Princeton’s student newspaper, The Daily Princetonian, recently published an article on their recent campus pilot using the Amazon Kindle in courses.  Although printing was reduced in each class by approximately 50%, both students and faculty found the Kindle limiting.

Despite the Kindle’s environmental friendliness, users said they often found its design ill-suited for class readings. Students and faculty participating in the program said it was difficult to highlight and annotate PDF files and to use the folder structure intended to organize documents, according to University surveys. The inability to quickly navigate between documents and view two or more documents at the same time also frustrated users.

Several other colleges and unversities have also conducted pilots in the past year.  For more information on those pilots see: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/02/23/ereaders

Instructional Technology has a Kindle that can be loaned out to faculty.  For more information see our page on e-Readers.