On the Road- Open Text

Good morning everyone! Today, as our introduction to Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road we will be exploring an e-text of the first pages of chapter one. Your assignment is to read the excerpt of On the Road and fill out the Reading Experience Survey which you will find at the bottom of the text.
Explore the hyperlinks found in the text in any way that you want and keep in mind how this type of electronic reading is different than reading from a paper version of the novel. Please click on the following link and enjoy Kerouac's On the Road.

one laptop for every child

There are roughly one billion school age children in the world....will they all have a PC one day?
http://www.radioopensource.org/one-laptop-per-child/

The Library of Alexandria

“Electronic texts could turn into a reality the old but never fulfilled fantasy of complete knowledge. Like the library of Alexandria, they promise the universal availability of all texts ever written, of all books ever published”( Origgi 6).

What are the risks then of a realized digital updated version of the Library of Alexandria accessible by all people? In an interview with Gloria Origgi, editor of text-e, Eco explains what he believes is the “primary metaphysical risk” of the unsystematic filtering process which the Web’s content undergoes by its readers. Eco believes that because each reader brings with them their criteria and purposes for reading, “we’ll end up with a civilization in which every person has his own system of filters, in other words where every person creates his own encyclopedia. Now a society with five billion concurrent encyclopedias is a society in which there is no more communication” (origgi 179). Could this be the greatest risk we run in creating a publicly accessible e-library which contains an updated catalogue of “complete knowledge”? While the library itself, and the volumes contained within it, would be a globally collaborative social effort, would the use of its contents become a completely individualized and isolating activity? How could a system of standardized filters, for content authority and publisher validity, be developed for Web based texts which would not discriminate against those writers with little or no official credibility but who possess valid and useful content that would enrich the universal library? What does it mean to "enrich" the library? Who would determine this?

Text as Art-Art as Text

Here are a few examples of text, poems, displayed visually with the help of three collaborators. A sculptor, a writer, and a painter.
http://english.uiowa.edu/faculty/bolton/artworks1.html

will we disappear...?

the computers are coming for our jobs. distance learning is spreading its cables and tentacles. degrees are awarded to students who never enter a classroom.......where do we come in?

personal preference versus the good of all

hmmmmm...... social constructivism or isolated comfort

Podcasts spreading the word at the speed of sound.

I have created a link to Wesley Fryer's Blog, a self-proclaimed digital storyteller and change agent. He has many links, discussions and downloads concerning podcasts and how they are being used for lectures, collaborative thinking, and teaching. www.speedofcreativity.org

Many of us own ipods and know what podcasts are, but their purpose is beings expanded and used very effectively by educators looking to tap into the potentiality of every form of digital technology. spreading the word at the speed of sound.

Web+Log=Blog

Blogs are web pages. Your email is a web page. Any window that ever pops up while your surfing is a web page. Any form of media that you watch or interact with on the Internet is occuring on a web page.

Text is all around us-WEBDINGS Translation

text is more than words. it is more than images. it is more than symbols and gestures. text is more than all of these things combined. Text is the texture of each of our worlds. it is the whispers in the halls of academia, the screams on the playing field, the way others touch you and look at you. You can see, smell, feel, hear, and taste text. text can be delicious. text can be poisonous. It all depends on you.

text is all around us

text is more than words. it is more than images. it is more than symbols and gestures. text is more than all of these things combined. Text is the texture of each of our worlds. it is the whispers in the halls of academia, the screams on the playing field, the way others touch you and look at you. You can see, smell, feel, hear, and taste text. text can be delicious. text can be poisonous. It all depends on you.

new genres and made for web novels

http://www.eastgate.com/catalog/PatchworkGirl.html
This is a link to one example of a hypertext novel created specifically for reading on the web. There are a multitude of new genre possibilities when considering what you can include in a "novel." sound, images, video clips, reader influlenced plot line and story development...

this is my third post

death to books as we know them

print/paper books are static in form. For novels this may be OK, but for other content they become outdated the moment new information about the topic is discovered. E-books can constantly be updated, corrected, and reintroduced to the readership. This type of communication is natural to humans. You can't respond to the author of a print text. You can only respond to the text itself; in this case, a static, nonliving object. When working with e-text/e-books, the author can be directly contacted and is given the opportunity to respond and engage with their reader in a natural conversational manner. Technology is only now catching up with our natural tendencies when communicating. Socrates hated the idea of a permanent scroll because language and the ideas they create are constantly in flux. He believed long ago that books would kill the essence of language. What do you think?

and we're off

keep your minds open for what may happen in the future. speaking about the evolution of books and technology from a static viewpoint will shut all the doors of possibility for you. think on those things you can't imagine fully and fill in the blanks with your own ideas and perceptions.