DIGITAL SUMMER FOR EU-STUDENTS

This year’s students attending the summer school programme on European Integration have been given a central role in one of the University Library’s LA2020-projects.

Twenty Kindle DX reading devices were handed out yesterday, and the project manager Birgitte Kleivset is looking forward to see what the students think of the Kindle. -As most of the course material consists of journal articles, the University Library has uploaded these to the Kindles, Kleivset says. –Unfortunately Amazon’s selection of academic literature is still somewhat limited and we can’t offer the course book in digital format. This is a challenge for the higher education and we do hope that more academic textbooks will be available in various e-formats in the coming years, her colleague and project member Arthur N. Olsen explains. In addition to the journal articles an English edition of Jo Nesbø’s ”Nemesis” has been uploaded to the Kindle. –If you have some spare time left after studying, Olsen said smiling to the students.

The students will be borrowing the Kindles until they finish their last exam in the beginning of August. -Then they will participate in a survey that we hope will give us a better idea of user friendliness and if this is a suitable device for academic study, Kleivset says.

Associate Professor and head of the summer school-programme, Jan Erik Grindheim, is also excited to see what the students think of this reading device. –Students often give me feedback that they want the journal articles available in a printed compendium rather than downloading from Classfronter themselves. This amazes me, Grindheim says, and I wonder why the students seem to stick to something so old-fashioned.

Student Ingvild Schie attending the summer course is excited about the opportunity they now have been given. –We are privileged to get this opportunity, now I don’t have to print out articles and struggle to keep them organized – it’s all available on the Kindle. According to Schie all the students started using their new device immediately after the University Library had their launch. –This is definitely something I will test and use. The text seems easy to read and I can easily bring it with me wherever I go. Lastly I don’t need to use Classfronter so much, probably I don’t need to use it at all, Schie says happily.

The University Library has received funding from UiA’s Learning Arena 2020 (LA2020) that aims to increase presence of information technology within all aspects of the University’s value chain. The e-book reader project will run up to next summer, and next stage is introducing the students to Apple’s iPad (Not yet launched in Norway).

More about the LA2020 programme