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April 18, 2005
New Books
I came across these books when I was at the library yesterday. They are in our new books section and I thought they might be of interest.
The first is Friendship and Educational Choice: Peer Influence and Planning for the Future by Rachel Brooks. The author investigates how friends influence each other when making education decisions. Just reading the front and back flaps of Brooks's text makes me wonder about peer pressure and whether it can be used as a force for good in a writing classroom. Are there such studies?
The second book is Democratizing Innovation by Eric Von Hippel. I think this book will be of immediate interest to anyone studying the open source movement and innovation management. Von Hippel seeks to "explain how innovation by users provides a very necessary complement to and feedstock for manufacturer innovation" (2). If Von Hippel's predictions are accurate, I wonder if we will see an increase in usability studies by manufacturers or even a rise in SNA studies. Von Hippel has a CC version of the text available for download: Democratizing Innovation. He also has some of his other papers available for download if you're interested. Although, I haven't linked to his homepage because it looks awful on my iBook (the text is running off the page).
Posted by mhansen at April 18, 2005 02:32 PM