School 2.0 - Periodic English Literature Via Email

I came across a very interesting website the other day called dailylit.com. It is a repository of free, public domain books of literature. There's nothing really new in that.

What distinguishes dailylit from other sites is that it emails the reader a chapter of the desired text one day at a time. For example, if you're an English teacher who wants the class to read Moby Dick in chapters, you can ask students to subscribe and then pick the frequency of that chapters will arrive in their emails.

It's a very nice idea that will save money on text books, innovate learning, and broaden our teacher's ability to teach difficult subject matter.

Online Libraries

This article lists numerous references to online libraries that students and teachers can take advantage of.

From: Generation of online libraries is born, PhysOrg.com

Google Book Search (http://books.google.com). By far the most known online library to date, the Google book project has scanned the pages of "thousands" of works into digital format.

Text from classics in the public domain is available in full. Summaries or snippets of books still under copyright are provided of books still under copyright protection.

A search engine taking the place of library card indexes makes it possible to seek authors' names, publication dates, or words or expressions in the texts or titles.

Open Content Alliance (http://www.archive.org/details/texts): Most open.

For the moment the library has 35,000 scanned books, mostly in English. All of the works are not copyright protected -- often more than 50 years old -- and downloadable, printable, and free to be re-used for commercial purposes. The search engine is less sophisticated than that of Google Books but can scout out reference words if the quality of the scanned pages is sufficient.

- Windows Live Search Books, an online literature search engine being developed by Microsoft Computer, is slated for release "later this year."

The Windows Live Search Books Publisher Program website (http://publisher.live.com/) invites authors and publishers send their books to be scanned.

- Gallica, the site of the national Library of France. Lists 90,000 digitized books available in "image mode" but does not feature scanning by key words wihin page text.

- Specialized websites: offer text versions of digitized works, usually classics, that can be downloaded for reading or printing and allow searches by key words.

For example the site of "complete works of Shakespeare" (http://www-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare/) created in 1993 or the site of Molière (http://www.site-moliere.com/). Other sites highlight poetry, essays, books or other themes.

Project Gutenburg - 18,000 Free eBooks

For schools who operate on razor thin budgets and in poor communities where household incomes are also tight, the books offered here for the reading are a treasure.

The fact that people read web pages 25% slower than paper print may also incrrease a child's ability to grasp context and content - an experiement worth measuring by any educational specialists looking for a graduate thesis.