Tag Archives: education

Voice Dream e-reading app: Stellar for text to speech—and promising as a general reader

The latest: An update of this post focuses on education-related issues of read-aloud apps. Also, I’ve just tried a promising Voice Dream beta with paging; more to come. Finally, NPR on May 20 ran a segment on developer Winston Chen. – D.R. A Catch-22 dogs those of us who most often read e-books visually but [...]

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Sad fate of ‘Five Laws’ book shows need for DPLA-related efforts to keep old masterpieces alive

Oh, the irony! In The Five Laws of Library Science, S. R. Ranganathan argued in the 1930s for libraries as improvers of life for rich and poor alike. Now Google Books has digitized 30 million titles, but you won’t find Laws on the Web in its entirety from Google at any price. You’ll see a [...]

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How a national digital library system could serve K-12: A veteran teacher and school librarian speaks out

Donald R. Smith spent 40 years as a public and private school teacher and as a school librarian. A Brown University graduate living in Howell, New Jersey, he is an Apple Distinguished Educator (“’Class’ of 1995,” the first). Also see other thoughts on the DPLA and K-12. – D.R. In responding to your concerns for [...]

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The risks if the DPLA won’t create a full-strength national digital library system: Setbacks for K-12, family literacy, local libraries, preservation, digital divide efforts?

Attn. LibraryCity visitors: You can participate remotely in a DPLA board meeting starting 11 a.m. EST, Monday, December 17. The teachers didn’t show up… Not one current K-12 teacher was among the two dozen or so attendees at the Audience and Participation Workstream of the Digital Public Library of America this month—even though the DPLA [...]

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Who needs ‘social worker’ librarians? Just ‘type into the search box’? Something for the DPLA to consider June 13 in the P controversy?

I’ve warned the Digital “Public” Library of America, the Harvard-hosted project that has claimed so much space in the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education. Please help public librarians set up their own national digital library system, and please drop the “P” from “DPLA” since the organization is a long way from [...]

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Digital library race: Education, ‘October Sky,’ and the Sputnik factor

Digital library race ahead? On Oct. 4, 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik—setting off the space race. Most of the action, though, happened back on Planet Earth. American scientists and politicians saw Russia’s triumph as a sign of a less-than-perfect educational system in the U.S. Why weren’t we first? The movie October Sky, although filmed decades [...]

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A new LibraryCity: The ‘what’ and ‘who’ and how you can help—with your own essays

Update, May 3, 2013: Given the different needs of typical patrons of public and academic libraries, we are now advocating two tightly intertwined but separate systems. The old LibraryCity wanted millions of e-books and other items on the Net—and to make them part of America’s library and school systems. But it ran into a little [...]

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