Month: August 2007

BookRenter.com (or, evidence that textbooks have gotten way WAY too expensive)

Way back in the day, when I was in college 20 years ago, textbooks were expensive (relatively speaking, of course), but it was still reasonably common for me and my peers to keep the books we used for classes. That might have been more normal for me as an English major than it was for people who majored in things like chemistry, since most of my “textbooks” were paperback novels and books of poetry and stuff like that. I certainly never paid over $50 for a textbook.

Nowadays of course, it is common– too common, if you ask me– for students to sell their books back to the book store at the end of the term. Inevitably, the return most students get is not enough but better than nothing. Again, English major-types are still better off than science oriented majors, where it’s pretty easy to find new textbooks priced at $150+. That’s too expensive of course, but I did once have a textbook sales rep tell me that for publishers, these uber-expensive books are actually a “break even” proposition because of all the detailed color printing in these books. Maybe, maybe not.

Anyway, now for those who cannot afford to own comes the opportunity to rent from BookRenter.com, which I found via DigitalKoans. It is what it is: basically, there are various options where students can rent their books. I didn’t look through the site long enough to see what was or wasn’t available and it’s clearly a new enterprise– in fact, they are inviting current students to design their college culture page.

There’s an analogy with home ownership, of course: years ago, people bought into the market at prices that were expensive at the time but which seems cheap now. A few years ago, people who wanted to be home owners ended up paying more both in terms of actual dollars and as a percentage of their income/overall expenses. And now, renting is presented as a viable option for those who can’t afford to own.

Given that when students sell their books back they tend to get pennies on the dollar, renting is probably a pretty reasonable choice. But I wonder if the next thing we’re going to see is some sort of “collapse” of the textbook industry along the lines of what we’re seeing now with real estate? Will things like open source textbooks, electronic textbooks, and now textbook rental disrupt the business model of the industry and causes prices to drop?

Man with a Movie Camera project

Via Cheryl Ball’s post on Tech-Rhet comes this project, a remake of Man With a Movie Camera. Basically, the project asks for folks to re-shoot scenes from this movie, which is a 1929 experimental/documentary film I had never heard of before (which perhaps proves the fact that I am not really a film scholar). Conveniently, the original is available at the project site in the form of a google video.

I’m not sure if there’s any way I could use this in my teaching, and I’m not completely sure I should even if I could. This seems to me to fall into that fuzzy space of not exactly writing, even though writing includes a lot of different things. I could go on and on about this, and I did write an article about these questions in 2004. I’m not sure I still agree with the arguments I made back then, but at the same time, this probably isn’t something that would fit well in anything I teach.

On the other hand, this might be a fun thing to try on my own. I’ve got my FlipVideo camera (not to mention access to the English department’s super-nice camera), and it might make for a fun little side-project during sabbatical lite. Of course, I’m getting more and more of these side projects….

Some things I learned from a land down-under (followed by a tangent…)

I’ve been following dannah boyd’s blog lately, and she recently discussed her role as a keynote speaker at one of the series of seminars put on by an outfit in Australia called education.au. Boyd was talking about MySpace (what else?), and there are podcast recordings of her talk there. Good stuff to think about with teaching later.

But perhaps more interesting to me in terms of teaching is the stuff that Jimmy Wales was talking about (this is where the tangent comes in). He was also a keynote speaker, and, among many other things I’m sure (I just listened to about 10 minutes of this), he talked about Wikia. As far as I can tell, Wikia is a free wiki service that works with the same software as Wikipedia and which is free because it runs ads in the right-hand column.

This seems to present a classic dilemma, maybe one that in and of itself ought to be a topic in teaching with computers and educational computing in general. On the one hand, there are a bunch of commercial services out there that provide a bunch of utilities and help for free that are perfectly useful in teaching with technology at all levels. Blogger, Wikia, pbwiki, wordpress.com, flickr, etc., etc., etc., the list is so long and so obvious to most that I am sure I don’t need to go any further than this. These services are reliable, robust, upgraded, and –oh, did I mention this?– free.

But there are two other hands here to this three armed monster. Other hand #1: the content generated by teachers and students are hosted and ultimately controlled elsewhere by these enterprises. Besides all the stuff about copyright and ownership and all of that, if one of these companies goes out of business or off line for some reason, all of your work is going to be gone. OH #2: It is generally considered unseemly and uncool to have ads on sites/tools being used for educational purposes.

This has been on my mind a lot lately because of the email situation at EMU. Feel free to go to EMUTalk.org to see the whole story, but basically, EMU’s email system crashed hard and was off-line for six days. I’m not going to sum up all of the frustration and anger going on over there because of all of this, but there was a lot. A LOT. EMU’s, um, “profile” in the national news has been a little bit higher than I would prefer as of late, and the only event that has happened in the last 12 months that has brought more traffic to EMUtalk.org is the firing of EMU President John Fallon, and he was fired largely because of the cover-up of a murder on campus.

Now, for me personally, the impact of this was severe, but not nearly as bad as it could have been because I switched to using gmail for as much of my email as possible in January. Even with the EMU email failure, I was receiving messages from outside of EMU at my gmail account– apparently, they get forwarded before they get to my EMU inbox. And it was a good thing too since I had a variety of work-oriented email messages from folks outside of EMU– potential students, for example.

A lot of the debate on EMUtalk.org has been about the role of services like Gmail. The opposition to Gmail services has been (basically) that using Gmail gives Google way WAY too much data for them to use on/against you, it’s never good to trust an outside source for your sensitive data because of all of the scary terms of service agreements with these folks, and because of what I guess I can only describe as self-defensive pride. While a lot of my local ICT people express concerns about Google’s suite of services because of privacy, I suspect what they’re really saying is they do not like the idea that the university could “outsource” these services and get a better product.

In any event, the pros and cons of these free services that run little ads are complicated for sure. I guess I make decisions about these things on a case-by-case basis. I run my own blogs on server space I lease with the open source product WordPress, but I have my students use Blogger simply because it’s easy, reliable, and I don’t want to deal with the support issues. But because Gmail has so many services that I can’t get from EMU for my email, I am willing to put up with some very small and often amusing ads. Maybe the same will be true with Wikia as well.

Um, I'm not hiring online teachers…

About three years ago, I posted about ITT hiring online teachers. There’s no need for me to repeat what I said here– just follow that link and you can read for yourself, if you’re interested.

If you do go to that old entry though, be sure to take a look at the comments, nearly a dozen of them from folks from all over the world trying to get me to hire them as an English teacher. The latest was just posted today.

So, just to be clear: I never was hiring people to teach online, and I am not hiring them now. Not that anyone posting these comments looking for an online teaching job are going to read this post, but….

Cool Golden Compass web site; meet my daemon

This seems about right to me, though I don’t know about the humble part. I like whippets.

I’m slowly but surly reading The Golden Compass right now, the book that is the basis of the movie site linked above, and the site that is the basis of this blog-like space. This sort of fantasy is not usually my reading cup of tea, but it is extremely well-written and interesting. I just hope they don’t screw it up in the movie too badly.