Free eBooks and Ways to Find Them

Posted by Danny on Monday, July 20, 2009 at 11:06 am

If anyone’s still out there, you’ve probably had enough Blueberry music. I’m going to be posting a longer article shortly, but I wanted to bring your attention to some handy resources for ebooks, as I’ve just found them. First, there’s MobileRead, which I haven’t just found, but which contains this directory of free ebook lists and author websites. It’s geared mainly to non-academic reading in multiple formats (PDF, Mobipocket, EPub).

They seem to have a small selection of individually-published open ebooks, though I’ve added links to Lawrence Lessig’s author page and Matt Mason’s The Pirate’s Dilemma, so it’s possible that there are other open books to be had which have yet to be catalogued here. It’s a wiki—if you know of something tasty, you should add it to the directory.

In other news, I’m gearing up for thesis research and adding resources to my daunting pile of “oughtta-read-this-before-you-go-talking-to-other-people-dammit” books. It turns out that MIT Press includes a lot of CC books and article series, among them the following that are of interest to me and maybe you:

Iiyoshi, T & M. S. Vijay Kumar (Ed.). (2008). Opening up education: The collective advancement of education through open technology, open content, and open knowledge. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. (Link) I’ve been using articles from this collection since my first project in 2008; it’s full of tasty goodness.

Willinsky, J (2006). The access principle: The case for open access to research and scholarship. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. (Link) I haven’t read this yet but it looks pretty good, if you’re into the OA thang. Leslie Chan gets a mention.

Also, The MacArthur Series on Digital Media and Learning is available as well from the MIT Press.  I’m particularly excited to look at Davidson and Goldberg’s The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, not surprisingly.

TED Talks: Introduction and Robert Full

Posted by Danny on Sunday, June 21, 2009 at 2:19 pm

One of my plans for this space is to regularly highlight TED Talks, which Geoff initially discovered by seeing Sir Ken Robinson’s Talk during a professional development day while on practicum in 2006. I gushed all over the place about it then, but for folks who don’t know about them, the Talks are a series of lectures broadcast from the annual conference of Technology, Entertainment and Design. They tend to be from ten to twenty minutes in length and feature some of the most prolific thinkers and workers in physics, biology, chemistry, astronomy, psychology, philosophy, health, music, architecture, fine arts, journalism, politics, economics, and occasionally videogames. However, in addition to a showcase of exciting, vanguardey thought, one of the main purposes of the conference is to get all of these people in the same room listening to each other: synthesis of freshly developed ideas across arbitrarily (but often trenchantly) separate fields, for me, is the most valuable and promising aspect of the whole enterprise. They’re also groovy enough to make the lectures publically available on their website and as a video podcast (with a bit of advertisements thrown in tastefully after the talks), which is nice because full attendance costs $6,000 and you need to justify why you’re important enough to take up a seat.

From most people’s perspective, this is very Web 1.0: resources are produced and transmitted from the top down to an audience with little opportunity for viewers of the free talks to contribute meaningfully despite the expansion of commenting functionality. Nonetheless, even if one can’t easily grapple with the authors of the talks in a social constructivist sort of way, one can enjoy them as a gallery of novel thoughts, technologies, and expert articulations of ideas you might have already been incubating. For the most part, the production quality and presentation skills of the lecturers is superb; compare the signal-to-noise ratio for these talks with most of the new documentaries you see on the Discovery Channel and see if you don’t get excited too.

There are a lot of talks I’m itching to bring to your attention but I’ll start with a series of three by Robert Full, a “biologist” at UC:Berkley. “Biologist” is in quotation marks here because the study of life processes seems inadequate to describe the sort of work Full’s doing. Check out the first video:

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