Monthly Archives: September 2009

NYACK, NY — 08/20/09 — Flat World Knowledge, the leading publisher of commercial open source college textbooks, today reported a dramatic increase in the number of colleges and classrooms adopting its textbooks. This fall semester, over 40,000 college students at more than 400 colleges will utilize Flat World textbooks, up from only 1,000 in Spring 2009 at 30 colleges.

The increased adoption of Flat World’s free and low-cost open source textbooks follows two semesters of successful in-classroom trials. During Spring 2009 trials, Flat World textbooks were shown to reduce average textbook costs to only $18 per student per class, an 82 percent cost reduction compared to traditional printed textbooks averaging $100 per student per class.

Flat Word Knowledge Press Release, August 20, 2009

Flat World Knowledge may well have developed a “Fremium” model that saves students money and could save the textbook industry from an ignoble but well deserved end. I particularly l like the idea of a textbook that can be accessed in multiple ways: downloaded and printed, ordered as a black and white or full color book, as audio-files, on the web, and so on.

The textbooks can be updated easily and, according to Flat World, the authors make money. There’s probably going to be a place for this sort of thing in the post-textbook era but there’s also a lot of potential problems. It’s very possible that students will unknowingly get ‘nickled and dimmed’ to death by this sort of publishing. Markets don’t need to be ethical.

What’s really missing here is the pedagogical opportunity to make the static textbook into a dynamic knowledge making enterprise shared by teachers as well as students. The software and services are available. What’s harder is convincing universities that they should put time and energy into facilitating broad based initiatives to create and maintain fully open source textbooks.

As the electronic record grows and we conduct more and more of our business and our conversations on company servers, more analytical firms will spoon through our digital soup. Their job is getting harder. E-mail has gotten much shorter and terser over the past eight years. In the workplace, we switch from IM to telephone to BlackBerry and often don’t use any proper names. It’s difficult to stitch these conversations together so that they make sense to outsiders. Yet some people still assume that anything they write will be lost in the giant sea of e-mail. Charnock says she still sees messages like: “I probably shouldn’t put this in e-mail, but …”

Yes, it’s lame if a manager needs to rely on an algorithm to figure out who her most valued employees are. Yes, the Big Brother-ish aspect of all of this gives one pause. But if you set aside that reaction, most of what Charnock is talking about is common sense. Are you in the mainstream of your workplace or off in a little eddy of your own? If so, why? Are you being productive in your own time and style or just getting really good at Desktop Tower Defense and wishing you did something else? Your electronic tracks don’t indicate your true value as an employee—Who cracks better jokes in the weekly meeting? No one!—but it’s naive to think they don’t reveal anything at all.

Sent Mail- Does your outbox reveal how productive you are? Michael Agger, Aug. 26, 2009, at 7:04 AM ET

My old economics professors, Dr. Harry Cleaver, used to talk about “chipping away at the working day” as one of the important ways that we resist capitalism. We come in late, take an hour instead of an hour and a half for lunch, leave by mid-afternoon on Friday. Surveys tend to show that people are working more and getting paid less, but there’s a lot of this hidden resistance.

It’s never so simple, of course, because employers are always looking for ways to do the opposite: to get us to work more, and more productively, for the same amount of money. Here’s the class struggle in an industrialized country writ small. We push for more money and more time to do what we want; the bosses push to take more and more of our time while paying us less and less.

If you work in a factory, the time-clock (and the motion study) govern your world. In education, and many other professions, things have always been looser. We are just now seeing the dawn of a new age in this basic struggle, one in which companies take full advantage of new communication technologies to monitor and shape employee behavior. It’ll be fun to see how folks fight back.

Agger gives us a hint of what’s next. If an employer uses the GPS on your phone to track your comings and goings, we’ll develop a application to fudge the data. If your boss uses email to check to see that you are on the job, someone will design clever automatic response software that will pass any Turing test. Students and professors are likely to be at the front of this wave of resistance.