2,073 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2015
    1. no research

      In direct opposition with the model for most universities, these days. So that may be the fork in the road. But there are more than two paths.

    2. we could attract some of the very best professors in the world

      As is well-known, there’s a direct correlation between financial incentives and the quality of one’s pedagogy…

    3. to offer just lectures
    4. MOOCs represent the unbundling of the course itself
    5. startup non-profit

      Those two models can mix, but there’s a big tendency for the “non-profit” side to be a way to generate goodwill while forcing the startup model down people’s throats.

    6. The forces that will make it inevitable are picking up steam right now.

      So it’s not inevitable now, but it should become so. Interesting part of the story. Commercial entities like Kaplan and Knewton are trying to put things in place so that this inevitability happens. Doesn’t give much agency to other players. Or address the issue that cable packages are still bundled and may even be bundling more. As sociology keeps asking: who decides, here?

    7. The more they bundle, the more they can raise prices.

      Ha! Now we have it. It’s yet again about tuition increases. Very important, and spreading from the US to elsewhere. But does the same logic happen when most universities are public, as is the case here in Canada? Sure, many fees increase and it’s a big issue. But the reasons might be different.

    8. Originally, the university bundle included courses, food, and board.

      Can we get a date for this one? Again, it sounds quite far from the original Bologna model. Maybe it came from the German model, which so influenced US universities? Can’t we think of other models?

    9. my old Kaplan Inc. boss

      Speaking of transparency…

    10. Universities bundle services like mad

      Who came up with such a scheme? A mad scientist? We’re far from Bologna.

    11. perfect storm of bundling
    12. This brings us to the university model

      Already? But we were just getting started!

    13. value is created for all users but is unequally distributed

      A very individualistic sense of “justice” runs through this type of model.

    14. But what about when some users consume far more than others?

      As what happens with some students who require so much care either because they’re so “entitled” or because they have special needs?

    15. only unbundling health clubs suffer

      There might be something about the connection between learning and “health & wellness”.

    16. all you can eat breakfast buffet

      The Lynda model (which now belongs to LinkedIn).

    17. Breakage is a free lunch for suppliers
    18. when outcomes are non-transparent

      Before Common Core.

    19. When a product’s outcomes are transparent, complex product bundles don’t last long.

      And since there’s no obfuscation in academia…

    20. The complexity of the bundle reduces the product’s transparency, impeding consumers’ ability to do cost-benefit analysis

      Might read the University Ventures piece but, pausing a second: a college student assessing the potential benefits of her degree has a harder time because she has to take this “Just in Case” course as well as the “Just in Time” one. Gotcha.

    21. speak louder with their purchasing preference

      Currency is mightier than the pen which is mightier than the sword which is thicker than blood. Or some such.

    22. Unbundling has played out in almost every media industry.

      And the shift away from “access to content” is still going on, a decade and a half after Napster. If education is a “content industry” and “content industries” are being disrupted, then education will be disrupted… by becoming even more “industrial”.

    23. consumer choice will inevitably force them to unbundle.

      The battle is raging on, but the issue is predetermined.

    24. this will likely happen too

      Sets the tone.

    25. Then the silos became narrower.
    1. Yes, my intention was to show the most easily replaced in dark and move it to the least easily replaced.

      One linear model, represented in something of a spiral… Agreed that the transformative experience is tough to “disrupt”, but the whole “content delivery” emphasis shows that the disruption isn’t so quick.

    1. Oops! Started annotating the Forbes version but this one might be better (no preload). Wish I could transfer my annotations from one version to the other…

    1. customers become less willing to pay

      There are a few key cases, here. a) Public Education (much of the planet) b) Parent-Funded Higher Education (US-centric model) c) Corporate Training (emphasis for most learning platforms, these days) d) For-Profit Universities (Apollo Group and such) e) xMOOCs (learning as a startup idea, with freemium models) f) Ad-Supported Apps & Games (Hey! Some of them are “educational”!)

    2. As a result, new disruptive innovations emerge that are more modular—or unbundled
    3. wring out every ounce of performance

      Now think of it with a learner in mind.

    4. In every industry, the early successful products and services often have an interdependent architecture—meaning that they tend to be proprietary and bundled.

      The idea that there’s a “Great Unbundling of (Higher) Education” needs not be restricted to the business side of things, but it’s partly driven by those who perceive education as an “industry”. Producing… graduates?

    1. The Learning Management System (LMS) pervades the EdTech space.
    1. course design is more important than the LMS

      In all the platform news, we can talk about “learning management” in view of instructional and course design. But maybe it even goes further than design into a variety of practices which aren´t through-designed.

    1. It is possible to achieve a more humane and personal education at scale

      Important claim, probably coming from the need for reports which answer the “But does it scale?” question.

    2. increased investment in professional development and teaching-friendly tenure and promotion practices

      Even those who adopt a taylorist model to education may understand that “it takes money to save money”.

    1. the major governing body of the Internet

      Well… The World Wide Web Consortium is really about governing the Web, not the whole Internet. But we do tend to forget that there’s more to the Net than the Web.

    1. personal note taking, peer review, copy editing, post publication discussion, journal clubs, classroom uses, automated classification, deep linking

      Useful list, almost a roadmap or set of scenarios. The last two might be especially intriguing, in view of the Semantic Web.

    2. deep linking

      Ah, yes! It may sound technical to some, but there’s something very useful about deep linking which can help fulfill Berners-Lee’s Semantic Web idea much more appropriately than what is currently available. Despite so many advances in Web publishing (and the growing interest in Linked Open Data), it’s often difficult to link directly to an online item of interest. In a way, Hypothesis almost allows readers to add anchor tags to an element so it can be used in a direct link.

    1. The EDUPUB Initiative VitalSource regularly collaborates with independent consultants and industry experts including the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), American Foundation for the Blind (AFB), Tech For All, JISC, Alternative Media Access Center (AMAC), and others. With the help of these experts, VitalSource strives to ensure its platform conforms to applicable accessibility standards including Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Accessibility Guidelines established by the Worldwide Web Consortium known as WCAG 2.0. The state of the platform's conformance with Section 508 at any point in time is made available through publication of Voluntary Product Accessibility Templates (VPATs).  VitalSource continues to support industry standards for accessibility by conducting conformance testing on all Bookshelf platforms – offline on Windows and Macs; online on Windows and Macs using standard browsers (e.g., Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari); and on mobile devices for iOS and Android. All Bookshelf platforms are evaluated using industry-leading screen reading programs available for the platform including JAWS and NVDA for Windows, VoiceOver for Mac and iOS, and TalkBack for Android. To ensure a comprehensive reading experience, all Bookshelf platforms have been evaluated using EPUB® and enhanced PDF books.

      Could see a lot of potential for Open Standards, including annotations. What’s not so clear is how they can manage to produce such ePub while maintaining their DRM-focused practice. Heard about LCP (Lightweight Content Protection). But have yet to get a fully-accessible ePub which is also DRMed in such a way.

    1. add multimedia marginalia

      Especially useful in “today’s memetic marketplace”. The “image macro” isn’t the only format for memes, but it has become enmeshed with the concept.

    2. public and collaborative space of social reading online

      A very special space inasmuch as it has few offline equivalents. Sure, we might describe the class “lecture” in a similar way. But the type of collaboration involved is severely limited (and, in some cases, prohibited). This is one deep dimension of online annotation, which requires some “sink in” time. People are reading collaboratively, as a social activity, by sharing annotations asynchronously.

    3. Annotation in academic settings

      Providing context for the coalition (coming a bit over two weeks later).

    4. something we all do all the time

      Sounds exaggerated, and there are people who probably go through life without annotating much. But point taken, annotation is a broad concept.

    5. that exercise can sometimes feel artificial.

      Touché!

    6. era of the Common Core

      Acknowledging a related controversy to make the argument non-controversial.

    7. slow readers down

      Does the slow reading movement parallel the slow food one? In some ways, there might be a point against “consumption” in both cases. Or, at least, utilitarianism.

    8. any other kind of text

      With “text”, here, in the broadest sense. Which some people outside the Humanities may not find so obvious. “A drawing is a text?” Well, yes, in this sense.

    9. age-old learning practice

      Embedded reference to Talmudic traditions?

    1. spread this to other communities

      It starts with academia and standards but it should trickle down to education and the corporate world. Gotcha.

    2. all interested stakeholders

      In some ways, all “people of the Web” hold stakes in this process.

    3. W3C welcomes technical feedback on its Web Annotation specifications

      This feedback process is key. The barrier to entry can be pretty high, but the effects may be felt widely.

    4. review, copy-editing, collaboration, categorization, and reference

      Laying down some of the core actions to be done with Web “content” through annotations.

    5. has used annotations (and the related techniques of footnotes and citations) extensively for centuries

      In some non-trivial ways, this might be key to how people have defined “scholars”, including religious ones.

    6. The scholarly community

      Officially, the core constituency for the coalition. And they’re probably easy to define, especially among English-speaking academics in North America or Europe. But there are important bridges to build with other spheres of agency which also contribute to the construction of knowledge. Who knows? Maybe open annotations will fill in the gaps between the Ivory Tower and the so-called “Real World”.

    7. e-readers

      Leaving the door open for eBooks? IDPF is part of the coalition after all and there are important connections with work done on ePUB3.

    8. public review of all of our specifications

      Former Web Platform DevOps Renoir Boulanger had nice things to say about Kardell’s Chapters.io.

    9. W3C is experimenting with using the technology itself.
    10. let you share a URL that navigates directly to the selection you shared.

      An important form of deep linking.

    11. The FindText API lets a browser or plugin “re-anchor” an annotation to its original selection within a Web page

      Ha! Good to know. Anchoring might be the trickiest issue with Web annotations, especially with dynamic content. There’s been a lot of work on similar things for SVG, including by Shepazu himself. So it’s useful to know there’s some way to automate anchoring. But it’s one of those problems which may still be difficult to solve if texts change in unexpected ways.

    12. add tags for categorization and search

      Well-structured annotations can pave the way towards Linked Open Data.

    13. share their thoughts about a site with friends or colleagues

      A description of both social bookmarking in particular and most social media practices generally.

    14. want to synchronize their favorite sites across multiple devices

      Open Annotations could serve private purposes, like FoxMarks.

    15. organize and remember useful sites on the Web

      Bookmarking still isn’t a solved issue.

    16. improving the quality of comments that a reader sees for Web content

      Sounds like solving the problem with comments is a priority to many, but approaches tend to diverge. Some content publishers have decided to turn off comments, because of perceived issues with the “signal-to-noise ratio”. Others adopt a community management approach, enabling people to monitor and moderate comments as a special type of a group effort. Annotation brings this approach to a new mode, though people may not comments and annotations as occupying the same sphere.

    17. decentralized way

      Not that decentralisation is necessarily a net good, but the risks of a centralised Web are probably clear to most people.

    18. on top of the Web

      Funny how this layering stacks up. What’s “under” the Web is probably the backend. But there’s depth in annotation and the structure created is more complex than a simple superposition.

    19. comments on the Web are disjointed

      Dreams of federated content.

    20. user-generated content

      Continuity with Web 2.0, emphasis on content. Though the coalition is forward-looking, there’s something of a timestamp on this wording.

    21. distributed curation

      While “web curation” is well-established as a practice, there’s still a lot of work to do on what it represents, conceptually and epistemologically.

    1. drive, in part, the development of the Moodle project through a democratic mechanism.

      Social scientists among us may dispute this “democracy” label. The whole “one dollar, one vote” system is literally a textbook example of the Matthew Effect (through which the rich get richer).

    2. The most popular project for the MUA to tackle was Learning Analytics

      Although Dougiamas claims Moodle already has what is needed in the form of logs and reports: no need for Caliper or xAPI.

    1. Apereo’s profile as an honest broker and facilitator for educational open source

      This sounds like an unambiguous statement against accusations of Open Washing. But other pieces of the contextual puzzle make it difficult to get what’s going on. Hmm…

    2. vindicates the merger strategy

      Oh? Might need to revisit Michael’s statements on the merger (wasn’t following e-Literate when the merger happened). Will also try to learn more from Apereo about this.

    3. logical home for an open source project of just about any learning tool

      Yet again, we’re reminded of Norman’s Law.

    4. a home for the project that provides them with some open source credibility as well as a community of potential adoptees and participants.

      This part makes it sound even more like Open Washing. Apereo is a legitimate foundation for Open Source development and Blackboard entities entering by a side-door would be a dubious process. But we probably should be careful as to what this means for Apereo itself.

    5. if the group should decide to fork Moodle together

      Contrary to Free Software, Open Source has special affordances for forking, even if the forks become commercial.

    6. the plugin work they wanted to do anyway

      Giving structure to an existing initiative.

    7. a group that is not exactly in perfect alignment with Martin Dougiamas and Moodle HQ

      That’s one way to put it.

    8. a rationale for a group of large Moodle hosts to collaborate on testing plugins with an eye toward requirements that other Moodle users might not have

      There’s a clear need for collaborative work on LMS. But this approach deepens the impression that Moodle is a solution for “admins”.

    9. Moodlerooms, now owned by Blackboard Remote-Learner UK, now owned by Blackboard Netspot, now owned by Blackboard Nivel Siete, now owned by Blackboard

      During MoodleMoot, the notion that one organisation could “own” different institutional members of the Moodle Association was brushed away. But it sounds like a distinct possibility. Maybe not Blackboard but, say, a publishing house or an EdTech vendor…

    10. Lambda Solutions [Corrected.]

      Oh? They were quite present at MoodleMoot. Wonder what their ties are. Clearly, their solution isn’t free software. Nor is it pushing Open Standards for Learning Analytics.

    11. alliance of Moodle service providers that currently collaborate on Moodle-related projects of mutual interest
    12. if one or more of the larger companies were to leave the Partner program.

      Had not thought of that, during MoodleMoot. But, clearly, there’s a number of things at the back of Martin’s mind (or anyone else at Moodle HQ).

    1. The goal of education is for the educator to become less and less needed for learners to learn.

      The reverse of the typical “goal displacement”. Instead of focusing on ensuring our continued employment as “instructors”, we want to make sure learning happens. Deep down, we know we’ll find ways to work, no matter what happens. The comparison with health can be interesting. If doctors had an incentive to keep people sick, society wouldn’t benefit much. Allegedly, Chinese healthcare provides incentives for doctors to help people stay healthy. Sounds like it’d make sense, somehow. Yet education and health are both treated like industries. We produce graduates, future employees, etc. Doctors produce people who fit a pattern of what it means to be healthy in a given social context. There’s even a factory-chain metaphor used when some people apply “lean management” to hospitals or colleges. Not that the problem is with the management philosophy itself. But focusing so much on resource allocation blinds us from a deep reality: as we are getting healthier and more “learned”, roles are shifting.

    1. We embrace standards and, where none exist, we create them.

      Guess ISO and the W3C have a very different view of “standards”, then.

    1. Among the most useful summaries I have found for Linked Data, generally, and in relationship to libraries, specifically. After first reading it, got to hear of the acronym LODLAM: “Linked Open Data for Libraries, Archives, and Museums”. Been finding uses for this tag, in no small part because it gets people to think about the connections between diverse knowledge-focused institutions, places where knowledge is constructed. Somewhat surprised academia, universities, colleges, institutes, or educational organisations like schools aren’t explicitly tied to those others. In fact, it’s quite remarkable that education tends to drive much development in #OpenData, as opposed to municipal or federal governments, for instance. But it’s still very interesting to think about Libraries and Museums as moving from a focus on (a Web of) documents to a focus on (a Web of) data.

    2. Anyone can say Anything

      The “Open World Assumption” is central to this post and to the actual shift in paradigm when it comes to moving from documents to data. People/institutions have an alleged interest in protecting the way their assets are described. Even libraries. The Open World Assumption makes it sound quite chaotic, to some ears. And claims that machine learning will solve everything tend not to help the unconvinced too much. Something to note is that this ability to say something about a third party’s resource connects really well with Web annotations (which do more than “add metadata” to those resources) and with the fact that no-cost access to some item of content isn’t the end of the openness.

  2. Nov 2015
    1. Les représentants de la Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) annoncèrent leur objectif de ramener le délai de traitement des documents à six semaines en moyenne

      C’était long, en 2002! Où en est la BnF, aujourd’hui? D’une certaine façon, ce résumé semble prédire la venue des données, la fédération des catalogues, etc. Pourtant, il semble demeurer de nombreux obstacles, malgré tout ce temps. Et si on pouvait annoter le Web directement?

    1. institutions with more funding are more able to produce OERs than poorer ones

      As long as we define OERs in the “publishing” model. Learners in poor institutions often produce a lot of resources. Many of them aren’t online. But they may still be open, in some kind of UNESCO-friendly definition.

    2. Questions of colonialism and inequality are occasionally raised

      Maybe too rarely. Or they’re dismissed too quickly. Or they’re too difficult to fully discuss when much of the scene is taken by modernization theory. This is where post-development’s Ivan Illich meets deschooling’s Ivan Illich.

    3. process of creation and sharing

      Much learning happens in this process. Including embodied cognition, in some cases. And experiential learning. And selfdirected learning. And emancipation, empowerment, growth…

    4. should focus more on process

      That ain’t new and we all agree. Why are we still caught up in “content”? Can we understand knowledge in new ways? Are we stuck in a “content” paradigm the same way the Web has been stuck in a document paradigm?

    5. like even Wikipedia

      Same issue perceived with Genius.

    6. users forking their own versions

      Slidewiki has lofty goals as well.

    7. the opposite of a textbook

      Can even be perceived as a direct reaction to textbooks.

    8. now evolving into Federated WordPress

      Thanks in part to David Wiley… Could be a neat thing to show off at WPcampus.

    9. “open” as in students can modify it

      In FACET’s Quick Hits, it’s called the “Collaborative Syllabus”. Works well in some cases and can open up new possibilities.

    10. it apparently meant allowing students to see the syllabus before they register

      There are initiatives to do much more than this, including using Open Data on syllabi to delve down into course content.

    11. richness of what is already on the Internet on most subjects in English

      Access is here, for some people.

    12. Encouraging students to curate their own content

      Learners already create and curate a lot of “content”. Let’s encourage them to do more with it, even if they keep it somewhat closed. Much of it doesn’t have to be so high-minded, as even forum posts can do a lot to the learning process. “Open Education” isn’t merely about content and a lot of work in the 5Rs can be done in learning communities.

    13. digital literacy to see that these open textbooks have more credibility than, say, Wikipedia

      Well… Credibility is a tough thing and Wikipedia’s NPOV model does offer something early critical thinkers might find more appropriate to develop their skills than a biased textbook. Those of us who have used textbooks may feel that pain.

    14. for students to choose and compare authorities on controversial issues

      Sounds so good! But often very dependent on context. Many learners (early dualists in Perry’s model?) have a lot of difficulty accepting the notion that there are multiple authorities. Plus, the same could be said of asking learners to come up with their own sources. A few blogposts and Wikipedia entries can accomplish much of the same thing. Or even a well-crafted coursepack, full of copyrighted material. Giving option is essential, but it requires a lot of adjustments and doesn’t always work.

    15. authoritative source of information
    16. hidden curriculum

      Now we’re talking!

    17. maybe OER material on organic chemistry with images and equations transfers OK

      So the reusability paradox is field-specific?

    18. may not transfer well across borders because of language and context

      Can we embrace diversity?

    19. if free textbooks or OER offer learners free access to good quality knowledge

      Big “if”. And it’s one of those cases where defining those terms (“access”, “knowledge”, “free”, “good quality”, even “learners”…) is important but risky. We don’t want sterile debates, but we need to acknowledge that we may not be talking about the same things.

    1. Canada is unique in the world in that it is the only country whose national government has no authority in education;

      Though it may be taken for granted by actors in the sphere of learning in Canada, this factoid can have a large impact in terms of “Canadian Exceptionalism”.

    1. learning spaces
    2. What we need is a way to tie those spaces together into a coherent learning experience.
    3. We live in an appy world now.
    4. The future is the Learning Cloud.
    5. Caliper could potentially provide them with better tools for richer integration in a more elegant way.
    6. Frankenstein’s monster of WordPress plugins and custom hacks

      No BuddyPress?

    7. the hub of the course is really just an aggregation point
    8. SUNY

      Wait… Any connection to SUNY Learning Commons?

    9. most part

      Relegating LMS to certain functions. Weaning ourselves away from the LMS milk.

    10. students’ blogs to be the LMS

      D’Arcy Norman, again.

    11. grows exponentially.

      As we get into “Big Data”, individual datapoints become less important.

    12. What is the correlation between levels of student responses to each other and outcomes?

      Levels and types of responses. Just read such an analysis, based on Brookfield and Preskill’s “Conversational Moves”.

    13. read by any Caliper-compliant system

      Or any Learning Record Store.

    14. Caliper WordPress plugin

      How long before we get such a thing?

    15. most blogs have a feature called “pingbacks,”

      Annotations should have “pingbacks”, too. But the most important thing is how to process those later on. We do get into the Activity Streams behind much Learning Analytics.

    16. entity called “comment,”

      Post, comment, annotation… All different, but can all have the same predicate.

    17. If you write a post and I write a post on my own blog referring to yours, my blog post also “is a response to” your blog post.

      Chain of attribution, as @Shepazu would have it.

    1. we have to experiment

      Which is quite different from solutionnism. Hill and Feldstein aren’t saying that we need to individualize at all costs and they’ve come out against some aspects of the great unbundling. But we can all try different things, see what sticks, what the implications are. In times of crises, we have no choice but to innovate.

    2. How do you aid recent high school graduates while at the same time dealing with working adults who are coming back to school?

      Used to be the core model for Quebec’s Cegep system, a mix of high school graduates and “non-traditionals” (especially divorcées going “back to school”).

    3. particularly for women of color.
    4. check off on your way to an institution-defined collection of competencies that they call a “degree.”
    5. prior learning assessments

      The new frontier!

    6. institution-defined competencies
    7. credit for whatever college-level knowledge she has

      In pernicious ways, the grade- and enrolment-based system makes it hard to give credit where it’s “due”.

    8. we need more student-ready colleges
    9. we have new methods to focus more on the individual.

      Bear in mind that it’s not necessarily about the “learning styles” which end up being rather controversial, for some reason.

    10. college was never quite as uniform as we thought it was

      Again, the “Myth of the average student”.

    11. adaptive learning with multiple levels of support.
    12. The status quo is not working,

      Yet we don’t seem to find a way out of the crisis. Or even perceive the crisis.

    13. wide range of metacognitive skills
    14. open access

      Not really what we tend to mean by “open access” in academia, but closer to “open education” than one might assume. It can be less about the cost of textbooks than about inclusion. And diversity.

    15. Non-Traditional Students: The New Majority

      Education, she sure is changing.

    16. technology-assisted differentiated instruction
    1. approach of breaking learning down into teeny, tiny bits, tied to fine-grained competencies and micro-assessments
    1. Personal Learning Record will define how to represent, capture and leverage user activity, including ratings, test results and performance measures in a distributed learning and work environment.
    2. Resource Repository Network will create a resource graph of learning/training resources data from multiple sources and formats including live and dynamic data

      Sounds pretty close to Comète.

    3. Development of a common platform for learning resource delivery: developing a working version of the infrastructure that partners can use immediately to address their training needs. This includes data and information harvesting services, and data and information synchronization services in a common resource network marketplace.

      Significant opportunities for collaboration on educational resources.

    1. Coursera et Udacity ont déjà été ajoutés à votre profil

      Intéressant, de la part d’un des pionniers des cMOOC.

    2. les versions futures du système feront état des résultats de jeux-questionnaires, des certifications, des badges et plus encore
    3. Cernez les compétences que vous souhaitez développer

      Souvent l’étape la plus difficile.

    1. The future of news is still about journalism? We can annotate any content. This piece makes it sound as though journalism should become even more controlling.

    1. some kind of curated library

      Which is where OER catalogues (tied to the Semantic Web) may shine. Sure, they can require a lot of work. But this is precisely why they matter.

    2. creation of an OER culture among faculty

      Pretty much what we’re trying to enable. Culture change is organic, but there are ways to empower those actors who are pushing things in an appropriate direction, in terms of Open Education.

    1. One key barrier to this shift is the time and energy it takes to find new course materials and ensure they are high-quality.

      Either an obstacle to Open Textbook adoption or an opportunity for OER.

  3. Oct 2015
    1. there will be more experimentation around content

      One would hope that the field is wide open for experimentation. Yet such dreams of creative endeavours get crushed by business models.

    2. digital academic textbooks

      Including Open Textbooks and Open Access articles.

    3. it tells us little about sales of actual ebooks

      Or about the broader context for reading. Often strikes me that we still take the “book” concept as a given. Texts come in many forms but we’re stuck with this model of packaging texts by length. Much of literary postmodernism had to do with breaking free of those boundaries on our thinking. But eBooks often reproduce the linearity and boundedness of pre-hypertext “books”. Landow’s book was first published in 1991. What happened in the last 25 years?

    4. But my analysis is simple.

      Shift to first person singular.

    5. leading to reports that the digital market had peaked and was in retreat.
    6. It has helped revive the print book market

      See, dear print book publishers? Nothing to fear from eBooks. They’re your friends!

    7. publish directly to marketplaces run by Amazon, Nook and Kobo.

      With their incompatible formats and digital locks… Funny Apple’s iBookstore isn’t mentioned.

    8. transition to digital reading

      We may still be in that transition, but it sounds like it’s felt more as a set of opportunities than as a crisis. At least by some actors. Can’t help but think about digital writing, as a longterm transition. Most authors now write digitally, one might assume, but few are fully cognizant of what this shift implies.

    9. this is not the same as a market in peril.

      Obligatory Mark Twain misquotation:

      ‘The report of my death was an exaggeration’.

      In this case, some people are rather quick to point out reports which allegedly demonstrate the longterm viability of dead-tree books.

    10. number of heavy-reading early adopters dropped off

      Although, Everett Rogers’s influence may encourage us to oversimplify things a bit.

    11. These – we later understood – were popular purchases for those who chose to read behind the relative anonymity of a screen.

      Funny that privacy wasn’t expected to be a key affordance of eBooks. Sounds obvious, a posteriori. But it wasn’t on publishers’ collective radar and wasn’t discussed at big eBook conferences, it sounds like. Maybe because publishers focus on selling prepackaged experiences.

    12. The ebook arrived roughly in 2009,

      No prior art?

    1. “It’s amazing that one event validated so much of what Apple does, and held us up as the gold standard. And that’s flattering.”

      That’s one way to put it…

    2. became an inevitability

      There’s a lot in STS (Science & Technology Studies) to challenge linear thinking about inexorable series of outcomes. Given a technocentric tendency to extrapolate from perceived trends, this kind of foretold consequence is at the very core of much #transhumanism.

    3. Ideally, you should be using the smallest possible gadget to do as much as possible before going to the next largest gizmo in line.

      Pithy, but potentially misleading.

    1. it may take years for any of it to become reality
    2. If all goes as planned

      Let’s hope it does.

    3. As a first step, I have implemented the capability to present annotations in the draft data model format when the web client explicitly prefers `application/ld+json` for the media type. The edits are mostly done upstream in the annotator-store project, part of the Annotator project Hypothes.is is built upon.

      Getting technical (thankfully)

    4. why not annotate, say, the Eiffel Tower itself

      As long as it has some URI, it can be annotated. Any object in the world can be described through the Semantic Web. Especially with Linked Open Data.

    5. machine-readable, ‘semantic’ annotations.

      Waiting for those to be promoted, through Hypothesis and other Open Annotations platforms.

    6. a web-wide ‘Like’ feature could just be implemented as a special kind of annotation

      Unlike some other approaches to development, this acknowledgment that usage can push innovation could help expand Hypothesis beyond a core base of “annotation geeks”. Document-level annotations can serve to classify or evaluate, like social bookmarking. What’s wrong with that?

    7. cross-website user identities

      aka SSO?