I have just received a copy of Web-based learning through educational informatics from my helpful colleagues in the OCLC Library and Information Center.
I have not yet read it, although I look forward to it. The author, Nigel Ford, describes educational informatics as the integration of three major R&D emphases: information and communication technology, education and library/information science. He defines it as follows:
The development, use, and evaluation of digital systems that use pedagogical knowledge to engage in or facilitate resource discovery in order to support learning.
Flicking through the pages, I was interested to see the following on the bottom of each page:
Copyright © 2008, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.
This was interesting as an example of how practice and thinking in the electronic environment is influencing practice and thinking in the print environment.
Jeanette Winterson’s remarks on book swapping sites I quoted the other day was another example, where she seems to be suggesting greater limits on the use of books than now exist.
Of course, those churches and charity shops that made money from second-hand book sales stand to lose out, as do the publishing industry and authors. “In the music industry, this kind of thing would be called ‘file sharing’, and technically illegal,” the author Jeanette Winterson wrote of book-swapping sites recently. [Charlotte Northedge on book-swapping websites | Environment | The Guardian]
[Lorcan Dempsey’s weblog]
