Check out “Beyond The Blog,” a photoset at Flickr put together by Brian Lamb and Alan Levine for the Educause conference. They say it isn’t quite done yet (and I guess it isn’t), but as it is, it’s pretty sweet.
When textbooks cost too much (which is often)
I came across this post on Maud Newton’s blog, where she’s quoting from GW Bush about fixing interest rates on students loans (apparently, this is a new change in the student loan program), despite the fact that it will potentially (likely, actually) allow corporations and other borrowers to get money with a lower interest rate. Click here for a more complete version of the story. Yet another example why it is clear that the phrase “the education president” was meant to be ironic.
In any event, on an issue that is perhaps a bit closer to my heart (because of my recent failures as a textbook writer) is this Washington Post article (which I found via Maud’s blog), “Swelling Textbook Costs have College Students Saying ‘Pass.'” Here’s a nice quote:
Textbook prices have been rising at double the rate of inflation for the past two decades, according to a Government Accountability Office study. In Virginia, more than 40 percent of students surveyed by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia said they sometimes just do without.
That’s been increasing, said Jennifer Libertowski of the National Association of College Stores; recently, the group found that nearly 60 percent of students nationwide choose not to buy all the course materials.
Sixty percent! Here’s some other fun facts from the article:
- Textbooks and supplies costs an average of $900 a year, and it doesn’t matter much if you’re attending “Most Expensive and Quaint U” or “Cheap Cheap CC,” the books are about the same and the cost is about the same– but a greater percentage of the bill for students at Cheap CC, who are liable to be paying most of their expenses by working anyway.
- According to the GAO study on which this article is based, textbook costs tripled between 1986 and 2004.
- And then there’s this passage: “Students have plenty of conspiracy theories for the rising prices: Greedy publishers who change the cover just to charge more. Self-absorbed professors who assign their own masterpieces or forget to list the books till it’s too late to find a used copy. Overpriced stores.” The article tries to correct some of the “conspiracy theory” here in the next paragraph, suggesting that the profit margin on textbooks is low (at least compared to things like sweatshirts and mugs). Riiight. That’s why no one is making money off of used textbooks or why the price of new textbooks keeps going up for no apparent reason.
Arguably, English studies and composition is “less guilty” in some ways than other fields in terms of the overall cost issues because our textbooks tend to have less expensive “production values” than books for art or the sciences which are routinely filled with hundreds of elaborate color images. But English– particularly first year composition, the one course that just about every college student in this country has to take–is also a cash cow for textbook publishers. I once had a book rep explain to me that the profit margin on the most expensive textbooks (the ones in the sciences and the arts with lots of color printing and such) is actually a break-even proposition for publishers; conversely, because first year composition books are so cheap to make and the volume is so high, the profit margin on those books is quite large.
I’m not saying that textbook companies don’t serve a valuable purpose in the composition community; there’s a lot of textbooks that I have used in the past that I like a great deal, and I also know, that when I started teaching first year composition many moons ago, I learned a lot from the textbook that was assigned to both my students and to me. I do and I will continue to use textbooks in my teaching, though nowadays, I also tend to find out how much students are going to have to pay students before I make the adoption decision.
But I also think that textbook companies don’t do enough to make materials available at a more reasonable cost, mainly because many of these folks still seem to not “get it” when it comes to electronic publishing, and also because they are terrified about doing anything that might cut into profits.
Take my efforts at trying to publish a version of my textbook online. This is a project in which McGraw-Hill has decided to more or less abandon. Based on a review scheme that I think is debatable at best (but that’s another post), they’ve decided that the interest out there is not great enough to justify a publishing run for my book. I’m not happy about that, but okay, these things happen. So, at no cost to McGraw-Hill, I suggested that I make it available electronically. To date, the answer has been a combination of “no” and a non-answer, and as far as I can tell, the main reason why McGraw-Hill doesn’t want me to publish the book I wrote on a web site– a book project that they would continue to own, I might add– is because some people might actually read and/or use the book, and, somehow, this will cut into the profits of the print books, despite the fact that the review process suggested that that many folks aren’t interested in it.
But enough about my problems.
My point simply is this: according to this article, a surprising number of students are already self-opting out of textbook purchases. If the prices keep going up, it seems entirely possible that teachers will seek other options, too.
Link-a-dink
It’s been a pretty crazy-busy week around here, mostly with one thing or another with various school things that have little to do with teaching or scholarship, including an all day meeting yesterday about NCATE, which I suspect is going to be the bane of everyone’s existence at EMU for the next few years.
Anyway, I’ve been meaning to post here about a variety of different things during the week, but I haven’t had time. And just to complicate matters more, I’ve spent the last couple hours (off and on, and while listening to the radio) coming across even more cool links. So, with little commentary and no sorting, here are all of these things now in no particular order:
- BBC News: Computer games ‘motivate pupils.’
- “Bringing You Books on Podcast: Amateur readers are working together to record novels and other texts to be downloaded free from the Internet.” (Sounds like an interesting hobby….)
- “Teens’ Bold Blogs Alarm Area Schools,” in the Washington Post. I had better download this before it “goes away,” though I don’t know if the Post does that practice….
- “E-Read all about it,” from the UK’s Guardian.
- “Internet users judge Web site in less than a blink.” This is from Reuters, which is too bad because a better article was in the journal Nature. But Nature is one of those web sites where they take articles off for all but subscribers after a few days. Bastards. By the way, this site compares looking at a page in 50 miliseconds and 500 miliseconds, which is a big difference. Thanks to Bill H-D for that link.
- The German version of Wikipedia is partly off-line. It’s a confusing story and the first thing I did was look up “Tron” on the English version of Wikipedia.
- Here’s a link from if:book called “the book is reading you,” which is about Google’s Book search functions.
- On the Professional-Lurker site, a CFP for a conference I might try to go to next year— I mean hey, Vegas and about history of technology? How could I go wrong?
- A good post from Jeff called “The Searchers,” which is also a critique of Jacob Nielsen’s complaining about search engines. And I totally agree with Jeff and Jenny. I feel like it’s getting to the point where I really need to educate myself (and ultimately my students) about PHP and MySQL at least as much as HTML and CSS.
- Larry Lessig’s presentation on Google’s Book Search funtion (I’m downloading it as I type, so I guess I’ll see what this is later.)
- Will Richardson has a book coming out that looks kinda cool.
Alright, enough of that. Now I’ve got to get back to my to-do list to get ready for a crazy week next week….
Organizing in the new year
In my new quasi-administrative role as the writing program coordinator, I’ve had to do something that I don’t ever remember having to do before: I’m keeping a calendar.
Oh sure, I’ve sort of kept a calendar/schedule in the past with things like iCal or the Yahoo calendar set-up, both of which email reminders of things. But to be honest, I never felt compelled to keep one of those old-fashioned paper calendars, mainly because I couldn’t see hauling it around with me and also because my week-to-week schedule just didn’t used to be that busy. I mean, I have always had meetings to go to and such, but basically I could just keep it all in my head. As the writing program coordinator, I’ve got more meetings, advising, etc., etc. So I decided it was time to be a grown-up.
My colleagues have been somewhat surprised and amused at my seemingly newly-found anal-retentive tendencies. But the truth of the matter is that my flaky/ laid-back/ non-planned/seemingly easy-going manner has always been pretty much an act. When I have to, I can be as tightly-wound as any other academic.
Anyway, I actually have kind of enjoyed calendar-keeping. I have one where I can organize a month at a time, and I have to say it’s kind of satisfying to see what I’m doing for weeks at a time. It’s kind of, ah, fun. I should have started keeping a calendar a long time ago, even if I didn’t have anything to put on it in the first place.
And, now that I’m in an organizing mood, I’m playing around with the so-called “Hipster PDA.” The creation of Merlin “43 Folders” Mann, the Hipster PDA is really a bunch of index cards clipped together in some fashion and it’s used to keep notes and such. Amazing. And yet, despite its simplicity, there are a ton of different web sitesand links and variations on the original “design” out there.
So far, I’ve just been using my index cards to keep track of attendance in my two face-to-face classes and as a way of keeping track of “to do” lists. And I have to say that if nothing else, it’s very convenient having some index cards to jot things on.
Book Review List: Any other ideas?
I don’t entirely know why, but I’m really quite behind in planning my English 516 class, which starts tomorrow night. The good news is I’ve taught this class several times now, so getting my act together shouldn’t be too difficult to do. The bad news is, because it is a graduate course in computers and writing and I’ve always placed a pretty high value on “currency” in the course, I inevitably have to make changes and do new research every time I teach it.
Anyway, in that spirit of things, I’m looking for some suggestions. I’ve had a lot of luck with a book review presentation assignment in past versions of the class. Basically, students pick from a list of current books that have to do with “computers and writing” in some direct or slightly indirect fashion, and each of them does a 15 minute or so presentation on the book and then writes a short essay. It’s turned out to be a useful exercise for me as both a teacher and a scholar because, like my students, I learn more about books I wouldn’t have necessarily read otherwise.
So, this is this year’s list of possible books to review; do you have any suggestions?
Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media.
MIT Press, 2000. (Steve’s comments: Interesting book, very much about "cyberculture"
and fairly theoretical, too).
Carr-Chellman, Alison A. (Editor). Global Perspectives
on E-Learning : Rhetoric and Reality. SAGE Publications, 2004. (Steve’s
comments: Judging from the table of contents, this looks like a pretty interesting
collection of essays about online learning/teaching from around the world).
Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and
Literacy.
Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. (Steve’s comments: This book comes highly recommended
from several friends and colleagues, was favorably reviewed by a student last
year, and we will probably be reading a selection from this book in the class
this term.)
Hayles, N. Katherine, and Anne Burdick. Writing Machines (Mediaworks Pamphlets).
MIT Press, 2002. (Steve’s comments: Hayles is a very theoretical writer, and
the reviews suggest that this book is a melding of "pseudo-autobiography"
and theoretical reading of the way electronic publishing has changed texts.)
Hocks, Mary and Michelle R. Kendrick, Editors. Eloquent
Images: Word and Image in the Age of New Media. MIT Press, 2003. (Steve’s
comments: This is actually an edited collection of essays, but given the way
that it connects with the Wysocki textbook, I thought it’d be nice to include
as an option here).
Inman, James. Computers and Writing: The Cyborg Era. Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates, 2004. (Steve’s comments: Inman is a fairly well-known and respected
name in the "computers and writing"
community. Probably a focus on higher ed and theories of writing).
Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. Datacloud: Toward A New Theory
Of Online Work. Hampton Press, 2005. (Steve’s comments: Johndan is an interesting
blogger and scholar in the field, so I suspect this will be an interesting read,
probably leaning toward "technical communication").
Kress, Gunther. Literacy in the New Media Age. London: Routledge Press,
2003. (Steve’s comments: Kress is a great writer and his previous work focuses
on "Language Arts," education, technology.)
Lessing, Lawrence. Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the
Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. Penguin Press, 2004. (Steve’s
comments: Recommended by a colleague, though I’ve picked up this book at store
myself a few times. As the title suggests, the focus here is more on media and
culture and not on teaching).
McGann, Jerome. Radiant Textuality : Literature after the World Wide Web.
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. (Steve’s comments: Brand-spankin’ new book which
seems to be as much about "literary theory" as it is about the web.)
Meadows, Mark. Pause & Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative. Pearson
Education, 2002. (Steve’s comments: Highly recommended; the focus seems more
on the uses of "interactive/multimedia" narratives in "writings"
in general– not really about education).
Mossberger, Karen; Caroline J. Tolbert, and Mary Stansbury. Virtual
Inequality: Beyond the Digital Divide. Georgetown UP, 2003. (Steve’s comments:
according to amazon.com, "That there is a "digital divide"—which
falls between those who have and can afford the latest in technological tools
and those who have neither in our society—is indisputable. VIRTUAL INEQUALITY
redefines the issue as it explores the cascades of that divide, which involve
access, skill, political participation, as well as the obvious economics").
Monroe, Barbara. Crossing the Digital Divide: Race, Writing, and Technology
in the Classroom. Teachers College Press, 2004. (Steve’s comments:
Pretty new book that looks like a promising read).
Palloff, Rena M. and Keith Pratt. The Virtual Student: A Profile and Guide
to Working with Online Learners. Jossey-Bass 2003. (Steve’s comments: Highly
recommended, a focus on K-12 and "education," not just English studies.)
Rice, Jeff. Writing About Cool : Hypertext and Cultural
Studies in the Computer Classroom. Longman, 2003. (Steve’s comments: Jeff
teaches at Wayne State and is definitely trying to push the envelope in terms
of hypertext, cultural studies, and teaching writing).
Rouzie, Albert. At Play in the Fields of Writing: A Serio-Ludic
Rhetoric.Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2005. (Steve’s comments: Judging
from the Hampton Press web site, this looks like an interesting and new book).
Selber, Stuart. Multiliteracies for a Digital Age. Southern Illinois
UP, 2004. (Steve’s comments: Selber is a well-regarded "computers and
writing" scholar.
The focus here is almost certainly higher ed.)
Warschauer, Mark. Technology and Social Inclusion : Rethinking the Digital
Divide. MIT Press, 2004. (Steve’s comments: Warschauer is a pretty well-known
academic writer about these issues; this is his latest book on the subject
of the digital divide.)
Whithaus, Carl. Teaching And Evaluating Writing In The
Age Of Computers And High-Stakes Testing. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005.
(Steve’s comments: I actually read a review of an earlier version of this manuscript,
and it is pretty much about what the title suggests).
Krause Podcasting (or, it's one thing to write about nothing, but is it okay to talk about nothing too?)
Andrew “Doc Mara” Mara mentioned in a comment the other day that I had a podcast listed on iTunes. That’s true, though as Andrew said, there really isn’t much there. Yet.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been using audio to help me support my online teaching and I think it has been pretty effective. Basically, I’ve attached audio to notes about readings inside the eCollege “shell”– I’d link to it, but you have to have a password and be signed up for the class to get to it and all that. I’m trying to extend this to what I guess really is an “honest to goodness” podcast, one available via iTunes and the whole bit. It’s called “Steve Krause’s English 328 Blog,” and you can find it if you go to the iTunes store, look in the podcasts, then in “Education,” then in “Higher Education,” and then it’s and alphabetic list. Or you can go to Krause’s English 328 Blog and take a listen for yourself– though, as Andrew pointed out, there’s not much there yet.
Unlike the audio I include as part of the online class materials, I’m not quite sure what the point of this podcast is going to be yet. I think I’m going to use it as an opportunity to make some “class announcements,” maybe to give some overall thoughts on the progress of students in class, etc. Maybe my students will catch on and will want podcast for themselves. We’ll see. What I wanted to do for the time-being was simply demonstrate that making a podcast and getting it included in iTunes is surprisingly easy. After I get a better handle on planning my classes, I’ll probably write up a “how to” document and post it some place.
I thought about the idea of including a podcast as part of my official blog space, and I guess I’m still thinking about it. On the one hand, it might be kind of an interesting experiment, and, as far as I can gather, no one else in the comp/rhet blogging world is doing this yet. Actually, I’m not sure there are any academic bloggers who have started to do any podcasting. In any event, what I’m getting at is it might be a worthy experiment because no one else is doing this yet.
On the other hand, I’m not sure if my podcast would be that interesting to anyone. As I suggest in the headline for this post, it seems to me that it’s one thing to “write” in a blog about (basically) nothing/what’s on my mind/etc., but it’s something else to just “talk” about nothing. Blog readers can pick and choose via an RSS feed and/or simply scan the text (my guess is that most of my readers are doing one or both of these things right now). You can’t really do that with audio; listening to a podcast is largely an “all or nothing” kind of commitment.
I dunno. I think I’d better plan my classes for the term that starts tomorrow before I start figuring out how to make people listen to me babble.
I think I'll just lift these ideas and post them here…
Rebecca Moore “Schenectady Synecdoche” Howard has had a couple of interesting posts on plagiarism lately– first, this one, which is about a “plagiarism” contestat the Utah Desert News Web site, which isn’t really about plagiarism at all. It’s based on a short story that was “written” by two of the paper’s reporters where they took quotes from a bunch of short stories– all of which are cited with footnotes (and thus not plagiarism)–and then put them together. The story is called “The Rearrangement” (warning– this is an MS Word file).
The second post on “blog plagiarism,” which (as far as I can tell) is what I would be doing here had I not credited Moore for these links/posts in the first place. I agree with the premise of Moore’s post about the claim maide in this “techdirt” post, that the plagiarism problem doesn’t matter much if it is a small-time blogger ripping off content from Google or Yahoo or something. However, as the first comment on the post asks, what happens if Google or Yahoo or something rips off the small-time blogger?
… And That's a Wrap!
I just finished (literally, just finished) posting the last of my grades for the term, which means that I am indeed finished with this term. I do want to send an email out to my online students (the ones who I just finished figuring final grades for) to let them know I’m done, that they can take down their web sites if they want, etc.
It’s been kind of a mixed bag of a semester in many different ways for me, but overall, pretty good. I think the online class was most interesting to me because of what went right and what went wrong, and also because of what happened that fits into some other projects I’m working on, most notably a CCCCs presentation on the use of audio in teaching. As I’ve mentioned before, this is a topic that seems to be moving faster than I can cope with it. When I proposed the idea for a CCCCs presentation, it seemed fresh and new to me. Back in October, I started to have my doubts. And now that “podcast” is the word of the year, I’m guessing that if anyone actually shows up to my presentation, they will look at me and say “oh ma gawd, that is like so last April.”
Anyway, I thought that the audio element of my online class was fairly successful and I’m looking forward to figuring out how to do some honest-to-goodness (albeit fairly low-fi, tech wise) podcasting next term. I’m also going to be taking over as the EMU writing program coordinator, which means I’ll be kind of the leader (to the extent that anyone can “lead” tenure-track faculty) of our undergrad majors in professional and technical writing, and our MA programs in teaching of writing and technical communication. Oddly, because of some other things not worth explaining now, I will also be teaching more (though making a little extra money, too). I bought a copy of a SAMS Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL and Apache book I intend to browse while hanging with the family this weekend– I’ll probably have to look at it beyond that, too. I’m looking forward with moving beyond the damned textbook project, though I will probably be starting a new category on my blog specifically to vent bitch reflect on my textbook writing experiences.
But hey, this is all next year. I might post between now and then; I might not. Hope finals et al wrap up well for others out there, too.
A couple of links/planning my near teaching future
I’ve been pretty swamped with this pesky school stuff lately. As I often joke, being a college professor would be a pretty easy job if I didn’t have to do things like grade and read student work; alas, that job is of a college administrator….
Anyway, I came across a couple of links I need to think about for at least one (possibly two) class(es) I will be teaching in the winter.
- As mentioned Kairosnews, there’s this article, “Who Needs a College Campus?” an article in Forbes by a computer science professor at Yale who (basically) suggests that students at all but the most elite schools will soon be taking all of their classes online. I don’t want to make too many judgements about an article I have yet to read, but I suspect a bit too rosy of a picture of the future. I do agree with one passage that is a quote from the article (apparently): while online classes probably cannot replace a well-taught small group seminar, they probably can replace big lecture hall classes taught by less than stellar teachers. I would add (and I don’t know if this is in the article or not yet), based on my experiences this semester, that while I don’t think students need to take all of their classes online, I think it makes perfect sense at schools like EMU for students to take about a third of their classes online.
- I wanted to include here a link to an article from last week’s CHE, “Do Not Fear the Blog” by Rebecca “her real name” Goetz. Basically, she is giving the flip-side to Ivan “the worst fake name ever” Tribble’s articles from earlier in the year where he suggests that academic blogging is a bad thing. These articles might make for a nice conversation in my graduate course and maybe my Writing for the World Wide Web course.
Speaking of which: I think I have (at least more of) a plan for the courses where I was asking for help previously. I am almost certainly going to be using the Wysocki et al collection Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition. My copy arrived just yesterday, but after looking at it for about 10 minutes, I’m already saying “Oh, yeah. I obviously should use this.” I think I will stick with the Literate Lives in the Information Age: Narratives of Literacy from the United States by Selfe and Hawisher and many “et alâ€� book (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004 ) because it went over well (though it is a bit pricey, if you ask me), and then I will round out the readings with quite a few articles and web readings.
For my Writing for the WWW class, I am going to use Horton and Lynch’s Web Style Guide (which I still think is a great book, even if it is getting a little dated), Williams’ and Tollett’s The Non-Designer’s Web Book (3rd edition), and Molly Holzschlag’s Spring Into HTML and CSS. I was originally going to use a different book that folks had recommended, but– long story short– I was worried about the availability of this other book because a new edition of it is coming out in March 2006 and I think the publisher has listed the current edition as out of print, which might make it tricky for students to get.
Now, my original plan for this week was to have all of my “ducks in a row” so that I could spend my freetime over Thanksgiving break getting these Winter classes ready. Alas, my ducks are still scattered about. Oh well, I’ll still have some time to work and such next week… and I might work in some eating, too….
A few more miscellaneous links
I need to get myself caught up on grading today, so for now, just a few miscellaeous links to things from the blogosphere for the last couple of days:
- Assigned plagiarism, from Mike at Vitia. Basically, Mike set up a project where he got his students to plagiarize to simultaneously make a point about research and plagiarism. Good assignment, I think.
- Via Johndan comes this link of a “Typography Crash Course Roundup,” which could be interesting to look at… someday….
- Via the CC Dean comes this post, “Teaching in Context, or, All Hail Dr. Crazy.” The “Dr. Crazy” in question is another blogger, who has a number of posts about the challenges of teaching (to quote Dr. Crazy) “at a Non-Elite, Teaching-Driven Institution.” They are good posts I suppose, but as a comp/rhet person who has always worked at these kinds of schools, they aren’t exactly surprising to me.
- Via John at Machina Memorialis comes this article “Intelligence in the Internet age,” which is on CNET News. In a way, it’s kind of a “pop” version of a lot of the reading I tend to assign at the beginning of a couple of different classes I teach; might be interesting to come back to later.
- Finally, and I’m not sure where I got this one (CultureCat?), comes CiteULike, which is “a free online service to organise your academic papers.”