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EPUB is the easiest and most reliable way for your works to be widely distributed and widely readable, with full copyright protection if you want it. The files are efficiently tiny and easy to send over the Internet, post on a web site, or attach to an email. Your readers can choose how to read them: on their computer, on their iPad, on their Nook or Sony Reader or even on their Blackberry or iPhone. The Luddites among them can print them to paper if they need to. One format, many devices. You need not worry about fonts, formatting, layout, or any of the glitches that arise with proprietary file formats such as Microsoft Word or PDF. Your reader chooses the font, page layout, text size, and style that best fits the device he's using or the setting she's in.

With advanced devices like the iPad, the EPUB format allows your work to take advantage of certain educational features that can enhance the reading experience. Imagine your students being able to click on a word, any word in your text, to see its definition, or hear it pronounced, or look it up in the encyclopedia. Imagine your visually-impaired readers being able to listen to your book, all without doing any extra work. All you need to do is publish your work in the EPUB format; the device applies the extra features as the reader wishes.

First, write something worth publishing. Write it in any word-processor you want, but don't do any formatting -- use only plain text. Avoid repeated spaces, tabs, fonts, centering, tables, headers, footers, page numbers, and special effects. Keep it simple. On Windows, use Notepad; on Macintosh, use TextEdit or Pages. If you need images, insert them as inline images. Save your writing in plain text format. Next, convert your work to the EPUB format:

No matter which method you use, the result is a file with an .epub extension. These are compact, cross-platform files, easy to email to your correspondents, to post on your own web site or on Moodle or Blackboard, or to hand off on a USB disk.

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Your Learn Math Yourlearnmath Your Learn Math You Learn Math Power to Learn - Boats and Cheese

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Boats and Cheese
by Jim Lengel, Hunter College School of Education, 03/04/10

In previous articles in this space, we have discussed the changing nature of the workplace, and the role of technology in it (Home, School and Workplace; Working and Learning; Education 1-2-3; Nonroutine Cognitive/Analytic). Like many other writers on this topic, we have described an American economy that has shifted quickly from manufacturing to information, from making things to moving ideas. And warned the next generation not to prepare themselves for work in a factory that no longer exists.

But we still have factories, and they employ millions of workers. We don't make many refrigerators or computers or televisions any more; these are manufactured for the most part overseas. But we still make such high-tech articles as aircraft and automobiles. And low-tech items such as boats. And cheese. Last week I visited two plants that manufacture the last two items, to see the kinds of jobs and the kinds of technologies at work and to consider the implications for how we use technology in school.

Boats

The factory in Warren, Rhode Island has been making boats for more than 50 years. In the middle of the sprawling factory floor are hulls in various stages of assembly, some empty shells, others ready to roll out the door to the launch ramp. From a small sailboat that Stuart Little would find familiar, to larger cruisers being built for the US Navy, the array represented the range of current boat production.

A boat is assembled from hundreds of parts, each manufactured in one of the shops that surround the main factory floor. One shop makes the hull, another the deck, others construct the floors, walls, and teak trim pieces. All are highly automated. What struck me was the lack of people, and the lack of noise. No banging, no yelling, no muscle work. The few workers in the plant wore blue button-down shirts and ID tags. Their hands rested on computer keyboards more than on wrenches or screwdrivers. The soft hum of machinery and exhaust fans seemed to quiet the place down.

Today's boat is a precision instrument, crafted for speed, strength, durability, and lightweight. Its parts are created not by people at lathes but by computer-controlled robots. Here's how the robots work.

Where's the worker? He's standing several feet away, safely monitoring the action. His hands are folded, his shirt spotless, his mind focused on how he might speed up or improve the manufacturing process.

What skills does he need to succeed at this work? Will he learn them at your school?

Cheese

We import very little cheese from China. It's one of the things that we still make at home. At the Cabot Farmer's Cooperative factory in the hills of rural Vermont, millions of pounds of cheddar go out the door each year aboard trucks bound for every state in the union. At the other end of the plant, huge pipes funnel in millions of gallons of milk from New England cows. In between we can see the cheese-making process, a natural organic transformation that we have employed for thousands of years: expose the milk to the air, add a little acid, watch the temperature, and wait for the curds to form. Then compress the solids, let it age, and slice it onto your sandwich.

On the factory floor, you'd expect to see a team of wrinkled codgers in plaid shirts and overalls stirring the pots, turning the valves, and tasting the samples. But they were nowhere to be found. Instead, I saw scientists in white lab coats armed with test tubes and computers.

While she monitors the process in the lab, the machines that make the cheese are run by computers.

Not too many jobs in this factory for unskilled workers, or for those limited to carrying out routine tasks. The routine tasks are done by the machines. The workers are there to program the machines, monitor them with precision, solve problems when they go wrong, and design new machines that make the cheese better. Are the students at your school learning what they need to carry out these kinds of tasks?

The skills we need

Boats and cheese are real, substantive physical entities that are still manufactured by Americans. They are neither digital, informational, nor service products. They are part of the old economy. But today they are made in new ways that call for a set of skills that were not so important in the old economy. The kind of skills described in the article Nonroutine Cognitive/Analytic : problem-solving; numerical analysis; engineering design; applied chemistry; statistics; close observation. And these are the lowest-level workers in the system; their supervisors must possess all these and more.

If basic products like boats and cheese require this level of technical skill and intellectual understanding, imagine what is required to manufacture more complex items. The expectations and standards of yesterday will not suffice for the world our students will move into.

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Your Learn Math Yourlearnmath Your Learn Math You Learn Math Power to Learn - Boats and Cheese

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by James G. Lengel, Hunter College School of Education, 12/10/09

Filebusters
by James G. Lengel, Hunter College School of Education, 01/28/2008

Vignette #1

The students had completed their slide show tracing the dissemination of Islamic art forms through areas of Spain and France in the 11th - 13th centuries. Replete with animated maps and photographic examples, the slide show supported their well-researched spoken narrative on this topic. Now it was time to post the PowerPoint slide show to the class web site.

With the help of their professor, they uploaded the slide show...but it did not make it. The system told them it would take six hours to upload the file! (And so, of course, it would take anyone wishing to view the file the same six hours to download it.) This was not what they were aiming at.

Vignette #2

The kindergartners' beautifully-published books on animal habitats were a big hit at the PTA Curriculum Fair. Printed in full color on glossy paper in a hardback binding, they told the story, in words and pictures, of adaptation, predation, and protection. The students used iPhoto to create the book, based on extensive online research, original photography, group discussion, and serious composition. Now it was time to provide a copy for each student.
But not every family had the iPhoto application on their computer at home, nor did the school have a .Mac account that would have allowed easy uploading and viewing of the book over the Web.

Vignette #3

The three faculty members had worked long and hard to prepare the grant proposal. They each sent their narratives, supporting research papers, and curriculum vitae to the grants manager, all in the form of Microsoft Word documents. As the grants manager compiled the final copy for submission, he noticed that some of the tables looked a little odd, and he remembered seeing a pop-up window warning of some missing fonts. But he'd learned to ignore all those pop-up windows, and so thought nothing of it.
Their proposal was rejected, on the grounds that two crucial data tables were indecipherable to the grant-review committee. The main ideas on the proposal were quite sound, remarked the committee, but the garbled tables did not allow them to see the results of the previous research.

Who are you going to call?

All three of the educators described in these vignettes have problems with their files: they are either too big, too strange, or too messed up to be useful. What they need is the digital equivalent of Ghostbusters, perhaps called Filebusters, to come in and save the day. Most computer-using teachers and students have at one time or another confronted issues such as these, where the files just don't work for the intended educational purpose. And a few have discovered a solution that applies in many similar situations, called Portable Document Format, or PDF.

The PDF format was pioneered by the Adobe company to make it possible to publish a document that would be eminently readable, and nicely printable, no matter what kind of computer you displayed it on, or printer you printed it on, or software you used to view it. And once published by the author, a PDF document could not be altered by the reader. This format was based in part on on Adobe's patented PostScript technology, which is used in many printers and some computer displays.

Here's how PDF could have helped our three disabled digerati:

Had the students of Islamic art saved their slide show in a properly compressed PDF format, it would have been small enough for posting to and downloading from the school web site. That's because the PDF format saves only the information it needs to display the slides on a computer with standard resolution. PowerPoint, on the other hand, saves the full resolution of each image in the slide show, which can amount to many megabytes of unnecessary pixels. And just about everybody has a PDF reader on their computer -- most are free or built in. But not everyone has the latest version of PowerPoint, which must be purchased. So PDF is concise.
Had the kindergartners exported their iPhoto books in PDF format, they could easily have been distributed over the web or on CD, and displayed on any type of computer, with or without iPhoto. From the PDF file, the books could be printed at home, or read directly from the computer screen. In full color. Or emailed to grandma in Texas. PDF is compatible.
Had the faculty members submitted their grant application in PDF format, it would have been much less likely to become contaminated by subsequent reviewers, and much more likely to display exactly as desired no matter what kind of computer or printer was used by the reader. That's because PDF files are not alterable by most grant mangers or reviewers, as Word files are. PDF is consistent.

How to save in PDF

You may need to save your own publications in the PDF format. Here's how:

On Apple Macintosh, it's easy and built in. No matter which program you are using, choose from the menubar File --> Print. Then, in the Print dialog box, click the PDF button in the lower left corner. You'll get a choice of dispositions: Save as PDF, Compress PDF, and so forth. For the situations described above, Save or Compress would have been the best choices. This process creates a new file on your computer, in PDF format.
On Windows and Linux, you'll need to install a PDF-saving utility on your computer, and then follow its directions to convert your documents to the Portable Document Format. A search on PDF utilities for Windows will point you to several free and paid programs for this purpose.

Once saved in PDF format, these files can be distributed by all of the means at your digital disposal:

You can attach the PDF file to on email, and end it to your correspondents with the confidence that it's concise enough to pass the email file size censor, compatible enough to be read by all, in a consistent format.
You can copy the PDF file to a compact disc, or flash memory stick, and let your public copy them from there to their own computers with the same confidence.

You can post the PDF file to a web site, knowing at all web servers know how to send out this format, and all web browsers know how to send it to the PDF reader to display it. Just as you published it.

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