Big news today comes from palm infocenter. Avantgo
has changed their $1000 pricing policy. Today, they announced
"they will still limit access to some custom channels but the company will look at each channel individually before making
a decision." Channels that become popular by word of mouth will not be restricted."Channels that advertise for subscribers and offer products or services for sale will need to sign a contract with AvantGo." This is great news for libraries that want to
publish pda friendly information on websites for their users. After trialing a bunch of other programs, my opinion is that nothing
quite compares with Avantgo! What do you think? Although some have responded to this story by saying they will not go
back to Avantgo, that they will use isilo, Handstory
or Plucker. For an interesting read, read some of the comments to the story. I'm not
proud-I'm pleased Avantgo made this decision and plan to use it to create a library channel and content for our users' handhelds.
Some online journals on handheld computing
Here are some online journals on handheld computing
topics.
Handheld Computing Weekly.
Sign up for a free subscription
Mobile Computing
Palm Power
Pocket PC Magazine
Beyond the Four
Functions: Academic Uses for a PDA" is a wonderful document written by Dr.
Carol Leibiger, of the ID Weeks Library at the University of South Dakota! This is
a great document all libraries should take a look at. The University of South Dakota
gave pdas to all of their incoming freshmen, medical students and law students this
year. It is great to see the library is playing a key role in this in helping students to
use their pdas for e-books, creating documents, database software, and online information
via Avantgo! What a great document!
The University of
Texas has some great flash tutorials on pdas!
I think e-books are alive and well! (thanks to pdas!)
Libraries Launch E-Book Programs
about a project in California from the Washington Post.
Metronet E-Book Project - an ebook
project in the Metronet, a multi-type library system serving
the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area.
This from Dr. Mohammad Al-Ubaydli:
"Hi there,
I saw your site through the excllent Shifted Librarian, and I'm most interested by your work. I wonder if you would be interested to include Medical Approaches within your Handheld Libraries section. We launched a month ago, with an article in Wired News, which Shifted Librarian also picked up on:
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,50655,00.html
Basically, we are a group of enthusiastic doctors who wrote a medical textbook for junior doctors / medical students, and have made it freely available for all handheld platforms. Our model is the open source movement.
By way of background, my name is Mo. I recently graduated as a doctor, but I also spent the last six years working as a freelance programmer. I love using IT to help in medical education. Last year I worked on Project Palm, at the University of Cambridge, to create a collaborative learning environment for all the medical students. Using their Palm Pilots, they could share their learning no matter which of the hospitals in the regions they were studying in at the time.
http://www.cbcu.cam.ac.uk/handhelds/"
Medical Approaches is certainly an interesting way to combine the development
of a medical text, a collaborative educational experience, and the use of handhelds!
Thanks Dr. Mohammad Al-Ubaydli!
Our project is going along well-more next week!
No comments:
Post a Comment