Textbo-tainment

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Textbook publishers argue that their newest digital products shouldn’t even be called “textbooks.” They’re really software programs built to deliver a mix of text, videos, and homework assignments. But delivering them is just the beginning. No old-school textbook was able to be customized for each student in the classroom. The books never graded the homework. And while they contain sample exam questions, they couldn’t administer the test themselves.

One publisher calls its products “personalized learning experiences,” another “courseware,” and one insists on using its own brand name, “MindTap.” For now, this new product could be called “the object formerly known as the textbook.”

“The Object Formerly Known as the Textbook,” Jeffrey R. Young

Universities are full of people who either know how to design software or want to know how to design software. We could have spent the last 30 years building an infrastructure of these people and ended up with a public software sector– an entire ecosystem of people and technologies–that made education cheaper and more accessible. It wouldn’t have stopped the commercial sector, but it might have pushed it to do more for less money.

This is the way research and development used to work before “buying from the lowest bidder” (if there was a competitive bidding system at all) was the only model. We got what we paid for, of course. Commercial software has helped to make online and traditional education more rather than less expensive and, arguably, slowed down the development of new communication technologies. We got a system that serves billionaires instead of the public.

Now it’s happening again as we move out of the age of paper-based textbooks. Once again we have the chance to create a public system of open source textbooks rooted in the huge numbers of education professionals who know how to create multi-media textbooks (writers and designers as well as scientific and humanities researchers) and the huge pool of people who want to learn how to do these things. We need a public textbook infrastructure.

Posted in: Composition, Economics, Professional, Writing

Let us be dissatisfied

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So, I conclude by saying again today that we have a task and let us go out with a “divine dissatisfaction.” Let us be dissatisfied until America will no longer have a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds. Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort and the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice. [,et us be dissatisfied until those that live on the outskirts of hope are brought into the metropolis of daily security. Let us be dissatisfied until slums are cast into the junk heaps of history, and every family is living in a decent sanitary home… Let us be dissatisfied. Let us be dissatisfied until every state capitol houses a governor who will do justly, who will love mercy and who will walk humbly with his God. Let us be dissatisfied until from every city hall, justice will roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream. Let us be dissatisfied until that day when the lion and the lamb shall lie down together. and every man will sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid. Let us be dissatisfied.

“Where do we go from here?” Dr. Martin Luther King, Speech, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Atlanta, Georgia, 16 August 1967

Posted in: Economics, Language, Online Places, Professional, Union

Show Me the (Research) Money

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Alarmed by growing scientific research on the health risks created by the widespread prevalence of guns, the NRA and its Congressional allies stripped all funding for the Center for Disease Control’s gun research budget. They also inserted a provision into the CDC appropriation bills that said “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control,” deterring the CDC from providing significant funds to gun research ever since. As a result, the New York Times reports, “the amount of money available today for studying the impact of firearms is a fraction of what it was in the mid-1990s, and the number of scientists toiling in the field has dwindled to just a handful as a result.” This has meant in practice that “there is no scientific consensus on the best approach to limiting gun violence, and the N.R.A. is blocking work that might well lead to such a consensus.”

“Biden: The White House Will Fight NRA’s War On Science” Zack Beauchamp

We know from other areas– evolution and climate change would have to top the list– that the American right is profoundly anti-intellectual and anti-science. They don’t want public funding of science (unless it supports corporate profit) and when science tells them something they don’t want to hear, they start disinformation campaigns. They force religious dogma– creationism– into the school textbooks and they pretend to debunk climate science.

The damage this has done to our intellectual life is probably best measured by the damage to our coastlines, amplified by the public’s unwillingness to support measures that might slow down the global rise in temperature. We are more ignorant, as a culture, than we ought to be and we will be paying the price for decades. I suppose that I knew this but it turns out the right has long used the same tactics in the science of gun violence.

Here, the enforced ignorance, sponsored by the right, has cost us in the sorts of scientific knowledge we might have used to prevent the recent gun massacres. It also makes effective gun control measures now much less effective, which I suppose is the point. I think that restoring this research has to be high on the agenda if we have any hope of real change. It ought to be obvious that We can’t prevent gun violence unless we understand it.

Posted in: Economics, Miscellaneous, Writing

Reasonable Teaching

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Under the new law, which takes effect in January 2014, employees who work at least a 30-hour work week must receive health benefits from their employers. Some colleges are concerned about how to tally up the hours adjuncts spend on the job to determine if they have reached that full-time status. Most adjuncts don’t receive health benefits, and the legislation appeared to pave the way for them to finally get access.

“IRS Says Colleges Must Be ‘Reasonable’ When Calculating Adjuncts’ Work Hours,” Audrey Williams June

One of the most insidious loopholes in labor law is the idea of the part-time and or contract worker. Through that tiny little crack administrators have driven the entire field of higher education teaching right into the ground. As long as you are below 30 hours in a technical sense (never mind the actual hours you work), you can be treated as the proverbial cog in the machine: no benefits or job security or health care or whatever.

This is why, at bottom, we’ve gone from 70% full-time faculty to 70% part-time in the last thirty years or so. Administrators didn’t want to pay benefits; since part-time and contract workers are temporary– “seasonal”?– they don’t need to be paid as much as full-time permanent employees. What’s the best way to save money, then? Make everyone temporary. It’d be great if the ACA was the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

Posted in: Economics, Professional