Historiann

You're a renter, not an owner.

(And drooling on an e-book when you fall asleep reading can be a messy, expensive, and potentially life-threatening proposition!)

I know many of you didn’t believe me, but here’s the testimony of a Kindle-ized author and former true believer:

[W]hen the Kindle edition of my book came out, the publisher set the price at $27.95. They also raised the price of the hardback by $5.05. It’s the difference between the electronic and physical copy of the book that matters, I figured, not the cost of the book itself.

What sent me over the edge is when I saw that Amazon.com is charging more for the Kindle version of David McCullough’s new book than they are for the hardback (at least as of the moment that I’m writing this). This tells me that the pricing for Kindle editions has become totally untethered from economic reality, and that can’t be good for consumers. Certainly, it costs more to produce the physical book than it does to deliver the e-version. All the savings from an electronic edition of McCullough’s book are therefore flowing to Amazon rather than readers. Readers should demand better.

Instead, Amazon.com believes that their Kindle customers are willing to pay more for this fleeting edition than they are the thing which is permanent. Continue Reading »

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Jonathan Rees hits another one out of the park today with “When Professors Disappear,” his demolition of the magical thinking about online courses, for-profit colleges, and the labor history that reveals the insidiousness of these phenomena.  (And, something silly someone said in the New York Times about disappearing professors because the internets will replace us, or something.)  I’d like to just quote the whole thing, but that would be plagiarism, but here’s some flava:

Proponents of distance education might tell you something about how wonderful it is that students can learn all the way from India or in their pajamas, but anybody who knows anything about labor history knows that this kind of large-scale technological investment is really all about costs. Professors demand salaries. Cut out the professors and save the cost of their salaries.

But that’s where the labor history analogy breaks down. The Bonsack cigarette rolling machine not only destroyed the jobs of untold thousands of workers, it led to really, really cheap cigarettes. Online education, an education so bad that some employers won’t even consider someone with a degree earned from a for-profit college administered this way, is actually seven times more expensive than a real education at a typical community college. Professors haven’t disappeared entirely yet, but obviously none of the cost-savings from online education have been passed on to students. Since even online courses with poorly-paid adjuncts save schools so much money in costs compared to real classes, shouldn’t they cost less rather than seven times more?

Jonathan, I’m sure we’re just too stupid to understand all of that awesome free enterprise, for-profit magic!  Continue Reading »

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According to an “unprecedented study that followed several thousand undergraduates through four years of college,” students aren’t learning “the critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communication skills that are widely assumed to be at the core of a college education.”  (H/t to commenter quixote for bringing this to my attention.)  How now? 

Many of the students graduated without knowing how to sift fact from opinion, make a clear written argument or objectively review conflicting reports of a situation or event, according to New York University sociologist Richard Arum, lead author of the study. The students, for example, couldn’t determine the cause of an increase in neighborhood crime or how best to respond without being swayed by emotional testimony and political spin.

Arum, whose book “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses” (University of Chicago Press) comes out this month, followed 2,322 traditional-age students from the fall of 2005 to the spring of 2009 and examined testing data and student surveys at a broad range of 24 U.S. colleges and universities, from the highly selective to the less selective.

But, wait, good readers!  There’s an interesting small fact you find only when you read all the way to the end.  Dig this:

Students who majored in the traditional liberal arts — including the social sciences, humanities, natural sciences and mathematics — showed significantly greater gains over time than other students in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills.

Students majoring in business, education, social work and communications showed the least gains in learning. Continue Reading »

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She no can say dat

 I LOLed, anyway.  Bonus LOL:  someone put it on Twitter!  (Well, part of it.  It’s more than 140 characters.)

I couldn’t have said it more emphatically myself.

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I hate–I mean–I love to say “I told you so!”  Online privacy and discretion:  it’s not just for the teenagers and young adults whom we love to lecture about this.  And you don’t even have to be in confessional mode to give up a lot of intel to teh fB, as it turns out!

Yes, I know:  I have a blog, so what the heck am I doing standing up for privacy and discretion on the world wide non-peer reviewed intertubes?  Well, those of you who know me in real life understand that this blog represents only a highly selective part of my personal life, and is mostly about my professional identity.  Those of you who don’t know me in RL–well, let’s just say you’re not missing much, but you’re missing enough for me not to wonder if I’ve overshared here. Continue Reading »

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Reader and commenter truffula sent this along last week.  She writes, “A colleague dared me to send the attached page from the January 1960 issue of Popular Science to our [University] President via campus mail.  Not that he needs any encouragement from the rabble.”  I thought you all might enjoy this glimpse of futures past, since many of you live with its ghosts (“distance education,” on-line classes, ”concurrent enrollment,” and whatever brilliant moneysaving or -making scheme they think of next.) Continue Reading »

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At least a dozen ways to stoopid, by Froma Harrop:

Bill Gates recently predicted: “Five years from now on the Web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world. It will be better than any single university.”

A year at a university costs an average $50,000, the Microsoft founder and Harvard dropout said last month. The Web can deliver the same quality education for $2,000.

Yet American colleges continue to float in the bubble of economic exceptionalism once occupied by Detroit carmakers.  American median income has grown 6.5 times over the past 40 years, but the cost of attending one’s own state college has ballooned 15 times. This kind of income-price mismatch haunted the housing market right before it melted down.

.       .       .       .       .       .       .       .      

As the father of a student at Kenyon College told me, “It’s like driving a new Corvette to Ohio every September, leaving the keys and taking the bus home.”

This reminds me of that old Calgon bath salts commercial:  internets, take us away!!!  So why does that father choose to do what Harrop implies is the economically irrational thing and continue to drive that Corvette every autumn to Ohio?  Gee, I wonder! Continue Reading »

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Unimpressive in actual classroom applications

Did anyone else hear this story on NPR last night about how allegedly the iPad is finally going to end the suckitude of e-textbooks?  Except the content of the story seemed to undermine the headline–it was all about how badly the Kindle sucked and how students were reluctant to buy their own iPads because they still kind of suck.  (They were happy to use the free iPads offered in trials for e-texts, though.)  The interview with Reed College Political Scientist Alex Montgomery-Amo is pretty much what I would have predicted:

Last year they tried out the Kindle and this year they’ve been given free iPads to test. Montgomery-Amo says they’re hoping to have better luck with the iPad than they had with the Kindle.

“That went … I think horribly would be a good way of putting it,” he says. “The problem is that the Kindle is less interactive than a piece of paper in that the paper, you can quickly write notes in the margin or star something or highlight something, and the Kindle was so slow at highlighting and making notes that the students stopped reading them as scholarly texts and started reading them like novels.”

The result, according to Montgomery-Amo, is that his students didn’t understand the material as well as they did when using a traditional textbook.

To make matters worse, he says the Kindle proved unable to keep up with the class discussion — it would take half a minute to load a page and by then, the discussion would have lost its momentum.

I absolutely understand the allure of e-texts.  Codex textbooks are heavy, expensive, and they use a lot of paper–there should be a better way, shouldn’t there be?  Except:  the “better way” has to actually be better than the codex edition.  Continue Reading »

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Undine has some useful thoughts about paper and its irreplaceability.  She notes that there are some instances in our professional lives as academics when hard copies of documents are not just preferable, they’re irreplaceable:

Sometimes paper just works better, and we ought to be able to acknowledge that.

Example: An upcoming conference is making the program available either in e-form or in paper form. I applaud the decision on a conceptual level, but it left me in a dilemma. Since I felt guilty ordering the paper form because of all the green rhetoric surrounding the choice, I ordered the e-version, but who am I kidding? I’ve tried getting .pdfs on a Blackberry screen, and even if the document doesn’t fail to download and go into a holding pattern, which it does about 90% of the time, the print is too tiny to read.

What I’ll probably do is print some pages before I go, but I’d really rather have a booklet so that I can mark the sessions in case I change my mind later. I won’t know where I’m going at the conference, but at least I won’t have a conference program that pegs me as a Despoiler of the Earth.  Continue Reading »

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I call bull$hit on this article in the New York Times today, which suggests that “digital age” students just don’t think copying and pasting stuff from the world wide non-peer reviewed internets into their papers and putting their names on said papers is plagiarism. 

Digital technology makes copying and pasting easy, of course. But that is the least of it. The Internet may also be redefining how students — who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking — understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image.

“Now we have a whole generation of students who’ve grown up with information that just seems to be hanging out there in cyberspace and doesn’t seem to have an author,” said Teresa Fishman, director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University. “It’s possible to believe this information is just out there for anyone to take.”

It’s the “I can’t help it–the intertoobz rewired my brainz!” story.  Riiiiiight.  What aside from a few of the most dumba$$ anecdotal examples is the evidence for this alleged generational cluelessness about plagiarism? 

In surveys from 2006 to 2010 by Donald L. McCabe, a co-founder of the Center for Academic Integrity and a business professor at Rutgers University, about 40 percent of 14,000 undergraduates admitted to copying a few sentences in written assignments.

Perhaps more significant, the number who believed that copying from the Web constitutes “serious cheating” is declining — to 29 percent on average in recent surveys from 34 percent earlier in the decade.

Wow!  All the way from 34 percent to 29 percent over nearly a decade!  Continue Reading »

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