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I will admit that it is at a minimum ironic that The Chronicle of Higher Education has the article, “Online, Bigger Class May Be Better Classes,” parked behind a firewall.  And I have some sympathy/some level of agreement with this post from Alan “CogDog” Levine about how this is bad, along with the complaints of one of the main sources in this article, George “elearnspace” Siemens.

But here’s the thing:  perhaps this is evidence that at the end of there is no such thing as “open learning education,” for two basic reasons.  First, perhaps what we’re getting at is the age-old difference between “learning” and “education.” Here’s a quote from the article (from behind the firewall, btw, which I get access to because of my connection with Eastern Michigan University):

“We have to get away from this whole idea that universities own learning,” says Alec V. Couros, who teaches his own open class as an associate professor of education at Regina, in Saskatchewan. “They own education in some sense. But they don’t own learning.”

Of course.  People can “learn” about all sorts of things without any connection with any sort of institution, and with college classes taking place in the open– in organized ways, as they discuss in the article, or less organized/visible ways, as I’ve been doing with my classes for years– and all the other “stuff” that is out there on the internets, it seems to me that someone self-motivated enough could literally learn damn near anything nowadays.

But if you want an education, something that is tied to some sort of institution, that involves a program of study/curriculum, where you have (in theory) reliable and trained instructors, and– and this is critical– where you get some sort of degree or certification that is recognized by others, if you want these things, it ain’t free.

Now, in some fields, it used to be there was no difference between learning and an education.  Someone can correct me if I’m wrong about this, but I believe that it used to be possible for someone to become a lawyer/member of the bar simply by “reading” the law– that is, literally going to a law library, reading on one’s own, and then taking a test.  But I’m pretty sure that has not been the case in the U.S. for quite a while.  And while someone could sit at home, in libraries, and/or in various online forums and do all the reading required to earn a PhD, I guarantee you that no university in the world– even one promoting “open learning/education”– would hire someone who claimed to have earned their education by participating in “open learning/education.”

Second, open learning isn’t really “free” and isn’t really completely “open” since it depends on “non-free” and “closed” institutions. As far as I know, everyone who has anything to do with the open learning movement is somehow tied to a “real” university.  In other words, the folks who are engaged in open learning/education really couldn’t do it without the financial support, resources, and credibility that comes about from being associated with a distinctly not open, traditional university.

Don’t get me wrong– I think that the idea and theory behind open learning is great, and it’s one of the reasons why I advocate moving classes from behind the firewall of CMS like Blackboard.  Education should be a public experience, and I think these folks– Dave Cormier, Stephen Downes, George Siemens, many many others– are doing great things.  But I also think that open learning is not going to transform education until we get to the point where we don’t think a college degree as a credential for a particular occupation.  And I don’t expect that to happen anytime soon ever.

I say “eventually” because most of my pre-fall term thinking as of late has been occupied by the impending faculty strike, which I predict here will begin on September 1. I’m sure there will be more posts/news on EMUTalk.org about all this.  All I will say here is that it annoys and frustrates me that we’ll probably be going on strike, mainly because of insurance and the Board of Regents micromanaging.  It seems avoidable to me, but it will almost certainly not be avoided.  Hopefully, since classes won’t begin until September 8, that won’t happen this time around.  Hopefully.

Anyway, the new school year is still on my mind, and as I have written in the past here and elsewhere, the new school year feels more like “the new year” to me than the actual New Year in January. I tend to measure things more in school years, which I suppose is a given since I’ve been doing this stuff for a while.  Actually, this year I start my 23rd year teaching in college (counting my time as a graduate assistant), which means a) I am about to cross over to a point where I have teaching college classes for more than half my life, and b) I am not at a point where I am old enough to be a parent to all but the “non-traditional” undergraduates and most of my “traditional” graduate students. Insert music here about drag getting older, etc.

This fall, we go into the year in exile while the building my department is normally in is closed for remodeling.  For the next 18-24 months, our offices are in a dorm and our classrooms are all over campus.  I’m hoping to do a CCCCs talk about this dislocation, actually.  Stay tuned for details.

I’m teaching English 328, which I’ve probably taught 50 times by now.  So not much new there from what I’ve done in the recent past, though I had some good experiences/experiments this summer with peer review I will try to repeat, and since this is an online class where there are some collaborative elements, I want to play around more with some things like Skype and Tinychat to do some synchronous discussion.

I’m also teaching English 505, which is a grad course called “Rhetoric of Science and Technology” I’ve now taught twice before, once online and once in person.  It’s a bit of a bear of a class to teach, because it is one of those classes that is (potentially, at least) about everything, and also because this is the rhetorical theory class for students in our professional writing MA program.  Without getting into the wisdom of that, what I’m going to be doing to get students “up to speed” is to this time teach Crowley and Hawhee’s Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students as sort of a “basically, this is what rhetoric meant/means” before we get on to the more contemporary stuff.  We’ll see how it works out.

And last but not least, I’m teaching an Honor’s Section (that has to be capitalized, right?) of first year composition.  I did this years ago, and I think honors students are an interesting lot to work with.  I haven’t completely figured out the syllabus for this yet, and given some of my challenges with the 505 class, I probably won’t figure it out completely until either the term strikes or we go off strike, whichever comes first.  But basically, I’m going to have them watch RiP! A Remix Manifesto early on in the class and requite students to develop research topics around it.  I think it is generally a good idea and it is also something I hope to talk about at the CCCCs in Atlanta.  Once again, stay tuned/we’ll see how this works out.

A lot of potential out there right now, no?

I have in mind a few more blog posts over the next few days about the end of the summer term/beginning of my 13th school year at EMU, but I’ll start this morning with some of the things/links/thoughts I’ve come across lately about publishing, reading, and writing.  Most of these have been left open in my browser for well over a week, and it’s time to clear them out.  And the clean the desk and then the kitchen.

First, there’s this helpful info-graphic, I believe from Newsweek:

Click on it to read it more clearly. Much more after the jump.

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I don’t follow copyright/DMCA issues that closely, but there was apparently an important decision from some changes to interpretations to the law.  Here’s a link with the technical stuff. The two changes I’ve read about so far are it is now legal get around various copy-protection schemes on materials like movies for educational purposes, and it is also now legal (at least according this link) to “jailbreak” an iPhone.

My two thoughts:

First, Copyright law, always complex and mushy and interpretable, is widely misunderstood and/or ignored in academia.  It is by me.  Take eReserves, for example, something I was discussing with a colleague the other day in relation to course packs.  At EMU, eReserves is the library’s “electronic reserve” system that allows someone like me to put various copyright-protected materials “on reserve” in the form of PDFs that students can download for free.   Many institutions have such systems.  The advantage of eReserves for me is I can add and subtract readings whenever, including the middle of the term (that’s just flat-out impossible with a course pack), and “free” is obviously much cheaper than even the most inexpensive course pack.  But as I understand it, it is actually illegal to repeatedly make available for free some copyright-protected text via this system.  In other words, with essays I teach pretty much every term, like Walter Ong’s “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought,” I’m supposed to put that into a course pack so that the copyright is cleared and students pay the royalty.  Another example:  as I understand it, if I show a movie in a class, I’m technically supposed to pay the copyright holders of that film some sort of screening fee, unless I’m showing something that the university has already paid some sort of royalty on already.  (I may be very wrong about this one).

The point is this:  I don’t know anyone who treats eReserves this way, I wouldn’t even think of asking for permission to show a movie in a class, and I don’t really care about these potential copyright violations for admittedly mushy and ignorant reasons.  The way I figure it, no one is going to sue me over eReserves or showing a movie in a class or committing any other copyright crime; at worse, they are going to send me a “cease and desist” letter.  Instead of worrying about the legal ramifications of getting various permissions for use of these materials in my classes, I worry about how reading the things I assign might actually “teach” my students something.  Let the lawyers sort out the copyright violations.

Second, I have been thinking lately about jailbreaking my iPhone.  As most 3G users know, the new iPhone 4 operating system slows and/or crashes older phones.  Quite a bit, actually.  Eventually, I’ll get a new phone, though I am not entirely sure when.  On the “early-side,” maybe I’ll try to justify the iPhone 4 as some sort of Christmas present; on the “late-side,” maybe I’ll hold out for whatever is next (iPhone 5? iPhone 4S?), which, according to MacRumors (they say that the average “update” cycle for the iPhone is 218 days), would probably be sometime between about March and May 2011.  So in the meantime, I kind of feel like I have nothing to lose with attempting the various jailbreak options that are out there; heck, it might even help my older phone work “better.”

I saw this here, here, and here (more or less in the reverse order of that list):  Japanese novelist Ryu Murakami is releasing a novel called A Singing Whale, which will apparently include video, a soundtrack, and other multimedia elements.  Part of the deal is about money because under the deal, Apple gets 30% and Murakami, composer Ryuichi Sakamoto (and presumably whoever else in invovled in the production end of things) split the rest, more or less cutting the publisher out.  But mostly, it isn’t about money.  Here’s a smart passage from Mashable:

Although the author advises publishers to “read it and weep,” this doesn’t mark the beginning of the end for the publishing industry — at least not yet. What Murakami is releasing is not an e-book in the traditional sense, but a full multimedia experience that can’t be replicated in print. In some respects, it’s similar to Alice for the iPad, an app that brings Lewis Caroll’s beloved Alice in Wonderland to life with full-color animations and interactive features. Furthermore, the author is also still in talks with its publisher, Kodansha, about releasing a hard copy of the novel.

In other words, Murakami’s project should be hailed less as a blow against the monopoly of big publishing houses over authors and the circulation of their work, and more as a celebration of the kinds of opportunities that devices like the iPad can provide for creativity and cost-effecient distribution.

The iPad is the perfect device for this sort of thing, and without a doubt, we’re going to see more of these fusions between novelistic “words in a row” text with audio, video, games, interactivity, and who knows what else.  One of the glib little comments I like to make in my writing classes is that the reason why it’s often a good idea to include an image, video, or even audio file as part of a writing project is because nowadays, you can.  So it seems just obvious to me that there will be writers who want to break out of the paper confines of “the book” and take advantage of the new technologies available.

Of course, this can go too far and just turn into a gimmick that can backfire.  I for one don’t need to see another 3-D film anytime soon– well, maybe the sequel to Avatar. But it’s also hard to figure out what will be a gimmick and what will be the next big thing until we try.  And this is also the main reason why I for one would like to figure out what it takes to program for the iPad so I could try to make something like this.

Incidentally, I’ve never heard of this writer and I have no idea when this is going to be released, and I have a feeling that unless this gets translated into English, I’ll be limited to reading about this instead of actually reading/experiencing it.

I wrote my first review of an app on the iTunes Store yesterday after I downloaded the “update” to the WIRED Magazine App for the iPad. It was not a favorable review, either.

Just to back up a second here:  as I previously mentioned, I bought the WIRED iPad App when it came out with the June issue of the magazine, and I was pretty impressed.  I thought most of the critiques about it, while basically accurate (a lot of ads, you can’t copy and paste, etc.), didn’t take away from the experience for me.  While there’s no way I would pay $5 an issue to read WIRED on my iPad, I would pay the same amount of money as a paper subscription to read it for a year– I think that was something like $25 or so the last time I subscribed.

Anyway, I plugged in my iPad yesterday to my computer for charging and synching and when I was prompted that an update of the WIRED App was available, I did what I always do and agreed to automatically update all apps.  But the WIRED App’s “update” replaced my purchased June issue with a free preview and the opportunity to buy the June and July issues issues for $3.99 each. In other words, I was downdated.

So, here’s my review of the new WIRED app on the Apple iTunes Store site:

If you bought June 2010 WIRED, DO NOT UPGRADE!

I bought the June 2010 WIRED (18.06) and was quite happy with it.  Then I “upgraded.”  This new version of the app overwrote the previous version, which means that my previously purchased issue was erased and replaced by a “free” promo that does nothing more than show me the covers of the June and July issues and invites me to spend $3.99 to buy what I already bought.  And I’m guessing that if I WERE to buy either of these issues, it’d disappear again with a new upgrade.

Not cool. Not cool at all.  Conde Nast and WIRED owe me $5 and I most certainly will not be buying any WIRED anymore, electronic or print.  Boo. Hiss.  Boo.

I don’t know why I said “upgrade” instead of “update.”

So I poked around the web site WIRED has for this app a bit, and at the bottom of it, there’s some information on how it’s supposed to be– my June issue was not supposed to be deleted. I don’t know if this is the difference or not, but the instructions here make it sound like I was supposed to update the app while my iPad wasn’t hooked up to anything, which is something I almost never do.

Then there was this:

If you’ve purchased the June issue but it is not available for installation after you’ve updated your app, please send an email to WIRED [at] cdsfulfillment.com requesting assistance. Our customer service team will get back to you with further instructions.

Which I did; they haven’t responded yet.  Grr.

Via Mark Crane, I came across this:  “Designing for iPad: Reality Check,” from iA.  This is pretty geek-heavy because iA is a web design firm (as far as I can tell, they do a lot of German language newspaper web sites) and it’s talking about some of the complex and largely invisible design issues of type and readability.  For me, the most accessible/usable points they make here are toward the end, and how the design elements being encouraged for the iPad by Apple to make it more object-like– wood and leather grain, for example– are what they refer to as “kitschy.”  I don’t know if I agree with that or not, but I think they are spot-on with the problems of the iBook app (and, for that matter, kindle) in terms of not knowing how many pages are left.    As they put it:

Having the same static thick paper stacks left and right in your e-reader application on the first as well as on the last page, is not just visually wrong, it is also confusing; it feels wrong and it is wrong. It’s kitsch.

I have to say that this is one of the things that I don’t particularly like about electronic reading on my iPad or my iPhone, and I’m not quite sure what it says about me as a reader.  Do I really need to know how many pages are left?  Is that a bad thing, always wanting to know where the end is?  Especially when I read before I go to bed (which is about half the time before I go to bed), I often will look ahead to see how far I’ve got to do before a logical place to stop.  Reading on an iPad doesn’t facilitate this that well, and some of the elements that the current designers are doing to help people bridge that gap between paper book (like these fake page stacks) and electronic book don’t help much.

I’ve also been thinking lately and again about the definition of “book.”  The experience of reading electronically– be it on an iPad or a phone or on a computer screen– has bubbled up in the news a bit lately because of Nicholas Carr’s new book, The Shallows. I’d buy it to take on my upcoming vacation/trip and also because it sounds interesting, but it isn’t available for Kindle or iBook yet.  (Yes, that irony is intended.) But as far as I can tell, it is a book-length treatment of Carr’s 2008 article in The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” To over-simplify, I think Carr’s basic point in the article and (probably) the book is that reading a book on the page is a more “real” and meaningful, deep-thought experience than reading it on a screen.

This is problematic for lots of different reasons, but the one that struck me again this past weekend is the definition of “book.”  What I think Carr means is the same sort of thing most of my students mean when we discuss the anxiety around the end of “the book.”  Generally speaking, I think Carr et al thinks of books as the sort of thing you buy in Borders and take with you on a trip or you give as a present or you read while in bed or in the bathtub or while sitting in an easy chair listening to soft music and drinking Chardonnay.  But a lot of books aren’t these kinds of “books” at all.

Last Saturday was the annual Normal Park (my neighborhood) yard sale, where there are like 100 yard/garage sales all going on at the same time on the first Saturday in June.  We didn’t have anything to sell really, but I put out some boxes of “books” that were in the garage and that needed to be disposed of with a sign that said “free.”  There were a couple of things that did actually get taken, a twelve year old copy of What to Expect When You are Expecting, for example.  But most of these books were textbooks, anthologies, writing handbooks, and instructor manuals, and those books, even free, were not taken.  And as I tell my students all the time, computers have eliminated all kinds of things that we used to think of as “books,” things like research databases and indexes, the MLA bibliography, dictionaries, and soon (more or less now), the phone book.  No one seems particularly broken up or wistful that these “books” are no longer.

Anyway, while I would like my iPad books to have more of a look and feel of a “book,” I have a feeling that Carr et al’s anxieties about these new electronic books will fade sooner than later.  And then we can all lament the loss and feel if the iPad book for something new that comes along.

I’ve come across a lot of articles about reading on the iPad lately, and thought I’d pass along some of them with some thoughts:

• Jakob Nielsen doesn’t think the iPad is that cool in terms of usability. I dunno, seems a little like he’s a hater, though Nielsen does raise some interesting points about how the iPad exhibits the growing pains of moving from one kind of literacy technology to another.
• How to self-publish a book for iPad. Really, how to self-publish a book for ePub format period.  This combined with this NYTimes editorial from Garrison Keillor, “The End of an Era in Publishing,” makes me think.  On the one hand, I don’t think that “self-publishing” is automatically going to spell the end of publishing business simply because there has always been self-publishers trying to get their work out there. Some were, for their time, pretty successful too– I believe Leaves of Grass was initially self-published.  On the other hand, this certainly changes the ease and scale of delivery possible with self-published electronic books.  Print something up on paper and your distribution point is pretty much limited to the street corner, maybe the trunk of your car; make an ePub book and the distribution point becomes international.
• An interesting review of reading on the iPad, comparing iBooks, Kindle, and GoodReader. I personally think the differences between iBook and Kindle are pretty negligible, and really, Kindle has two possible advantages right now.  First, amazon.com/Kindle has A LOT more books available than Apple/iBooks.  Second, I can read Kindle books in multiple places.  So, for example, I have been reading (very slowly, in fits and starts) The Omnivore’s Dilemma on Kindle.  Sometimes, I read it on my iPad, but as often (maybe more often, since I do this at the gym while on the stationary bike) I read it on my iPhone.  What’s nice about Kindle is the book syncs up to my place.
• I think a lot of the “love of the object” of the book is sort of misplaced, sort of like the sentiments in this NYTimes editorial, “Further Thoughts of a Novice E-Reader.” Verlyn Klinkenborg is mostly lamenting the loss of paper and look, probably smell and touch too.  Interestingly, it seems to me that a lot of what’s going on with the iPad is also a love (or hate) of the object.  I don’t think that the iPad or other tablets is going to completely eliminate the sort of fine books that Klinkenborg feels she (or he?  what is Verlyn?) might miss, but what might be a good thing is that these devices might save a lot of trees.  As the post “To Kindle or not to Kindle?” from “Limited Prerogatives” points out, a lot of those wonderfully smelling and feeling paper books end up wasting a lot of trees.  She quotes a NYTimes article about how the book and newspaper industries harvested something like 125 million trees, and something like about a third of books printed are returned to the publisher and/or “pulped.”
• And while I don’t have any links to it, I’ve heard some interesting reactions to the Wired iPad App, which I (of course!) bought.  I don’t think it’s fair to complain about it because of all of the ads, because a) the print version of Wired is basically a Geek Glamour magazine, intensely heavy on ads that many of its readers actually want to read; b) a lot of the ads are pretty cool and interactive, and c) it’s how magazine publishers make money (dirty little secret).  I don’t think it’s fair to complain that it is just the print version on the iPad since I never had a print version of Wired that included video and audio.  And I also think it’s only a little fair to complain about how the Wired iPad app doesn’t allow for “cut and paste” copying or bookmarking, because while I would agree that these features would be nice, Wired is not exactly the kind of thing I read to “cut and paste” from.  Besides, they still have a web site.

  What I thought was more interesting with the new Wired App and all of these other things is how they are the latest in a long history of what happens when we make the transition from one literacy technology to another.  A number of people talk about this with the transition from early handwritten manuscripts into printed books:  at first, the printed books looked a lot like the handwritten ones, but then, after people figured out the capabilities of the technology, they looked different.  We still call web pages “pages” because they initially looked a lot like “words in a row” pages with some links, and once we figured out the technology, they ended up looking a lot different.

  But I’m not going to keep paying $5 a pop for it.  They either are going to have to set up some sort of subscription service (the print version delivered was about a third of the price on the newsstand), or they are going to have to drop the price for me to be a regular reader.

• Finally, I downloaded and installed onto my iPad (as part of my iBooks library) Cory Doctorow’s new YA book For the Win. Despite his dislike of the iPad, I like Doctorow’s thinking and writing a lot, and I very much admire his practice of putting books up online for free.  But the iPad and similar devices raise an interesting question about the sustainability of this practice:  before the iPad, I might have been inclined to buy one of Doctorow’s paper books because as a matter of convenience and form, I would much rather read the paper book than the PDF (or whatever) on my computer screen.  As a result, Doctorow (and his publishers) would still sell a lot of books.  But if I’m inclined to read one of his books on an iPad or similar device anyway, why would I do anything but download the free version?  In other words, since the “free” version is no longer is a means of selling/promoting the “not free” version, how long will it be before Doctorow starts charging something to download the ePub from his site?

With the whole CCCOnline thing off my chest, I decided to divide this up into two parts because of my adventures with the iPad (as I mentioned before, I decided to take it instead of a laptop to the conference)– I’ll post about that one later.

Anyway, as usual, Computers and Writing was great, that one conference I go to every year where it really is “my people.”  There are a lot of conferences like C&W, actually– Rhetoric Society of America, the Council of Writing Program Administrators (and their conference is coming up in July), writing center folks, etc.  I like going to the CCCCs and participating in its “big tent,” but it’s a little more comfortable to be in the smaller tent (side show?) that is C&W.  Here’s how it went for me, more or less in this order:

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Generally, I attend my department’s once a month or so faculty meetings, and generally speaking, they are kind of boring.  But when I miss a meeting, something inevitably contentious and/or otherwise interesting happens.  So it was at this year’s Computers and Writing Conference, or so it would appear.

Since I presented twice and back-to-back on Saturday afternoon (and I’ll have more about that and the rest of the C&W experience later), I decided to have a little “quiet time” before the “hog roast,” which was good but not really involving a “hog” on a spit as I was expecting. But I digress. Anyway, while I was hanging around my room and lazily looking through the twitter feed that was going on during the “featured deliverator” sessions, I noticed that things were heating up in the feed during Bump Halbritter’s “Exploring the Constellations of the New CCC Online.” Here are some of the tweets that peaked my interest (which I found via the “Twapper Keeper” for the conference):

@mday666 I’m excited, but wonder how it will be different from previous efforts at NCTE, and current journals like Kairos & C+C Online.

@rrodrigo @mday666 I’m thinking that’s one of the major ones, please prove me wrong!

@preterite disagree somewhat with Bump’s contention that CCCO 1.0 was just archiving: C. & D.’s indexing functions did much, much more.

@trauman @rrodrigo Not sure the comparison’s necessary. I’m just thinking context and a capacious history.

@mday666 @rrodrigo I’m not disagreeing; just want to see it to believe it. It would be great!

@kristinarola man, there’s a backstory here i do not know clearly…. watching 1/2 the people get it, and 1/2 the people not.

@selfe3 #cw2010 Bump’s Talk: ball, concerns about animosity between CCCC and C&W. How to bridge that? How to understand this will be sustainable.

@mday666 Cheryl asks how we can erase some of the issues we’ve had in the past, with mistrust between NCTE/CCCC and the C & W community.

@dcfitzg Some intense emotions swirling around ccc online intro and cfp

@thatcarlygirl @varhodes @kristinarola Not getting it either… But boy the mood sure shifted in here! Must hear backstory.

@warnick Maybe we can invite Dr. Phil to next year’s conference. He might be able to help us hug it out.

@preterite yet again, Derek asks the right question

@kristinarola this conversation would be way more interesting if i knew what was going on. veiled conversations by those in power. la lala. la.la.

@CNBlank As a newbie to the party, I’m not sure what to make of all of this. Civil but tense seems to be the mood.