Yesterday, Bob Stein visited us here in Manhattan to talk about, among other things, the future of the book in the digital age. Bob is the director for the Institute for the Future of the Book which he dubbed a “think and do-tank” that is interested in exploring the emerging forms of and potential changes to intellectual discourse. They are working on an interesting piece of software called Sophie, which Bob demonstrated for us. From what I saw, Sophie is like PowerPoint on steroids but, given my disdain for PowerPoint, making such a comparison may be inappropriate. To give a cursory overview from my own perspective, Sophie allows you tremendous freedom in making, well, anything you want. It is deliberately open source so users can tweak it however they choose. Additionally, on the front-end it is easily customizable and malleable. I just downloaded it last night so I haven’t been able to thoroughly check it out yet, but it seems like a very valuable tool for the classroom. It allows you to aggregate all kinds of media formats making for a truly rich presentation. Also, it has wonderful commenting functionality that could be used to encourage participation and interaction between students. Indeed, Bob himself said he valued “writing in the margins” and Sophie really allows this to happen. Anyhow, I won’t say too much more because it’s probably best if you just check it out for yourself and play around with it. Bob said they are working on creating a browser plugin for Sophie, but that it won’t be out for a little while. It will be great to see Sophie move onto the Internet, I’m excited to have Sophie’s user-friendly interface and functionality on, say, a blogging platform.
Check it out, lemme know what you think. I’m gonna play around with it some more and I’ll do the same. Oh, and I don’t know if anyone is familiar with This Spartan Life (I just learned about it yesterday), but Bob was interviewed on it and his introduction is hilarious (the interview is good too).
