Learning Innovation

While Niall Ferguson's new book, Civilization: The West and the Rest, is mostly about the past, it true importance is what it says about our future. Nowadays it is hard not too worry about the future, as we struggle from one funding crisis to the next, watching resources for public investments (like education) erode.

My campus is in the middle of a strategic planning process, and I have the good fortune of participating in the "digital" working group.

Audrey Watters' post inspired me to spend some time building a new Coursekit site.

2011 was the year that I tried some Apple and Microsoft mashups. They failed.

I'm intrigued by this whole idea of borrowing Kindle books from my public library.

If I were with you now, I'd ask you what you are reading. Why did you choose your current book? Paper, e-book, or audio? Library, bookstore or online? How have your book reading habits changed? What do you plan to read next?

Two book recommendations for Thanksgiving 2011 are Robert Frank's The High-Beta Rich and Michael Lewis' Boomerang. These books go nicely as a pair, as the first seeks to explain the consequences of the financialization of wealth and the second follows this trend to its ultimate conclusion (world economic crisis and default). If you were planning on going crazy on Black Friday at Best Buy with your credit card, you might be wiser to download (buy?) these books and stay home reading.

Why is the e-book borrowing experience with OverDrive so atrocious? How is it that Amazon is able to make the "Kindle Books from Your Local Library" so easy, while OverDrive makes the process so painful?