Book publishing via WordPress

Posted on January 7, 2012 by Antonio Vantaggiato

A tool I’m looking into for my project of Zen of Teaching is PressBook, a WordPress-based solution to author, produce and distribute books.

PressBooks lets you and your team easily author and output books in multiple formats including: epub, Kindle, print-on-demand-ready PDF, HTML, and inDesign-ready XML.

PressBook seems a powerful platform for publishing, and I consider using it after I end the first writing phase of Zen of Teaching, which is being done with a WP plugin, Digress It, a wonderful solution that divides text into paragraphs and then allows comments to be attached to them. After the discussion around the text has finished, though, I’m thinking of PressBook to make the sort of final version before the virtual press.

I discovered PressBook through this interesting article in WPMU: An Introduction to PressBooks: A Digital Book Publishing Tool Built on WordPress, which also introduced me to Anthologize, a nice tool which allows to construct a book from a WP blog.

Here is a slideshow:

Pressbooks Demo Deck

View more presentations from Hugh McGuire

Happy publishing!

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The mimics of Mr. Bean {and copyright}

Posted on January 7, 2012 by Antonio Vantaggiato

Truth is, I was not fair to Rowan Atkinson in my post of yesterday. In it I wanted to raise the spirits with Trenet’s La Mer, sung while Mr. Bean ends up his vacation on a hilarious staircase improvised as he descends onto the sea. YouTube’s wonderful research library helped me with the video, only to inhibit its proper working when embedded. Ridicule as it is, you must watch the video on YouTube.

However, here I just want to focus on the extraordinary mimic capacity of Mr. Rowan, who does not talk in the movie, except for some weird mumblings, like

Bean, Sabine

(the two words do rhyme) when he meets the lovely Sabine.

In this video, which doesn’t as well work whence embedded herewith, Mr Bean uses all his histrionic abilities to improvise a show to get money in a Provence street market. It is absolutely fabulous in his interpretation of “O Mio Babbino Caro“, elsewhere known as the Puccini soprano aria sung by, among others, Maria Callas or Sissel Kyrkjebø. Even more fun when you realize the word of the aria do not match Mr. Bean’s actions! Watch it on YouTube, my friend.

{In truth, I cannot embed the movie segment here, even though I am publishing free marketing for the distributor of said movie,  Universal Studios Home Entertainment. Which sucks. Enough said. Need SOPA?}

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Happy New 2012 with La Mer and Mr. Bean

Posted on January 5, 2012 by Antonio Vantaggiato

What better way to salute the new year than with a blog post? And what better than celebrating it with the beautiful “La Mer” song by Charles Trenet? A song which has been played all over the world and is being heard in new versions all the time.

The new year begun and I had this song in my mind, but within the setting of Mr. Bean’s Holiday, the nonsense movie which ends with a very nice shot by the sea, with this song, played by Trenet himself. So here it is, enjoy: It’s good karma! {UPDATE: The embedding doesn;’t work; it has been disabled by request. Not mine! –YouTube’s contradictions! But it can be watched on YouTube itself. I wonder what were the conditions for this weird Faustian bargain…}

Here is Trenet live, half swinged, lovely!

And since YouTube is such a spectacular research library, here are some other versions which I love: Kevin Kline‘s version (from A French Kiss / 😉 yes, the actor Kevin Kline himself); and Bing Crosby’s version.

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Some myths in education 2.0

Posted on December 28, 2011 by Antonio Vantaggiato
Illustration from a collection of myths.

Image via Wikipedia

Some myths in education 2.0 (that I’ll need to address asap).

  1. Socrates: “I cannot teach anyone, all I can do is make them think”.
    The myth of the relativist. But my definition of teaching is to make somebody think. Duh?
  2. The future we cannot describe / the jobs we cannot imagine, etc.
    There is this old meme which comes around. We’ll have tomorrow jobs we can’t even imagine today. So? It’s always been like that, hermano.
  3. Paying attention & learning: what’s the fuss?
    Danger lurking: the myth of learning within the classroom. Another version:
  4. After learning this & that, they memorize only 36.4%.
    OMG, this is terrible. If you don’t remember, you haven’t learned it, sorry.
  5. Learning styles?  Wheeler: “There are as many learning styles as there are people” (2009)
  6. The image of a person (preferably, a girl) while listening/reading on her iPod with earphones. And the label: “xxx learning anytime anyplace”. Come on!
  7. The identity education == learning, without using the word “to study”. In fact, interesting is that in George Siemens’ book Knowing Knowledge, said verb is not mentioned at all.

    Keep in sync with the gorgeous Zen of Teaching, where all this is taking shape.

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Learning without studying

Posted on December 27, 2011 by Antonio Vantaggiato

Welcome to Popling – The Learn Spanish, French, German, Italian, Anything Without Studying App

Of course one can learn without studying. Running a bike, skiing, talking. But this, I cannot believe. A spamming window that interrupts you while working/studying (sic!) **teaches** you exactly what? The meaning of a word in Spanish? This is serious misinformation. They equate learning a language with a failing, spam-like attempt to have a user memorize vocabulary!

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