Category: Academia

“The Library Web Site of the Future” and the Espresso Book Machine

I am basking in the semi-warm glow of being vaguely caught up with my teaching for the first time in two weeks. Not that it means that much; I still need to get back in gear with research and writing, we need to get ready around here for our an annual function for this weekend, and we still haven’t quite figured out what we’re going to be doing when we go to D.C. next week. But none of this has stopped me from posting something that might actually be useful to the ol’ blog. Besides posts about bacon, of course.

First, there’s this Inside Higher Ed article, “The Library Web Site of the Future” by Steven J. Bell. I can imagine this being handy for English 516 for the electronic library angle on things, but I can also imagine it being interesting for English 444 too. Most of the article is about how academic-types find most university library web sites/portals are not user-friendly and/or useful. I don’t know if I agree with that or not when it comes to EMU’s Halle Library web site, to be honest. I have always found it pretty easy to find journals and such through it– though oddly, there seems to be some glitches in the book catalog. Of course, part of my comfort-level with the library’s web site comes from the librarians: when I have questions, I ask; when I take students to the library for orientations about doing research in the library, I inevitably learn something myself. So maybe part of the “usability” part being left out of Bell’s article is the fact that most academics– certainly faculty but also students– don’t interact exclusively with the university library web site. Most of us manage to get over to the building once in a while to talk with actual librarians and occasionally touch actual books.

I did think this passage was kind of interesting though:

Several years ago academic institutions shifted control of their Web sites from technology wizards to marketing gurus. At the time there was backlash. The change in outlook was perceived as a corporate sellout, a philosophical transformation of the university Web site from candid campus snapshot to soulless advertiser of campus wares to those who would buy into the brand. I observed that academic librarians feared what the marketers wrought, and would resist efforts to let any advertising consultant or marketing vice-president take control of the library Web site. They might just make it more about marketing than connecting people to information.

I was one of the resisters. Now I think the marketing people got it right. The first thing librarians must do after ending the pretense that the library Web site succeeds in connecting people to content is understand how and why the institutional homepage has improved and what we can learn from it. Doing so will allow academic libraries to discover answers to that first question; how to create user community awareness about the electronic resources in which the institution heavily invests.

Of course, instead of just talking to the marketing people, the library-types could talk to people in academic programs interested in usability and web design… just sayin’….

The other thing I heard earlier today that I thought might be good to bring up in 516 at some point was a story on Michigan Public Radio about the Espresso Book Machine. It was actually on the “Environment Report” because the angle was on how these machines can save paper. The story also took the angle of how these machines would replace browsing for paperbacks in Borders or something, but that strikes me as unlikely. No, the real value of this sort of “on demand publishing” machine is clearly in academic publishing where the press runs are already pitifully small and expensive.

Quite frankly, I’m surprised there aren’t any academic publishers now using this technology; or am I wrong about that?

New Kindle thoughts lawsuits, pirates, and PDF wishes

Amazon has released Kindle 2— or rather, they’ve released the opportunity to buy one (I’m not sure when they are actually going to be available). There was a NYTimes article about this last week.

Among other issues/controversies, it would seem the Authors Guild sees the new Kindle’s potential/ability to read text aloud is some kind of copyright violation. I like this response from Neil Gaiman about this via boing-boing. I also thought this article was interesting: “Why aren’t ebooks taking off? Not enough pirates,” which I found via Stephen’s Web. Very smart article, pointing out the differences between the music industry and the book industry when it comes to pirating and sharing of files. Besides the fact that it is a ton easier to “share” and/or pirate music than it is to do the same with a book, there are places right now “for sharing this information that’s wholly supported by the industry (you might know them as libraries).”

My friend Troy has a Kindle and absolutely loves it. In fact, I toyed with the idea of buying one myself back in November/December. I might try to get EMU to buy me one (it wouldn’t be easy to do though) because it really is something I’d like to have to demo in the classes I teach. Or who knows? Maybe a bunch of money and/or a Kindle will just fall on me from the sky.

At this stage, I’ll probably wait for a while. For one thing, since me and the Mrs. just got iPhones, I’m a little tapped-out right now gadget-wise. But the other thing that I want that I don’t think is quite there yet for the Kindle is the ability to handle PDFs well. Quite frankly, I don’t read that many of the kinds of books that are readily available for the Kindle. I do read a lot of academic stuff, particularly journal articles that are increasingly available in PDF format, or things for my teaching that I make available as a PDF and post on eReserves. So what would be very useful is if this thing would handle PDFs as well as Apple’s Preview does– allowing for highlighting, notes, etc. It’d be very nice to have all of these articles and chapters in PDF format for my teaching right there on one device instead of the mountain of paper I forget to file.

Oh, and maybe they should put a phone in this thing.

Selling textbooks/going to “the dark side”

I was in my office the other day, catching up on various things (the main state of affairs for me as of late, but since the search I am chairing is in the final days, I think/hope, stuff will be “normal” busy here soon) when a textbook buyer knocked on my door. For those unfamiliar with the process/concept: a textbook buyer is someone who visits faculty offices offering to buy textbooks. They do this because the buyer and/or his company then turn around and sell these textbooks to students for a higher price. Obviously, it’s a “win” for the buyer, and it’s a “win” for most faculty since a lot of us get sent textbooks we don’t want or need all the time. It’s even a “win” of sorts for students who then have more used books to buy at a lower price.

The only one who “loses” out of this arrangement is the textbook publisher/industry. They lose money out of this process because textbook publishers send these books to faculty for free in an effort to get faculty to adopt a book for their teaching; they don’t do this so the professor can make a few bucks selling it. Needless to say, textbook publishers aren’t exactly crazy about the textbook buyback business– of course, they aren’t that crazy about used textbooks in general, but that’s a slightly different topic.

In any event, this guy came by yesterday asking if I had any textbooks to sell. My usual answer is “no, I don’t sell books,” delivered in a somewhat “holier than thou” tone of voice. Because generally speaking, I agree with the publishers on this one: it’s probably not entirely ethical to sell something that you received for educational purposes, and it probably does contribute to the rising cost of books. And besides that, it feels a little like regifting something. That’s always struck me as tacky.

But this time, I responded “no, but you’ve reminded me I need to find a book for a student of mine.” So I got up and started to rummage around my shelves a bit.

“Hey, are you using that little spiral-bound guy there?” the textbook buyer dude asked, pointing to a book that a) I’ve never used, b) I wouldn’t use, and c) I didn’t ask for in the first place.

“No,” I said. “You might want buy it?” And with a simple check of some sort of bar-code scanning data device the buyer had and an affirmative answer from him, I was off to the races. Off to what my wife jokingly referred to later as “the dark side” (she’s been selling books like this for a long time and thought my previous attitude on the subject was a tad haughty). Mostly I unloaded books that I just never ever thought I’d use and a couple of books where I had multiple copies. Ten or fewer books later, I had collected a tidy little $35.

Well, the textbook industry hasn’t exactly been kind to me in the past. And I like to earn a buck here and there. And it seems like everyone else does it. We are probably going to regift that Saturday Night Live Trivial Pursuit game someone gave us last Christmas.

Oh, the dark side indeed….

A few teacherly links

I perhaps should be posting this over at the web site/blog for the grad class I’m teaching right now, but since they are things I’ll want to come back to again later anyway and for perhaps other purposes, I guess I’ll post them here:

  • “Teachers’ lessons go viral on education video web site,” which is a Dallas News article about teacher videos “going viral” on sites like Teacher Tube. The example of “Dr. Loopy” is a lot less interesting to me than the Teacher Tube stuff.
  • “At MIT, large lectures are going the way of the blackboard” in the New York Times. Surprise surprise: small and interactive classes teach students better than lecture halls. But also surprise surprise (which is buried in the story): these classes are really expensive, and this format was made possible in part because of a $10 million grant from an alum.
  • Alec Couros at the U of Regina has invited here participants in his “open access” undergrad and grad courses. The idea, as I understand it, is if students from elsewhere want to follow along and become at least kind of a part of the community, they are more than welcome. Sounds like it might be fun for someone in 516.

I’d write more now, but there is that whole dinner thing, and I believe that Will and I are going to watch Get Smart! this evening….

Kaplan’s ads (or fantasy island meets back to the future)

While hanging out and watching a little television the other night, I saw an ad for Kaplan University, part of their “talent” campaign. The ad depicts a professor and college classroom straight out of central casting. The professor wears a sweater vest and a bow tie, he’s bald, in his fifties, and he is African American (that throws a bit of a wrench into the stereotype). He stands at lectern on a small stage in an anciently old lecture hall, a chalk board behind him–the word “talent” is scrawled on it– and a group of college-aged students in front of him. The classic “sage on the stage” scene. He’s giving a speech about how we are wasting talent and time in an educational system “steeped in tradition and old ideas.” Our professor says it’s “time for a new tradition, that talent isn’t just in schools, it’s everywhere.”

And suddenly, we’re transported to the magic of the “online classroom:” a woman laying on the couch and watching a laptop with her cat, a young man watching the professor on an iPhone while waiting for a subway, a mom sitting at a kitchen table watching the professor with a couple kids running about, a male model propped up in bed with coffee and a laptop, a business woman watching the professor on some sort of hand-held device, and a young woman sitting on an apartment roof with her laptop, perhaps the only place where the wifi signal is strong. And I swear I am not making any of this up– watch the ad. Through this montage, the music swells and the professor tells us again and again “it is time for a different kind of university– it’s your time.”

According to this Business Wire/Yahoo snippet about the campaign, “‘The new campaign makes a statement that the U.S. traditional higher education system doesn’t always meet the needs of today’s adult learners, mainly working adults struggling to balance jobs, families and education,’ said Andrew S. Rosen, Chairman and CEO of Kaplan, Inc. ‘At Kaplan University, we are rewriting the rules of higher education by offering students the opportunity to customize their education to meet their needs, and by providing resources and support to help them succeed.'”

Well, I see the point they are trying to make. But this is so wrong in so many ways.

First there is the fantasy of the kind of instruction being provided (potentially) by these online classes, of the “great minds” teaching to the masses. Long-story short, that’s not what has historically happened. David Noble (who I largely disagree with) made this point a decade ago: correspondence courses promised this sort of experience 120 or so years ago, but ultimately, what ended up happening was the “great minds” wrote up a few lessons and unknown and frequently inexperienced part-timers actually did the teaching. That is a danger at all institutions, but I guarantee you that you will never take a class from a “distinguished professor” at Kaplan simply because about 90% of their faculty are part-timers.

Second, there is the fantasy of the kind of students and the student experience. Basically, the ad depicts two kinds of students: those who are literally laying around and those who are doing something else while “learning.” I think the not so subtle implication here is that you can take classes online while simultaneously working a real job or something, or taking an online class is as easy as laying around on the couch with your cat. The one student the ad does depict that is somewhat realistic in my experience is the woman (perhaps a single mom?) sitting at the kitchen table with her laptop while a couple kids are running around. Lots of my online students have been single women with young kids, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a male model who laid around in bed all day.

And then there is the “back to the future” aspect. Kaplan is accusing traditional institutions as being “behind the times,” so what do they do to depict online learning? Why, they show a bunch of people watching a lecture! Splendid!

I appreciate that they can only do so much in a 30 second spot, but the fact is the point of online learning/teaching is not to replicate the face to face experience. Rather, the point of online learning/teaching is to take advantage of medium that fosters a lot of interaction between students and instructors. Speaking of which: I need to stop my rant here so I can actually go and do some online teaching this morning….

Any book review suggestions?

I’ve been spending my first day of the year kind of doing stuff around the house, running errands, doing laundry, watching Iowa pound the crap out of South Carolina in the Outback Bowl, and working on the materials for my grad class, English 516: Computers and Writing, Theory and Practice. It is a work in progress, though it is much more together than the rather blank schedule page on the site might suggest.

In any event, one of the assignments I have for the class is for students to do a book review of a recently published book that has something to do with the subject matter of the class. My current list of book options is up and running here; anybody out there in the comp/rhet world have any other ideas for possible readings?

The only two qualifications/requirements are it has to be some kind of book that has to do in some way with “computers and writing” (and that obviously could include a lot of different things), and it has to be a book that has come out recently (certainly nothing before 2004).

Once again, I’m happy to not be at MLA

The Chronicle of Higher Education blog has a couple of posts about MLA on it tonight. The first one I read was “MLA 2008: Market Realities in San Francisco.” Apparently, the MLA has discovered both teaching and the internets. A couple of quotes:

Does the ailing economy have anything to do with a pragmatic streak evident in some of the panels this year? Maybe not, but you could say the timing is good. Gerald Graff, a professor of English at the University of Illinois, picked “The Way We Teach Now” as the topic of his presidential forum. At the session, some of the profession’s marquee names tackled questions of how literary theory works (or doesn’t) in the classroom and how senior scholars could do a better job of helping their graduate students acclimate to “the culture of the profession, whatever that means,” as Michael Berube put it.

And:

Richard E. Miller, a professor of English at Rutgers University, made the idea of theory in the classroom look almost quaint with a talk—make that show—on reading and writing in a 2.0 world. The Web has not only changed the way we compose, it has become the material of composition, he said, citing the work of Jonathan Harris as a prime example.

“We are living at the moment of the greatest change in human communication” the world has ever seen, he said—more important than the moment our ancestors crawled out of the muck, more revolutionary than the invention of the printing press. If you want revolution, he seemed to be saying, it’s already here.

And then there’s this: “MLA Meeting Designed for Broader Appeal.” Here’s a quote from this:

She [Rosemary G. Feal, the MLA’s executive director] said that the group wants to close a perceived chasm between different constituencies—language-and-lit professors at research universities and those at community colleges, for instance. The association hasn’t been known to lavish attention on the latter group. “Too often, community college colleagues suppose that the MLA does not provide enough of what they need to justify being members,” Ms. Feal wrote on her blog.

To help remedy that, the MLA held a workshop this year on “the central move of academic writing” for community-college members. It was well-attended, with more than 60 participants. “We really are in this together,” Ms. Feal told The Chronicle.

Now, I may be a bit cynical and even defensive as a comp/rhet-type. But this sure sounds like too little and too late to me.

Basically, composition and rhetoric as a field originated in English departments among traditional literature faculty who actually took an interest in teaching writing and that purgatory called first year composition, and nowhere is the burden of teaching more acute than in community colleges. The mark of a good appointment in literature has traditionally been one with a low teaching load consisting of upper-level undergraduate literature courses, a grad seminar, and no freshman comp. This allows for plenty of time to worry about what’s really important, whatever that might be.

Over the years, this division of labor has evolved into deeper lines between literary studies and writing studies. Rita Felski, a professor of English at the University of Virginia, refers to this as “disciplinary Balkanization,” but from my point of view, this is simply the evolution of the field. Once upon a time, speech and English were typically the same department. But eventually English and speech/communications began to take on their own disciplinary identities; and nowadays, we’ve got English departments and communications departments. I think that this is what’s happening between literary studies and writing studies. In my view, it is less about the traditional political tensions between literature and comp-rhet and more about the increasing distance between what our different fields define as scholarship, teaching, and the other practices that define academic disciplines. This is why there are more and more Writing departments and programs completely separate from Literature and/or English departments, and this is certainly a trend that is going to continue.

Anyway, I’m not buying it. It just seems a little disingenuous to me to believe the MLA is all now most interested in teaching, writing, technology, and community colleges.

Hire a digital compositionalist… if you must…

I’ve seen versions of this video in many other places– just do a search for “Hitler downfall meme” on YouTube to see what I mean— though this one is kind of field specific:

I found this via John Walters, though I’m told it’s going to be in the next issue of Kairos. And just to be clear, this does not even remotely resemble the search process we have had here at EMU so far.

Someone in Tehran likes my (free and web-based) textbook

I was checking some Google analytics stuff this morning (mostly as a way of procrastinating on actually doing the mountain of work I pretty much absolutely and positively finish in the next 48 hours or so) and that including perusing the hits on my (defunct, free, and/or web-based) textbook project, The Process of Research Writing. Two little fun-facts: In the last year, my textbook site has had about 1200 or so “visits,” and in the last month, six of them have been from Tehran, Iran.

This was on my mind a bit at the gym in part because I learned the other day that I will indeed be presenting about this at the upcoming Computers and Writing Conference in Davis “right next to wine country” California in late June 2009. (Actually, I’ll be giving two presentations: the other one is going to be about “ending” and/or giving up on blogging.) This is the panel on alternatives to traditional publishing that I originally proposed for the CCCCs and that I wrote about some time ago here, and my spiel is going to be about my “do it yourself” approach with this project.

At the end of my McGraw-Hill experience in 2006, when it was officially “dead” to them and when they didn’t want to give me back the rights, I kind of felt like my book was being packed away into a crate to be deposited into that same warehouse that’s at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark: gone forever, and I wasn’t exactly expecting a sequel (ala Crystal Skull) to change the situation. So, my theory was that in publishing the project online, I would automatically receive some version of an audience, certainly more than if I had just shelved it entirely. And this has turned out to be very true.

Now, 1200 visits in a year is not a lot– this blog received ten times that many in the same time-frame, and technorati ranks this site 278,352– and I don’t have a lot of evidence as to what those 1200 or so visitors did with the site. But that is about 1200 more people doing something with this project– even if it is just glancing at the main page– than would have seen it otherwise. And I’m pretty sure that no one in Tehran would have thought about it much.

When I was at the gym this morning, I was reading Clay Shirky’s book and the chapter “Publish, then Filter,” and one of the point he makes in there is about the difference between an “audience” and “friends.” I don’t quite agree with what he’s getting at there, but he is kind of saying something that a lot of other theorist have said about audience and internet technologies: you don’t have to have a big audience to be a “success.” I’m thinking here in particular to something that Chris “The Long Tail” Anderson said in an interview someplace about how an audience of 100 is a good thing if it is the right 100 people. For me, it turns out that at least a few of them are in Iran.

Now, it’s easy for Shirky and Anderson to say these things of course, especially when they are saying them in books that have reached very large audience and which have undoubtedly made each of them a lot of money. In fact, the cynic in me says that this is all part of some twisted con, kind of like one of those “get rich” books where the advice really ought to be to write a book about getting rich quick, only the pitch here is a little different: “Buy my book about how big audiences or big organizations don’t matter, and pay no attention to the fact that you are joining a big audience and contributing dollars to a big organization.”

Still, it’s pretty cool that by forgoing dead tree print and the money that could have come from it (had I been able to convince McGraw-Hill, of course), I’ve been able to produce a resource that is at least kind of interesting to someone somewhere. That doesn’t pay the bills, but it is satisfying in a small way.