digital digs

digital publishing rights

Kate Pullinger has an interesting piece in the Guardian that I picked up on from a Dave Parry twitter regarding royalties for writers moving into the digital medium. There seems to be a fair amount of disagreement going on there over what author royalties are typically like (Pullinger says 10-20%) and whether or not going digital incurs so many more costs for the publisher that it ends up being just as expensive as print.

Here's where I imagine the expense coming through:

1. DRM protection and enforcement
2. Creating a quality digital product. That is, if you're going to give it away for free I'm happy with a PDF of the print book, but if you want me to pay for it, then I might expect something more, eh?
3. So many platforms, so little time. Again, if I'm paying, I'm likely to want to "have it my way."
4. Rethinking your industry. We still don't really know what an electronic book is.

Here's the interesting thing, though, and I'm always going back to these stats b/c they are so illuminating of the book industry.

composition and the graphic organizer

So my eight year-old daughter came home today with some information about T-charts. A t-chart is a kind of graphic organizer (imagine a list where you write "should I get a cat?" at the top and then list pros and cons in two columns and you'll get the idea of what a t-chart might look like).

In this t-chart, the student writes the question that has been asked at the top. In the left column, the student writes the "answer" to the question: the sheet notes that "filling in this box really makes you think." OK, if you say so... Anyway, in the right column, the student lists the "details that prove your Answer." The t-chart my daughter receives comes with three bullets already put in. Elsewhere, we are given the essay structure with an "Introduction" where you "Tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em," the "Body" where you "Tell 'em the details!" (and we have previously learned that the optimal number of details is 3), and finally the
"Conclusion" where you "Tell 'em what you told 'em."

Yes, my daughter is being taught the five-paragraph theme. Keep in mind that the person teaching this crap has a graduate degree in Education and received that degree from my own college. So I wonder how you go through all those classes and come out thinking that this is a way to teach writing. What are we doing?

The thing is that the problem isn't really with the concept of the graphic organizer or even the T-chart as a graphic organizer.

more on wasting a liberal education

I see that Will Richardson and Jeff Jarvis have been talking recently on the issue of a "distributed university." This fits in with my earlier discussion about a low-cost or no-cost higher education. Again, everyone wants to point out that we go to college for the certification; that's what we are paying for.

There's an interesting set of contexts here. Of course these are generalizations, but I'll make them anyway.

1. The typical, 18-20 yo college student is not especially interested in learning. They've got a million other things going on in their lives. I've seen enough students struggle to stay on pace in online courses to realize how unlikely the idea of a "distributed university" is for them. Older professionals looking for continuing education, maybe.
2. The standard line is that students aren't interested in "liberal arts" b/c they want a "practical" education that will help them get a job. This may be more true at other schools, but my experience is that this is hardly the case. First, most students have no idea what they want to do. Second, students who do have ideas about what they will be often have very unrealistic ideas (e.g. "Yes it would be great to be an editor for a prestigious literary press and maybe if you work hard for 20 years you'll get there). Third, even students who have realistic career goals often have little idea about what they need to learn to enter those professions.
3. There's a misleading dichotomy that emerges from the traditional and constructivist teaching models as they filter into everyday discourse. You look at the lecture-driven format and say "of course I can get that experience downloading video or audio." Then you look at the constructivist model and say "I can get that experience on a blog or web forum or whatever." However, what most students need, in my experience, are customized, interactive lectures and discussions guided by experts (who are expert in both subject matter AND pedagogy). Furthermore, they need this in a sustained and fairly systematic way that obligates all involved to hundreds of hours over many months: that's just to complete the major requirements for a typical BA.

wasting memory and bandwidth on humanities scholarship

Nice provocative title, eh? I'm still thinking about Chris Anderson's discussion of free (see previous post). As he remarks there, when the cost of memory, bandwidth, and processing speed drops so low as to be essentially free then there is no reason to worry about scarcity or waste. He notes that when things that are so fundamental to how we communicate become free, we are bound to see some significant changes.

Take our own disciplines for example. Peer review in humanities scholarship is kind of a curious thing. First of all it's about reputation: a journal can't have a good reputation unless submissions are peer-reviewed. Second, it's about scarcity, and in some senses an enforced scarcity. That is, paper journals and book publishers have material limits to what can be published. This is both in terms of each issue of a journal and what kinds of journals or books make sense in the marketplace. There is also an enforced scarcity in that peer-reviewed publications only have academic value if some people have them and others don't. If everyone can publish easily then the value of the publication as a unit of currency goes down. Third, it's a mechanism for controlling disciplinary discourses. I don't mean this in a conspiratorial way. It's just simply the case that if you limit the places where scholars can publish articles that "count" then you automatically create a mechanism for controlling the discourse.

Will higher education be free?

Those of you who follow Chris Anderson's blog know that he's been working on a book on the concept of a free economy, and an article on this subject is on the cover of Wired this month. The underlying premise of the article is that the cost of the fundamental technologies of the internet--bandwidth, memory, and processing speed--have become so cheap as to be effectively zero, thus opening up a free economy. Obviously, Google and Yahoo! are tremendously successful examples of this. You can read his article for where he goes with it.

However it got me wondering whether higher education will ever be free.

the obligations of curriculum

An unfortunate incident during our Writers Retreat has me thinking about the obligations of curriculum. In the wider scope of life, it wasn't perhaps the biggest deal, a policy violation, but also a demonstration of disrespect and immaturity. It is something I take seriously, but I don't really want to talk about that but rather about what that event has me thinking today: the obligations of curriculum.

I don't want to be one of those old-timer profs saying "kids today blah blah blah," though I am technically getting old enough to be the age of my students' parents. Honestly, I don't see students today as really being less mature than students when I started here in 2001. However I do think that I have changed. I know I have, and I'm starting to think differently about what I want our program to look like.

why does writing make me such a jerk?

Does this happen to you too? When I'm really working on writing an article, I become nearly insufferable. I become very distant and then argumentative when you can get through to me. I tend to begrudge anything that gets between me and writing.

I know. It's tiresome, cliche even, right? Some people may find this single-mindedness to be an admirable quality. But I don't. I am finding it increasingly unhealthy and certainly not positive. I've been thinking that if the my mental habits of scholarly writing lead to such bad behaviors and mental states, then my mental habits need to be rethought. I don't think, btw, that being intellectual necessitates such bad mental habits.

I just need to pursue a practice of mindful writing. Any suggestions?

open access publishing, harvard and beyond

Perhaps you've seen the announcement from Harvard (also reported in the NY Times) that the Arts and Sciences faculty have voted to create an open access, online repository of their scholarly articles. This led to some discussion on the TechRhet listserv about whether or not the articles were going to be peer-reviewed and accepted by journals before being added to the repository. The reports I've read are not specific, but it looks to me like that will be the case. It will be interesting to see how scholarly journals respond to this shift. Maybe Harvard scholars think their work is so valuable that journals will want to publish it even if it is available somewhere else for free. On the other hand, if Harvard can make it happen, maybe the rest of us can as well. After all, SUNY is a state institution, working for the public; there's a logic in making our work publicly available.

I do think there would be some changes that would need to take place. Most of the significant work of scholarly publication is paid for through faculty salaries. I.e., it's part of our job to do research and write articles; serving as an editor or a reviewer is also an important kind of academic service/scholarly work. Scholarly journals, to my knowledge, never pay anyone for this work. Scholarly journals may pay people to do some line editing or copy editing. They might pay to get layout done. They obviously pay for the printing, binding, and mailing of issues. They handle subscriptions, accounts, advertising, marketing, and various service requests.

The question of copy-editing is a valid one. It's quite possible that in other fields, faculty already pay for some copy-editing assistance. We have student interns who do some copy editing for faculty. Also you would have to have someone who would design and maintain this online repository. You will probably also need to have someone do marketing and handle service issues/tech support related to the website. However, universities already have individuals and departments that do this kind of work.

public pedagogy

I working on the subject of public pedagogy this semester while on sabbatical, specifically the practice of teaching in public, online spaces. It's something I've been doing for a couple semesters now on blogs, wikis, YouTube, Second Life, and so on. It's a subject that I see bringing together several conversations going on in rhetoric and composition and elsewhere.

1. The issue of public pedagogy itself, which I see as primarily an issue of cultural studies and critical pedagogy, but generally I think the idea is to see the classroom as a mechanism of social change.
2. The reshaping of the humanities (and rhet/comp in particular) as disciplines that connect more immediately to everyday people, including our students. Here I see public, online teaching spaces as wonderfully mundane, everyday interfaces with what academics do and say.
3. The Internet as a "public sphere" or democratic force: of course this is a broader ongoing debate that covers everything from issues of access and literacy to complaints about amateurs and the value of knowledge produced online.
4. Preparing students to be critical, productive participants in media networks: really the backbone of the work I do.

Perhaps most interestingly though, at least from a rhet/comp perspective, is how public online pedagogies might address the question John Trimbur considered in his CCC article "Composition and the Circulation of Writing:" "how to imagine writing as more than just the moment of production when meaning gets made. How can we see writing as it circulates through linked moments of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption?"

directions

Picked this up from Scot Barnett's site, Richard Miller presenting to the Rutgers Board of Trustees on the future of English and the 'new humanities"

Of course there's the whole thing about technology and the mildly embarrassing task of feeling that you have to explain to the people running your university what Wikipedia is (not that you wouldn't but it's still disconcerting, right? That people responsible for guiding the overall direction of a university might not have a clue about such matters.). However I was particularly interested in Miller's observation about the role of the humanities in relation to "creativity" and the suggested error we have made in becoming overly focused on the activity of "critique."