Groundbreaking report details status of US secondary Earth science education

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

17-Oct-2013

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Contact: Ann Benbow
aeb@agiweb.org
703-379-2480
American Geosciences Institute

Alexandria, VA - The Center for Geoscience Education and Public Understanding at the American Geosciences Institute has released a landmark report on the status of Earth Science education in U.S. middle and high schools, describing in detail significant gaps between identified priorities and lagging practice.

The report, "Earth and Space Sciences Education in U.S. Secondary Schools: Key Indicators and Trends," offers baseline data on indicators of the subject's status since the release of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) in April 2013. Establishing clear aims for the subject, the NGSS state that the Earth and Space Sciences should have equal status with the Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, Technology, and Engineering. However, the report shows that school districts and other organizations fail to assign the Earth Sciences this status.

Only one of the nation's 50 states requires a year-long Earth/Environmental Science course for high school graduation, whereas 32 states require a Life Science course, and 27 require a Physical Science course, according to the report. Only six states require that students are taught Earth Science concepts as part of their graduation requirements. Detailed and analyzed are key indicators including:

• presence of Earth Science topics in state and national standards;
  
• consideration of Earth Science as a graduation requirement;
  
• evaluation of Earth Science concepts on high-stakes assessments; and
  
• acceptance of Earth Science courses for college admission.

Recommendations for better treatment of Earth Science subject matter include changes in the subject's relevance to graduation requirements, the discipline's presence on assessments, designation of Earth Science courses as laboratory courses, and establishment of an Advanced Placement Earth Science program.

###

The 2013 report is the first original offering of the Center, which launched an online hub of geoscience education and outreach resources on October 16, 2013. The site can be found at http://www.geocntr.org, and the report at http://bit.ly/19UBQMt.

The report is being launched as part of Earth Science Week, the international celebration of the Earth Sciences that is organized by AGI and reaches over 50 million people with geoscience resources and information each year. Updated editions of the report are planned to be released annually during Earth Science Week, each October, to gauge changes in the status of Earth science nationwide.

The American Geosciences Institute is a nonprofit federation of geoscientific and professional associations that represents more than 250,000 geologists, geophysicists and other earth scientists. Founded in 1948, AGI provides information services to geoscientists, serves as a voice of shared interests in the profession, plays a major role in strengthening geosciences education, and strives to increase public awareness of the vital role geosciences play in society's use of resources, resiliency to natural hazards, and interaction with the environment.

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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

17-Oct-2013

[


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| Share

]

Contact: Ann Benbow
aeb@agiweb.org
703-379-2480
American Geosciences Institute

Alexandria, VA - The Center for Geoscience Education and Public Understanding at the American Geosciences Institute has released a landmark report on the status of Earth Science education in U.S. middle and high schools, describing in detail significant gaps between identified priorities and lagging practice.

The report, "Earth and Space Sciences Education in U.S. Secondary Schools: Key Indicators and Trends," offers baseline data on indicators of the subject's status since the release of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) in April 2013. Establishing clear aims for the subject, the NGSS state that the Earth and Space Sciences should have equal status with the Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, Technology, and Engineering. However, the report shows that school districts and other organizations fail to assign the Earth Sciences this status.

Only one of the nation's 50 states requires a year-long Earth/Environmental Science course for high school graduation, whereas 32 states require a Life Science course, and 27 require a Physical Science course, according to the report. Only six states require that students are taught Earth Science concepts as part of their graduation requirements. Detailed and analyzed are key indicators including:

• presence of Earth Science topics in state and national standards;
  
• consideration of Earth Science as a graduation requirement;
  
• evaluation of Earth Science concepts on high-stakes assessments; and
  
• acceptance of Earth Science courses for college admission.

Recommendations for better treatment of Earth Science subject matter include changes in the subject's relevance to graduation requirements, the discipline's presence on assessments, designation of Earth Science courses as laboratory courses, and establishment of an Advanced Placement Earth Science program.

###

The 2013 report is the first original offering of the Center, which launched an online hub of geoscience education and outreach resources on October 16, 2013. The site can be found at http://www.geocntr.org, and the report at http://bit.ly/19UBQMt.

The report is being launched as part of Earth Science Week, the international celebration of the Earth Sciences that is organized by AGI and reaches over 50 million people with geoscience resources and information each year. Updated editions of the report are planned to be released annually during Earth Science Week, each October, to gauge changes in the status of Earth science nationwide.

The American Geosciences Institute is a nonprofit federation of geoscientific and professional associations that represents more than 250,000 geologists, geophysicists and other earth scientists. Founded in 1948, AGI provides information services to geoscientists, serves as a voice of shared interests in the profession, plays a major role in strengthening geosciences education, and strives to increase public awareness of the vital role geosciences play in society's use of resources, resiliency to natural hazards, and interaction with the environment.

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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-10/agi-grd101713.php
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Kids Should Hack Their School-Provided iPads

This article originally appeared in Zócalo Public Square and the New America Foundation’s Weekly Wonk. Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, the New America Foundation, and Arizona State University; Zócalo Public Square is a partnership of NAF and Arizona State.

Last year, 40 tablet computers were delivered to the children of two remote Ethiopian villages. The villagers were 100 percent illiterate—the kids had never seen road signs, product labels, or printed material of any kind.

Technicians from the One Laptop Per Child program dropped off a stack of boxes, showed a couple of adults how to use the solar chargers, and then walked away. Within minutes, the kids had cracked the packaging open and figured out how to turn the tablets on. Within weeks, they were singing their ABCs, picked up from the English-language learning software installed on the tablets. Within five months, some kid figured out that the tablets had built-in cameras—they had been disabled for ethical reasons—and hacked the Android operating system to activate them.

So, frankly, it shouldn’t have come as much of a shock when a few hundred of the tech-drenched children of Los Angeles figured out how to “hack” the $678 iPads they were given by their school district, just one month into the new school year.

In recent weeks, Los Angeles distributed iPads to 50,000 students in the public school system as part of a pilot for a $1 billion citywide initiative. Kids at Westchester High, one of the few schools that allowed students to take their tablets home, quickly noted that they could bypass the district-installed security filter with two clicks, allowing them to access banned sites like YouTube and Facebook.

One of the student hackers—if two clicks can be called “hacking”—was Westchester High valedictorian candidate Brian Young, who was hauled into the principal’s office for a dressing-down. “He wasn’t threatening me, but he told me millions of dollars of technology had been compromised because of me,” Young told the Los Angeles Times. Young said he fiddled with the security settings innocently, after having trouble getting online at home. Apparently, the iPads are configured to work well only on the limited in-school network. Young said he’d hoped to download some apps that the school’s network couldn’t handle or didn’t permit. We don’t know whether young Young was looking to download something to help with his math homework or whether he was pursuing … other extracurricular activities. But that didn’t stop school administrators and local media from panicking.

L.A. Unified School District Police Chief Steven Zipperman fretted in a confidential memo obtained by the Los Angeles Times that students would share their “hacks” via social media. “I’m guessing this is just a sample of what will likely occur on other campuses once this hits Twitter, YouTube, or other social media sites explaining to our students how to breach or compromise the security of these devices,” Zipperman wrote. “I want to prevent a ‘runaway train’ scenario when we may have the ability to put a hold on the roll-out.”

But why would students gaining mastery over their digital devices be considered a “runaway train” at all? The iPads were loaded with software from the textbook giant Pearson, so perhaps the fantasy was that high school students would be content paging through glowing versions of their textbooks.

But the whole point of introducing current technology into the classroom is to help education catch up with the rest of the world, which has been utterly transformed by fast computers with fast Internet access.

Unfortunately, when it comes to technology in education, traditional schools tend to use fuzzy math. Give ’em iPads, the thinking goes, and the test scores will soar. The intended mechanism isn’t always clear, and the vision becomes even more muddled when the inevitable committees, unions, and concerned parents get involved. The result too often is restricted access to semi-useless tech crippled by proprietary software deals and censored Internet.

Implementing bold ideas like “flipping the classroom”—having students watch lectures at home and spending their classroom hours doing problem sets, engaging in group discussions, or getting one-on-one tutorials—means letting kids use the relevant tech on their own time and in their own way. It means trusting them with access to devices like the ones they might someday use at work.

Schools are supposed to be places of free inquiry, where kids seek knowledge and debate ideas in a safe space. Limiting access to such basic sites like YouTube signals that kids can’t be trusted to make their own decisions—about information sources or time management.

One of the most famous innovations in online learning to date is Khan Academy, which offers thousands of tutorials on subjects from A to Z. What site does Khan use to host those lessons? YouTube. Sorry, L.A. school kids!

One Laptop Per Child considered the Ethiopian kids’ hack a success. “The kids had completely customized the desktop—so every kids’ [sic] tablet looked different. We had installed software to prevent them from doing that,” a contrite Ed McNierney, OLPC’s chief technology officer, told the MIT Technology Review. “And the fact that they worked around it was clearly the kind of creativity, the kind of inquiry, the kind of discovery that we think is essential to learning.”

On Oct. 1, LAUSD pronounced its ed tech experiment temporarily out of control and admitted that several schools were in the process of attempting to pry the new tablets from their students’ clammy hands.

Los Angeles should take a page from OLPC’s lesson book. School officials say the project has not been halted and that schools are still on track to distribute another 300,000 tablets next fall. But unless administrators are willing to radically rethink their goals for the billion-dollar tech initiative in the coming months, a few hundred kids figuring out how to customize their iPads may just be the most beneficial result.

Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/10/l_a_school_ipad_program_students_should_hack_their_tablets.html
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Booker wins N.J. Senate race, but what does it mean for his future?

Cory Booker won his bid for New Jersey’s U.S. Senate seat Wednesday, defeating Republican Steve Lonegan in a whirlwind special election race that gave the ambitious Newark mayor an official entry to the national political stage.

Booker, a rising star in the Democratic Party, had been the heavy favorite to replace the late Sen. Frank Lautenberg, who died in June. He’s expected to be sworn into the Senate as early as Thursday—giving Democrats an extra vote in what has been a tumultuous political period in Washington.

But it’s still unknown what kind of lawmaker Booker will be in the nation’s capital—or what damage, if any, his Senate campaign did to his stratospheric rise within the Democratic Party.

As mayor of Newark, Booker has been a larger-than-life political presence, a man as famous for rushing into a burning building to save a neighbor as he is for his savvy embrace of Twitter to communicate directly with his constituents.But the Senate is a different, stuffier place—where lawmakers deal more with each other than with the people they serve.

It’s unclear what kind of impact Booker’s celebrity might play in his profile in the Senate. On one hand, he could chart a path as the Democratic alternative to visible Republican stars like Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas or Rand Paul of Kentucky. Or he could follow in the footsteps of former Sen. Hillary Clinton, who pointedly worked with Republicans as she sought to build up her own legislative profile in advance of her 2008 presidential run.

Booker, who has made no secret of his desire for higher office, has suggested he’s willing to work with Republicans—pointing to his friendly relationship with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

Yet Booker’s time in the Senate could also serve to repair the damage done to his political reputation by his Senate bid. While it was never seriously suggested that Booker would lose the race, the Newark mayor struggled to pull away from the little-known Lonegan, a tea party candidate whose support of abortion and the federal government shutdown put him at odds with the majority of New Jersey voters.

Booker’s path to victory was largely complicated by his own missteps--including odd scandals involving his Twitter messages to a vegan stripper and revelations that he’d profited off being one of the most famous young mayors in the country.

Many Democrats were frustrated that Booker did not campaign more aggressively—as he spent days at a time off the trail and largely ignored Lonegan until the final days when polls suddenly showed him within 10 points of the mayor.

On Wednesday, Politico reported Booker had spent less than $1 million on television ads—a surprisingly low number for a candidate who had outraised his Republican opponent by nearly $10 million.

Perhaps Booker was saving his cash for the longer race. His win in Wednesday’s special election allows him to serve out the rest of Lautenberg’s term—which runs until November 2014.

If Booker wants to serve a full six-year Senate term, he’ll have to file to run again—a race that officially kicks off Thursday.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/booker-new-jersey-senate-race-win-024859656.html
Tags: Joseph Gordon-Levitt   iOS 7   jadeveon clowney   Harry Styles   Olivia Nuzzi  

Yoga accessible for the blind with new Microsoft Kinect-based program

Public release date: 17-Oct-2013
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Contact: Michelle Ma
mcma@uw.edu
206-543-2580
University of Washington

In a typical yoga class, students watch an instructor to learn how to properly hold a position. But for people who are blind or can't see well, it can be frustrating to participate in these types of exercises.

Now, a team of University of Washington computer scientists has created a software program that watches a user's movements and gives spoken feedback on what to change to accurately complete a yoga pose.

"My hope for this technology is for people who are blind or low-vision to be able to try it out, and help give a basic understanding of yoga in a more comfortable setting," said project lead Kyle Rector, a UW doctoral student in computer science and engineering.

The program, called Eyes-Free Yoga, uses Microsoft Kinect software to track body movements and offer auditory feedback in real time for six yoga poses, including Warrior I and II, Tree and Chair poses. Rector and her collaborators published their methodology in the conference proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery's SIGACCESS International Conference on Computers and Accessibility in Bellevue, Wash., Oct. 21-23.

Rector wrote programming code that instructs the Kinect to read a user's body angles, then gives verbal feedback on how to adjust his or her arms, legs, neck or back to complete the pose. For example, the program might say: "Rotate your shoulders left," or "Lean sideways toward your left."

The result is an accessible yoga "exergame" a video game used for exercise that allows people without sight to interact verbally with a simulated yoga instructor. Rector and collaborators Julie Kientz, a UW assistant professor in Computer Science & Engineering and in Human Centered Design & Engineering, and Cynthia Bennett, a research assistant in computer science and engineering, believe this can transform a typically visual activity into something that blind people can also enjoy.

"I see this as a good way of helping people who may not know much about yoga to try something on their own and feel comfortable and confident doing it," Kientz said. "We hope this acts as a gateway to encouraging people with visual impairments to try exercise on a broader scale."

Each of the six poses has about 30 different commands for improvement based on a dozen rules deemed essential for each yoga position. Rector worked with a number of yoga instructors to put together the criteria for reaching the correct alignment in each pose. The Kinect first checks a person's core and suggests alignment changes, then moves to the head and neck area, and finally the arms and legs. It also gives positive feedback when a person is holding a pose correctly.

Rector practiced a lot of yoga as she developed this technology. She tested and tweaked each aspect by deliberately making mistakes while performing the exercises. The result is a program that she believes is robust and useful for people who are blind.

"I tested it all on myself so I felt comfortable having someone else try it," she said.

Rector worked with 16 blind and low-vision people around Washington to test the program and get feedback. Several of the participants had never done yoga before, while others had tried it a few times or took yoga classes regularly. Thirteen of the 16 people said they would recommend the program and nearly everyone would use it again.

The technology uses simple geometry and the law of cosines to calculate angles created during yoga. For example, in some poses a bent leg must be at a 90-degree angle, while the arm spread must form a 160-degree angle. The Kinect reads the angle of the pose using cameras and skeletal-tracking technology, then tells the user how to move to reach the desired angle.

Rector opted to use Kinect software because it's open source and easily accessible on the market, but she said it does have some limitations in the level of detail with which it tracks movement.

Rector and collaborators plan to make this technology available online so users could download the program, plug in their Kinect and start doing yoga. The team also is pursuing other projects that help with fitness.

###

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, a Kynamatrix Innovation through Collaboration grant and the Achievement Rewards for College Scientists Foundation.

For more information, contact Rector at rectorky@cs.washington.edu or 503-449-1736.

Posted with video and photos: http://www.washington.edu/news/2013/10/17/yoga-accessible-for-the-blind-with-new-microsoft-kinect-based-program/

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Public release date: 17-Oct-2013
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Contact: Michelle Ma
mcma@uw.edu
206-543-2580
University of Washington

In a typical yoga class, students watch an instructor to learn how to properly hold a position. But for people who are blind or can't see well, it can be frustrating to participate in these types of exercises.

Now, a team of University of Washington computer scientists has created a software program that watches a user's movements and gives spoken feedback on what to change to accurately complete a yoga pose.

"My hope for this technology is for people who are blind or low-vision to be able to try it out, and help give a basic understanding of yoga in a more comfortable setting," said project lead Kyle Rector, a UW doctoral student in computer science and engineering.

The program, called Eyes-Free Yoga, uses Microsoft Kinect software to track body movements and offer auditory feedback in real time for six yoga poses, including Warrior I and II, Tree and Chair poses. Rector and her collaborators published their methodology in the conference proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery's SIGACCESS International Conference on Computers and Accessibility in Bellevue, Wash., Oct. 21-23.

Rector wrote programming code that instructs the Kinect to read a user's body angles, then gives verbal feedback on how to adjust his or her arms, legs, neck or back to complete the pose. For example, the program might say: "Rotate your shoulders left," or "Lean sideways toward your left."

The result is an accessible yoga "exergame" a video game used for exercise that allows people without sight to interact verbally with a simulated yoga instructor. Rector and collaborators Julie Kientz, a UW assistant professor in Computer Science & Engineering and in Human Centered Design & Engineering, and Cynthia Bennett, a research assistant in computer science and engineering, believe this can transform a typically visual activity into something that blind people can also enjoy.

"I see this as a good way of helping people who may not know much about yoga to try something on their own and feel comfortable and confident doing it," Kientz said. "We hope this acts as a gateway to encouraging people with visual impairments to try exercise on a broader scale."

Each of the six poses has about 30 different commands for improvement based on a dozen rules deemed essential for each yoga position. Rector worked with a number of yoga instructors to put together the criteria for reaching the correct alignment in each pose. The Kinect first checks a person's core and suggests alignment changes, then moves to the head and neck area, and finally the arms and legs. It also gives positive feedback when a person is holding a pose correctly.

Rector practiced a lot of yoga as she developed this technology. She tested and tweaked each aspect by deliberately making mistakes while performing the exercises. The result is a program that she believes is robust and useful for people who are blind.

"I tested it all on myself so I felt comfortable having someone else try it," she said.

Rector worked with 16 blind and low-vision people around Washington to test the program and get feedback. Several of the participants had never done yoga before, while others had tried it a few times or took yoga classes regularly. Thirteen of the 16 people said they would recommend the program and nearly everyone would use it again.

The technology uses simple geometry and the law of cosines to calculate angles created during yoga. For example, in some poses a bent leg must be at a 90-degree angle, while the arm spread must form a 160-degree angle. The Kinect reads the angle of the pose using cameras and skeletal-tracking technology, then tells the user how to move to reach the desired angle.

Rector opted to use Kinect software because it's open source and easily accessible on the market, but she said it does have some limitations in the level of detail with which it tracks movement.

Rector and collaborators plan to make this technology available online so users could download the program, plug in their Kinect and start doing yoga. The team also is pursuing other projects that help with fitness.

###

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, a Kynamatrix Innovation through Collaboration grant and the Achievement Rewards for College Scientists Foundation.

For more information, contact Rector at rectorky@cs.washington.edu or 503-449-1736.

Posted with video and photos: http://www.washington.edu/news/2013/10/17/yoga-accessible-for-the-blind-with-new-microsoft-kinect-based-program/

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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-10/uow-yaf101713.php
Related Topics: big bang theory   Jonathan Ferrell   nbc sports   Kendrick Lamar Control   mumford and sons  

Lara Flynn Boyle Looks Unrecognizable Without Makeup Out in Bel Air With Mom: Picture

My, how things have changed! Lara Flynn Boyle stepped out in Bel Air, Calif., on Tuesday, Oct. 16, looking unrecognizable without makeup and with puffy lips and cheeks. The 43-year-old actress was photographed shopping with her mom at the Beverly Glen Market.

PHOTOS: Plastic surgery nightmares

The Hansel & Gretel Get Baked actress dressed casually for the outing, wearing a blue-and-white striped long-sleeve shirt, tight-fitted blue jeans, a messenger bag and sunglasses. The star -- most known for her television work in Twin Peaks and The Practice in the '90s and early aughts -- also was photographed smoking a cigarette and holding on to a brown shopping bag.

PHOTOS: Stars without makeup!

This isn't the first time Jack Nicholson's ex has stepped out looking drastically different. In April, the Lucky Dog star made another rare appearance (with the same messenger bag) in Beverly Hills.

PHOTOS: '90s TV stars

Two weeks after, the brunette star attended the Wayne's World reunion in Beverly Hills for an Academy of Motion Picture Art and Sciences screening 21 years after playing Stacy in the cult classic in 1992.

Boyle has never publicly discussed the drastic change to her appearance, but it has been rumored for years that she's undergone cosmetic procedures.

Source: http://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-beauty/news/lara-flynn-boyle-looks-unrecognizable-without-makeup-out-in-bel-air-with-mom-picture-20131710
Category: kim kardashian   george zimmerman   chargers   nytimes   Breaking Bad Season 5 Episode 10  

2 killers escape Fla. prison with bogus documents

This undated photo provided by the Florida Department. of Corrections shows Joseph Jenkins. Jenkins and Charles Walker were mistakenly released from prison in Franklin County, Fla., in late September and early October. According to authorities, the the two convicted murderers were released with forged documents. A manhunt is under way for the two men. (AP Photo/Florida Department of Corrections)

This undated photo provided by the Florida Department. of Corrections shows Joseph Jenkins. Jenkins and Charles Walker were mistakenly released from prison in Franklin County, Fla., in late September and early October. According to authorities, the the two convicted murderers were released with forged documents. A manhunt is under way for the two men. (AP Photo/Florida Department of Corrections)

This undated photo made available by the Florida Department of Corrections shows Charles Walker. Walker and Joseph Jenkins were mistakenly released from prison in Franklin County, Fla., in late September and early October. According to authorities, the the two convicted murderers were released with forged documents. A manhunt is under way for the two men. (AP Photo/Florida Dept. of Corrections,HO)

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — A prosecutor says he learned from a murder victim's family that a convicted killer had escaped from prison.

Orlando State Attorney Jeffrey Ashton said Thursday a relative of Roscoe Pugh notified his office this week that Joseph Jenkins was out of prison.

Authorities say Jenkins was released after he fooled the court system and Department of Corrections with forged court documents. The prosecutor's office says they then discovered a second convicted murder, Charles Walker, was also released based on bogus documents.

Jenkins and Walker were serving life sentences.

The prosecutor's office says another man serving a life sentence for attempting to kill a law enforcement officer was also scheduled to be released using forge documents, but an investigator discovered the scheme in the spring before he was freed.

Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2013-10-17-Prison-Mistaken%20Release/id-48f557ef7998497e929baa3ea6b9d877
Related Topics: kris jenner   calvin johnson   fox news   Romain Dauriac   Sonic  

The Word E-Book Should Be Replaced With CodeX

E-reading is a fundamentally different experience than curling up with a paper book.

Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

When's the last time you sat down to read a book for several hours? Or even one hour? We are both card-carrying humanities scholars, but even we can barely scrape 15 minutes together for sustained engagement with a text. And yet humans are reading now more than ever when you think about the billions of hours we collectively spend on email, Facebook, Twitter, texting, sexting, and reading illicit things online. This is more than just information overload: When we change how we read, we are changing our brains. Researchers have proposed that we play out literary scenarios with mirror neurons and fire up complex, full-brain patterns of activity when asked to practice “close reading,” in contrast to the patterns associated with reading for pleasure.

Neurological effects, different types of media, totally new reading habits—just a few reasons why e-reading is a fundamentally different experience than curling up with a dead-tree book. Print books are a highly refined technology that isn't going anywhere soon, but there are ways in which the digital is superior to the old-fangled, and vice versa: They’re horses of different colors.

And yet publishers keep trying to re-create the print experience online, with the faux wood of the iOS bookstore and the fake page-turning animations on many e-readers. It’s time for that to end. We need to embrace digital reading as its own medium, not just a book under glass. That means imagining a new language for reading as an experience, starting with a new word to use instead of book.

It’s still no easy trick to figure out a name for this thing, though. At the Frankfurt Book Fair last week, we acted as ringmasters for a crack team of novelists, journalists, and publishers conducting a gonzo experiment in the future of publishing. Our project, Sprint Beyond the Book, aimed to upend the publishing industry’s centuries-old model for book production. We wrote in public, on the crowded and noisy floor of the fair. We moved from concept to final product in just 72 hours. We crowdsourced the writing, featuring dozens of contributions collected through our website. We shot and embedded videos throughout. We’re even giving the thing away for free. But despite our pretensions to renegade chic, we couldn’t stop returning to the word book to talk about what we were building. (Disclosure: We work for Arizona State University; ASU is a partner with Slate and the New America Foundation in Future Tense. Sprint Beyond the Book is part of a research project funded by Intel Labs.)

The fact is that every other name we came up with sounded boring or silly. Text was a strong early contender—after all, it’s used by humanities geeks like us to refer to everything from political speeches and Hungarian rap lyrics to recipes for gumbo. Sadly, it’s totally misleading: We’re hurtling toward a future in which reading means making decisions, watching videos, writing back, and getting lost in vast virtual spaces. Book system is too stodgy (as are reading system, platform, and service) and doesn’t even get rid of the word book. We gleefully entertained and discarded many bad ideas like graphies. Some of us liked plat, a shortening of platform that sounds like something out of a Golden Age science fiction story, but the more we said it, the more it sounded like a comic book sound effect for something gross.

Rather than grope forward, we decided to look back. With some trepidation, we would like to nominate codex, a word with a rich history that most of us don’t know anything about. Codex, derived from the Latin caudex (meaning “trunk of a tree”) even happens to contain the English word code, which will be central to the future of reading in a variety of ways. The things we’ll be reading in the future will not only involve a lot of programming; they’ll also require readers to decode complex, multilayered experiences and encode their own ideas as contributions in a variety of creative ways. Since standard printed books are technically codices, we propose (with significantly more trepidation) to distinguish our variant with one of those annoying midword capitals: codeX, to remind us that these new things involve experience, experimentation, expostulation … you know, all those X things.

This also works nicely because it reminds us of the X-Men and the X Games: We see the future of reading as an arena with the social dynamics of competition and play, scoring points and showing off, rather than a LeVar Burton rainbow of love and generosity. (Twitter works like this now, as a performance space where we’re all more or less openly vying for the award for “most clever person on the Internet this minute.”) Books have always been potent weapons in the cultural battlefield for prestige and distinction, and they won’t magically turn into utopian spaces anytime soon. At the risk of sounding too academic, we think the X highlights the jousting and (hopefully friendly) conflict inherent to digital reading.

From social reading platforms like Medium to digital pop-up books like 2012’s Between Page and Screen, we’re already building the future of reading, and there’s no going back. So let’s agree on a new term and stop pretending these utterly new ways of reading are anything like the singular and lovely experience of thumbing through a printed book.

This article arises from Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, the New America Foundation, and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, visit the Future Tense blog and the Future Tense home page. You can also follow us on Twitter.

Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/10/we_need_a_new_word_for_e_book_here_s_one_idea_beyondthebook.html
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