The Great Ebook Debate

We find it so hard to give up our dream, our favorite fantasy. Who does not relish the idea of curling up before the fire, snow swirling in the window, reading a good book?

But wait... What if we play back the little dream. Try this... Who does not relish the idea of curling up before the fire, snow swirling in the window, reading a good ebook?

Ugh!

It's just not the same somehow...ebook...You can't be serious.

Well, you'd better get used to it. More than likely that is exactly what you will be reading and enjoying a good Brahms symphony too, all on your mobile phone.

Now lets come back to reality... When we read a "good book" we are actually reading a good paperback. How many trees have given their all for those retched paperbacks! The lighting is always on the page you are not reading, you have to pull on the book to keep it open...drop it and you loose your place. You have to scan back and forth with your eyes because edges the page is just out of the range of your bifocals. If you find a few spare moments to read, the book is at home...you are not. You seldom choose to read what you want because it is hard to find many of the books you would really like to sink your mind into. And those paperbacks are expensive, especially in the airport stores.

You read your ebook on the small phone or wireless PDA screen. It is always with you even in the bathroom, lighting is always perfect, text is sharp and clear, the page is always the right size to speed read and you never loose your place. If you don't know the meaning of a word, you can look it up. You can highlight or even draw in it without getting a librarian mad at you. You can beam it to a friend and both read it at the same time. You can look up stuff on the internet that the author is talking about, like the painting of the last supper when reading the Da Vinci Code. Best of all, if you want to read some special book you can download it, often for free, in about 30 seconds.

For that matter, why read at all? Nowdays we can just listen to a good book. So curl up by the fire with that idea!

Personal Wireless Technologies at Dhahran HS

Personal Wireless Technologies at Dhahran HS

Hey Dorothy, we are not in Kansas any more!

During the 2004-2005 school year, many new personal digital wireless devises have surfaced at school. Of course the most common is the mobile phone, many of which have blue tooth file sharing capability and built in cameras. Small Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) are being used by some faculty and students to do a wide range of tasks including email, web browsing, e-books, music. The iPod music players have become popular this year. Finally laptops and tablet style computers are a common site in the library and common areas. These computers are also wireless and can transfer information from the Internet of from student files on the school server without the need to hook up to any wires. It all comes through the air on the school's wireless network.

The key to understanding why these devises are so useful for a student (and we are all becoming lifelong students) is twofold. They offer ready access to information and can store vast amounts of information.

The age of record players, tape decks, CD players, end even printed books is nearly over. No new mechanical devices will take their place. Books, music, movies and other information can now be obtained from internet libraries and music and video stores, through the air over rapidly developing wireless networks. Even today, while I am standing in the school hallway, I can download an entire novel to my tiny PDA in less time than it takes me to write this paragraph. We see several examples of these technologies in use. The iPod is perhaps the most popular example of this marriage of access and storage. iTunes are downloaded at very reasonable prices and stored in the tiny iPod device. The equivalent of hundreds of music CDs can now be stored in the memory chips in these devices.

This information is stored on high density media such as tiny SD memory cards. The iPod can store hundreds of music albums. The iPAQ PDA can currently store 2GB of information in a tiny SD chip. The 250MB SD memory chip I carry in my pocket contains a small e-book library consisting of eight modern and classic novels and poetry, the complete English version of the Qur'an, the entire new and old testament of the Bible, a dictionary, two music CDs, slide shows of several of our recent trips to Africa, and a movie of our cruise to Tahiti last summer.

A favorite format for the student learner is the "tablet" laptop computer. The machine is smaller and lighter than the regular laptop. It features a screen that rotates and data can be hand written onto the machine. The laptop and the PDA can take handwritten text and efficiently convert it into a font, which can then be printed on a school printer over the WiFi wireless network. The tablet computer has the advantage of being a good productivity tool. PowerPoint presentations, Word documents and Excel spreadsheets are all easy to create on this machine and they hook readily to the classroom projector for project presentation. Another favorite is the Pocket PC computer. The HP iPAQ is an entire wireless computer which fits in a purse or shirt pocket.

If you are thinking of investing in one of these technologies for your student learner, be sure that the machine is "WiFi compatible." Bluetooth will not hook up to the existing 802.11b wireless network. The machine must be able to connect to 802.11b to be fully productive at Dhahren HS.

Heatwave -- May 2005

Ode to the missing cable..

Din, Bin, RS232, USB
don't the english teachers know
the DVD won't project
without you.

Why do they send the machine back
with pride at their responsible act
without the cable that hooks it all up
and frustrate the next poor smuck.

Where do they go?
those controlers, cables and camera foot
so trustingly loaned to intellegent folks
as part of a working package.

Is there a black hole in every school
into which fall these minor parts
without which nothing works
renedering this stuff useless?