Ebooks in Education

From Publishers Weekly:

I have seen the word curated used more and more on bookstores’ websites. As a verb, it indicates that something has been thoughtfully chosen and organized. Does that mean if bookstore buyers disagree with what is published in a book, they should not carry it? Is that not a violation of their customers’ right to choose which books they buy on their own? Shouldn’t the titles they carry on their shelves provide as many different points of views as possible, no matter what the subject?

Let’s consider the following. Has there ever been a time when any independent bookstore or chain did not select the books it wanted to carry? Are we as publishers required to publish every manuscript submitted to us? Are bookstores required to stock every book available? Furthermore, has there ever been a period when a commercial publisher didn’t curate the titles that it was going to publish? The answer is no. The freedom to select books that one either agrees with or not has always been the right of every bookstore and publishing entrepreneur.

At Square One, we publish a number of health books. These titles normally balance traditional medicine with complementary self-care approaches. We believe that people should take some responsibility for their own health. We know that not every bookstore and library is going to buy all of our health titles because of our approach, but what we publish is our choice, just as it is our buyers’ choice to order these titles or to pass on them.

The argument becomes louder and much more confrontational when the questions focus on titles dealing with politics, sexual orientation, religion, and race—but our philosophy remains the same. As publishers, we select the books we want to make available. Does this mean we are somehow violating the First Amendment by virtue of our business practices? Absolutely not.

The industry finally has a growing and more diverse group of publishers and bookstores willing to provide any controversial title to their own markets. We all have the right to select, or curate. Our ability to freely select the books we wish to publish, or as bookstores to carry, is not likely to change—or is it? Decades of efforts by publishers. booksellers, and others has expanded the protections provided by the First Amendment, but now it seems that the concept of book selection may be going in a different, yet all-too-familiar direction with state governments’ eagerness to ban books in schools.

For years, publishers have gone to court to overturn the censorship laws that had existed since the 19th century. Starting in the 1920s, our industry watched as James Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness masterpiece Ulysses was deemed obscene by a court. In the mid-1950s, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita was initially rejected by scores of American publishers because of concerns about its content, and other so-called obscene works like D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer were eventually published in the U.S. despite serious opposition. In other words, generations of publishers fought for and won our right to be treated like grown-ups and allowed to make decisions about our reading tastes for ourselves.

Today, state governments are once again banning books and even certain words in schools and libraries. These actions prevent readers from making their own choices. There are no alternative school libraries for students to visit. Instead, there is a list of titles assembled by special interests and politicians to be banned from schools. For those teachers and school librarians who do not follow these laws, there is a fine and possible loss of employment. This is the real threat to the First Amendment, not accusing private businesses of selecting one book over another.

If publishers and bookstores keep making the wrong choices in the titles they select, they lose money and possibly their business. That is their right—just as it is to be profitable when making the right choices. What these state governments are doing is taking away our rights under the convenient camouflage of “protecting our children.”

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

PG suggests that one person’s curation can be another person’s banning. Public schools are ultimately responsible to the public and the government officials the public elects.

Choosing books for school curricula always entails selecting a small number of books and excluding a larger number. When politics, left, right and/or center, enters the choosing, there is likely to be conflict.

Over his lifetime, PG has seen a substantial expansion of the number of questions and issues about which vocal minorities and majorities disagree with other minorities and majorities.

“Everything is political,” is not, in PG’s humble opinion, a recipe for comity and compromise. Sometimes a book is just a book, not a life or death choice between opposing social, political, religious, etc., values. Children have been ignoring things their teachers tell them or that they read in school books for decades, if not centuries.

From National Public Radio:

Two years ago this month, schools closed their doors in 185 countries. According to UNESCO, roughly 9 out of 10 schoolchildren worldwide were out of school. It would soon be the biggest, longest interruption in schooling since formal education became the norm in wealthier countries in the late 19th century.

At the time, I spoke with several experts in the field of research known as “education in emergencies.” They gave their predictions for the long-term implications of school closures in the United States based on the research on previous school interruptions caused by war, refugee crises, natural disasters and previous epidemics.

Two years on, schools are open and masks are coming off in most places, restoring a feeling of normalcy.

So, how have these predictions played out? Let’s take a look.

Prediction: Student learning will suffer. Vulnerable and marginalized students will be most affected.

Verdict: TRUE

In the United States, compared with wealthy countries in Western Europe and East Asia, schools were typically closed longer. A majority of Black, Hispanic and Asian students stayed remote through early 2021. In the fall of 2020, enrollment dropped, driven by families who sat out pre-K and kindergarten.

All the data we have to date shows students falling behind where they would have been without the interruption. As predicted, these gaps are consistently bigger for low-income, Black and Latino children. This study from November found these gaps were bigger at schools that had less in-person learning in the 2020-2021 school year.

Some of the latest research focuses on students learning to read. One recent study in Virginia found early reading skills at a 20-year low this past fall.

In New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, schools were closed for a few months, and student learning recovered to its previous trajectory after two full school years – and then improved from there. Post-COVID recovery could take even longer.

Prediction: A spike in the high school dropout rate and a fall in college enrollment.

Verdict: MOSTLY TRUE

For the class of 2020, districts relaxed graduation requirements, and students graduated in similar or even improved numbers compared with previous years. For 2021, it was a different story. Data is incomplete, but Chalkbeat reported recently that high school graduation rates were trending down in most states for which they had data. And district superintendents have told NPR they are missing older students who have traded schooling for paid work.

Federal data, meanwhile, show college enrollment is down more than 1 million students over the past two years. This is an international phenomenon that could reduce earnings around the world by a total of $17 trillion if not addressed, the UN predicts.

Link to the rest at National Public Radio

The COVID shutdowns were, among many other things, a huge sociology and psychology experiment for the world. Different nations responded in different ways, but most acted quickly and for most people, a lack of normalcy continued over an extended period of time.

PG suggests that the consequences/results of the COVID period will continue to be analyzed for quite a number of years into the future.

PG remembers reading about/talking about other similar shared shocks in somewhat recent history.

1. Everyone in the United States who alive and cognizant of world affairs remembered where they were and what they were doing when they learned that the Japanese had attacked Peral Harbor.
2. Everyone in the United States (and perhaps elsewhere) (alive and cognizant) remembers where they were when they learned that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated.
3. Everyone in a much more media connected world remembers where they were when they heard that the World Trade Center in New York City was destroyed by hijacked airliners and recalls the experience of watching replays of that event over and over again on television.

These were shared events that shocked nearly everyone, traumatized more than a few and left lasting memories and, for more than a few, consequences thereafter.

Each event was different in significant ways, but the communal disruption and group emotional impact had some similar emotional impacts, short-term and long-term and certainly resulted in a more consequential communal impact than other memories during the relevant time period. PG suggests that COVID will be another such disruptive and traumatizing event, different in some ways from earlier events/periods, but similar in others.

Psychiatrists and psychologists will be picking up the pieces for a long period of time. Millions of news stories and think-pieces and masters/doctoral theses will result. Urban legends will proliferate.

From Document Journal:

In public libraries, information is truly free. And private. In many ways, libraries are the forefathers of privacy, and perhaps the greatest remaining champions of it. The books you check out are exclusively your business unless you choose to post a picture of the final pages of Infinite Jest to prove you actually did read it, recommend the latest Sally Rooney to your book club for single women, or accessorize with a vintage copy of Dune as a mark that your sci-fi interests expand beyond the screen. Librarians live under the same code of confidentiality as doctors and lawyers: if you check out a self-help tape on how to jumpstart your love life, that’s between you and the guy behind the counter (who will pass it over without judgement). But in an age where information is largely digital, free public library cards are replaced by tempting academic studies with paywalls and hyperlinked research to even more paywalls.

It seems that digitally-hosted information not only often comes with a price, but also compromises privacy for those who choose to pay said price. After being exposed on Twitter by an independent researcher, Elsevier, one of the world’s largest publishers of academic papers, admitted to adding a unique fingerprint to every PDF its users downloaded. Elsevier told Vice, “The identifier in the PDF helps to prevent cybersecurity risks to our systems and to those of our customers—there is no metadata, PII [Personal Identifying Information], or personal data captured by these. Fingerprinting in PDFs allows us to identify potential sources of threats so we can inform our customers for them to act upon. This approach is commonly used across the academic publishing industry.”

Elsevier’s history of legal pursuit against those who pirate and share paywalled articles suggests that this outward commitment to the cybersecurity of their users may actually be a mask for surveillance. Perhaps instead of pursuing gross legal fees to sue those trying to equalize access to primary sources (which has led to universities boycotting Elsevier, who then loses even more money), the publisher would be better off fundraising to subsidize subscriber fees or developing a free-access program for low income users.

The information we consume now is largely filtered through media conglomerates and so-called expert commentators. When a news giant shares what might be fake news that references a paywalled source, a reader with access to the hyperlinked study is able to form their own take on it. If that access is restricted, they put their faith in the giant. I can say with fair certainty that people are more likely to fact-check their news sources if they don’t have to pay to fact-check them. Secondhand accounts can be useful in breaking down academic jargon and giving the busy reader a highlight reel, but equalizing access to information produces stronger bases for debate and dilutes the power of algorithmically powerful secondary sources.

It seems almost nonsensical that much paywalled content is produced by universities who then pay to get that paywall down for students whose tuition then goes up for such subscriptions. (Yes, this is a gross oversimplification of what is happening, but you get what I mean.) How can we keep complaining about the complete idiocy of our country when there are obvious solutions? Free community college! Free trade schools! Add financial literacy and how to navigate government resources to high school curriculums! At the very least, make information free and accessible.

Link to the rest at Document Journal

PG spent almost three unhappy years working at a large subsidiary of Elsevier catering to lawyers a long time ago.

It was truly amazing to observe the possessive attitude the company had toward documents it had not authored and, in many cases, documents that, as a matter of public policy, should have been widely distributed at no charge in PG’s irrefutably humble opinion because they were created by employees of state and federal governments.

PG’s employer during those ancient times earned a substantial amount of money for providing these documents to lawyers via one or more computer networks.

PG suggests that colleges and universities should provide substantial incentives for their employees to publish in journals that don’t live behind a paywall.

Given that the overwhelming majority of articles that appear in academic journals are written by employees of public universities or tax-exempt private universities and colleges and that the expert editorial review of these articles prior to publication is virtually always provided by other employees of the same sorts of people, it’s grossly unfair for those same educational institutions to pay exorbitant fees to access those journals.

This is one of those sort of traditional practices that “works” but which is seriously harmed by the nature and greed of the very profitable companies who have managed to set themselves up as gate-keepers for knowledge created by others who don’t require any compensation for the use of their creations.

PG hasn’t seen a publishing agreement from an academic publisher of this type for a very long time. If any of the visitors to TPV have a copy of a recent academic publishing contract, PG would love to see it. Feel free to black out your name and identifying information before sending it or PG will do it for you after he receives it.

From The Wall Street Journal:

Oakland University didn’t top Matthew Henry’s list when he started hunting for colleges in Michigan to attend. But one visit to the spacious campus, situated on a serene 1,400-acre estate donated by the heiress to the Dodge auto-making fortune, sold him on the school.

Four years after making that decision, the 21-year-old senior is capping an education made possible, in significant part, by a corporate behemoth from another part of the world. German industrial giant Siemens AG provided software, instruction, curriculum, technical support and sophisticated gadgetry to make Mr. Henry and his fellow Industrial and Systems Engineering classmates fluent in some of the most used tools in the profession they aim to pursue.

“Siemens has no doubt played a bigger role than I gave much thought to before starting,” Mr. Henry says. He came to find out that his chosen focus would require learning what is equivalent to a software language. Siemens’ “Tecnomatix” digital manufacturing programs are a fixture in Oakland’s department.

Robert Van Til, director of Oakland’s Industrial and Systems Engineering program, says experiences like Mr. Henry’s are a meaningful template for future students of design, engineering and other sciences. While companies have long provided grants, engaged in joint research, funded scholarships, and offered internships or apprenticeships, an era of close-knit working relationships between companies and undergraduates in classrooms at four-year universities is now getting under way.

. . . .

Tim Sands, the president of Virginia Tech, says that student experience with real-world corporate problems will become table stakes in the job market in years to come. Students “really need to be embedded within an employer that has real-life problems, and to look at how they solve those problems,” he says.

Mr. Sands has welcomed several corporate partners to Virginia Tech’s campus in Blacksburg, including Qualcomm Inc., Caterpillar Inc. and General Electric Co. New initiatives require students to spend extensive time working on the actual riddles companies are trying to solve to get a degree.

Partnerships like this remain somewhat rare, Mr. Van Til says, but they are a hot subject at education conferences. “There’s a real push to get academic programs to actually take the tools like these and integrate them.”

Elizabeth Popp Berman, a University of Michigan professor of organizational studies and author of “Creating the Market University,” says there have long been critics of corporate meddling in four-year universities. Often, funding from companies for research or other academic pursuits comes with strings attached, she says.

Corporate involvement in curriculum may also narrow the skills that students pursue, ignoring information or career pathways that may not apply to a company’s business.

But colleges are more open to corporate partnerships as budgets are squeezed and student debt loads rise, Ms. Berman says. “The tighter the budget the institution has, the more open they are going to be,” she says. “It’s hard to reject this support outright because of the position the students are in.” Companies also offer deep-pocketed support for a “practical applied model” that doesn’t break the bank, she says.

The Siemens partnership, partially funded by the company, has been on Oakland’s campus for a decade and serves hundreds of students. They have used the partnership to complete projects at hospitals, banks and aerospace companies. To set up a facility like the Siemens lab where Mr. Henry studies would cost a university hundreds of thousands of dollars, not including steep licensing fees for software and tech support.

“We’re not asking them to create a factory or our employees for the future,” says Barbara Humpton, the CEO of Siemens’ U.S. operations. Siemens isn’t necessarily hiring all the students who use its tools in class, she says, but it expects those students could work for Siemens customers or suppliers.

Caterpillar, International Business Machines Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. have implemented similar efforts. A company’s branding on curriculum and classroom instruction is often unmistakable.

Students at Cal Poly University’s Digital Transformation Hub walk through a door proclaiming the department is “powered by AWS,” short for the Amazon Web Services cloud-computing product. Here, students participate in the AWS Cloud Innovation Center, about a dozen of which are embedded at schools around the country.

Instead of being a classic sponsorship, like an advertising deal at the university’s football stadium, programs like the Cloud Innovation Center are staffed by Amazon employees, bringing Amazon business principles into formal education. In this case, students interested in solving public-sector problems learn how to think like an Amazon employee; the company’s leadership principles, such as “customer obsession,” are taught in college workshops.

Paul Jurasin, director of the Hub, says the partnership is designed “to provide our students with learn-by-doing activities.” Amazon funds the operation but knows that most who go through it will use Amazon Web Services as clients or in outside organizations instead of as Amazon employees, a spokeswoman says.

. . . .

A task force assembled by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities found in 2017 that such relationships are becoming more attractive as institutions look “to attract the resources, relationships and recognition necessary for these institutions to be competitive in an environment marked by declining state funding and continued questions on the value proposition of public higher education.”

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.)

Nothing exactly to do with books, but PG thinks these sort of educational activities would have been much less boring than most of his college classes were.

From Slate:

When schools closed this spring, many parents, including me, felt overwhelmed and underwater trying to help our children participate in distance learning. Every day seemed to usher in a new way for my husband and me to fail at reading emails, managing logins, printing worksheets, troubleshooting tech problems, photographing assignments, and keeping track of class Zooms. Being an educator as well as a parent gave my experience a particularly nightmarish quality, as if I were somehow both the driver and pedestrian in this collision. As a teacher, I participated in a flurry of trainings on using various apps to make videos, find e-books, host meetings, use data, and share student work, but as a parent, I could not keep up.

It doesn’t have to be this hard. School closures brought a cascade of serious problems, from declining maternal workforce participation to child hunger, many of which will require broader government intervention to solve—but streamlining remote instruction is well within schools’ institutional capabilities. A viral video of an Israeli mom venting about the nonstop barrage of communications her kids were receiving from their school spoke to the frustrations many families felt trying to keep their heads above water in a fast-moving stream of assignments and online resources. That’s not a problem that is going to be solved by adding another app to the mix, but there is a tool that can help, one that works even if the internet cuts out and isn’t full of distractions a click away. It’s not new, and it won’t disrupt education as we know it, but in a time of upheaval, steep learning curves, and decision fatigue, there’s a lot to be said for the familiar. As districts invest millions in distributing Chromebooks and helping families secure internet access—a necessity for keeping kids connected to their teachers and to school—they should also make plans to invest in and distribute another essential learning tool: the textbook.

. . . .

For 150 years, the textbook was a mainstay of American classrooms. Their progenitor was the McGuffey Readers, of which an estimated 120 million copies were sold between 1836 and 1960. Written by frontier teacher and scholar William Holmes McGuffey, the original Readers contained literary selections that promoted Calvinist ideas about salvation and piety, while later editions were secularized in keeping with the nation’s changing mores. These days, the Readers are better known for their role in shaping American identity and culture than for how they changed teaching and learning. But although they seem stuffy and moralistic to contemporary eyes, the Readers represented an important pedagogical step forward in their time and spoke to the real needs of students McGuffey witnessed, first as a roving teacher who began working in schoolhouses at age 14 and later when he tested his textbooks with groups of neighborhood children in Ohio. The Readers were organized into levels across which students would progress over time, from phonics, through basal stories, all the way up to selections from Milton. Vocabulary was taught gradually by repeated exposure to words in context instead of being doled out in a list for memorization. Unlike their predecessor the New England Primer, which was designed to put the fear of God into children, the Readers were designed to be appealing to children, and incorporated helpful, clear illustrations.

Crucially, the McGuffey Readers also guided teachers, who at the time were often poorly prepared, educated only a year or two beyond their pupils, and working with large, mixed-age groups of students. The Readers embedded good pedagogy on the page by including questions for teachers to ask their students, and numbered passages so students could take turns reading aloud. Imagine—a year’s worth of assignments, compiled in an appealing edition, accompanied by instructions for what the poorly prepared adult in the room can say to help. Sure sounds like something that I, a woman who misled a 5-year-old on number bonds for three whole months, could have used this spring.

At their core, textbooks are a way to distribute the essential content of a class to a massive group of students in a way that is standardized and economical. A good textbook is clear, appealing, and organized in a predictable way. It’s not just paragraphs of text, but it also includes extratextual features such as reference materials, answer keys, sidebars, and key terms to aid students in their comprehension.

. . . .

For cash-strapped districts, cheap Chromebooks and software licenses are often less expensive in the short term than purchasing sets of hardcover books. It isn’t just wealthy districts that are making these investments in technology. But the phasing out of print textbooks in favor of online texts and learning software has been driven by ideology, too. Since 2015, textbook sales have declined year over year while the EdTech sector has ballooned into a $252 billion business. In 2019, Pearson sold off its textbook arm in order to focus on its more lucrative educational software business. In a 2012 article (which in hindsight reads as overly optimistic not only about online textbooks but about algorithms, the internet, and the future in general, but was very much in line with the zeitgeist in education at the time) Megan Garber writes of Apple’s e-textbooks, “They create a kind of kaleidoscopic experience: video, text, audio, all whirring and whirling into each other in a self-guided tour of history or chemistry or biology.” To my tech-fried pandemic brain, that seems like a bit much. In 2020, I’d like to pass on teaching sixth grade language arts—or helping my child understand second grade math for that matter—through a widening gyre of multimedia experiences.

Link to the rest at Slate

PG suggests that kids who are digital natives do just fine with ebook versions of textbooks.

He’s also skeptical about paper vs. screen comprehension studies that have been conducted using children who are not digital natives.

FWIW, PG’s own experience is that his comprehension for long-form texts is somewhat better with a Kindle Paperwhite screen than an iPad screen. However, he doubts his comprehension of textbook-style pages would vary in the same way.