Netiquette IQ: 2014-08-17

Saturday, August 23, 2014

Netiquette IQ Blog of The Day - The Tipping Point For Digital Textbooks (etextbooks)

This blog has had several posts regarding demographic gaps throughout the world. Arguably, etextbooks can be a part of narrowing some of these huge gaps. I was happy and surprised to see some of the initiatives now ongoing in certain areas of the world to make this a reality. See the article below.
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From IDG Connect

The Tipping Point for Digital Textbooks

Students who go to university in London and don’t live with their parents can get a full living-cost loan of £7,751 ($13,265) per annum, next academic year. This sum must cover rent, bills, food, entertainment, text books… everything.

To provide a bit of context, the cheapest Halls of Residence accommodation at University College London (UCL) work out at £5,292 ($9,064) for the year (based on 40 weeks). Many would argue, this makes the price of textbooks obscene.

Of course, not all textbooks need to be purchased. And the type and volume needed entirely depends on the course students choose to pursue. But many of the print-based scientific tomes weigh in at around the £50 ($86) mark, and these are precisely the books which are subject to numerous revisions and updates.

Surely this is where digital versions should make a big difference?

June Jamrich Parsons, who has been producing digital textbooks for decades, describes herself as a “digital textbook pioneer” and earlier this year released a SlideShare report on digital textbooks in 2014. Based on information compiled from a range of sources, this provides a fascinating insight into what is going on in this market at the moment, and how things are liable to change.

Parsons shows that the total US textbook market is worth a mammoth $14 billion at present. Yet whilst increasing numbers of students are purchasing eTextbooks, the price of digital versions is almost the same as the price of print. She demonstrates that last year, in 2013, the average price of a print textbook was $64, whilst the average price of its digital equivalent was only $3 less, at $61.

This is leading to many changes within an industry which has historically been dominated by a handful of extremely large publishers. Popular digital formats offer different educational features which provides the opportunity for agile new entrants to challenge traditional market leaders. Free textbook suppliers like bookboon (42m downloads), Boundless (1m downloads), Flat World (300k downloads) and OpenStax (170k downloads) are proving extremely popular. Yet this “open and free educational software is mostly experimental… for now”.

There is actually a lot of space for interactive publishing. Parsons herself produced what was possibly the first interactive textbook, nearly 20 years ago. However, this has never been solidified.

Overall, popular perception is that the cost of textbooks is ridiculously high. Many students are renting standard books rather than buying them. And the majority who are buying, are doing so from large eRetailers, rather than the old fashioned college store. This highlights a lot of changes to previous, established models and Parsons’ big fear is that students may stop buying textbooks altogether, to rely instead on (often inaccurate) materials sourced via Google.

It is hard to predict the future. Although it is certainly true that children who have grown up with iPads are likely to have different expectations on how they access information. But perhaps digital textbooks really have reached a tipping point moment?

Free sites are destined to provide precisely the type of disruption they have for all those forms of publishing like fiction, magazines, newspapers, you name it. Maybe the time has come where the old guard of textbook publishers must either cut their digital costs, offer something that print books don’t provide… or frankly, do both.

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In addition to this blog, I have authored the premiere book on Netiquette, "Netiquette IQ - A Comprehensive Guide to Improve, Enhance and Add Power to Your Email". You can view my profile, reviews of the book and content excerpts at:

www.amazon.com/author/paulbabicki

If you would like to listen to experts in all aspects of Netiquette and communication, try my radio show on BlogtalkRadio and an online newsletter via paper.li.I have established Netiquette discussion groups with Linkedin and Yahoo. I am also a member of the International Business Etiquette and Protocol Group and Minding Manners among others. I regularly consult for the Gerson Lehrman Group, a worldwide network of subject matter experts and I have been contributing to the blogs Everything Email and emailmonday . My work has appeared in numerous publications and I have presented to groups such as The Breakfast Club of NJ Rider University and PSG of Mercer County New Jersey.
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Netiquette IQ Technical Term of The Day - The Internet of Things (IoT)

The phrase, Internet of Things, has been around a number of years but is only now is becoming quite prevalent. I thought it would be nice to have a definitive definition.

Internet of Things (IoT)

Part of the Cloud computing glossary:

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a scenario in which objects, animals or people are provided with unique identifiers and the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction. IoT has evolved from the convergence of wireless technologies, micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) and the Internet.

A thing, in the Internet of Things, can be a person with a heart monitor implant, a farm animal with a biochip transponder, an automobile that has built-in sensors to alert the driver when tire pressure is low -- or any other natural or man-made object that can be assigned an IP address and provided with the ability to transfer data over a network. So far, the Internet of Things has been most closely associated with machine-to-machine (M2M) communication in manufacturing and power, oil and gas utilities. Products built with M2M communication capabilities are often referred to as being smart. (See: smart label, smart meter, smart grid sensor)

IPv6’s huge increase in address space is an important factor in the development of the Internet of Things. According to Steve Leibson, who identifies himself as “occasional docent at the Computer History Museum,” the address space expansion means that we could “assign an IPV6 address to every atom on the surface of the earth, and still have enough addresses left to do another 100+ earths.” In other words, humans could easily assign an IP address to every "thing" on the planet. An increase in the number of smart nodes, as well as the amount of upstream data the nodes generate, is expected to raise new concerns about data privacy, data sovereignty and security.

Although the concept wasn't named until 1999, the Internet of Things has been in development for decades. The first Internet appliance, for example, was a Coke machine at Carnegie Melon University in the early 1980s. The programmers could connect to the machine over the Internet, check the status of the machine and determine whether or not there would be a cold drink awaiting them, should they decide to make the trip down to the machine.

Kevin Ashton, cofounder and executive director of the Auto-ID Center at MIT, first mentioned the Internet of Things in a presentation he made to Procter & Gamble. Here’s how Ashton explains the potential of the Internet of Things:

“Today computers -- and, therefore, the Internet -- are almost wholly dependent on human beings for information. Nearly all of the roughly 50 petabytes (a petabyte is 1,024 terabytes) of data available on the Internet were first captured and created by human beings by typing, pressing a record button, taking a digital picture or scanning a bar code.

The problem is, people have limited time, attention and accuracy -- all of which means they are not very good at capturing data about things in the real world. If we had computers that knew everything there was to know about things -- using data they gathered without any help from us -- we would be able to track and count everything and greatly reduce waste, loss and cost. We would know when things needed replacing, repairing or recalling and whether they were fresh or past their best.”
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In addition to this blog, I have authored the premiere book on Netiquette, "Netiquette IQ - A Comprehensive Guide to Improve, Enhance and Add Power to Your Email". You can view my profile, reviews of the book and content excerpts at:

www.amazon.com/author/paulbabicki

If you would like to listen to experts in all aspects of Netiquette and communication, try my radio show on BlogtalkRadio and an online newsletter via paper.li.I have established Netiquette discussion groups with Linkedin and Yahoo. I am also a member of the International Business Etiquette and Protocol Group and Minding Manners among others. I regularly consult for the Gerson Lehrman Group, a worldwide network of subject matter experts and I have been contributing to the blogs Everything Email and emailmonday . My work has appeared in numerous publications and I have presented to groups such as The Breakfast Club of NJ Rider University and PSG of Mercer County New Jersey.
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Netiquette IQ Quotation of The Day From William Shakespeare

My last blog was about giving your mind a rest from email and social media. In my soon to be published book as well as my existing one (see below) I strongly recommend quick replies and proactive actions with email. And so, I wanted to add the quote below.
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"Better three hours too soon than a minute too late."

William Shakespeare

Friday, August 22, 2014

Netiquette IQ Blog of The Day - Science Says Give Your Mind a Needed Rest From Email and Social Feeds

I have stated numerous times in this blog on the need to have a process to deal with email and social media. This is to maximize the time given to and to maximize either or both of these. The article below emphasizes this.
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Over at The New York Times, researcher Daniel Levitin shares why you should give your brain a much-needed reset by only checking email or social feeds during designated times:

If you want to be more productive and creative, and to have more energy, the science dictates that you should partition your day into project periods. Your social networking should be done during a designated time, not as constant interruptions to your day.
Email, too, should be done at designated times. An email that you know is sitting there, unread, may sap attentional resources as your brain keeps thinking about it, distracting you from what you’re doing. What might be in it? Who’s it from? Is it good news or bad news? It’s better to leave your email program off than to hear that constant ping and know that you’re ignoring messages.

The science Levitin refers to here is that which he conducted with his collaborator from Stanford, professor of neuroscience Vinod Menon. The researchers discovered that part of the brain called the insula is responsible for switching our thoughts from high-focus to unfocused, depending on the task at hand.
When the insula is balanced evenly, we can be extremely focused for productivity or letting ourselves get caught in wild daydreams to boost creativity. The problem, Levitin explains, is when our insula is imbalanced, either by overwhelming distractors (like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, email, or co-workers) or by a lack of energy caused by a poor night’s sleep, for example.
Dedicating portions and set times of your day for checking email, social networks, meetings, or other common attention-sucking tasks can give your brain the much-needed structure it needs.

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In addition to this blog, I have authored the premiere book on Netiquette, "Netiquette IQ - A Comprehensive Guide to Improve, Enhance and Add Power to Your Email". You can view my profile, reviews of the book and content excerpts at:

www.amazon.com/author/paulbabicki

If you would like to listen to experts in all aspects of Netiquette and communication, try my radio show on BlogtalkRadio and an online newsletter via paper.li.I have established Netiquette discussion groups with Linkedin and Yahoo. I am also a member of the International Business Etiquette and Protocol Group and Minding Manners among others. I regularly consult for the Gerson Lehrman Group, a worldwide network of subject matter experts and I have been contributing to the blogs Everything Email and emailmonday . My work has appeared in numerous publications and I have presented to groups such as The Breakfast Club of NJ Rider University and PSG of Mercer County New Jersey.
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Netiquette IQ Technical Term of The Day - ICANN - An Important Entiy For All Internet Users!

ICANN is a critical organization for the Internet and our global community. We should all keep up with it's developments!
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ICANN

Stands for "Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers." The ICANN is an non-profit corporation that is responsible for allocating IP addresses and managing the domain name system.

Every computer connected to the Internet, from servers to home PCs, has an IP address. However, it would be unrealistic for the ICANN to directly assign each computer an individual IP address. Instead, the ICANN allocates blocks of IP addresses to companies, educational institutions, and Internet service providers. These organizations then allocate IP addresses to computers that use their Internet connections.

While the ICANN is a US-based organization, it is also a global Internet community. According to ICANN's website, the organization is "dedicated to preserving the operational stability of the Internet; to promoting competition; to achieving broad representation of global Internet communities; and to developing policy appropriate to its mission through bottom-up, consensus-based processes" (icann.org).

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