope.bccampus.ca/mod/wiki/view.php?id=1210 Thanks once again, Sylvia!

So, on behalf of the current "Museum Team" and with thanks to all of you for joining in and contributing so generously this month, I'll close the session with a quote from Ellen Goodman.

"There’s a trick to the “graceful exit.” It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a life stage, or a relationship is over — and let it go. It means leaving what’s over without denying its validity or its past importance to our lives. It involves a sense of future, a belief that every exit line is an entry, that we are moving up, rather than out."

(Edited by Sylvia Currie - original submission Tuesday, 21 October 2008, 10:19 AM)

(Edited by Sylvia Currie - original submission Sunday, 17 May 2009, 02:23 PM. Fixed links from lidc.sfu.ca to bccampus.ca)