Living Textbook

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Christopher Potter on August 3, 2007 at 1:56pm

I really like the idea, but couldn't I just use the Google search you reference on the 1st page to find news articles myself?
It also seems very labor intensive for you. Having to find all those articles and create thinking questions to go with them. How are you going to be able to keep it timely?

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Andrew Pass on August 3, 2007 at 2:03pm

Hi Christopher,

My thought is that the questions will actually be able to be good any time. Certainly, the news articles may not be relevant but hopefully the questions still will be. You could certainly use the Google search to find articles yourself. But, then they won't have the questions. Do you think I'm kidding myself. I'm actually hoping to generate some revenue from this from the ads.

Please let me know.

Thanks.

Andy

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Christopher Potter on August 3, 2007 at 2:20pm

I am one guy, so I would get other opinions, but I am not sure you are going to make a whole ton of money off of it. Not enough to quit your job and move to the Ritz eating bon-bons all day.

You need to have timeliness. You need to be able to find the articles pretty quickly and put good, solid questions to them. if you can do that and get yourself @ the top of the Google rankings, you might get somewhere.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Sharon Betts on August 6, 2007 at 11:48am

Wow, this is a work of huge proportion. Would it be possible to encourage online collaboration to keep things updated? Current events are one of the areas that really becomes enhanced and transformed with the internet tools of today.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Andrew Pass on August 6, 2007 at 5:50pm

Sharon, Do you have any suggestions as to how we might do this? I am in the process of developing comments pages for the website. But any other suggestions would also be appreciated. I had a wiki for a while but people did not post.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Christine Southard on August 9, 2007 at 5:26am

I like the idea of a living textbook. I can see the potential of using this tool with my 5th graders, but having me, the teacher, as the facilitator. What grade levels are you aiming to reach?

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Andrew Pass on August 9, 2007 at 7:13am

First of all, I absolutely agree that the questions are not sufficient to promote great discussion. The teacher has to do it. If teachers don't facilitate students won't thoughtfully engage with the ideas. Secondly, I'm really hoping to reach a variety of different grades. I think that some questions are good for younger students and many of the questions could even engage adults. I'm thinking it's not so much the age that the questions are targetted to but the age that the discussions are targetted to. Does this make sense?

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by wilmomoney on August 10, 2007 at 4:39pm

Don't take it a self promotion, but I thought this would be the best way to describe what we have been building. I believe one can build a great business around the new forms distributed digital communications tools and social platforms to create new forms of life long and life wide centered learning.

I am the owner of 4vision, Inc., a 20-year-old software R&D company. Over the past two years we have developed a distributed, digital media network platform called the Nomad Storyteller platform.

Nomad enables end users to act as digital media consumers and producers of multimedia content that can be shared across a network of Nomad users. Users are provided personal workspaces called "digital portfolios", that are hosted on their own devices (desktop, laptop, mobile), or third party storage services. Digital portfolios are used to manage the creation of multimedia content and individual personal content.

An easy to use content editor, and narrative based templates, enables the user to create multimedia content in the form of stories and narratives. Seamlessly integrated communications services such as Instant Messaging, Voice Over IP, peer-to-peer collaboration and streaming services provide users many ways to share stories.

A key feature of the product is the integrated social network connector that enables the Nomad platform to connect Nomad digital portfolios across social networks based on users like interests. Facebook and Ning are our initial social network integration targets. Facebook boasts over 30 million users providing immediate potential users of our services as a result of Nomad's seamless integration with Facebook user profiles.

Information about Nomad can be found at www.4vision.com

Thanks

• ▶ Reply