MangoReader launched in beta

Tue, 17 May 2011 17:37:06 -0400

See all your books in one place

See all your ebooks, notes, reviews and ratings together, on the web or your iPhone/iPad(Coming soon). Mangoreader automatically pulls all your books information into one place, so you can manage them all at once.

Meet your reading goals

We’ll help you plan ahead by showing you which books you should read

Save money on books

We’ll help you save money by letting you search for books and get the best price available across major retailers and ebook-stores

Books are fun with friends

Invite your friends, share your achievements, discover books and find that next great read based on reviews and ratings from friends, not from stores and publishers.

View Friend’s libraries, Meet more people

See what your friends are reading, Get the books they recommend and find more friends with similar interests.

10 Truths About Books and What They Have to Do With Video Games

Tue, 17 May 2011 17:30:06 -0400

Lots of people these days — some old, some young; some in suits, some not — are advocating that we use video games for learning, education, health, social change, and other “non-entertainment” purposes. However, lots of people who understand games, don’t understand books and lots of people who understand books, don’t understand games. There are 10 key truths we know about books. They happen to be equally true of other “meaning making technologies” like television and video games. Thus, in these 10 ways, books and video games are the same. They are both tools suited for certain jobs and best used in certain ways. So here are the 10 truths (for citations to the literature, see my book Situated Language and Learning, Routledge, 2004):

1. Books are a powerful technology. They can lead to aggression and violence (witness the Bible, the Koran, and the Turner Diaries in the wrong hands). Nazi Germany was a highly literate society. Games, so far, do not have this much power, but some day they may.

2. Books can lead to peace, tolerance, and charity if (and only if) they are read in a society and in families devoted to peace, tolerance, and charity.

3. For good learning, books require talk and social interaction with others around interpretation and implications.

4. Books can make you stupid by not questioning what they say.

5. Books can make you smart by supplying vicarious experience, new ideas, and something to debate and think about.

6. Books are often best used as tools for problem solving, not just in and for themselves.

7. To get the most out of them, books require the reader to read like a “writer” (a type of designer).

8. Just giving people books does not make them smarter; it all depends on what they do with them and who they do it with. For young people, it depends, too, on how much and how well they get mentored. Mentoring is, in fact, crucial.

9. Connecting books to the real world and to other media is good for learning, not doing so is bad for learning.

10. Books tend to make the “rich” richer and the poor “poorer” (those who read more in the right way get to be better and better readers and get more and more out of reading; those who don’t, get to be poorer and poorer readers and get less and less out of reading. The former get more successful, the latter, less). This is called “the Matthew Principle.”

To read complete article, go to: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-gee/ten-truths-about-books-an_b_859469.html

MangoSense website is up.

Fri, 08 Apr 2011 15:41:17 -0400

MangoSense website is up.