Alfred Thompson the Cyberspace People Watcher: Books

Book Meme

Sun, 04 May 2008 04:27:46 GMT

Thanks to Michele and Leigh Ann I found this list and had to fill it out. Honestly some of the books I was required to read I wouldn’t wish on people I didn’t even like. How “Catcher in the Rye” is regarded as more than trash is beyond me. Not so much because of the language as much as how depressing it is. I’ve long wondered how many students read that book and decide to kill themselves. (Yes I am serious.)

According to a LibraryThing survey, these 106 works are the ones most often marked as “unread”, That is, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded.
Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones read solely as a curriculum requirement, italicize the ones you started, but didn’t finish.
Final touch: denote (*) the ones you liked, and would (or did) read again or recommend. Even if you did read them for school in the first place.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
*Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
*The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
*Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
*Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
*The Three Musketeers (I’ll read anything by Dumas)

Book Review: Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms

Tue, 02 May 2006 03:41:05 GMT

I’ve reviewed books on blogging for business, for casual bloggers and today- teachers. Will Richardson has written a book that does a great job of introducing blogs, wikis, podcasts and related software for use by classroom teachers. This is a book by a teacher based on actual classroom experience which makes it a lot more then just theory.

Teachers need a good reason to adopt new technology and Will spends some time in this book giving examples of best practices as well as explaining “why” teachers should use these new tools. But there is not a lot of serious research out yet so this book is mostly a “How to.” That’s not a bad thing though. Teachers can really benefit from a book that has been written in there own language.

I’ve been amazed at how slow teachers have been to learn and use new technology in their classrooms. Stories to idle computers in classrooms are common and I have seen more than a few teachers resist computerized grading and attendance systems. Even when they do start using technology they often straggle to learn more then the basics. I see this a lot email lists for teachers when teachers seem not to know how to properly use such lists. They reply all when they mean to reply to an individual or they ignore clear instructions at the bottom of each email on how to remove themselves from the list and instead send a message to the whole list asking to be removed. Generally this is because no one has spent any time with them to explain what is going on. Teacher training on technology is in short supply even when you can get teachers to go for it. Books like Will’s are one of the answers.

Our students are way a head of most teachers in using social computing software. This is a very bad situation for several reasons. One is that teachers lose credibility with their students when they are ignorant of tools that students take for granted. Another is that teachers, like most people, tend to react out of fear of things they do not understand and that has serious negative consequences for the educational process. Also teachers by not incorporating new technologies miss valuable tools to teach students in new ways that better match the way modern students learn.

We need more books by teachers for teacher to help explain technology and how it fits into pedagogy. We don’t need technology for their own sake but for how they can improve the way we teach and the ways students learn.

I didn’t learn a whole lot that was new to me other than some details about how Flickr (something I haven’t had time to play with myself) works and can be used. But it was very helpful to me to have someone who had actually used blogs in the classroom reinforce the ideas I had come to on my own about how they might work. So I plan to pass this book around in hopes that people who might not listen to me might take Will seriously.

BTW I bought this book with my own money and it was worth it to me. Will Richardson blogs at http://weblogg-ed.com/.

Share Your Story - A book review

Tue, 18 Apr 2006 01:01:05 GMT

One of the things I really enjoyed about being a teacher was being able to get free books. I was able to tell a publisher that we were looking for a new textbook and they would send a review copy. That doesn’t happen so much since I can to work for Microsoft. It does appear that bloggers can some times get books to review. In fact I just finished reading the second book I’ve been sent to review. So now you get the review.

The book is “Share Your Story Blogging with MSN Spaces” and it’s very good. This is a “how to” book about blogging at MSN Spaces. It is not a generic book on blogging but it is a great book for someone who is new to blogging and wants to set up and use a blog at MSN Spaces. This book will show you how to create a Space, customize it to make it your own, write and enter blogs (including by mobile device), load pictures and use MSN Spaces with Hotmail and MSN Messenger. In short you’ll learn all you need to know to make the most of MSN Spaces.

The writing style of the book was quite friendly and conversational. It was a lot like having a friend explain things to you. There is no unexplained jargon in this book. Reading it will teach you the vocabulary of blogging and help you understand what others are talking about. But every term is clearly explained before you are expected to use it. This book is a confidence builder with its step by step instructions with lots of helpful and well annotated images.

Since the book is for beginners I didn’t expect to learn a lot but I did learn a couple of very useful things. In fact there is a new list of links for subscribing to my blog at the main page of this blog because of this book. My only problem with the book is that the side notes are in white text on a grey background and my eyes struggled with that. The content was generally worth the effort though.

This is a book I’d feel comfortable giving to people who are not Internet or computer experts. Who is this book for? It’s for your aunt who not only sends out the annual Christmas update letter but regular letters for the start of school, Easter, spring cleaning and just about any other event. It is for your friend who keeps sending you pictures of their puppy, kitten or other pet doing cute things. It is for your cousin who is always sending out the latest joke, Internet quiz or link to an interesting web site. In short it is for anyone with a story or pictures or ideas to share with family, friends or the world in general.

BTW There is a related blog for the book where you can get updated and additional information about blogging at MSN Spaces.

Book Review: Blogging for Business

Tue, 28 Mar 2006 06:15:43 GMT

I finally had my chance to finish Blogging For Business by Shel Holtz and Ted Demopoulos. I’d received some sample chapters a while ago and I was impressed enough with them to add the book to the book list on the blog. When Ted arraigned for me to get a copy of the book I was pleased (thanks Ted) because I was pretty sure this was a book I wanted on my shelf anyway.

This is a book for beginners and so I didn’t learn a lot that was new to me. I’m not the target audience though. There are some people in my family who are though. My brother the insurance executive may get a copy from me. Why? Even if he isn’t going to blog he’s in a position that should understand this phenomenon. He has customers that he needs to reach and to communicate a good view of his company to. His territory is huge and he spends a lot of time traveling. I tend to think that blogging might be a good thing for people like him to use to build relationships.

My brother is not a big computer person. He’s far from computer illiterate even if he probably doesn’t remember the FORTRAN I helped him learn in college. (He helped me with my math courses which I thought was a far trade.) But like many busy executives I suspect he doesn’t know much about blogging. This book would get him started. One doesn't have to be an Internet expert or any other kind of computer expert to get a lot from this book. That is what makes this book valuable for the typical executive.

The book is very much a “how to” book. The subtitle “Everything you need to know and why you should care” is very apt. The book steps the reader though determining where to blog, what tool to blog with and even runs though a sample setting up a blog. I wish they’d talked about MSN Spaces a bit but I know that people tend not to see MSN Spaces as a business blog. That is a fairly minor complaint though.

The introductory chapter on “what is a blog” is enough of a reason to lend the book to most managers. Adding in the chapters on business uses, monitoring blogs, tapping into the blogosphere and legal considerations is probably enough of a reason for executives to buy the book even if they are not going to blog themselves. The explanations in those chapters can potentially save business people from making some major mistakes. At the very least they will not look like idiots when corporate legal comes to them with the first blog repeated incident that comes to their attention. Hum, maybe legal departments should buy copies for internal training purposes?

Overall I liked this book. I have enjoyed Ted’s blog for a while now so I was expecting that I would like the book and I wasn’t wrong. There may be other books out there for the more experienced blogger or for business people who want to go beyond this book. This is not the book for your power Internet user or long time USENET geek. But for the raw beginner, Blogging for Business is a great place to start.

Oh, yeah, there is companion blog for the book also called Blogging for Business. It’s worth a read as well.

Book to Blog - More on the changing nature of publishing and the Internet

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 20:33:15 GMT

My friend Richard Seltzer recently got back the rights to his book Web Business Bootcamp. This week he started posting each chapter (one a day) to his blog. Richard has been involved in the Internet and Internet marketing for a lot longer than most people. His B & R Samizdat Publishing company was one of the first, if not the first, operation to see potential in selling easy to read electronic texts.

So now he is taking his Internet business book to the Internet. It will be interesting to see how other authors use this format as a publishing medium of first resort in the future.

Talking about Wikipedia as the sole secondary? at seattleduck

Wed, 16 Nov 2005 16:01:30 GMT

Kevin Briody brings up an interesting possibility for using Wikipedia to create a history book. Call me old-fashioned but I worry about the whole idea of automatic creation of "books." Last night I heard an adjunct professor as the question "tell me about the textbook that you thing replaces all the information on the Internet?" That was scary to me because it showed a weird and diminished understanding of what a textbook is. A textbook is not a collection of facts. Nor is it a selection of articles or tutorials. A textbook has a structure and organization. It is put together with the purpose of teaching. Sure some people can learn all on their own by looking things up on the Internet. Good for them. But that is not everyone.

Obviously as a textbook author I have some bias here. But I do not think that the textbook is going away. Oh it may change and the future may bring new interactive and online textbooks. But "the Internet" is not a substitute for a good textbook.

Quote

Wikipedia as the sole secondary? at seattleduck
Now that I know I can’t retire off my Mega Millions winnings this week, I got back to thinking of books I’d love to write. A history book is right up there, and I started wondering about writing an entire history book relying on Wikipedia as the sole source.