Thursday, September 2, 2010

Remedation Blog 1

According to Dictoinary.com remediation is “the correction of something bad or defective”, personally I don’t believe this is true. Yes, the evolution of an idea or product can help and usually does, but it doesn’t mean we should ditch the old ways for good. A great example of this is the idea of an e-book. Everything about it seems great and I am all for the idea of having a way of purchasing cheap very accessible books. The more people I talk to though, still prefer regular old fashioned books. I am trying to understand why, when it seems e-books are the future.
Let’s look at the pros and cons of both E-books and regular books. E-books portability is wonderful. Electronic text takes up virtually no room and, compared to lugging around three books or more, can be very light. Carrying around many books can be almost impossible, but an e-book device can store up to many different books which can be accessed anytime. The features of e-books depend on the company you bought it from, but being electronic the usability is endless. Being able to copy, paste, search, highlight, take notes, erase, and book mark more easily make using an e-book easy to do. Having a back ground screen also makes it able to access an e-book at anytime without some kind of light source.
Although all these great features there are always going to be cons. The most frequent complaint I have heard from people is that they don’t like staring at a computer screen. They would rather read off of paper if they are going to sit down and read for long periods of time. Some e-books can also be very expensive and having the responsibility of having all of your books on one device that can get stolen or broken can turn people away.
According to the reading “remediation is used by educators as a euphemism for the task of bringing lagging students up to an expected level of performance…” I believe this idea of remediation doesn’t describe what is happening in this situation. Once they figure out a way of making the back light better on e-reading devices and that all books are actually e-books, then we can get close to bring “lagging” ideas to new. What I think e-books do are fill and repair the fault of “regular books”. They capture the idea of having thousands of books at the disposal of a two pound device.

1 comment:

  1. A good start here, but let's try to be a little more focused on answering the question from the start -- you start answering it at the end and then don't support your answer (which I know you could do), so that made me sad. :( Work in more direct quotes from the reading to support your responses, and you'll do just dandy.

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