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  • My Business Development Idea for Insidehighered and Amazon

    By Joshua Kim August 31, 2009 8:36 pm EDT

    Dear founders of InsideHigherEd and Jeff Bezos.

    Please get your business development people together to create the following service: the InsideHigherEd Educational Technology Daily Kindle Download.

    This service would:

    • Aggregate all the most relevant educational technology articles, blogs, and news items from around the Web in one Kindle download.
    • Provide an editorial "wrap" for each piece chosen.
    • Be produced so that all the reading can be done within 1 hour. With 1 download, and 1 hour of time, the reader can be up-to-date on the worlds of education and technology.
    • Provide a method to mark articles for commenting, either directly by the Kindle keyboard or through an online mechanism.

    Why Kindle? Why not simply an aggregated Website? Mostly because reading on screen is really difficult. I want my daily consumption of materials to be on e-Paper. I want to be able to carry all my daily professional reading around with me. I don't want to spend the time to aggregate this - as I want someone to do this for me.

    Why do we need InsideHigherEd? Because in this deluge of information the service of professional editors making choices about what should be read, what is worth spending our most valuable commodity on (time), has has become very valuable. Each day I wade through tons of RSS feeds trying to find good nuggets. I'd be much happier if someone I trusted did this work, and then packaged it all up in a format I could take with me.

    Why Educational Technology? Pure selfishness. This is the area that I read about. This idea could of course work for any discipline or specialization. Something like educational technology works because their is a finite number of good materials on this topic. At the same time, the number of articles, blogs and news stories that live at the intersection of education and technology is getting too large to keep track of without some editorial assistance.

    Why is this a business development idea? Because I would pay for this service. I'd pay $10 a month. I'd buy a Kindle DX if this was offered.

    The next challenge that publishing and technology needs to solve is where publishing and technology meet - and is all about helping us overcome time and attention scarcity. We are all overwhelmed by the amount of information we want to follow. This seems like a great business opportunity.

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Comments on My Business Development Idea for Insidehighered and Amazon

  • Hurrah!
  • Posted by Laura M. on September 1, 2009 at 9:00am EDT

  • What a fantastic idea! But let's press Sony to do it for their e-readers as well - up here in Canada, we still can't buy a Kindle. There is tons of great stuff going on in Canada in ed tech (think WebCT, D2L, George Siemens...) I love my Sony E-Reader and can't wait until it gets wireless functionality. Having access to a daily, edited newsfeed that helps me wade through the enormous amount of relevant material would be utterly fabulous.

  • Posted by Greg on September 1, 2009 at 1:30pm EDT

  • what a great idea! now ask some of your blind or low vision colleagues what they think about it! Some in education are boycotting Kindle and Amazon, Federation of the Blind has lawsuits going against many college campuses using Kindle. This is a great example of how a new promising technology had to be dumbed down so that a segment of our population could not access it or have access to it.

    read more at: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/07/06/kindle

  • response to Laura and Greg
  • Posted by Joshua Kim , Senior Learning Technologist at Dartmouth College on September 1, 2009 at 3:00pm EDT

  • Laura.....I'm definitely under some weird Amazon sway (must happen when they take so much of one's money from the size and from Audible.com). Yes....an open format and other readers would be much better.
    Greg....thanks for the heads-up on the accessibility issues with the Kindle and e-readers. This seems like a serious problem, and I don't understand why the makers of e-readers would not want to serve these markets. If these issues could be addressed then what would you think of the option of having a portable, edited, curated, compendium of daily news, data and opinion on specific topics?

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