Category Archives: Writing

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.

Earlier this month I attended a UNESCO Educational Leaders Forum sponsored by Microsoft. The forum’s theme was thinking through the challenges that lie in the future of higher education and to focus on the vision, barriers, and strategies to address these challenges as they develop.

The vision discussed by a number of panelists (see http://blogs.msdn.com/elf08/default.aspx ) was that we should be using technology enhanced active learning strategies to improve student learning. One of the primary barriers to doing this was a traditional faculty and organizational culture that relies on the lecture method as the primary instructional strategy.

Current approaches to broaden the instructional repertoires of faculty members include faculty workshops, summer leave, and individual consultations, but these approaches work only for those relatively few early adopter faculty members who seek out opportunities to broaden their instructional methods. The major problem is how to affect organizational culture as a whole so that most professors will be receptive to adopting active learning methods and using IT tools to enhance the effectiveness of these methods in their classes.

Addressing the problem of faculty resistance to using IT tools in active learning instructional strategies, James Morrison on July 21, 2008 at 2:36pm

I know I shouldn’t be so hard on my own tribe, but the myopia of academia drives me a little crazy sometimes. This is a fine piece, and it generated some interesting discussions. Clearly these are people who care about teaching and who have a lot of good ideas about how to improve it. Yet it’s a discussion that seems to happen in an ivory tower vacuum.

To make the void visible you just have to consider this idea of a “teacher who resists new technology” that lies at the heart of the debate engendered by the essay. They certainly don’t mean online education faculty, for example. In my experience, too, most community colleges have long since incorporated the computer and the web into their classrooms.

If there’s resistance at Community Colleges, it’s probably due to a lack of funding or a concern with student’s lack of access. They are also not talking about graduate students, or the adjuncts who teach the majority of classes in many subject areas, especially in the first few years of a degree plan. Unless they have a union, they have to take what they get, more or less.

The so-called junior faculty in public universities are likely a mixed bag. Most are perfectly comfortable with these new technologies, but not all of them feel it is appropriate in the classroom. There’s a kind of “reverse chic” phenomena too; it’s the same thing that created College Republican fads several times over the last three decades. Just say no to something.

So what this term means, to a large extent, is tenured and often reactionary faculty. They have the power and status necessary to resist the introduction of new technology into the classroom. Maybe that’s good in some ways: slowing down the system might help ameliorate pedagogical consumerism. Teachers, like everyone else, tend to want every shinny new toy.

In my experience, though, the real problem isn’t with what these faculty do in their classroom. History will just past them by in time. The real problems is that they too often see themselves as romantic refuseniks, last hold outs against the coming robot Apocalypse. Honestly, that’s hardly an exaggeration. That makes discussions of change nearly impossible.

When the Online School for Girls flickers to life this fall on computer screens across the country, students will take part in an unusual experiment that joins two trends: girls-only schooling and online teaching.

A consortium that includes the 108-year-old Holton-Arms School in Bethesda is driving the project, in the belief that girls can benefit from an Internet curriculum tailored just to them.

“There’s been a lot of research done on how girls learn differently with technology than boys,” said Brad Rathgeber, Holton-Arms’s director of technology. “Part of this is a little bit of theory that we’re trying to put in practice to see if it really does play out.”
Md. School Joins Test of Online Courses Tailored to Girls

Md. School Joins Test of Online Courses Tailored to Girls, Michael Birnbaum, Washington Post, Monday, July 6, 2009

Jujutsu, my father once told me, was all about using your opponent’s own weight against him. Or her, in this case. That’s what’s so interesting about these single gender courses. Patriarchal culture pushes everyone into polarized genders, girls on one side, boys on the other. Of course, biological life is much more nuanced than this simple binary implies.

Still, we all grow up inside these oppositions and the oppositions grow up in us, too, helping to shape everything from work to family. The usual counter-impulse (or at least the usual modern liberal impulse) is to try to create little gender utopias, especially in the classroom. If we can only learn to treat everyone equally, then we will achieve equality.

Culture turns out to be just as nuanced as nature, and we seem to have hit some sort of wall. In very specific ways, and despite a lot of effort to fix the problem, girls don’t do as well as boys in certain subjects. (Boys have their own distinct difficulties.) Single sex classrooms have had some success, particularly in science. It’ll be interesting to see if this works online too.