Yearly Archives: 2009

Today, the U.S. House of Representatives took a giant step forward in comprehensive student aid reform. The Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act, introduced by Education Committee Chairman George Miller, invests billions of dollars in financial aid at no new expense to taxpayers. The United States Student Association, along with college students nationwide, is ecstatic about Congressman Miller’s unsurpassed commitment to higher education.

Students Thrilled with Student Aid Reform Bill, Education is a Right, July 15, 2009

The Obama or Democratic party agenda seems fascinatingly split into two. On the one hand are the programs deemed “controversial” by some weird mixture of media interest and conservative hysteria. First it was the stimulus money and now it’s health care reform. These are certainly important efforts. But underneath or beside these efforts are an entire range of other initiatives that might add up to something just as important, if not more important. These initiatives (almost) slip under the radar.

They are noticed but then fade out of the media. Among these I would include the dropping of the F22, the so-called cash for clunker program, and now the ongoing attempts to de-privatize the student loan industry, which would make millions of dollars of new money available for Pell Grants while lowering the costs of education loans. These programs are going to start bearing fruit in the next few years and I think the effects are going to be dramatic. Taken together, they might be just as transformative as the ‘priority’ reforms.

It is a bittersweet privilege to provide the introduction to this issue of Currents, which is a tribute to John Slatin. Although we are still struggling with his loss, the remarkable work of his former students gathered here is a testament to his living legacy. It is a tribute that would have meant the most to him. He was a consummate teacher, who delighted in the successes of his students, and I know he would have been so deeply touched to know that they remember him with such gratitude. I will not repeat here what I have said in other places about John’s contributions to our field, and his innovations in computers and writing. I will say that our conversations and his example always supported and inspired me in my teaching. The outpouring of responses from his students when we offered the invitation to contribute to this issue was another reminder of the love and affection expressed by so many people throughout John’s illness and passing. The range of these pieces gives some sense of the scope and diversity of John’s scholarly and pedagogical interests and influence. In keeping with John’s love of experimentation, creativity, imagination, and exploration, the projects here are rich and diverse.

… John’s playfulness and spirit of adventure are at the heart of the MOO/webtext of Albert Rouzie and Ray Watkins: “A Sustainable Culture: John Slatin’s Ludic Pedagogy.” Their conversation ranged across diverse topics in just the way that Slatin celebrated, including Hypertext, MOOs, Interchange, authority, play, persuasion, New Media, cultural capital, progressive education, blogs, digital technology, slow reading, Open Source, cloud computing, and Twitter…

John Slatin’s Legacy, Peg Syverson

This has been out for a few weeks and I should have posted it here earlier… Anyway, now’s a good time because I’ve been traveling all week and I don’t have much time…

The book publishers are in the process of picking a fight with Amazon and other sellers over the pricing of e-books. If the publishers are lucky, they’ll lose. Here’s why.

Publishers generally sell e-books to Amazon and its competitors for the same price they sell paper books to retailers—about half the list price of the paper version. Amazon and the others insist on selling most e-books for about $9.99, which pleases the publishers when the e-book retail price is close to that of the paper edition: Currently, Amazon is selling the $14 list paperback of The Big Sleep for $10.98 and the electronic Kindle version for $9.99.

Does the Book Industry Want To Get Napstered? Jack Shafer, Wednesday, July 15, 2009, at 7:13 PM ET

Republicans like to toss out the idea of a “class war” in order to conjure up frightening images of rock throwing thugs and police tossing tear gas and chaos in the streets. Usually, they are complaining about something simple, like the necessity of avoiding regressive taxation in a democracy. The rich, apparently, have an infinite right to be richer, no matter the price to the rest of us.

The class war, however, is at times much more subtle, involving almost invisible changes in the relationships and social agreements and assumptions that make up what we call private property. As Shafer suggests, that’s what happened with music, or, rather, that’s what continues to happen with music. Now, he says, we might see the same thing with books.

That’s already happening elsewhere, of course, as at some universities make their courses open-source. In the sciences, there’s the Public Library of Science and every month or so it seems another academic journal adopts a free online model. Wikipedia, too, represents a shift in the old “private property” paradigm and its associated copy-write regime.