Justin Reich, the Richard L. Menschel HarvardX Research Fellow, a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and a lecturer in the MIT Scheller Teacher Education Program, has a lot on his plate. Not only is he the co-founder and co-director of EdTechTeacher, he also writes the opinion blog EdTech Researcher, which is hosted by Education Week’s Digital Directions channel. He took time out of his busy schedule to share his summer reading plans with BookMarks:
The reality is that my summer reading will consist almost entirely of scholarly articles, white papers, blog posts, tweets, forum threads, and data documentation. Some considerable portion of that material will relate to Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) or online learning in higher education. If you are like me, then that might be a summer reading list to get geeked out about, but for most people, it would be like reading a stack of microwave operating instructions.
The books on my summer list are also all professionally related. I just re-read Seymour Papert’s Mindstorms (Basic Books, 1993), which education technology folks should read once a decade whether they need to or not. I also have finished Marina Gorbis’ The Nature of the Future (Free Press, 2013) which I’m hoping to review soon.
I’m working through a pair of books related to the Maker movement that I’m going to review together at some point: Sylvia Martinez and Gary Stager’s Invent to Learn (Constructing Modern Knowledge Press, 2013) and Julia Walter-Herrmann and Corine Büching’s FabLab: Of Machines, Makers, and Inventors (Transcript, 2013).
So, with that on my plate, the outlook for pleasure reading looks bleak. The bad forecast is compounded by the fact that I have a few fantasy series that I’m waiting on. I read the first four Game of Thrones books from George R.R. Martin under the mistaken impression that the series was four books long. I refuse to read another one until he finishes the series. I’m still scarred from starting the Wheel of Time series, having it decline in quality, and then having the author die before finishing. I’m also eagerly awaiting the third book in the Kingkiller Chronicles series from Patrick Rothfus, but that’s not coming this summer either. So I’m in a fantasy stasis.
If I make time for one more reading experience, I’d love to jump in on one of the reads done by Diana Kimball’s 24 Hour Books Clubs, where the club chooses a book for people to read in a single day, and folks all over the world, read, blog, tweet, and share their experience together.