Book People Archive

E-Books in the Higher Education Classroom and Library (fwd)

[Moderator: This announcement was originally posted by Lori Bell
 in the ebook-community mailing list
 (described at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ebook-community/)
 I've stripped out headers and tailers from this forward. - JMO]

Final Evaluative Report on "Academic Libraries Take An
E-Look at E-Books" Available on the Web

With funding from an Educate and Automate grant from
the Illinois State Library, Spoon River College and
Eureka College in Illinois participated in an
electronic book project involving the college
libraries and two English classes. The final report
was compiled by Tom Peters, Project Evaluator;
Director of the Center for Library Initiatives,
Committee on Institutional Cooperation.
(tpeters@[redacted] report is available at
http://www.geocities.com/lbell927/index.htm

Comments on the report can be sent to Peters; Lori
Bell, Co- Project Director (lbell927@[redacted]
Virginia McCoy, co-Project Director
(vmccoy@[redacted] Loren Logsdon English Professor
(llogsdon@[redacted] or Jan Hardy
(jhardy@[redacted]

For an eight-week period in September and October of
2001 lower division undergraduate students enrolled in
English courses at two Illinois institutions of higher
education used handheld, portable e-book devices to
read primary literary texts assigned as part of their
course reading. The 22 students in the English class
at Spoon River College read The Awakening by Kate
Chopin on the Franklin eBookMan 901. Spoon River
College (http://www.spoonrivercollege.net/) is a
public, coeducational, two-year community college.
Twelve students in an English class at Eureka College
read Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson on the
Gemstar/RCA REB 1100. Eureka College
(http://www.eureka.edu) is a private, coeducational,
four-year undergraduate institution.

The primary objective of the project was to learn what
happens when a college library provides pre-loaded
course-related content on handheld, portable e-book
devices directly to the hands of undergraduate
students and their professors for their use in actual
course-related readings. After actual integration of
these devices into the classroom and the library, the
experiences, impressions, and suggestions of students,
professors, and librarians were collected and
analyzed. The project team was interested not only in
the overall acceptance and usefulness of the e-book
devices, but also in the use of specific features and
the real-life challenges of using e-books in higher
education environments.