Friday, August 06, 2010

NookStudy seems Disappointing

Well, I have been trying Barnes and Noble's NookStudy and still have more investigating to do, but I will say that I am disappointed with the materials which they are making available in the starter kit. Take the 10 Free Spark Charts -- I looked at the Research Style and Usage one -- it has a copyright of 2004 which means that the information it offers is not correct and up-to-date -- instead of being "free" it is actually of negative (wrong) value.

I randomly checked a few other charts and they, too had 2004 or 2005 copyrights - from before this year's college freshmen even entered high school -- not very state of the art, are they?

I do like the color and the highlighting options relative to using the Kindle, but the NookStudy feels much more "commercial" to me -- FREE downloads require entering a user name, password AND credit card (they say to be used as a default for future purchases). It just doesn't seem that they are considering educators who are not necessarily going to use their personal credit cards and who may not have access (or rights) to share an institutional card.... and that is not even discussing how we might help students experiment with a tool such as NookStudy. There is learning here when experimenting which is good in itself, but I think that if Barnes & Noble really want to see adoption of their product they should have fewer barriers to using it. Time to investigate some other options....

1 comment:

Judy Gressel said...

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by the Free Spark Charts ( MLA documentation??) but having them THAT FAR OUT OF DATE is crazy when launching a new product.

Too bad they didn't have a librarian on their product launch team. Perhaps you can write to them with your review & they will update NookStudy!