Adult Education

Over the weekend I realised that e-books are making progress. there is enough momentum for a definite culture around them. What I wrote in blogs for IPEX and drupa is still making sense so I am starting to think about the ways this could influence approaches to knowlwdge and content. The Kindle format is carefully controlled and Amazon will try to keep pricing close to print books as requested by publishers. The ePUB format is based on open standards and seems better suited to open content. Adobe can arrange Digital Rights Management but anything on the web could be moved to XHTML fairly readily and the method for creating ePUB is better understood over time. InfoGrid Pacific have a route from Open Office though the business model is a bit vague at the moment. They are open to offers as to how they could be paid.

Previously I thought about knowledge as "official" and "grassroots" as in "Everything is Miscellaneous" by David Weinberger. So the collective view from people on the web is one sort of knowledge, the book suggested by a librarian is another. There are modes of knowledge production described by Gibbons and others. Some conferences distinguish academics and practitioners. I don't fully understand the "critique" theory, but part of the reason Chris Grey is "Against Learning" seems to be the positioning of official education.

There may be a new meaning for "adult education" around knowledge available through Amazon and/or as ePUB. Not sure how this will work out. The academic journals are now mostly digital but this has made public access more difficult. Texts appear online as drafts or leaks for humanities and social science but this is still in flux, like much else.