I stumbed across an interesting post from the MARquee which described a Small Projects Award which studied the use of e-readers and nursing students. Nursing informatics students sampled e-readers to see if they could be used effectively as tools to reduce the cosst of nursing textbooks and their utilization in classroom setting. What was interesting was their was a surprising unanticipated benefit of using e-readers, notes and highlights of texts could be shared via Twitter and Facebook. It turns out sharing this information made for “highly interactive sharing of readings. The social networking tools provided an added value above text cost savings for those considering using e-readers.”
Huh… I never would have thought of that. I don’t have an e-reader, and while I have heard people talking about sharing notes on ebooks it has been mostly in theory. At conferences people (mostly ebook vendors) talk about how you can take notes and then share these notes. I think this is the first time I have actually read where it has happened in the real world with real students. I would like to read more of about this type of thing, when reading a book becomes social.