[Air-L] e-reading limitations

[Cristian Berrio Zapata]

Really many thanks for your input Emma. Will look for some of the tools you
mention. Although some comments about teaching in pregrad in Bogota,
Colombia (South America)

1. People are not quite into reading from the PC. Altough that is not only
an item here but in many other parts of the world, the diference may be
regarding the "easiness" that my students perceive when they face the PC and
any of these "gadgeting isues". Administration students are not the
"cyber-nerdie" type so pushing the key and not having an instant display of
the text becomes a tragedy. Some of them had discovered "Brava" software
(some colleage also recommended) but that is a seldom case.

2. I try to push them into ICTs (we use Moodle, web based exams and things
like that), as I do believe digital proficiency is a must. On the other
hand, I handle about 180 students (colombian universities can be pretty
pushing on getting as much from you as possible on this regard). Therefore I
need tools to maximise eficiency. Paperless exchange of readings should be
more efficient that ton of photocopies BUT, we come to little nonsences like
this of the TIFF vs PDF that increase the cost of knowledge transaction
incredibly.

Maybe this is what marvels about technology: complexities are so human...

Good news is that I looked again at Adobe site and found a special offer
that lowers down Adobe Pro cost from $630 to $163...

Saludos!

-----Mensaje original-----
De: Emma Duke-Williams [mailto:emma.dukewilliams at gmail.com] 
Enviado el: sábado, 13 de octubre de 2007 11:42 a.m.
Para: air-l at listserv.aoir.org; cristian.berrio at gmail.com
Asunto: Re: [Air-L] e-reading limitations


On 12/10/2007, Cristian Berrio Zapata <CRISTIAN.BERRIO at cable.net.co> wrote:
>
> A little sample of digital divide where we need a free software 
> solution (yeah, as in FREE or at least not expensive. Why des not 
> Adobe produce something like Microsoft's Campus Agreement so we can 
> access legally their products at competitive price. A Vista Pro copy 
> under this license is around USD $20).
>

Hi Cristian
I'm not sure about the OCR aspects - as I'm guessing your scanner mayn't
have come with the requisite software - mine had OCR software with it
(though I think that it was designed to be then dumped into a WordProcessing
package, rather than saved as a .TIFF.

A few thoughts though, as it's scanned documents you're talking about, could
you leave Office 2003 on the PC so that you can create the documents that
you want, or are you considering the students that mayn't be able to read
the documents that you create?

As far as the annotating goes, a couple of thoughts - have a look at Agilix
GoBinder - they have a free version. It's designed for a tablet PC, and it
lets you annotate things like Word Docs. I can't remember the exact details
of what it does, as it's on my tablet - which is at work. However, you can
use the mouse to do the annotating, albeit not as easily as a pointer. There
are other low cost annotation tools designed for tablets which might work.

Another idea - not sure if it works with Word 2007, as I've only used it
with Word 2003, is to install MS's tool for converting Word Docs to MS
Reader format; as the Reader tool lets you annotate/ make notes in the books
you create. (It's also designed for ease of reading onscreen, so lets you
adjust the contrast between text & background a lot).

Depending on how much time you've got, perhaps you could scan your docs &
use the scanner's OCR software to dump to word, then save as Reader format.
I suspect, though, that this might take a bit longer than your older method.

-- 
Emma Duke-Williams:
School of Computing/ Faculty eLearning Co-ordinator.
New URL: Blog: http://userweb.port.ac.uk/~duke-wie/blog/