The CITE goes Mobile

You can now view The CITE even when you are not at your office.  Use the QR Code below with your mobile device to connect to The CITE's mobile page.  In the year ahead we will be talking more about mobile as a significant emerging trend for retail and course materials.  Thus, it seemed appropriate to make our site more mobile as well. 

The CITE returns!

Hi everyone. Sorry for The CITE being on a longer hiatus than originally expected or indicated. Thanks to everyone who sent messages to see if everything was okay and to everyone who came to the site to see if we were posting again. More than 10k of you came back at least once this month to see if posting was active again, and many days had over 1000 unique visitors -- more than a few of you checked back very often! My apologies for making you wait, but thank you for your persistence!



Regular posts have already been scheduled to start showing beginning on Monday (Aug 29)and we should be back to regular daily posts quickly. A great deal has occured in the past two months while we were on hiatus, so we will try to mix some updates of news from the summer in with current events. A few quick items on the blog to point out:



A new look. You will notice a slightly updated look and feel to the page. Hopefully this revised layout will make it easier to use and find information of value.



Ask Your Questions. In addition we will be experimenting with a "community answers" tool over on the right-hand toolbar. Currently, it only seems work for select browsers or if you log in. The latter should not be necessary. If you can see content under the "community answers" label, then your browser works with this widget. Here you can post questions to me or the community. I will work to see if I can resolve the problems with the widget, if not, it will likely get removed. You can always send messages to me directly with your questions.



New Voices. The blog will have some new voices. We have hired a new Emerging Technologies Strategist (Jeong Oh) who will be a regular contributor to the blog. Our Digital Media Specialist (Veronica Gancov) will contribute occasional posts. Our fantastic publication team will hopefully also continue to send stories to me for posting.



Thank you again for your continued interest and support. On to the blogging!!!

The CITE on a short hiatus.

To our loyal readers,

The CITE now reaches tens of thousands of readers from more than 170 countries. Your continued interest in our part of the conversation is appreciated. However, due to travel and meetings, preparation to launch some larger pilots and programs, and some resource constraints, the CITE will be on hiatus for the month of July.

We plan to make several announcements in August -- and of course, much is happening quickly in this space these days so there will be a number of news stories to report. We will look to get back to frequent if not daily postings next month.

We are also looking at moving the blog to a new platform, and may make that shift in the next month, time permitting.

I hope that many of you return when posting resumes in August. In the interim, please feel free to post questions here which you would like to see answered in future blog posts.

Best regards,
M

Move toward digital series

The Textbook Guru blog has begun a new series on the "Move Toward Digital." The series includes guest posts, interviews and the author's view point on the every changing world of education and the move from physical books to digital.

Here are some of the initial postings in the series:

- Consumer Trends and Drivers toward e-Textbook Adoption
- Four Obstacles to Overcome Before Digital is Universally Adopted
- How the Internet is Changing Education (Infographic)
- The Status of Math in the United States, and the Classroom of Tomorrow

The CITE added to Best Textbook Blogs

Thanks to DistanceEducation.net for adding The CITE at the #5 spot on their list of 50 Noteworthy Textbook Blogs. The listing has a number of other great blogs on there -- some which we have featured here, and some which are new to me. It is a useful resource to check out (and I would say that even if we had not made the list).

www.thetextbookguru.com

Here is a new blog that recently came across my radar: www.thetextbookguru.com. Jeff Cohen has created an interesting blog that contains links to a range of articles relevant to the course materials industry. His weekly round-up of articles of relevance to the industry provides a great sorting and scan of industry developments -- definitely a must read. The textbookguru will join my blogroll here as a blog to follow.

The CITE's 1000th blog posting!

Welcome to the 1000th blog posting on The CITE and Thank You for coming!

This posting marks the 1000th blog entry on The CITE. The first posting, back on September 5, 2007, noted that this would be an experiment – posting occasional news stories, analysis, commentary, responses to questions, etc. The blog started out with a posting every 1-2 weeks. Somewhere around April 17, 2008 we decided that the blog had merit, and folks out there had interest and so the decision was made to commit. At that point we began to track traffic volume to the blog and thus I tend to look at April 17th as the blog’s birthday.

When we began tracking the volume of traffic to the blog, we had a few visitors a week. Today we have thousands -- more than 58,000 readers have visited the blog from 170 countries around the world. Thank you for coming, and coming back.

One of the very first postings on the blog announced the new Sony Reader. Not long after that, the Amazon Kindle was announced and that story too was covered here. EReaders have been a common theme on the blog ever since – and quite a few have come and gone over the past few years. In the last few years we have seen the devices come to some early maturity, at least on the trade book side, if not quite as much in textbooks. We have moved away from wide-scale experimentation to some dominant designs, and standards. The device wars have somewhat ended, with the platform wars just heating up. The iPad’s introduction last year represents the next generation of devices. Not quite an ereader, not quite a laptop. Some early projections suggested that the device would flop – being neither quite one nor the other, did it have a place? Apparently history will prove that it did.

Birthed with the first commercially viable ereaders, this blog too has grown over the past few years. With some occasional breaks, we try to get a posting up daily. Occasionally we have a couple spurts with two postings a day. I have a backlog of items to blog about that is well over 50 items deep. For a while Liz Hains helped convert many of these to blog hosting, for which I am appreciative. Since the start of the year, the NACS Publications team – including Cindy Ruckman, Michael von Glahn, Dan Angelo, and Dan Pender – have been very helpful and supportive by providing me with a couple postings each week. While comments on the blog have been few, I have received numerous emails over time, including a variety of suggestions and articles of interest.

I hope this blog has provided some insight (and occasionally useful advice) to those out there involved with course materials or print -- whether retailers, publishers, authors, educators, administrators, or students. The world is changing. Sometimes it seems that change is faster or slower than others. Change is coming, though, and hopefully this blog is serving to both signal and record some of that change, and generating some thought about what future roles and opportunities exist in the digital space. The revolution in ereaders, ebooks, digital content, and digital course materials has just begun. We will try to make the next 1000 posts informative, broad-based, and occasionally fun. Let’s see what the next three years brings!

Thanks for your time and interest.

M

A new view on the CITE

Google now offers dynamic views -- allowing you, the readers, to view The CITE content in different ways. So if you are tired at looking at the blog in its current format, try taking a look at it using: thecite.blogspot.com/view You can select different types of views to see the content in different ways. One note -- the "snapshot" view will not work for this blog as we do not have a daily picture associated with posts. Also, to use the new dynamic views feature you must be using a newer browser, such as IE8. There is also a Google post where you can learn more about the different dynamic views.

Thanks to Liz

Thank you to Liz Hains for her contributions to The CITE over the past 2 years. Liz has increasingly handled most of the blog postings and was a great member of our team. Her contributions helped the blog grow past the 50k reader point this year.

Liz was offered and accepted a position with another organization that will be an excellent career move for her. While we search for a replacement, and with the pending holidays, there will be fewer posts for a few weeks. I want to take this opportunity to thank our loyal readers and welcome readers new to the blog.

There are many things happening in this space and with this change in staffing we are looking at a number of opportunities and ways to increase the value of this blog in the year ahead. While postings may be sparse for the next two weeks, we plan to get back up to regular posting speed after the new year. Best wishes to all for the holidays.

-M