“Now write that a hundred times”

I haven’t used this one yet, have I?:

Another problem with the Kindle: You can’t write on the pages.

Look’s like it’s time for another Kindle post. I must have skipped over the part of the Nicholson Baker article that Stan Katz is referring to here:

He [meaning Baker in the New Yorker] also reports that Amazon has struck a deal with several universities, Princeton among them, to test the DX’s “potential as a replacement for textbooks and paper printouts of courseware.” Our participation is partially supported by an environmental foundation, since one of the university’s objectives is to cut down on the huge number of pages of copy-paper used by students to print out their e-reserve assignments.

As it happens, I am one of the three instructors who have volunteered to participate in our Kindle DX pilot project. Unlike Nicholson, my default is to give technology a chance, and I am curious to see what it will be like to use the Kindle device for my course reading assignments. I should mention that the predictable has already happened, and an ADA suit alleging discrimination against the visually-impaired has been brought against one or more of the institutions piloting class use of the Kindle. We had planned from the start to make use of the device optional for students, so I hope this will not be a problem for us.

Textbooks? Really? Even in the pre-Nicholson baker days when I was still coveting a Kindle I never imagined using it for textbooks, but of course Amazon did since they want a slice of the dough. If this could actually bring down the cost for students, I probably ought to support that effort. But I can’t.

In every class I teach, I recommend to students that they mark up their textbooks. That means bending pages, hi-lighting and especially writing what they think of particularly important passages as they encounter them. This is not just to make writing papers easier because it’s easier to find the quotations you’ll use as evidence, critically engaging the book helps them read better.

Sure searching the text of a book is nice. Indeed, I use that function on Google Books all the time now, but you can’t write a paper that requires a deep reading of the book that way. Is it even possible to skim if you have to push a button to turn the page?

Kindles strike me as a great tool for reading novels on airplanes, but I really hope they don’t kill marginalia. How else can people make all their books unique?

Update: My apologies to Amazon. Apparently you can make margin notes on a Kindle. However, it seems that Amazon can also delete them, so that last question still stands.

Doesn’t the style you choose depend upon your audience?

Reaccessed from my del.icio.us feed to the right, it’s Stephen J. Pyne in the Chronicle of Higher Ed:

It may be that the scientific model of the grant-supported article is becoming more dominant, or that the simple production of data has become a sufficient justification for scholarship. Surely one reason is that research seminars offer enough time to compose an essay or a journal article but not a book, or even a book chapter. Perhaps an obsession with historiography has blocked interest in historical writing as literature, or the belief has arisen that the best way to meet the challenges of postmodern literary criticism is to deny its claims altogether, particularly since the contamination of memoir by fictional devices has tainted the whole question of applying “literary” techniques, borrowed from fiction, to nonfiction sources.

It may be simply that most of us don’t know how to teach writing —real writing, which is to say, finding the means to express what we want to say. Instead we defer to the off-the-shelf formulas of the favored journals and the thesis-evidence-conclusion style of traditional dissertations.

Yes, it’s another “history isn’t relevant” article in a major national publication. Here’s a quick story: The most useful panel I’ve ever been to at an AHA was last year in New York. It was about publishing for trade presses and included an agent, a publishing exec and a couple of prominent authors. Ever since, I’ve been asking all the prominent historians I’ve met about their experiences in that world and they’ve been thriving. One of them – a labor historian, no less – has an agent shopping his book around Hollywood.

Perhaps Stephen J. Pyne and I just meet different people, but I do agree with most of this:

For some scholarly writing, the prevailing formulas are sufficient, and part of good writing is recognizing when they work. Yet they often falter when confronted with new ideas, and learning how to adapt traditional templates to the actual requirements of the material and the enthusiasms of the writer is a craft that can be learned, and even taught.

Without departmental support, however, writing with literary imagination is not only difficult to teach but detrimental to graduate students because they will not get credited for the work nor be allowed by dissertation committees to use what they have learned. Before writing can be taught seriously to graduate students in history, their professors will have to agree on what good writing means, decide that it matters, and accept themes as well as theses. Before we can educate students about good writing, we may have to re-educate their teachers.

It’s funny that he puts it this way, because my friend Scott Martelle has kindly been re-educating me in order to write for a popular audience. Scratch that. It’s not a re-education, he’s helping me learn a different set of conventions for a different audience. It’s not like I’m going to give up writing scholarly articles with lots of evidence, it’s rather that I’m learning an additional way to write in order to attract additional readers.

And, of course, if I didn’t have tenure, I wouldn’t even consider doing this. Your audience may small in some journal with a subscription list of 200 libraries, but your audience is an important one. Professors with grad students should be preparing them to please that crowd if they want to stay in the professoriate.

I, on the other hand, am enjoying the freedom to try new things. It’s not re-education, it’s just lifelong learning.

There goes that Kindle I wanted for Christmas.

This morning I got to read the New Yorker article by Nicholson Baker which tears the Kindle to pieces. It didn’t seem all that devastating until I got to the end:

[I]f you want to read electronic books there’s another way to go. Here’s what you do. Buy an iPod Touch (it costs seventy dollars less than the Kindle 2, even after the Kindle’s price was recently cut), or buy an iPhone, and load the free “Kindle for iPod” application onto it. Then, when you wake up at 3 A.M. and you need big, sad, well-placed words to tumble slowly into the basin of your mind, and you don’t want to wake up the person who’s in bed with you, you can reach under the pillow and find Apple’s smooth machine and click it on. It’s completely silent. Hold it a few inches from your face, with the words enlarged and the screen’s brightness slider bar slid to its lowest setting, and read for ten or fifteen minutes. Each time you need to turn the page, just move your thumb over it, as if you were getting ready to deal a card; when you do, the page will slide out of the way, and a new one will appear….

Forty million iPod Touches and iPhones are in circulation, and most people aren’t reading books on them. But some are. The nice thing about this machine is (a) it’s beautiful, and (b) it’s not imitating anything. It’s not trying to be ink on paper.

My wife has an iPod Touch, so we did precisely this. [It turns out the application is actually called "Kindle for iPhone." It works the same on both devices.] Then we downloaded a free sample chapter of a bestseller I might actually want to read some day. And guess what? It worked exactly the way Baker described. You can even change the print size like on an Kindle and it looked perfectly fine to me.

The root of Amazon’s problem is then not necessarily that the Kindle works badly. I’ve played around with other people’s to have previously coveted one. The problem is why should anyone go out and buy a Kindle when there are other devices out there that work just as well AND do other things besides display books? The only way I can see around this is to come out with a Kindle phone, but people will look pretty stupid hold a page-shaped device up to the ears.

PS: I hate to sound materialistic, but it’s more for my wife’s sake (since she has trouble buying anything for me): If I’m not getting a Kindle, what interesting new-fangled electronic gizmo should I put at the top of my Christmas list? And don’t be shy about making suggestions in the comments as she doesn’t read the blog.

John Muir.

I just made it through Donald Worster’s new biography of John Muir. The first two chapters are as dull as dishwater, but the rest of it was just riveting. Really. I had no idea what happened next since it was all brand new to me.

One of the great things about Google Books is that after you finish reading a book like this, you can go online and read all the primary sources. The above is from Our National Parks (1901).

Omniscient British narrators rock.

Yes, I know he’s way too far right for someone like me, but as I’ve said before here I like Niall Ferguson. Even though I had already read the book, I started watching “The Ascent of Money” when I was in Australia and was totally hooked. I liked the book a lot, but the series is much better. There’s something about omniscient British narrators traveling around the world that just screams authority. Think David Attenborough.

Shockingly, only now did I think of looking for the rest of “The Ascent of Money” now that I’m home. Rather than see it chopped up on YouTube, here is Episode One on Google Video:

If you go to the original site, there are many if not all – I haven’t checked yet – the other episodes in the 15 pages of related video.

PowerPoint = Slide Projector. Google Image Search = Library.

It appears as if two of my favorite bloggers are separated by about 180 degrees by the same article. In this corner, we have Margaret Soltan:

If I were king, enlightened deans would see that most instances of PowerPoint use in the classroom are lazy and irresponsible and even inhuman. They would understand that PowerPoint breeds a robotic remoteness and simple-mindedness in professors that in turn breeds boredom in students. These deans would firmly discourage their teaching staff from using PowerPoint.

In the other corner, we have Eric Rauchway with “Bullet points don’t bore people, people do,” which is a follow-up to this post.

Although I’m probably closer to Eric on this one (maybe it’s a history thing), I want to aim for the middle here. I remember a professor from grad school who could lecture without notes and about an hour and fifteen minutes in I would hear him say something like, “Roman Numeral IV (A) 1.” Of course, I was so bored I couldn’t remember any of the other signposts, but they weren’t really for me. They were for him. That’s how he remembered what he wanted to say. Unfortunately, the idea that I was going to take in that much sociology in one sitting was just laughable. Bullet pointers out there ought to remember this. To assume everyone cares about your 16 slides of solid bullet points, especially when they are forced to listen to you, is just hubris. In fact, it’s educational malpractice.

Pictures, on the other hand (and maybe even film clips) – now that’s another story. Here’s Rauchway:

The added value of a lecture should be that you are constructing a performance to lead students through an argument in a way they’ll absorb and remember better than if they’d merely read it. You make your argument memorable by the usual methods—enthusiasm and wit—but also by keeping students’ attention. A little visual demonstration, perhaps a slightly surprising one, is a harmless and often effective way of doing so.

Absolutely true. But the visual demonstration doesn’t have to just be for entertainment purposes, it could be part of the education itself. For example, I remember in the pre-PowerPoint Era trying to describe this picture to students:

Back then I could only explain that the power of this suicide was in the monk’s eerie calm, but now I can show it. Sure it’s a cliché, but a picture really can speak a thousand words.

Here’s another one I just started using recently:

Again, I can talk about the slaughter of the buffalo, but don’t you think you’re more likely to remember it if you actually see it?

I say use PowerPoint like art history professors used to use their slide carousels. That way you can add to the lecture rather than bore people. [Indeed, I wonder if that dean who seems to have started this discussion is trying to get the art history professors there to drop PowerPoint too.]

Yes, I always have a little text at the beginning. I also label the pictures when I’m afraid students won’t be able to spell the name of the person or thing that’s depicted. But man oh man, I hate predominantly textual PowerPoints. If your presentation consists of reading your own PowerPoint slides AND NOTHING ELSE, I don’t see why you bother to show up for work in the first place. You might as well give them to your TA and have them read it for you.

From the Tower of the Brooklyn Bridge (1899).

Most historically significant video ever.

In 2000 years, they’ll probably still be playing this one back (via Boing Boing):

Representation and Rebellion: The book cover.

Here’s the cover of Representation and Rebellion, my history of the Rockefeller Plan at the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company coming out in February:

All I have left to do is respond to the copy editing. Oh wait…I guess I’ll have to help sell it so look for a book page linked from this blog appearing very soon.

For now, here’s the page at the University Press of Colorado describing the book.