Read the article here. Looking over the state of current uses for the web in education and some of the stuff out there that might change this in the future such as social networking, mashups and the like I have to agree with the guy who basically invented the web.
One point I think deserves highlighting more: the web was invented back in the day of proprietary online services such as AOL and Compuserve. The Internet itself was the plaything of geeks at universities, with text-based services like email, USENET, Gopher and Archie. CERN gave away the early webserver code, and today the web is the internet as far as non-geeks are concerned. This wasn't an coincidence.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Monday, April 28, 2008
NYT piece on textbook costs
As a followup from the Kindle post I came across this NYT article on the ever rising costs of textbooks and a pending bill in Congress to force publishers to unbundle the CD-ROM and other add-ons that help drive up the cost. This is a wonderful idea at the core- I've barely even looked at most of the CDs that come with the General Chemistry books I have used in the past and when I have sat down and evaluated them I've been highly unimpressed. Most suffer from "Powerpoint syndrome"; just because you know how to do fades and wipes in Director doesn't mean you should. The thing that always surprised me the most was how limited they were- you'd think in a high-tech resource you'd have clear, large videos, useful 3-d models and the like, but videos always seemed to be 320x240, 10 fps at best with horrible compression artifacts and the 3-d models were more limited than what the free plug-in Chime can do.
Perhaps a free textbook option (FWS or Textbook revolution) might actually work? I still haven't chosen a base text (or even know if I will) for my seminar next year- too bad FWS won't be ready yet.
Perhaps a free textbook option (FWS or Textbook revolution) might actually work? I still haven't chosen a base text (or even know if I will) for my seminar next year- too bad FWS won't be ready yet.
Other blogs
A quick list of other ed tech blogs that are still being updated. Google finds lots of dead ones out there...
David Davies
David Wiley
Stephen Downes
ElearnSpace
Trey Martindale, Teachable Moment
David Davies
David Wiley
Stephen Downes
ElearnSpace
Trey Martindale, Teachable Moment
Friday, April 25, 2008
Kindling
I spent an enjoyable lunch at Mamie's Cafe this week meeting with Rod (my boss), a number of faculty and a representative from Amazon who is looking into uses of the Kindle in higher education. We're one of the few schools that actually has tried this out: Rod has loaned one to everyone in his Comp Sci senior capstone course to read their various assignments on, and so Susie Kroll decided to come see how it's been working out.
We have a number of test Kindles laying around the college and I tested one myself for a few weeks a while back. My overall review of the machine (posted on Amazon) was not very favorable- in my opinion the machine has a number of technical flaws such as a small screen, poor control layout and poor battery life as well as being tied to DRM'd content that will simply vanish if the Kindle does. As a bibliophile, I have an extensive library at home, with books ranging from last week's paperback to 150-year-old textbooks, all of which are still quite usable. The technical limitations don't bother me too much- it's a first gen device that will be improved: that's just engineering. The DRM and content control issues, on the other hand, are far more serious.
To Susie's credit, she didn't try to shy away from this. It's a difficult position for Amazon to be in- they do make more money if you have to rebuy content in new formats, so she has to argue against her company's own interests if she pushes it. But it's also a demand from the copyright holders, and without them the Kindle goes nowhere quickly. Her comments that the Kindle is a major project at Amazon and isn't going away anytime soon ring a bit hollow on the same week Microsoft announced it's turning off the MSN Music license key servers. Somewhere along the line there's going to have to be a format you can get the content off the Kindle and put it somewhere safe or people are going to get burnt. This may not matter to many people, but for those of us who buy lots of books and keep them forever it's a killer.
So where could it help in academia? Beyond some pie-in-the-sky discussions of add ons like external video out and tablet-like support, there are some realistic options. Textbooks are big, heavy, expensive and honestly don't get used all that much. Why not put them on a Kindle- I know a lot of students would be happy to ditch 30 pounds of Zhumdahls and Campbell&Reeces for a single small device. But here the technical limitations of the Kindle come back to really kill this idea- the screen is too small, you can't do color illustrations, textbooks use lots of non-standard formatting (making them hard and expensive to convert) and the footnoting and indexing features of the Kindle are nonexistent. (It's a consumer device, after all) Perhaps the next gen?
The really interesting part of the discussion came when we began to discuss small-run content. College courses are notorious for requiring course packs, a few chapters of a dozen different books bundled together into one Frankenbook. These are annoying to create, since you have to clear each chapter with the publisher, pay fees, etc. Why not just have a "Create a reader" option on the Kindle website? Get the publishers to work out something flexible- if the book is $20, each chapter can be bought individually for $2 with all rights cleared. A professor could assemble a course reader in a few hours and get exactly what they want, all the tedious photocopying goes away, etc. Work out a deal with each college so that the student just goes to the Amazon website, clicks "My school", selects "Gettysburg College" and there are the list of all the course packs.
How about professor-generated content? Academics love to publish scholarly books, often with very small print runs: a few thousand perhaps. These aren't done for the money- one professor here comments he buys a case of beer every six months with the proceeds from his book. Instead, these are a critical piece of the academic reputation process, showing that you have the skills to do serious research in a field, and as such are essential for a professor in the humanities or social sciences to get tenure. The Kindle would be ideal for these in many ways- no need for a minimum print run since you can just make a copy when someone clicks "Buy", better exposure since anyone can get a copy of something there are interested in rather than having to go to a specialized academic library, etc. But will an ebook count towards tenure in the same way as a physical one? Until the answer is "yes", this idea is dead in the water, or perhaps we'll always have to have at least one small print run just so Joe Prof can hit his tenure committee over the head with his 600 page masterwork into the grooming habits of pre-Incan women.
There is a lot of promise here, but there's still a long way to go.
We have a number of test Kindles laying around the college and I tested one myself for a few weeks a while back. My overall review of the machine (posted on Amazon) was not very favorable- in my opinion the machine has a number of technical flaws such as a small screen, poor control layout and poor battery life as well as being tied to DRM'd content that will simply vanish if the Kindle does. As a bibliophile, I have an extensive library at home, with books ranging from last week's paperback to 150-year-old textbooks, all of which are still quite usable. The technical limitations don't bother me too much- it's a first gen device that will be improved: that's just engineering. The DRM and content control issues, on the other hand, are far more serious.
To Susie's credit, she didn't try to shy away from this. It's a difficult position for Amazon to be in- they do make more money if you have to rebuy content in new formats, so she has to argue against her company's own interests if she pushes it. But it's also a demand from the copyright holders, and without them the Kindle goes nowhere quickly. Her comments that the Kindle is a major project at Amazon and isn't going away anytime soon ring a bit hollow on the same week Microsoft announced it's turning off the MSN Music license key servers. Somewhere along the line there's going to have to be a format you can get the content off the Kindle and put it somewhere safe or people are going to get burnt. This may not matter to many people, but for those of us who buy lots of books and keep them forever it's a killer.
So where could it help in academia? Beyond some pie-in-the-sky discussions of add ons like external video out and tablet-like support, there are some realistic options. Textbooks are big, heavy, expensive and honestly don't get used all that much. Why not put them on a Kindle- I know a lot of students would be happy to ditch 30 pounds of Zhumdahls and Campbell&Reeces for a single small device. But here the technical limitations of the Kindle come back to really kill this idea- the screen is too small, you can't do color illustrations, textbooks use lots of non-standard formatting (making them hard and expensive to convert) and the footnoting and indexing features of the Kindle are nonexistent. (It's a consumer device, after all) Perhaps the next gen?
The really interesting part of the discussion came when we began to discuss small-run content. College courses are notorious for requiring course packs, a few chapters of a dozen different books bundled together into one Frankenbook. These are annoying to create, since you have to clear each chapter with the publisher, pay fees, etc. Why not just have a "Create a reader" option on the Kindle website? Get the publishers to work out something flexible- if the book is $20, each chapter can be bought individually for $2 with all rights cleared. A professor could assemble a course reader in a few hours and get exactly what they want, all the tedious photocopying goes away, etc. Work out a deal with each college so that the student just goes to the Amazon website, clicks "My school", selects "Gettysburg College" and there are the list of all the course packs.
How about professor-generated content? Academics love to publish scholarly books, often with very small print runs: a few thousand perhaps. These aren't done for the money- one professor here comments he buys a case of beer every six months with the proceeds from his book. Instead, these are a critical piece of the academic reputation process, showing that you have the skills to do serious research in a field, and as such are essential for a professor in the humanities or social sciences to get tenure. The Kindle would be ideal for these in many ways- no need for a minimum print run since you can just make a copy when someone clicks "Buy", better exposure since anyone can get a copy of something there are interested in rather than having to go to a specialized academic library, etc. But will an ebook count towards tenure in the same way as a physical one? Until the answer is "yes", this idea is dead in the water, or perhaps we'll always have to have at least one small print run just so Joe Prof can hit his tenure committee over the head with his 600 page masterwork into the grooming habits of pre-Incan women.
There is a lot of promise here, but there's still a long way to go.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
The infomation can find us...
but is it what we want?
Michael Wesch gave an amazing keynote at the NITLE conference in early April. He's an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, but has become somewhat well known outside of academia for a series of YouTube videos describing both information in the Web 2.0 world as well as the students who live there. See:
Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us
Information R/evolution
A Vision of Students Today
He is simply an amazing speaker, one of the few who can truly make you sit up and watch an entire PowerPoint and enjoy it. These skills clearly translate into classroom popularity as well: his courses have long waiting lists and he makes students apply for his upper division courses. He's thought deeply about the way that Web2.0 applications change some of the information dynamics in modern education: information is not hard to find anymore. Information does not need to be indexed by experts. Information and its physical form have no relation. Information can even find us in the form of RSS feeds and bots.
Fascinating stuff. But step back and look a bit more: I think the experts might have the trump card after all.
Yes, information is trivial to find. Google has seen to that. Information can find us: RSS, Atom and the rest can feed us a constant stream of info on everything from current politics to fly fishing. The public as a whole will index the material, not experts. But is that really new?
Even in the Web2.0 world, information still has a place. It's not sitting on a bookshelf- it's sitting on a spinning hard disk on a server farm somewhere. It still has an address-not a call number, but a URL. The public can create links to it and index it for searching, but that's not really new: back in the good old days of Paper 1.0 we called those references. There's a reason scholarly papers and books have hundreds of footnotes- it's the Paper 1.0 version of linking. Reference works like the Science Citation Index are a public tagging facility for scholars.
Was information hard to find? Not really- any college grad should have the skills to search a journal for articles and to follow a reference/citation chain. Has Google made it faster and easier? Of course- I managed to find a paper on response rates in online course evaluations in an obscure British journal in about 20 minutes using Google the other day(Brit. J. Educ. Tech, V38, N6, 2007, 1085-1101), but it's not like it wasn't possible before. It just would have taken a few more hours of search time and then a wait for my library to request a copy of the article from another, but not impossible. (I'm still not going back to Paper 1.0)
What's changing is the democratization of this process. To get a journal article or book published is a significant undertaking, involving things like credential checks, peer review and the like. This is gradually getting replaced by thousands of people tagging, digging and otherwise marking any given article with their own set of keywords. Democratization is good, right?
I'm teaching a new course in the fall: the history of the world through materials science. Like Wesch, I can set up a home page that will feed interesting stories about materials in our world to a single location for my students. This will bring in lots of interesting topics to discuss: lead paint in toys, concrete fatigue in bridges, how mercury in vaccines causes autism and so forth. This will certainly help my students tremendously.
Except that study after study shows that mercury doesn't cause autism. There is an active, very loud group that despite all scientific evidence (and there's mountains of it) believes this link to be true and has written thousands of web pages detailing their beliefs. Doing a Google search for mercury will find these pages high up- lots of people link to them driving up pagerank, they are often dugg, etc. Yet to the best that serious research can show, it's simply not true. But people searching for this information won't find the careful, peer-reviewed studies about this, because they are long, hard to read and contain a lot of jargon. Even the newspaper articles that cite the journal articles are fairly dull- it's much more interesting to read about poor Stevie who suddenly changed personality after getting a vaccination and the trials his parents have to endure to care for him.
So the blogosphere gets this wrong, as it does a lot of science questions where a handful of loud mouths can distort the issue to make it appear that there is controversy where none really exists. How do we handle this properly? One way is to rely on experts to make the call about how an argument should be tagged, but then we're back to the Paper 1.0 days where the indexing is controlled by a small elite.
The information is out there. But which information is actually good?
Michael Wesch gave an amazing keynote at the NITLE conference in early April. He's an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, but has become somewhat well known outside of academia for a series of YouTube videos describing both information in the Web 2.0 world as well as the students who live there. See:
Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us
Information R/evolution
A Vision of Students Today
He is simply an amazing speaker, one of the few who can truly make you sit up and watch an entire PowerPoint and enjoy it. These skills clearly translate into classroom popularity as well: his courses have long waiting lists and he makes students apply for his upper division courses. He's thought deeply about the way that Web2.0 applications change some of the information dynamics in modern education: information is not hard to find anymore. Information does not need to be indexed by experts. Information and its physical form have no relation. Information can even find us in the form of RSS feeds and bots.
Fascinating stuff. But step back and look a bit more: I think the experts might have the trump card after all.
Yes, information is trivial to find. Google has seen to that. Information can find us: RSS, Atom and the rest can feed us a constant stream of info on everything from current politics to fly fishing. The public as a whole will index the material, not experts. But is that really new?
Even in the Web2.0 world, information still has a place. It's not sitting on a bookshelf- it's sitting on a spinning hard disk on a server farm somewhere. It still has an address-not a call number, but a URL. The public can create links to it and index it for searching, but that's not really new: back in the good old days of Paper 1.0 we called those references. There's a reason scholarly papers and books have hundreds of footnotes- it's the Paper 1.0 version of linking. Reference works like the Science Citation Index are a public tagging facility for scholars.
Was information hard to find? Not really- any college grad should have the skills to search a journal for articles and to follow a reference/citation chain. Has Google made it faster and easier? Of course- I managed to find a paper on response rates in online course evaluations in an obscure British journal in about 20 minutes using Google the other day(Brit. J. Educ. Tech, V38, N6, 2007, 1085-1101), but it's not like it wasn't possible before. It just would have taken a few more hours of search time and then a wait for my library to request a copy of the article from another, but not impossible. (I'm still not going back to Paper 1.0)
What's changing is the democratization of this process. To get a journal article or book published is a significant undertaking, involving things like credential checks, peer review and the like. This is gradually getting replaced by thousands of people tagging, digging and otherwise marking any given article with their own set of keywords. Democratization is good, right?
I'm teaching a new course in the fall: the history of the world through materials science. Like Wesch, I can set up a home page that will feed interesting stories about materials in our world to a single location for my students. This will bring in lots of interesting topics to discuss: lead paint in toys, concrete fatigue in bridges, how mercury in vaccines causes autism and so forth. This will certainly help my students tremendously.
Except that study after study shows that mercury doesn't cause autism. There is an active, very loud group that despite all scientific evidence (and there's mountains of it) believes this link to be true and has written thousands of web pages detailing their beliefs. Doing a Google search for mercury will find these pages high up- lots of people link to them driving up pagerank, they are often dugg, etc. Yet to the best that serious research can show, it's simply not true. But people searching for this information won't find the careful, peer-reviewed studies about this, because they are long, hard to read and contain a lot of jargon. Even the newspaper articles that cite the journal articles are fairly dull- it's much more interesting to read about poor Stevie who suddenly changed personality after getting a vaccination and the trials his parents have to endure to care for him.
So the blogosphere gets this wrong, as it does a lot of science questions where a handful of loud mouths can distort the issue to make it appear that there is controversy where none really exists. How do we handle this properly? One way is to rely on experts to make the call about how an argument should be tagged, but then we're back to the Paper 1.0 days where the indexing is controlled by a small elite.
The information is out there. But which information is actually good?
Introduction
Welcome to paidogogos, my occasionally updated musings on instructional&educational technology. I've begun this exercise mostly to help crystallize my own thoughts on how technology and education interrelate. I've been working in this field for more than a decade, yet I spend half my time at conferences surprised at some idea out of left field that makes me feel like a dinosaur, and the other half surprised at the other folks who seem stuck in the stone age compared to us. Yet most of these new technologies have a pretty thin track record in terms of verifiable impact on learning- the number of talks, papers and ideas with detailed statistics on learning outcomes is low at best and often close to zero. (And this includes a lot of my own.)
So where do we go from here? Are our current projector + Smartboard equipped classrooms really effective? Do Web 2.0 technologies really translate into a different (and better) way of working and learning? Is Powerpoint truly a tool of the devil, or perhaps just a mild annoyance?
I've taken the name of the blog from the Greek παιδαγωγέω, a slave who would accompany a young boy in ancient Greece to supervise his education, make sure that he went to school and that he behaved while he was there. It's the origin of the modern word pedagogy, the science of teaching. Interestingly, the word origin assumes that you only teach children!
So where do we go from here? Are our current projector + Smartboard equipped classrooms really effective? Do Web 2.0 technologies really translate into a different (and better) way of working and learning? Is Powerpoint truly a tool of the devil, or perhaps just a mild annoyance?
I've taken the name of the blog from the Greek παιδαγωγέω, a slave who would accompany a young boy in ancient Greece to supervise his education, make sure that he went to school and that he behaved while he was there. It's the origin of the modern word pedagogy, the science of teaching. Interestingly, the word origin assumes that you only teach children!
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