The news announcement from Apple also says this is the last time they will participate in the expo. MacWorld is where Steven Jobs traditionally announces the flashy new product(s) of the year, such as the iPhone (2007) and Air laptop (2008).

Says the Wall St. Journal: “An Apple spokesman said Mr. Jobs won’t be attending the conference.” Instead, the company’s senior vp of world-wide product marketing, Philip Schiller, will deliver the last keynote on Jan. 6. The WSJ also noted that “In after-hours trading, Apple shares were down 5.5% at $90.15.”

Not only am I concerned about Jobs’ health — has his cancer returned? — but I’m also grieving that a good part of my daily entertainment will die. You see, to counterbalance the endless bad news on the wars, the economy, the corruption, the terrorist attacks, etc., etc. I track Apple  + Jobs + Rumors with Google Alerts. 

Now…well, now…I feel sad. 

Update in December

 So…I finally downloaded the e-reader app, mostly could only find “Tarzan of the Apes,” which I loved as a kid, almost as much as I loved Burroughs’ “Thurva, Maid of Mars.” I read the grey/darker grey text for a few minutes. The type was clear, I had to flick my finger constantly to scroll and all in all…forget it.

October Story

Why didn’t I know that iPhone already has been turned into an e-reader?!!

My alert came via Goggle picking up software Engineer Shoaib Hashmir’s blog about the free iPhone application, Stanza, created by Portland, Ore.-based Lexcycle.

Through Hashmir, I tracked back to Anthony Ha’s Venture Beat article on iPhone as an e-reader, which includes an interview with the Lexcycle COO Neelan Choksi. 

In its first six weeks, Stanza was downloaded 200,000 times, Choksi told Ha. (Versus 40,000 Kindles sold a month.) The only books available for iPhone now are “older works that have entered in the public domain… or available for free via Creative Commons.”

But — I add — the books on iPhone are in color. Okay, black text on white pages isn’t colorful, but it offers a brighter experience than shades of grey E-ink. Okay, you can’t read the screen in the sun…but…get in the shade. 

Where’s Jobs’ iTablet?! January?

Greg Platts of National Geographic fame just mass mailed his .pdf family Christmas card. Even with a flood of emails to answer from my own “Happy New Year’s” email, I clicked on Greg’s message at once — who wouldn’t?!

“Bad Hygiene,” said the subject line. Greg’s message noted that in organizing a dozen pix of his family’s year, that he’d worn the same baggy blue Oxford (Brooks Bros?) shirt at the Grand Canyon and a week later in Berkeley  for one of his son’s graduation. 

Cheryl Diermyer, University of Wisconsin, returned from our Center for Digital Storytelling workshop in October, “ignited with the desire to help tell a million more stories.”

Immediately, Cheryl created an Oh Yeh!! video (three-minutes) about our Train-the-Trainer workshop, which show what the workshops are like, and models what a digital story is. We ten trainees learned:

1. Start with a story that only you can tell, and you tell it.  Ask a dramatic question. 

2. Add photos, artwork and video clips. Don’t always be literal; seek metaphors.

3. Add music to build emotion.

4. As your story cirlces to its conclusion, understanding will unfold, and perhaps, you, as well as your audience, will change. 

Cheryl’s truth? “I’ve learned through story,” she says in her video. “Stories that tell of triumph, of pain, of healing, of history, of how things work and why individuals care.”

The Oh Yeh! video kicked off a two-day STORYTIME, conference at UWisc, which Cheryl organized for professors who are — or who want–to use stories in their curriculum. Speakers included the founder and CEO of the Center for Digital Storytelling, Joe Lambert.

The conference is another step in Cheryl’s job, which aims to incorporate technology and digital storytelling into curriculum at all UWisc campuses.

Background: What is Digital Storytelling?

I admire Cheryl’s definition: “Storytelling is an oral tradition used to teach beliefs and values, and to transfer knowledge….While there is no doctrine defining a digital story as a distinct genre, it has become generally associated with a short film (less than 5 minutes), which is a mixture of a written and recorded voiceover with still and moving images, and often a soundtrack. Digital stories are often told in the first person voice and can be used to create connections between students, instructors and content.” 

Cheryl also notes that a lot of research has been done on how “digital storytelling facilitates of development of metacognitive skills through the integration of technology and personal reflection.”

Examples of Digital Storytelling

Examples of Digital Stories

So of course I wanted to send a clever card, something that would make my friends go, “HEY! Are you cool or what, Cathy?” Leopard’s Mac Mail has a few email designs where you drag in your own pix, but their styles are ho-hum, not ho-ho, so I searched around and found Equinux.com. Bought the family pack (I’m a two-computer person) for about $100 and found a perfect card. A book announcement. How perfect is that to announce a blog that specializes in e-books? I sketched a pic of the photo of myself that I wanted, and the security guard in my condo building got the right shot. 

Then Came Tech Tension

I sent out batches of emails, and the replies flooded back. Some said WOW, most said, “I can’t read the yellow type.” Their reply-return messages looked like the red book cover wasn’t one of the designs’ six attachments they received.

There didn’t seem to be any pattern to who had the problem. Some Macs, some PCs received. And vice versa. 

Then I sent out batches of mea culpas with a jpg of what the clever-cool-creative card was supposed to look like. Ha-Ha. I still don’t trust Equinux.com. 

Gulker Conclusion

Valley Maven Chris Gulker (gulker.com) thinks the “breakage is caused by the large number of different email clients out there… some treat jpegs as attachments to be downloaded rather than displayed.” Chris solves the problem by creating a web page and emails the link. Simple solution. But I thought mine was simpler, kind of a paint-by-numbers batch of creativity. 

Anyway

Merry Eid-Hanukah-Christmas…and for all, a Happy New Year.

I’ve been delaying coping with a WordPress upgrade during months of upgrade hell. Just as I was preparing to tackle the promised newer, better, blab-blab WordPress, I read my pal Chris Gulker’s reaction. Gulker, a Valleyman who knows everything says:

One of those frustrations is the Wordpress 2.6 editor… so, we’ve just switched, mid-post to an old friend, MarsEdit. The new Worpress editor just did so many ‘helpful’ things, especially with photos, that I was spending a lot of time in the HTML editor cleaning up the posts, anyway.  gulker.com

Maybe 2.7 is better? But Chris just posted his switch to MarsEdit, so I’m not convinced.

I was reminded again in reading about some of the upcoming e-reader announcements/demos that show time will be at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas from 8th-11th January. Look for Readius (the cell phone with pull-out e-paper) and PlasticLogic (14″ diagonal screen in plastic, weighing less than a pound) to announce newspaper partners and US delivery dates. [This is an assumption.]

Mac fans, of course, are waiting for MacWorld, Jan, 5-9,  when Jobs always delivers his biggest surprise(s) of the year.

I’m ready for the surprise that Apple and Amazon are joining forces and the iKindle will be in color and have Amazon’s 290,000 books and all major newspapers and magazines. 

Sometimes online news, for all its read + watch + talk, isn’t enough. Sometimes you need to look at big pictures, analyze info-graphics that are far bigger than a screen, and sometimes you need to hold onto paper like you are sealing a memory with your fingers.

This morning I mailed two print WPost stories, which ended up taking all of my stamps, a collection of 41-cent and 42-cent and 1-cent and 2-cent. In other words, it was a pain. But worth it.

Story 1

Above the fold, spread across the center of the Business section home page, was a story about the business of indulgence in the recession. The spa featured was Nustra, an eco-spa owned by Elizabeth Snowden, the daughter of a Wyoming friend of mine. My friend lives like an Amtrack switchman on steriods when it comes to the Internet, but she will open the envelope, sit down in her living room with a mug of herbal tea, and savor the story. Nicest: There’s a three-column pic of her friend’s daughter on the jump. Bet my friend mails the story on.

Story 2

A few days ago, one of the “children of my heart” told me that he has been making his living with online poker for the past two years. I felt myself freeze. I had a gambling grandfather and I know how dangerous this “livelihood”. “I’m not a gambler,” he said. “Gamblers lose.”

Oh, dear. And gamblers win enough to keep coming back to the table/screen, and lose.

By coincidence today, the WPost ran a two-part series about fraud in online poker, which is illegal in most countries, lives off-shore and answers to no one except itself. The timeline’s on the frauds were especially important, so I mailed the series. (Besides, my young friend is trying to improve his English.)

Part One: “Hunting the Internet Poker Cheats”

Part Two: “Should Internet Gambling be Legal?”

CBS’s 60 Minutes program.

Discussion with two-time Pultizer Prize-winning author, Gilbert M. Gaul, after series was posted.

Some suburban DC families are buying copies of their children’s schoolbooks so the kids don’t have to carry home pounds of books, I heard at Thanksgiving dinner. The subject in particular was elementary school math books, which can weigh about five pounds.

I noted that fact in a slide for the lectures that I’m preparing for India in February about why the shift for e-readers is going to happen. There are just too many sensible reasons to change, starting with book weight. To really emphasize my point, I also added data from a previous blog about how the average US law student buys an average of 28-pounds of books each year for her classes. [28 pounds vs. ounces for an e-reader.]

While most publishers in the $8 billion textbook industry are waiting for better e-readers and more secure copyrights — of course – the business is shifting anyway. The digital share of the higher-education text market is between 5 and 10% and growing, reports the Washington Post, in a Nov. 30 article about how the State of Virginia and its teachers are pushing ahead in one of the first state-sponsored efforts to digitize course content.

The revolution is starting in high school physics. By February, Virginia’s physics teachers will begin to have free access to supplemental chapters and lab experiments on such emerging fields as nanotechnology, biophysics, and flat-screen technology. (Many physics books are stuck back in cathode ray tubes.) 

Called “flexbooks,” the chapters are being written by a dozen volunteer teachers across the state. A physics professor at Virginia’s College of William & Mary will review the chapters before they are posted. Once the text is online, other teachers will be able to post updates and corrections and customize lessons for their students.

Some feedback also might come from students.  The WPost interviewed an honors physics high school student in Montgomery County (Maryland’s premier school district in the DC suburbs) who said he plans to check the text for readability. 

What difference does up-to-date material make?

Everything, says Mike Fetsko, a physics teacher in Henrico County, is writing a chapter on particle physics for the flexbook. Mike told the WPost’sMichael Alison Chandler  that one of his main goals is “to give students experience with ongoing physics research so they don’t think physics is dead….Students ‘are not necessarily going to be interested in Galileo dropping a rock off a building’ to learn about inertia, Fetsko said. But a black hole — that is pretty interesting.”

WPost: names, orgs to track

[Note: the Post offers apples and oranges in this list, and doesn't mention a key player, Sun Microsystem Foundation's open-source curriculum wiki, Curriki.]

 1. Virginia is partnering with CK-12, a nonprofit in Silicon Valley that offers “next-generation textbooks” in physics, math, and biology online. It also offers software to help school systems develop their own content

 2. Connections at Rice University offers 7,000 free, online modules or chapters for subjects in Pre-K-16.  According to the NY Times, Connections, which received $6 million from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, is using a digital music model on textbooks — “rip, burn, and mash.”

3. MIT posts almost all of its coursework online.

4. A Caltech econ professor, R. Preston McAfee, wrote and posted a free introductory economics textbook to protest the cost of textbooks (It would have listed for about $200) and the dumbing down for the broadest audience, according to the NY Times.

The curious coincidence is that this is the same sold-out story with the same prices as this time last year during the Holidays. Except there wasn’t a rumored Kindle 2 in 2007.