Well, it’s almost the end of the summer. I can’t believe it went so fast, but I did read some great books. Here’s a quick list of the ones I’d recommend:
Wikinomics – This is a great book about the power of mass collaboration to change the world. This is the kind of book that really has the power to change a person’s life. Since reading it, I’ve become keenly interested in the open educational resources movement. I’ve started developing some copyleft licensed resources and plan to do more in the future.
Everything is Miscellaneous – An interesting read about how digital searching and tagging is changing things. This covered everything from why the Dewey Decimal system may not be relevant any more to how playlists could be a model for so many things. At first, reading this book made me think about how educational content could be indexed and organized in a myriad different ways to meet the needs of different teachers and learners. By the end of the book, I questioned the whole current paradigm of learning and what is considered knowledge.
Faster – A book about how society is speeding up more and more every day. This one made me want to move to somewhere on the wide -open prairie and take a five-year long hiatus (and maybe never come back).
Three Cups of Tea – This had nothing to do with 2.0 or even technology, but everything to do with education in the developing world, which is certainly related to open cotent. It is about education, world culture, and humanitarianism. Along with Wikinomics, this was the most important book I read this summer.
Sidenote: I read most of these books on my handheld….lots of hours on a plane this summer.
So what did you all read and like this summer?