Off Course-On Target

iPad and eReading Update

I’ve written previously about my ongoing experiences with eReaders eBooks and my evaluation continues as my use of these devices as well as my appreciation grows dramatically so I wanted to give you a quick review of my experiences with all of them so far. For me reading is a vital part of learning and something which is as important and necessary for me as air to breath. I have therefore long been experimenting with any and all ways to improve the effectiveness of my reading and hence my learning.

I should also not that similar to the word and concept of a “phone” the word/concept of “reading” seems to be going through some dramatic changes and expansions. Some people rarely ever use their “smart phone” to talk on yet we still call them phones, smart or otherwise. Perhaps we will create a new term, though I’m happy with just letting the definitions expand, and don’t know of a better choice (please let me know if you do) so my use of the word “reading” here will be very broad and inclusive to essentially be any “consumption” and interaction with typically large collections of “readable” content such as text, illustrations, animations and video. In some ways this is not new as we say that we read magazines when they may have more images than text and some say they just read a great audio book. In any case the migration from the paper based printed word to our current consumption of multiple medias on digital screens would seem to be yet another example of how we are very much living in a world of abundance and exponential rates of change. Furthermore, I believe we are just now hitting the tipping or inflection point of the exponential curve of reading and as always things are radically different on the other side of these tipping points. Here is how I see the differences.

Choose the Right Tool (category) for the Job
By my count, there are about four different classes or types of devices that we have to choose from for reading; dedicated eReaders such as the Kindle, tablets such as the iPad, computers (laptop/desktop) and handhelds (aka phones). Since we humans first started using tools, choosing the right tool for the job is very important to doing the job well whether you are building a house, moving furniture and now reading a book or magazine. You might think that with the increasing transportability of eBooks across all four of these different devices, it would matter much less which device you used to do your reading and in part this is true. Amazon in particular gets huge kudos from me for how seamlessly they have made my reading of all my Kindle content on whatever device I happen to have handy from my laptop to my phone to my Kindle or my iPad. All fully synched up so all the content knows where I left off, what I’ve read, etc. no matter which device I last read it on. This is extremely valuable in that we are closer to anytime anywhere reading, however my experience is that matching the device to the type of reading and content is a more critical choice than ever for a great reading experience.

I. Computers (laptops & desktops:
Computers, be they laptops or desktops, typically have several strong benefits for reading including; a large, bright high resolution color display, a keyboard for controls and text entry, additional software for editing and note taking, good network connections, plenty of computing power and complimentary capabilities such as word processing, audio, video, browsers, and the like. Even more importantly in my experience though is that our physical position when using a computer is usually sitting upright, in a comfortable chair, with both hands free. This makes them most conducive and comfortable for things like editing content, text entry for notes, looking things up and therefore this is the best choice when your “reading” will involve these types of tasks.

II. Handhelds (aka phones)
Phones and handhelds have the primary advantage of ubiquity; they are the device we are most likely to have with us the most amount of time and situations. This combined with their instant on and almost always connected features has given us an abundance of more choices of when and where we can do our reading and expanded the “social” side of reading by enabling us to do more sharing with others, both in person and from a distance or virtually. While the screens and processors are typically smaller, both of these have been improving exponentially and it is now quite an enjoyable experience to do more “reading” on our “phones”. However, again and as is the case in all these devices, is often our physical position while using them and the situations they allow us to use them in that is proving to be the most telling for me and determines which one is the right tool for the job at hand. In the case of handhelds or phones this means that we can use them when we are walking around, in a crowd, when we only have one hand free and we seem to have them on our person, literally at our fingertips, almost all the time.

III. Dedicated eReaders:
Dedicated eReaders most popularized by the Kindle have the typical advantages of a device or tool that is made to do one job only; it does it VERY well. In the case of eReaders my experience is that they are ideal for reading a large amount of text, such as reading a book or long papers and articles. You can read my previous posts for much more detailed accounting of my experience with the Kindle so suffice it to say that it continues to be my hands down first choice for feeding my voracious appetite for books and long articles. For me the key advantages include a screen that is as good as or better than paper for reading text, (also just as bad in that it requires good light) gives me direct search and a built in instant dictionary, lets me easily underline and take notes as I read and manages them as both integrated yet separate files, it is an ideal size and weight to hold by hand (thumb & finger) and I have almost immediate access to almost any book, newspaper or printed article, which is an advantage for all but a true gift in my situation out sailing in some of the most remote locations in the world. As I noted in my Kindle article, it passed the acid test for me with flying colors in that it becomes completely transparent to my reading experience. I can easily loose myself within the great book I’m reading as I am transported fully into the story, forgetting that I’m reading at all.

IV. Tablets/iPad
Most recently we have a fourth category and choice to meet our reading needs that of tablets and in particular the incredible popularity of Apple’s iPad. Thanks to my good friend and colleague Elliott Masie I’ve had an iPod for the past few months and have been using it daily for a wide range of purposes, though I will focus on my reading experiences in this article.

Tablets such as the iPad provide a unique new collection of capabilities which make them significantly different than any of the other three categories above, more so than I and most others would have thought before using one for a while. This unique combination creates a new category and also makes tablets the best tool to choose for some kinds of content and reading situations. The primary advantages for reading I’ve experienced with the iPad include the great color screen, which works surprisingly well in almost all light conditions from bright sunlight to no light at all, the ability to have embedded high quality images, animation and video, and the multi touch interface.

There is one thing with the iPad, which will be rectified in the future I'm sure but which drives me nuts daily, is the lack of multi-tasking. Even when I’m using it as “just” a reader I often like to listen to music as I’m reading, which the iPad does very well of course. But, if I need to do anything such as select a song or skip forward, I have to stop reading, quit my reader, start up my audio app, do whatever task I need to such as skip the current song, then quit the audio app, start up the reader app and finally get back to reading! Or when I want to go back and forth between two or more books or articles, I can’t have them open at the same time so I have to go through the same frustrating process of shutting down one book to start up the other and then repeat to go back. OK, end of rant and let me be clear that when it comes to reading content such as magazines or anything that has lots of color illustrations, video, audio, etc. then the iPad is my hands down #1 tool I reach for.

As good as all these features are and just as with all the other three categories above, perhaps even more so in the case of the iPad, the key bit of context to determine when it is the right tool to choose is the physical position and situation you are in when using it. Some of this is obvious for the tablets like the iPad such as being able to read it while more reclined such as lounging in a comfortable chair or in bed, but the most striking and surprising thing to me has been how much this is a “social” device. By that I mean it seems to compel you to share it with others. You find yourself showing more people things on the iPad than on any other device I know, either by looking at it together, which works very well as when you flip it over to show the person across from you the image flips right way up for them to see, or you just hand them the iPod to them and let them read or use it. With the simplified multi touch interface even first timers have no problem quickly figuring out how to move navigate, turn pages, run videos and even more interesting to me there doesn’t seem to be any reluctance to do so for fear of “breaking something” that is still common when you share your laptop. I’ve also noticed that there is very little sense of invading someone’s privacy when sharing your iPad with others compared to the very strong sense of doing so when sharing your laptop. It is partly due to the type of content that you most often seem to be viewing on the iPad such as magazines, articles, videos, etc. but I suspect it is much deeper than this. In any case I now tend to bring my iPad with me everywhere because it is so shareable and such a great source of reference when you are with others. In my case that is things like maps and charts when I’m with other “yachties” but I’ve found the same thing when I’m with friends and family or with any other group of people engaged in just normal conversations and socializing.

For reasons I don’t fully understand these tablets just naturally invite you to hold them and the touch interface is not only very natural and intuitive but also what I would call a very “intimate” interface where you are acting directly with what you are reading. It sounds like a small thing and a small distance to cross from interacting via mice, track pads and keyboards to directly touching the content on the screen with your fingers, but in my experience and especially sharing it with others, this is a quantum leap that makes a huge difference.

Great Choices, but More of Them!
The one down side of having these four very separate categories of devices is that you end up needing, or at least wanting, to buy and carry around all four of them. While there is certainly some overlap between them, my experience has taught me clearly that none of them eliminates or replaces the other. If you are not a big book or long article reader I can see that you may find a tablet such as the iPad will serve perfectly well as your main eBook reader and you don’t need to have a dedicated one like a Kindle. And if you are not a big consumer of content (are there any such people?) then perhaps you don’t need an iPad and your laptop and phone will do just fine.

However for most of us and certainly for myself, I now have all four of these devices and I am delighted to have the additional choices enable me to have the just the right reading tool to match my needs at the time. Abundance may bring with it the need to make more choices, but fortunately, thanks to lots of experiential learning, it is now very clear to me which device is the right one to grab for any given task. I hope that with this article and some hands on learning for yourself, you too will find it much easier to choose the right reading device and by doing so, your reading experiences and your learning experiences will improve dramatically.

Wayne
Ambassador at Large for The Masie Center

Coming to you today from:
Aboard s/v Learnativity
17 06.775 S, 179 05.487 W
Namena Island, Fiji

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Top Three Big Little Reasons Why I Now Prefer eBooks to pBooks

I have always been a voracious reader as it helps me satisfy my life long lust for learning. I’ve therefore been an avid consumer, collector and buyer of books, magazines, periodicals, journals, manuals, you name it. For most of my almost sixty years my primary source was paper or pBooks as they are sometimes referred these days but my reading addiction has only gotten worse with the introduction and rapid rise of digital, electronic or eBooks. When I say I am deeply indebted to Amazon, I really mean it!

Perhaps more than most and thanks to my living and learning full time on my boat as I sail around the world, I am reading more than ever and doing so on whatever media is available, digital or paper. However, I wanted to use some of my recent reading experiences to bring you the top three reasons why I now prefer to do all reading possible on eBooks using either my Kindle, iPad or even my laptop or phone.

I recently had the mind expanding experience of reading, in its entirety, the paper or pBook version of Martin Gardner’s amazing collection of his essays in “The Night is Large”. Part of the appeal to me I think is that Gardner was such an exemplar of a lifelong learner and a great teacher through his erudite observations and questions. The Night is Large is a collection of forty seven of his challenging and inquisitive essays that cover an extraordinary range of eclectic topics from mathematics and science to philosophy, religion and literature. It has been a long time since I’ve had such a thoroughly engrossing and thought provoking reading experience from one book, one filled with so much learning and the degree to which one person has influenced my thinking and perspectives. Sincere thanks to my dear friend Erik for gifting me with this book several years ago and to serendipity helping me stumble over it one of the many book shelves onboard a few weeks ago. If you are not familiar with Martin Gardner or have not had a chance to read this amazing collection yourself, it is my highest recommendation that you give yourself the gift of doing so soon and consider it as a great gift for someone you know who appreciates great thinkers and great learning.

Three Little Things Make a BIG Difference
In addition to wanting to recommend this book to you, I also wanted to tell you about how much the experience of reading this pBook highlighted just how much more I prefer reading eBooks and eReaders. There is literally no difference for me in the literal reading part of the experience because the screen on my Kindle is at least as good if not better than most paper printed text. Indeed they also share identical drawbacks such as the requirement of good lighting to read them in as the Kindle has no backlighting which is part of why it is so similar to reading paper based text and just as easy on the eyes.

Please note that I also now do a lot of reading on tablets such as the iPad, and for things like magazines and other types of reading where color pictures, animations, video and so on are a major part of what you are reading, they are my first choice. However for true “book” reading or other long articles where the content is almost all pure text and B&W charts and illustrations, the Kindle is still my hands down first choice.

Regardless of which eReader I use, the key difference for me lies in what I can do with eBooks on my Kindle or iPad that I cannot do with pBooks and which this recent experience has taught me just how big a difference this is. If you have not yet had much experience with eReaders, these may all sound like trivial “nice to have” little things, they did to me at first too, but now that I’ve logged a couple hundred reading hours on them they have proven to be invaluable to my overall reading and learning experience. Below (in no particular order) are my top three big little reasons why I now do all reading possible on my eReaders:

I. Instant & Integrated OED = Instant Integrated Learning
Next to experiential learning, reading is the primary way I learn. In addition to the stories, information and knowledge I receive from reading so many books, articles and magazines, I also read them to improve my vocabulary and my writing skills. (Evidence here not withstanding!) Therefore one of the features which I’ve come to absolutely adore and addicted to is the built in Oxford English dictionary. It is not just that a dictionary is available, I’ve usually had a dictionary at hand when I’m reading, it is the way the Kindle software (not just the device) in particular has implemented and integrated the OED. It is as simple as it is superb; put the cursor in front of any word and a short two line definition from OED instantly and unobtrusively pops up at the bottom of the screen. Want more? One more click or tap and it brings up the full page of that definition in the OED. For me this is just brilliant and something I often do multiple times on one page I’m reading to check a word that is new to me, dig into some of its nuances, or find synonyms, pronunciation, and all the other things that a dictionary enables.

With eBooks this has become transparent to me when I’m reading and so when I suddenly went back to reading a traditional pBook and no longer had this instant dictionary I realized just how much I depend upon and love this feature. Of course I could and did just keep my Kindle or my iPad beside me as I was reading The Night is Large and was able to look up any words I wanted in their OED, but it was so much more disruptive and time consuming to have to put down the paper book, pick up the Kindle or iPad, start up the dictionary, type in the word and then go back to reading.

I should note that this OED feature used to only be available on the Kindle reader itself (the hardware) and so I had the same problem when I was reading my eBooks in the Kindle reader software on my iPad or laptop or phone. So you can imagine my delight, and I suspect yours too, when Amazon has recently updated the Kindle reader software to include the OED. In fact with the touch screen interface on the iPad the implementation is even better in that you just touch the word in question and up pops the two line definition at the bottom. One more tap on the definition brings up the whole OED page for that word. So while I still prefer extended book reading on my Kindle device I do like the implementation of the dictionary on the iPad version of the Kindle software even better. Either way though, this built in instant look up is just brilliant and something I don’t want to be without whenever I’m reading.

II. Finding vs. Searching
Next up on the reasons why I now so much prefer to read eBooks is that they let me instantly find, rather than spend time searching for, a word or reference within the content I’m reading. How did I ever live without this? As my recent experience going “back” to reading a pBook reminded me, the lack of a find feature (aka search) when reading paper text is a huge hindrance to my reading and learning experience. For example in addition to his own astute observations and writing, Gardner makes a lot of references to other works and does an excellent job IMHO of finding just the right great quote to illustrate a point he is making. There were so many examples of this within the almost 600 pages and forty seven essays of The Night is Large that I found myself being very frustrated by the amount of time it took me to find that quote or passage I’d read earlier. Even with copious note taking, underlining and highlighting, it would usually take me several frustrating minutes to find what I was looking for. With any of my eBooks I just type in the phrase or word and instantly find where it is in the book. Often times I also serendipitously find another reference to the same word or idea which turns out to be even more revealing and valuable. Recently many of the eReaders are also building in direct subsequent links to sites like Wikipedia or Google for extend your references world almost endlessly. Either way, this fast finding and integrated deep searching is easily one of my top three big little differences I don’t want to be without whenever I’m reading.

III. Notes & Highlights
Last, but certainly not least of the top three reasons why eReaders and eBooks are providing me with such a superior reading and learning experience is the improvement they enable for my notes and highlights. I’ve always been a big note taker and underliner and while I must admit that I don’t reread or refer back to all of them, or probably even very many of them, the act of highlighting and note taking is an integral part of how I learn. This worked well enough when both my notes and highlights were on paper but it was never very efficient or effective for me. I never seemed to have my notes, pen and paper with me when I needed them. They were so easy to lose or misplace and I would need to transcribe or retype them whenever I wanted to use them elsewhere.

With the advent of computers I was able to take my notes digitally and I did so both directly on the computer and then more recently I found it to be far superior to use digital pens and paper such as my LiveScribe Pulse pen and Anoto based digital notepads. (See previous articles here on OCOT for detailed reviews of these). However, this was still very distracting and removed from my reading. Now that I can take notes and do my highlighting directly and of course digitally on my eBooks, my learning and reading experiences are so much more efficient and effective.

Highlighting or underlining on paper with pen, pencil or highlighter felt pens works very well and still does for doing the actual underlining or highlighting. It isn’t very obtrusive and is quick and easy. However it is after the fact that the problem arises, specifically finding your past highlights and also transcribing them to use as a reference or to share with others. On my eBooks highlighting is still very quick and easy to do, just drag across the word or passage with the cursor or by touching with your finger and it is underlined. The highlighted text shows a telltale graphical underline in your eBook so you can see it later, but the big little difference is that all your underlined passages are stored in a separate file for later use and extraction. Both for your own personal use and also when you might want to share these highlights with others, having them in a separate file is a great advantage. We are also beginning to see an interesting phenomena as these highlights are starting to be shared on social networks so that you can start to see what someone else is highlighting and what they found to be of note in a book or article.

As you might imagine, taking notes with eBooks work similarly in that you can now take notes directly using the same eReader you are reading on, either on a built in keyboard or on-screen virtual keyboard. As with underlines, all your notes are both referenced directly with marks directly in the text of the eBook as well as being stored as a separate file. This makes them not only very easy to access and find but they are already digitally transcribed and every so easy to copy & paste to share with others or use in reports or subsequent writing you might do.

Having your notes and underlines all collected together also makes them much easier to manage and reference at a later date when in many cases the notes become more valuable than the book itself. And you can quickly imagine the additional capabilities this provides for situations where you want to provide someone with a summary of what you got out of a book or article, or in reverse where you want to have this from someone else. I can see this being an extremely handy and powerful tool for teachers, trainers, educators, managers and for the dramatic expansion of the collective wisdom as more and more of us start to take and share notes and highlights this way.

There are other features of eReaders such as text to speech conversion and changeable font size which I use on occasion but nothing compared to my uses of these other three features which I use multiple times every time I’m reading an eBook, sometimes multiple times every page! While I still enjoy reading good old paper books and there are still many books which are not yet available digitally, there is no going back for me and I am reading more and learning more and having a better overall reading experience than ever before thanks to these three big little differences that eBooks have delivered. From my perspective, the writing is clearly on the wall that paper books are on the wane and in a few years, while they will still be around and we will still have great quantities of them, we will regard them to be as quaint and curious as quill pens and scrolls.

Wayne Hodgins
Ambassador at Large for The Masie Center

Coming to you today (Aug.20, 2010)
Aboard s/v Learnativity
17 06.775 S, 179 05.487 W
Namena Island, Fiji

Email: [email protected]
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Learning Like Lobsters

I suffer from an affliction which I once read all teachers (yes I used to be one) suffer from; premature explanation”. This is something you can easily verify by asking any of my students, children or friends and which regular readers will already know! As such, you’ll need to indulge me in a bit of some explanation, premature or otherwise, to lead in to today’s story. I guess you have the option to just skip ahead but I think the lead in is fun and informative as well.

I am privileged to have managed to retain and nurture a child-like insatiable curiosity and therefore almost everything and anything fascinates me. I suspect it is a result of this that I love learning so much and everything about the learning process. Every time I find something I don’t understand, or something new or something that frustrates me because it doesn’t work the way I thought it would or should, I ask myself “What is this trying to teach me?” and try to turn it into a learning moment. I often think of this along the lines of the great Buddhist saying “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” I’ve found this to be more profoundly true every day, and therefore I try to be in a state of constant learning readiness so I can that “ready student” and have “teachers” appear in my life on a continuous basis. As this next story will show these teachers come in all shapes and forms.

This learning readiness is also something I work on as a personal goal to increase the velocity, density and quality of my learning. All part of my trying to, as Doug Engelbart so nicely put it, “Getting better at getting better”. Above and beyond the learning, or perhaps just part and parcel of it, I find that if I maintain this constant state of openness and readiness almost any and every person, place, thing, or event can become a muse to inspire me further in what seems like a constant cycle of creativity and curiosity. While exhausting at times this has proven to be extremely valuable and effective for me and I hope that by sharing some of my experiences you too will find great value within.

A recent example and the point (finally) of this article is a recent run in I had with a lobster. Actually the initial little grain of sand which acted as the irritant to stimulate this little oyster of learning (I’ll stop with the analogies soon, maybe) was planted near the beginning of my voyage when I was reading a book I can highly recommend called “Crazy by Design”. Those who know me will understand my attraction to the book on several levels by just the title alone, but it was also given to me by a fellow sailor, friend and Autodesk colleague, Maurice Conti because the author is his incredible father, Ugo Conti. (and you should meet his mother!) In the book, Ugo recounts a tale of one of his run ins with a lobster and makes a note in doing so about how lobsters need to continuously shed their hard exoskeleton on a regular basis to enable them to grow. I guess I kind of intuitively knew this but reading it here piqued my curiosity and lodged in the recess of my brain (I’ve got lots of them) and has been growing ever since.

The other day, when I was tying up my dingy upon my arrival in Levuka, the original capital city of Fiji, a sudden change of color below in the amazingly clear water under the dock caught my attention. Upon closer inspection it turned out to be an enormous lobster that I would estimate was over 18 inches or 45cm long. Although this one had no claws, as is common in many parts of the Pacific the lobsters and throughout Fiji, it was still a formidable sight and I quickly put on my snorkeling gear (always with me) and spent about ten minutes floating above and just marveling as he moved slowly around the coral and rocks below the dock. Best of all though for me, and hopefully for you, this finally provided the motivational muse I needed to write up my long festering thoughts on how I think we can learn from lobsters or at least what I’ve learned.

First some of the basic facts about lobsters, straight out of their Wikipedia entry, that are relevant to the learning Ieap they inspired within me.

Lobsters facts:
• must molt, shed their hard protective exoskeleton, in order to grow
• eat their shed skin after molting
• Continue to grow throughout their lives
• it is not unusual for a lobster to live for more than 100 years
• May exhibit “negligible senescence” in that they can effectively live indefinitely barring injury, disease or capture
• Largest one caught in Nova Scotia Canada 20.15kg/44.4lbs

While each of these are pretty fascinating it was the first point about their needing to constantly shed their protective hard out shells and replace them with new ones by excretions. As I looked into this further I learned that as the pressure caused by their internal growth increases, they break out of and shed their current shell and secrete a new one. However they are very smart or Mother Nature is in that before they secrete their new exoskeleton they puff themselves up with their environment of sea water so that the new shell will be large enough to allow for further growth. Otherwise they would be in an almost continuous process of shed/secrete and have time for nothing else. This process continues their whole life in a cycle of growth, molt old, puff up, secrete new, live, rinse and repeat. As per the other pretty cool lobster fact above, lobsters can live for a VERY long time, potentially indefinitely, if we don’t catch and eat them first (which I must admit to doing many times. How cool is all this?!

The leap this sparked in my synapses was to use this as metaphorical model for life and learning. Think about it, they are growing constantly, just as we are too I hope but they also need to have some limits and some protection as they do so. But these limits start to become too restrictive at a point and become a hindrance rather than a help, so they get rid of the limiting protective shell surrounding them and create a new one. Sound familiar?

The key for me is the transition from one shell to the next. Firstly when they shed their old shell they must take the risk of being “naked” and very vulnerable to their potentially hostile outside world. Secondly, they puff themselves up to ensure the new shell will be a bit bigger than their current needs require and allow for their continued growth.

I’ve been thinking about this from multiple perspectives for my own personal growth, as a parent for the growth of my children, as a friend and a teacher for the growth of those around me. It seems to be so rich with lessons we can take away from it and hence this article. The need for example to take the risk of shedding the similarly protective shells I think we all tend to erect around ourselves. Over time these become very hard and very secure. Some find this very comforting and comfortable and are tempted to leave well enough alone and continue to live life as is. I get this; being comfortable and secure feels good and we need to have protection and perhaps some limits to help us grow. And I get that the alternative is very scary; to open yourself up, to step outside your bounds of familiarity and comfort, to do something new and different, to be vulnerable to the unknown. Yet to remain comfortably ensconced within the shell we have created for ourselves means that we can’t change, can’t grow and can’t learn. For me that means I’m just existing not living and that’s an even scarier alternative! As I learn and grow I feel the pressure build and feel restricted and suffocating so I blow up my perfectly strong and secure current shell and bust out in all my naked ignorance and innocence in an attempt to continue my own growth and learning.

Like the lobster I’ve learned that I need to create a new shell with the sufficient protection I need in order to grow further. Additionally important though I need to use my current environment of my dreams, my ideas, my creativity and my self-confidence to “puff” myself up a bit and ensure that my new shell fits just right. For as with the lobster it is important to make my new shell neither too big such that I become lost or unwieldy, yet neither too small so as to prematurely restrict my continued growth. By doing so I ensure my new shell will serve me well for my next leg of life’s journey before I need to blow it up and continue my growth.

I also take note of the high degree of reuse and self-sufficiency as more lessons to learn from lobsters. They eat their old shells to provide some of the materials and they use their overall environment of sea water to puff themselves up to just the right size and shape for the new shell they are creating. Hopefully we too reuse the lessons and surroundings of old as part of the fodder and nourishment we need to create the new. And note as I did that lobsters do this all themselves, not relying on others to do it for them.

Perhaps the key takeaway from all of this for me though is how it helps me continue to see everything as “permanently temporary”. Yes, I still love a good oxymoron and still find them to so often capture so much truth. In this case the notion of regarding everything as infinitely temporary helps me think of change as a continuum rather than fixed stages or even cycles. I don’t for example think about how long any given “shell” of mine will last. I’ve learned I won’t ever know when it is time to shed one and create another. The worse thing I can do is to try to make one last longer than it should and miss out on opportunities to grow in new directions and rates. As you may have previously read here quite often, I’ve learned to use serendipity as my guide in life and if a new opportunity surprisingly presents itself I do a kind of continuous triangular triage between my head, my heart and my gut to decide which ones to follow and then shed my shells as necessary to go after them. Like the lobster, I hope to have my own version of that “negligible senescence” I noted in the initial lobster fact list where they can effectively live indefinitely barring injury, disease or capture.

All this of course fits quite perfectly with my equally oxymoronic philosophy of planning as if I’ll live forever and living as if each day is my last. Not that I expect to or even want to literally live forever or die tomorrow, but I do want to have a kind of learning immortality such that I learn and grow for as ever long as I may be privileged to live, be that a few more seconds or a few more centuries.

I hope that you too will find some valuable lessons in learning and life from lobsters. Now can someone please pass the butter?!

Wayne & Ruby the Wonderdog
Aboard s/v Learnativity
17 01.511 S, 177 18.326E
off SW corner of Yaqeta Island, Fiji

Email: [email protected]
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COOL TOOLS for READING, LEARNING & TEACHING

One of the most useful and powerful browser based utilities I’ve been using for the past year or more and one I really wouldn't want to be without is called Instapaper. If you’ve not had a chance to try this yet I recommend you do. It is an example of the power of simplicity as “all” Instapaper does is add a “Read Later” button in your browser and with one click Instapaper saves any web page so you can read it later. It’s one of the best forms of a personalized digital newspaper I’ve used.

Handy enough, but Instapaper does a bit more than that because when it saves the page it uses an additional bit of technology called “Readability” (which you can use by itself if you like) which automatically strips out all the superfluous web page info, ads, etc. and just saves the clean text and images. Even better, it saves all this locally, as well as a record online and enables you to keep multiple devices in synch with all the “Read Later” items you have clicked on. Therefore you can both save and read your Instapaper “library” on your phone, iPad, laptop, and Kindle, and you can do it online or off. For me, having all these articles and pages I’ve saved with the Read Later button ready and waiting on my Kindle and iPod has been a true gift and helped me discover and read some excellent articles I would have otherwise missed. There are even more options and abilities you can explore for yourself when you do some experiential learning with this very cool tool.

I’ve found a lot of people are still unaware of these cool tools so wanted to put them in this post to help more discover them, and the other reason for writing this up today is that I’ve come across a new extension of this power called LongForm which works very well for longer articles, which are still my most preferred form. Kevin Kelly recently wrote up a good overview and some of his thoughts on Long Form on his Cool Tools blog. Kevin also rightly points you to Instapaper's sister site, Give Me Something To Read, which like Long Form, makes reader selections of the best magazine articles which you can then hit the “Read Later” button and add to your collection. My experience also matches Kevin’s in that I find these two services help me serendipitously discover some of the best magazine and other articles out there and which I would have otherwise missed.

While I’m no longer actively teaching, at least not in any traditional sense, I would think that the combination of Instapaper, Longform and Give-me-something-to-read, proved very powerful and useful tools for teachers and trainers or anyone wanting to easily capture and share articles with others. To me this is a form of quick and easy publishing that enables anyone to create very customized collections of articles from almost any source. The ease and speed by which you can grab just what you want and compile these clippings into a unique new collection that is so eminently readable and easily distributed and synchronized across a wide range of “screens” easily earns my vote as Cool Tools for learning.

Hope you get as much out of them as I do and please let me know your impressions and use these Cool Tools and if you find better ones.

Wayne
Masie Fellow and person of no fixed address