Heavy student backpacks haven’t gone anywhere yet.

Yesterday, “Diogenes” wrote in the comments of my post on Courseload that if I had a problem with what that company did, then I should contact the company and talk to them about it. Turns out I didn’t have to as CEO Mickey Levitan called on the phone me this morning.

It was a very useful and civil conversation with someone whose firm I called a “money-sucking parasite,” so I’d like to begin my second post on Courseload by officially taking that quote back. While I didn’t get anything factually wrong about Courseload, there is one thing I didn’t realize (because it’s not at all clear on their website or in any of the press I read about the service): Courseload is opt-in at the professor level. If you don’t want to use digitized books in your class, you are not required to do so. Therefore, there is still a way out if prices get too high, namely go back to paper copies. Therefore, student backpacks are still going to be rather heavy for the foreseeable future. Honestly, I can live with that, but it was good to hear another perspective.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about our conversation with was the differences between the two paradigms in which we both operate. Mickey’s primary concern is clearly with the kinds of classes that tend to use a single textbook that really can cost hundreds of dollars, like those in biology or business. In these instances, I can certainly see how an electronic alternative could really help bring down prices.

The most interesting trait in these kinds of disciplines is that the content of the text really doesn’t seem to matter that much. I found this study (.pdf) from Indiana University (which just signed a deal with Courseload) when I was Googling around looking for faculty reaction to Courseload there:

In general, the faculty believe that many students do not read the text unless forced to do so.   In some cases, faculty do not expect them to; they basically say that they will not test on things not in their lectures (thought the book may help them understand material in the lectures.  Others use CLIP [which seems to be the way Courseload's e-texts are presented] to promote reading of the text in a variety of ways.  In some cases students are required to annotate the text based on particular questions asked by the instructor.  In other cases, the instructor will insert annotations that offer extra points if the students respond to the annotation (may be simply acknowledging they saw it or it could be a very short extra credit paper.)  One instructor inserted a comment saying the first 10 people to respond to having seen this post will get extra credit – only 8 people ever responded.

So if you have no intention of making students actually read what you’re assigning, by all means let them buy the cheaper electronic copy. If all their reading is at home and not a central part of the classroom experience, by all means let them buy the cheaper electronic copy. And thank you Courseload for recognizing the fact that all texts (electronic or otherwise) need page numbers, which is something that I’ve complained about before.

However, I still think e-texts, especially e-texts grouped into a single platform, are a horrible way to organize any course in which those texts are at the center of classroom pedagogy. If I want to discuss a passage in the middle of a 500-page book, all students have to do now is flip to it. At worst, I’d have to say, “Look about a third of the way down the page.” How much maneuvering would it take a student to find that passage on their phone?

More importantly, who really wants to read an entire 500-page book on their phone, or even their laptop? I love Google Books because it gives me access to thousands of texts that I wouldn’t get a chance to read otherwise without ordering them up ILL, assuming their home libraries would even let them go on loan. However, if I’m planning to read the whole thing from start to finish, there’s no way I would ever choose to read it on a screen of any kind if I had a paper alternative. Don’t we spend enough time staring at screens at work as it is?

Another problem that I still have with Courseload is that, as I predicted, setting up the service requires enough lead time to get permission from publishers to put their content in electronic form and deliver it through their platform. And that assumes they give permission at all. I don’t know about you all, but I change multiple texts every single semester in just about every course I teach. I need that level of added bureaucracy like I need a hole in the head. It’s also pretty clear that Mickey and I are never going to agree on the significance of electronic distractions (i.e. the ability of students to check Facebook while they’re supposed to be listening to you), which he is prone to underplay.

What bothers me the most though about Courseload’s business model is that it’s aimed primarily at administrations rather than individual professors. Yes, individual professors can opt-in or decline at IU…for now…but what happens when someone’s dean tells an untenured or adjunct faculty member that they should use Courseload because it saves their students money (which the administration can then make them spend on higher tuition rather than the other costs of life)? There’s voluntary and then there’s the appearance of voluntary. I am simply not comfortable with anyone other than faculty having any role in book adoption decisions. Period.

At the end of our conversation, Mickey challenged me to come up with a system of integrating e-texts into a humanities classroom that would address my concerns. Since (as anyone who reads this blog regularly already knows) I’m not a Luddite, I accepted. It may take me a while. It might take more than one post for me to work it out. Still, I promise to give it a try somewhere down the road, after this current semester is finally over.

Short attention span theatre.

Darnit! Nick Carr (this Nick Carr, not this also excellent Nick Carr) was in Colorado Springs and I missed it. That’s a shame, because judging from the coverage in the CS Indy it sounds as if his speech would have been right up my alley:

Nicholas Carr proceeds carefully. Though it will soon become clear that he needn’t have bothered.

“My own belief is that, obviously, computers have a role to play in schools, maybe not in those early elementary grades, but in schools in general,” he says. “And, of course, students are going to be using computers, and they have to learn how to use them, as well. But I think schools also should be a refuge from the digital life and the online life.”

Giddy applause explodes from the packed Colorado College auditorium.

Carr continues, “The argument that kids use these all the time outside of school, so we have to bring them in, seems self-defeating in a way. The best thing a school can do is encourage a student to use the full potential of their mind. And some of that is skimming and scanning, and doing things very, very quickly, but some of that is being able to be attentive, and being able to be alone with their thoughts sometimes. So I think we need to have a more balanced view of technology in the schools than we have up to now.”

Who can argue with that? People trying to sell schools electronics, of course. [So many quotes I could pick from for this part of blog post. Think I'll go with this one]:

We’d be blind not to recognize and utilize students’ inclination for social interaction and their obsession with mobile technology. This is our opportunity to join them on this side of the millennium. If we don’t, we will lose their attention, and to some degree, their respect.

And how will we keep their attention if we can’t see what they’re tapping into their phones? Our students already know how to text each other. It’s not that tough to learn.

They also know how to network socially. Chances are they picked it up entirely by themselves because that’s not too hard to learn either. That’s why there’s absolutely no reason to have a social network embedded in your textbook. After all, your friends won’t be around to help you when it’s time to take the AP History Exam. Therefore, they need to develop other talents in social studies class.

I thought students went to school to learn new, useful skills that will help them excel in real life. Perhaps the ability to be able to sit in one place for more than five minutes without checking your phone will be a huge asset in our increasingly impatient and demanding world. I bet their future bosses will think so.

What if disrupting education isn’t such a hot idea after all?

Perhaps the most annoying aspect of the Clayton Christensen interview I linked to last Monday, was the explicit comparison between techno-skeptical teachers and Luddites. I’m not sure that I’ve ever read anything edtech-related that was quite this smug:

In the early 19th century, British textile artisans protested the Industrial Revolution with the anti-technology “Luddite movement.” They believed mechanized looms would replace them and make their jobs obsolete. They were right.

Automation in the 19th century was the disruptive equivalent of high-speed digital technology today, which is replacing jobs in the manufacturing and service sectors at astonishing speeds. Self-checkout counters at the grocery store, complete with laser scanners to read bar codes, are starting to replace human cashiers. On the road, the advent of EZPass and other computerized toll machines are replacing human tollbooth collectors. The rise of online education could effectively render terrible teachers redundant, while bolstering the careers of talented educators. There’s a word for this; it’s progress.

But what if it isn’t?

What if education suffers when the technology of pedagogy changes? We can all agree that that’s within the realm of possibility, right? This issue seems especially relevant for online education in its current underdeveloped, often poorly-administered form. Why can’t we wait for online education 2.0 rather than embrace the current extremely rudimentary product that most colleges offer? Besides, who says teachers who don’t embrace every disruptive technology that comes down the pike are necessarily Luddites? Why not accept the ones we like and reject the ones we don’t? After all, it seems as if for every wonderful innovation like Zotero, there’s a Courseload out there too.

Writing at Tenured Radical, Judith C. Brown offers what I think is a pretty good rule for telling the difference between a good edtech innovation and a bad one:

The key to the success of incorporating digital approaches is to know when and how to use them for pedagogical purposes rather than simply to lower costs.

Teachers and professors are undoubtedly in the best position to tell one from the other. Unfortunately, since online education in America is primarily about lowering costs, they don’t exactly get consulted very often. It’s gotten so bad that even Anya Kamenetz, who I have had absolutely nothing nice to say about previously, can write:

Personally, I’d like to see more university presidents making faculty their partners, not adversaries, in the transformation process.

Does that make her a Luddite too? If some administrators actually listened to this advice, educational technology disruption might be a little less…ummmmm…disruptive. Unfortunately this whole line of argument is really just titling at windmills, because the educational disrupters aren’t interested in education. They’re interested in money.

But what about administrators who facilitate this kind senseless disturbance? They already have money. What they’re interested in is power. As Thomas Pynchon explained in reference to the relevance of the Luddites to the modern world in 1984:

The word “Luddite” continues to be applied with contempt to anyone with doubts about technology, especially the nuclear kind. Luddites today are no longer faced with human factory owners and vulnerable machines. As well-known President and unintentional Luddite D.D. Eisenhower prophesied when he left office, there is now a permanent power establishment of admirals, generals and corporate CEO’s, up against whom us average poor bastards are completely outclassed, although Ike didn’t put it quite that way. We are all supposed to keep tranquil and allow it to go on, even though, because of the data revolution, it becomes every day less possible to fool any of the people any of the time.

That’s why campus police have pepper spray. The only disruptions allowed on campus are in the classroom, as long as the faculty and the students aren’t the ones doing the disrupting.

Why can’t they leave well enough alone?

Thanks to Audrey Watters, I think I’ve found the absolute worst edtech idea ever. It’s called Courseload and here’s the pitch:

If you don’t have the stomach or the time to watch the whole video, I don’t blame you. Therefore, here’s the short version, as Audrey explains it:

But there’s an interesting twist with Courseload: schools that adopt its platform require students to pay, as part of their tuition fees, for their course materials. That means there’s no opting out of buying textbooks. There’s no looking for cheaper, used books. There’s no sharing the cost burden with your roommates. There’s no looking elsewhere for a better deal.

And when your school bookstore collapses (or at least becomes nothing but a branded clothing retailer) Courseload and their publishers can crank up the costs as much as they want.

Now let’s look specifically at the company’s pitch to get professors:

Courseload’s faculty dashboard enables new ways to teach and understand how students learn with real-time analytics and note sharing. Choose any textbook, workbook, article, publication, or video you like; we can handle it. Want to incorporate multimedia materials into your courses? We can do that too. Digital course materials provide the ultimate flexibility for instruction.

I have trouble believing that they can get the rights to digitize any book I might want to assign, but let’s assume they do. What if I don’t want all my students tapping on their phones and laptops during class since they could spend the whole period on Facebook and I wouldn’t be any wiser? What if I can provide media content myself at a much cheaper price?

Besides, logistical complications are almost inevitable: What’s the turn around time between submission and loading? Do you write your syllabi at the last minute? How much earlier will you have to get everything ready now that there’s a money-sucking parasite wedged between you and your students?

Why can’t they leave well-enough alone? Money, of course. This is my transcript of the above promotional clip, from about two minutes in:

“But there’s a whole second wave of cost reduction that’s possible. Right now, the proportion of proprietary content that’s used on college campuses is very high, and proprietary content is the highest cost. Schools are interested in using more open-source content and self-generated content which has become much more plentiful in the digital era, and that content is lower cost. So over time, schools would like to see the proportion of high-cost proprietary content go down, the proportion of lower-cost content go up, so there may be that second wave of cost-reduction for students over time.”

So they’re going to use a problem that faculty did not create, the high cost of college, as a wedge to destroy your prerogatives as an instructor. Sounds like The Shock Doctrine for higher education to me.

Update: For additional analysis by me about Courseload, click here.

Teaching through a bullhorn.

You know an article has got to be pretty bad to get me to blog during Thanksgiving break, and this one certainly is:

At The Future of State Universities conference last month, which was sponsored by Academic Partnerships, Dr. Clayton Christensen spoke in front of 250 of the nation’s state university deans, provosts, presidents and faculty about the challenges universities face scaling their education models and how online education can serve students potentially better than brick and mortar classrooms.

That doesn’t sound too bad yet, but there are two warning signs of bad things to come: 1) Christensen was talking about “scaling” education. That means teaching more people at the same time. 2) “[S]erving students potentially better” is not the same as educating them.

It gets worse fast. For purposes of this post, though, I’ll skip some stuff that’s just pretty bad in order to focus on the worst part. This is a paraphrase of Christensen formed out of the interview that forms the bulk of the article:

Rather than teachers fearing for their jobs, they should see online education as liberating. Teachers no longer need to just stand up and lecture when students can absorb the content at home. And when a teacher doesn’t have to be consumed with delivering content they can become a coach and a tutor to the students and help them on an individual basis.

Liberating? Only if you mean liberate them from their ability to pay their bills. I don’t mean to defend lecturing here, although I could. This is about defending skilled labor. If Sal Khan is delivering your lectures, and you’re not; then your skills as a “coach” are much easier to replicate. That means more people can do your job, which means that your employer can pay you less.

That will hurt students too. In fact, let’s talk about what this kind of “coaching” means for the actual practice of teaching. Remember, Christensen is advocating scaling up education. Essentially, he wants bigger class sizes even though the students in those “classes” will be spread out all over the country and the world. How much individual attention can anybody get in a class with 100, 500 or even 35,000 students in it? Maybe some (but by no means all) college students can thrive in a sink-or-swim environment, but what about Kindergarteners?

More importantly, at least for purposes of this blog, what is it like to teach 100 students at once? Britney’s last point from the other day about typing being more onerous than talking goes triple from the teacher’s perspective. The only way teaching more students online than you would in an actual classroom could be liberating is if you deliberately offer them less attention than they would get in a face-to-face setting.

Online education is like teaching through a bullhorn. It’s a great way to reach a lot of people at the same time, but a terrible way to have real interactions with each student. That makes me wonder about this point, which comes immediately after the passage quoted above, even more:

“Rather than [online education] being a threat, it makes it a much more interesting profession,” says Christensen. “It’s really exciting because teachers can have deeper relationships with their students and not be so detached from them.”

Do you think Christensen is being deliberately deceptive or do you think he actually believes that slavery is freedom? Seriously, I don’t know. I also don’t know which answer to that question would be scarier.

Circumstances beyond your control.

Since I’m officially on Thanksgiving vacation now, I’ve farmed out this post out to CSU-Pueblo history grad student and friend-of-the-blog Britney Titus. What I write about, she has to live through in courses outside our department. Therefore, here is one student’s perspective on online education:

Now that the fall semester is drawing to a close, I can officially say that during the last four months I have had a constant feeling of disappointment with online education. But rather than throwing my computer against the wall as I wanted to do so many times, I made a more responsible choice and decided to take out my frustration here through the written word.

This past Sunday, I had to complete an assignment before midnight and after working on it for about three hours, the program I was working with completely deleted my progress to that point. Being as it was 9PM, I became angry and upset. I quickly realized, however, that my anger wasn’t towards the program that deleted my project, it was towards the fact that the online education’s key argument of “do it at your leisure” had failed me. I worked on the project when I wanted to and all I got was an intense feeling of wanting to destroy my computer, coupled with an hour of crying.

Some might say that this was my own fault as I waited ‘til Sunday night to start the project in the first place. Yet, does that not go against the argument of online education anyways? A student is supposed to have the “freedom” to decide when and where to do their homework, but what happens when a student cannot depend on that freedom? Not only do online classes have students adhere to “strict” timelines, but within those deadlines, students have the additional worry of actually being able to complete the task at hand.

In a traditional face-to-face environment, a student has to have time management skills in order to physically hand in a paper to a professor by 5PM. They know that no matter what, even if their computer breaks down, they have to hand in that paper even if it means going to the library and re-doing it. However, an online student cannot simply go to the library to re-do the assignment and moreover, an online student doesn’t prepare for that circumstance. They trust the online environment and the possibility of something going wrong doesn’t even cross their mind because their whole classroom is supposed to work in this system.

Yet, one must wonder how a student can have time management for something that may or may not happen? Can educators expect them to constantly plan for the programs to maybe not work and if so, does that not undermine the argument that online education works the same way as a traditional bricks and mortar classroom? Students in regular classrooms do not have to plan for the Internet being down or programs failing, but online students have to plan for all of the above. Furthermore, how does the teacher know whether or not they truly had a problem with the program in the first place? I am lucky that my professor knew me personally as a good student, but what happens when a student abuses that privilege? How can students ever truly adhere to a schedule or be held accountable for turning something in on time?

I wish I could say that not having the “freedom” to do my work when I choose was the only problem with online education. However, the aspect of “group work” is another huge cause for concern, especially pertaining to group projects and discussion boards. I am not sure how those two things can even be called as such, given that group projects are more like individual projects put together and dressed up as if the students actually completed it cohesively.

My friend, the one who is currently taking her entire master’s program online, told me just last week how she had been the group “leader” and despite her best efforts, with conference calls and constant emails, there were still individuals who failed to produce their portion of the work. Since my friend served as the leader and knew the grade she received depended on the work of the other members as well, she completed the portions of the project that the others failed to produce. Once again, this beckons the question of how an online educator knows who is really doing the work? Some may respond by saying to just not assign group work, but doesn’t that result in a lack of collaboration and brainstorming? It seems like an impossible task to establish human relationships and teamwork in a non-human environment.

Online educators may also say that this is where the infamous discussion boards come in. However, I can honestly say that not one of my discussion board posts this semester have embodied a passionate opinion or an effective argument. One reason for this is the discussion board questions themselves. Many of my posts are just answers to the questions that my professors pose, which don’t entail any arguments, just mere answers that can be found in the textbook. The second reason would be the fact that no matter what, discussion boards will always be work in an online setting. The students have to log on and physically write a response. Unlike a traditional classroom where the students just have to speak to stimulate discussion, the online setting makes the students type out their responses, making the discussion work rather than a natural activity. Discussion boards thus, in an online classroom, will never be as effective as one in a physical classroom because the students have to worry about all the grammatical and structural components of writing instead of just saying what’s on their minds. This not only decreases motivation to participate in the discussion boards, it causes the students to relinquish all creativity and impulsivity that they may have had otherwise in a physical classroom.

These are just a few of the many problems a student faces in online classes today. In talking with other online students, I find that they face most of the same problems I do on a daily basis. Like them, I find myself saying that I will never take another online class again, not because I hate anything technological or modern, but because at the end of the day, it makes me a worse student, whether it is convenient or not.

When exactly did America turn into a Ray Bradbury novel?

#OWSlibrary been told to remove the books from the park or the police will seize them. Bring it on.—
The People's Library (@OWSLibrary) November 17, 2011

First they take the books away from Occupy Wall Street. Next, they take the books away from college professors. Think I’m kidding? This is from the Chronicle:

In this bookless college, all reading­­—which would still, of course, be both required and encouraged—would be done electronically. Any physical books in students’ possession at the beginning of the year would be exchanged for electronic versions, and if a student was later found with a physical book, it would be confiscated (in return for an electronic version). The physical books would be sent to places and institutions that wanted or needed them. Professors would have a limited time in which to convert their personal libraries to all-digital formats, using student helpers who would also record the professors’ marginal notes.

Why exactly does this guy want to take all the books on paper off college campuses, exactly?:

Because it makes a bold statement about the importance of moving education into the future. It is, in a sense, only a step removed from saying, “We no longer accept theses on scrolls, papyrus, or clay tablets. Those artifacts do still exist in the world, but they are not the tools of this institution.” Or: “In this institution we have abandoned the slide rule. Those who find it useful and/or comforting can, of course, use it, but not here.”

I can’t tell you how tired I’m getting of reading smug, self-interested articles by edtech entrepreneurs. Physical books are not obsolete because you declare them to be so. In many ways, physical books are much better than the electronic ones for pedagogical purposes. For example, students can’t check Facebook on physical books while you’re discussing them in class.

More importantly, with physical books you don’t get an intermediary between you and the author who can restrict access to unpopular ideas. A few months ago, one of my friends had her Kindle stolen from her car. She called Amazon and they wiped it out. You realize, of course, that Amazon can do that any time it wants to, right? That’s the technology that their new-lending library is predicated upon. In other words, in our glorious all e-book future, every book we “own” could disappear in the blink of an eye.

Yet we’re told the world has to go this direction in the name of “progress”:

[W]e would wean students (and scholars) off the physical books of the past, just as they were once weaned off scrolls when new and more efficient technology came along.

Efficient? Really? If I want every student to be at the same place of the same edition of the same book, all I have to is tell them the page number. Many e-books don’t even have page numbers! [Even if they did, the size of the screen varies so the pagination would likely be different for all of them.] Besides, if you get to read the exact same text in the paper and e-book version of the same work, how on earth is the electronic version any more efficient? The ideas are the same. They’re certainly not cheaper in all cases.

The other day, I asked my favorite used book buyers, a married couple, whether e-books had begun to affect their business. “Not at all,” they said, practically in unison. If e-books are so great, why can’t we let the market take its course? Destroying all physical libraries will make it much easier to force people to buy shiny objects that most of them don’t want and none of them actually need.

The destruction of the OWS Library is obviously a powerful symbol of this scary future. When they come for my books, I think I’ll memorize Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class because it’s likely to come in handy.

Cheating is the new learning.

Apparently, cheating is the new learning. How do I know?:

Exhibit A): “I think it’s about time that we get rid of the idea that cheating is a bad thing per se. Generally speaking, cheating is nothing else than collaboration, something we even want to foster in education today.”

Exhibit B): “Here’s some typical summer AP English homework: “Read Walden and write a report on Thoreau’s theme.” I’d bet that SparkNotes sees a surge of traffic in the last week of summer. It’s not that Walden doesn’t contain big ideas relevant to today’s kids. But they’ll do better by constructing meaning from it socially — not alone with a text and a Google search for “Walden Thoreau Themes.” They need something tangible to learn by imitation or iteration, which is the way we all learn most everything. They need to see and hear what academic discourse sounds, looks and feels like.”

Isn’t it convenient that the entire learning paradigm at every level of education has to shift just because there a bunch of edtech companies want to sell their products to school and colleges? I recognize that pointing this out makes me an old fogey, as another passage from Exhibit B suggests:

We’d be blind not to recognize and utilize students’ inclination for social interaction and their obsession with mobile technology. This is our opportunity to join them on this side of the millennium. If we don’t, we will lose their attention, and to some degree, their respect. They know we’re teaching them, for the most part, like we were taught — like our parents were taught.

So I’m an old fogey. But I don’t just want to defend the old paradigm of learning, I want to attack the new one. The easy line of attack, which is actually incorporated into Exhibit A, is how exactly are you going to assess learning if everyone’s collaborating? Why should Little Johnny get any credit of Little Suzy did all the work? That’s a good argument, but I want to take it one step further.

This is from Exhibit A:

Grades are given based on the performance of the individual, not the group so society taught us that it is better to take care of things on our own. Therefore the skill “able to work in a team” became something you would mention in your CV or demand in a job offer. But, as I said, I believe that team working is the natural behavior of humans. To declare it a special skill only proves that our society is detached from natural behavior.

The workplace isn’t natural either. In most workplaces, you don’t get a raise as a team. You don’t get promoted as a team. Indeed, the whole point of employee management is usually to pit one employee against the other to see who can do the most work in order to distinguish themselves and rise into management. I’m not exactly a big fan of dog-eat-dog capitalism, but that’s America people. If students don’t learn to work on their own, they’re going to be eaten alive out there.

Still, the labor historian in me wonders whether that’s precisely the point. If all work in the future is done in teams, then salaries won’t rise because every employee will be easy to replace with another member of the team. To borrow a line of reasoning that Historiann left here yesterday, when they start teaching this way at Choate and Yale, then maybe we can talk about new paradigms. Until that point comes, this seems to me to be a lot more like the old segregation than the new learning.

“Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?”

Yesterday, Historiann explained the “crisis” in higher education with sixteen links. I haven’t made it through all of them yet (though I will), but I think I can explain that crisis just as well with just two.

1. Via Sociological Images, here are the real earnings of recent male college grads over time:

Here are the real earnings of recent female college grads over time:

2. Now consider that alongside this (via Education Week):

President Barack Obama’s goal of once again leading the world in percentage of college graduates by 2020 is impossible without increased implementation of technology in education, said U.S. Deputy Director Steve Midgley today at the Virtual School Symposium in Indianapolis…

Midgley said hitting the president’s 2020 goal will take not only a drastic increase in graduation rates for children currently in the nation’s public schools, but also outreach to people who have already left the school system and do not have a college or even high school diploma. Increasingly, online coursework is viewed as a way to reach those students.

“The only way to hit that goal is to bring people back to the system and provide credentials,” Midgley said. “The only way we’re going to do that is with technology.”

I don’t normally have anything nice to say about economists, but I think they have a point with that whole supply and demand thing. When supply increases, price tends to go down. That means that the more college-educated people you have around, the less likely they are to pull in the big bucks. This is particularly true when economic restructuring limits the number of available jobs in the first place. That fact is not the fault of higher education. It is the fault of the economy at large.

Sending people to college online just because you don’t have the guts to take on the 1% of the population that benefits from mass unemployment isn’t doing anyone any favors, except perhaps for the owners of companies who want to join the 1% through spearheading this transition. In fact, steering the economically desperate towards an expensive inferior product strikes me as nothing but wanton cruelty.

You would think that as the number of available jobs decreased, what you actually learn in college would matter more, not less. Increased knowledge and a track record of success would be the best way to distinguish yourself from the pack. As Historiann explained in her contribution to her own linkfest, students who do better in college should tend to do better on the job market assuming college signifies anything.

Turn college into an entirely online experience, and it will signify nothing. If online classes were just as good as face-to-face classes, nobody would try to hide the fact that they went to online college. They do. If online colleges were just as good as face-to-face classes, they wouldn’t be the higher education of last resort in this country. They are. But the struggle to preserve college from creeping electronic mediocrity is not over!

Higher education should be open to everyone willing to do the work. However, there’s “college,” and then there’s college. There are only so many compromises that professors can make before we dilute the brand “college” beyond all recognition. Otherwise we might as well all wear shirts like Bluto’s because all colleges and universities will be equally useless.

Kindles are still for suckers.

If there is anything good about e-books besides weighing less than the paper variety, it would have to be the way they de-emphasize the material aspect of owning books and emphasize the importance of the ideas within them. I think that’s why Bookshelf Porn associates itself with porn. Good liberals like me feel slightly guilty about coveting so many objects at once.

Amazon.com, however, appears to be doing everything it can to exploit such proclivities for its own material gain. When I wrote my original “Kindles Are for Suckers” post, the price of the Kindle version of David McCullough’s The Greater Journey was pennies more than the hardback. [I now see that that relationship has reversed since the book came out.] As I write this, the Kindle version of Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects is over five dollars more expensive than the paperback.

This would explain why Amazon.com is selling a device that costs $84 to make for $79. While there are other e-readers out there, Amazon has a monopoly on all things Kindle. With no used copies of e-books circulating to keep down prices, why not test what the traffic will allow?

Maybe a little materialism isn’t such a bad thing in the end. It might even end up saving you money.