You're a student in a one-room schoolhouse in a middle-class New York community in 1910, and your teacher (who happened to be trained at Teachers College) projects this image onto the wall:

What does it mean to you? What does it mean for the history of education?

The library has a collection of 4000 images from magic lantern slides. These images were, one presumes, projected into the classrooms of yesterday (or, as the about.com page suggests, through the 19th century until the 1950's). They depict images from many disciplines, including social studies, natural science, mathematics, and so on.

But that's about the extent of our knowledge. Teachers who used these in the classroom aren't around to tell us about them, and the slides don't come with a user manual (not one that I've found yet).

So, what would you do? Is there a game that could make the collection of images richer? Something else worth doing? Or should they be relegated to the trash-heap of educational history (where lessons once learned are forgotten)?

We'll be putting the collection into PocketKnoweldge, and PocketKnoweldge Viewer (where they can be viewed as a slideshow). But that's all that's currently planned... which seems kind of sad to me.

Have you read it yet? Do you have any stories to share?

A somewhat random (and tangential?) thought.

We are excited to announce the release of Pressible 0.1 today! This is a very experimental release, though we are hoping you (the lab) and others hop on board and give it a try! Please see our features page for more details, but in a nutshell:

• We're responding to Gary's vision for EdLab's publishing work that he's been articulating for at least the past year: Make a "powerful, networked, lightweight publishing solution for the TC community." And: "It should be a whole new genre for publishing." Well, no small task, to be sure, but we think Pressible is at least the beginning of an answer!
• Pressible is highly "templated" -- meaning that users can't change much about the design of their site. Is this a good or bad idea? (Is it good or bad for Facebook?) In any case, it allows us to try some things out that wouldn't be possible otherwise. Watch for more visual elements in the future.
• We think Pressible is a reinvention of blogging as a vehicle for publishing your ideas and work to the web in a fast, intuitive, and powerful way. Will you? Let us know!

Also, here are some things we think are cool about the project as a whole:

• It's hosted entirely in the cloud -- a new experiment for an EdLab application.
• It's built on the back of WordPress. We did kung fu on the data WordPress throws around to create cool results now, and even cooler results in the future.
• Right now it's experimental, but we are hoping it can mature into a fully-fledged software project hosted by the Gottesman Libraries. We think it can become a way to not only serve the TC community (and alumni), but also individuals and organizations around the world.
• We hope you break it. Really... we're ready to learn from our mistakes. So if you do, let us know!

We hope this is the beginning of a new stage in the lab's exploration of the future of publishing (hey, it may also be the end of the road!), and are excited to invite the lab to join us moving forward. We envision a lot of other features and functionality that did not make this release, and there are probably things we haven't even considered yet.

So, what are you waiting for? Sign up for Pressible today and begin your next big publishing project!

Along with the Apple Tablet, this week (Friday?) will also mark the launch of the experimental "website theme" at the core of Pressible.org (What will it be? What will it look like? How much will it cost?). See the presentation outline below (submitted to Educause's 2010 conference) for a peek into our progress (and to put an end to some of the rampant speculation):

Hello Lab. Jeff and I are learning about the future of e-books today and tomorrow at Digital Book World's 2010 Conference. So far we've heard a bit about social media trends and Google's e-book strategy – interesting stuff. Check back for more posts as the event unfolds. (Also, because my laptop battery can't last forever, see my twitter feed here.)

To read comments chronologically, start at the bottom for first-level comments, and top-to-bottom for threads. (Please pardon the cludginess.)

Just a reminder that we have our regular weekly seminar tomorrow (Thursday): Pete Elam on Building Training and Tutorial Applications. Please join us!

Just wanted to bring your attention to the brand new After Ed! Um, normally we might not have launched it in quite this fashion (even folks on the video team might not have seen it yet), but we ended up signing a new (less expensive) contract with our video streaming provider (Brightcove) that went into effect on December 1st, and it forced our hand a bit. Here's a little more detail from the homepage:

If you've visited After Ed before, you may have noticed our site has changed. We've abandoned multi-video players, for example, in favor of a more modular platform. We've grown from a blog-like archive to a moderated community site, where you can use YouTube to contribute to After Ed shows and themes. We think changes like these will make it easier to find, bookmark, and share videos, playlists, and shows. Please email us if you have feedback or suggestions, and please bear with us as we continue to add new features in early 2010. Enjoy!

Great set of Letters to the Editor in the New York Times on the act of selling a lesson plan here.

The speaker of this session, Brad Wheeler, says that higher ed is a "different" kind of industry in that institutions don't directly complete against each other. Instead, and as a consequence, ed organizations should follow a strategy to approach problems in similar ways (across a wide range of activities).

He spoke about the growing set of activities that are leading to a "meta-university." Parts of this tool-set, he says, come from the following inter-institutional collaborations that have resulted in the following software projects/platforms:

Hathi Trust for library books.

Public Knowledge Project for journals.

Connexions for textbooks.

Sakai for learning management.

Kuali for finance.

He also talked about the foundation for joining collaborative development across institutions. Some key factors: