compared to writing a book, turning on an iphone camera is easy.

but there is also this, about george r.r. margin and television:
> he was tired of the medium’s limitations.
> “Everything I did was too big and too expensive
> in the first draft,” he told me recently.
> He wanted castles and vistas and armies, and
> producers always made him cut that stuff.
> A line producer for “The Twilight Zone” once explained,
> “You can have horses or you can have Stonehenge.
> But you can’t have horses _and_ Stonehenge.”
>
> On the printed page, however, he could have it all.
> He recalls telling himself, “I’m going to write a fantasy
> and it’s going to be _huge._ I’m going to have
> all the characters I want and all the battles I want.”
>
> http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/04/11/110411fa_fact_miller#ixzz24VWABCjd

that resonates strongly with me; i believe in words.
the imagination can compete with any videocamera.

so there’s no doubt in my mind that text will persist.
it won’t be our only mode, no, but it _will_ continue.

but that’s really beside the more important point.

the real fear inherent in a cloud-based approach
is that the books will simply disappear some day.

or that they will undergo silent “modifications”.

and yet another fear is that we will be charged
over and over and over again to access them…

so i’m immediately suspicious of any entity that
wants to take away my ability to _own_ a book,
to have it and to keep it myself, in its entirety.

and i will stress that i’m _already_suspicious_of_
the current bosses of the publishing infrastructure,
who’ve done everything they can to “earn” distrust.
so i will strongly resist any shenanigans from them.

i’m not opposed to cloud-based far-flung e-books;
every book in the world should be on the internet.
but i want ‘em on my 8-petabyte thumbdrive too.

-bowerbird

Thanks for this post and I enjoyed reading your observations regarding youth and media literacy.

This is not unlike what we experienced during a pilot program I led in conjunction with Answer The Call and Elmwood School.

The students used iMovie to “re-tell” history podcasts and the results were superb. In the post-project evaluation the students confirmed that they that they will never forget the subject matter! The SMR below plus a link to their vids on YouTube below.

Here’s what I had to say…

“Kids use technology and they are empowered by it. This project puts the learning in their hands and the students are eager to research the subject matter to develop the artistic content for their videos. Kids actually want to watch these because the stories are retold in a style that is meaningful to them and through a medium that they enjoy using.”

Kids Use Technology To Tell Hero Stories
http://www.prlog.org/10551821-kids-use-technology-to-tell-hero-stories.html

Links to their videos on YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/user/NewMediaWeb?feature=watch

Enjoy!

Guy Paquette
Twitter: @GuyPaquette