Sunday, August 10, 2008

Sophie

Just came across a new technology for creating online "books". Sophie. Here's a quote from the website:
Sophie’s goal is to open up the world of multimedia authoring to a wide range of people and institutions and in so doing to redefine the notion of a book or “academic paper” to include both rich media and mechanisms for reader feedback and conversation in dynamic margins.
I downloaded it and installed it and tried to view one of the demo books, but it didn't work. I guess it's still immature - but it seems like an interesting idea - and a genuine attempt to use technology to go beyond the familiar page metaphor for online texts. Multimedia design made easy. Perhaps. Eventually. Maybe some of you might like to try it out and see if it works (I'm using a mac and it may work better on Windoze).

2 comments:

Lisa said...

There was something related to this not that long ago where a minister for something-or-other suggested that school students didn't need to memorise facts and dates anymore becasue they could just google them. This caused a big stir and got on the front page of "The West" becasue google was making our kids lazier/stupider. I can't remember exactly who said it and when, so i tried googling it, but to no avail.

On another note, it is interesting that "google" is now a word in the dictionary.

Lisa said...

Oh, sorry. This comment was meant to be attached to the previous post - the one about google. :/
Hopefully i'll have it worked out by the end of semester!