Another Elvis analogy.

In 1969, Elvis Presley returned to live performances for the first time in ten years, doing a month-long run at the International Hotel in Las Vegas.  It was a huge critical and financial success.  Here’s Peter Guralnick again (pp. 350-51), quoting some of Elvis’ between-songs chatter:

“Anyway, I got out of the service in 1960, and I made some movies like G.I. Blues and Blue Hawaii, and several pictures that did very well for me.  But as the years went by it got harder and harder to perform to a movie camera, and I really missed the people, I really missed contact with a live audience.  And I just wanted to tell you how good it is to be back.”

Do administrators feel that way when they get back in the classroom?  My dean, for example, does at least one course each year because he actually likes teaching. Our ex-Provost who just retired went from the administration building to teaching four sections of introductory public speaking each semester for over five years and she says she wouldn’t have had it any other way.  People running universities need to remember their roots the same way Elvis remembered his during that first month back in Vegas.*

Yet some people don’t seem to think that higher education should have any roots whatsoever.  This article is particularly frustrating if for no other reason than its consistent historical refrain that change is inevitable and that everything will work itself out in the end:

The problem, [Erik Brynjolfsson] says, is that not enough people are sufficiently educated or technologically savvy to exploit such rapid advances and develop as-yet-unimagined entrepreneurial niches. He and [Andrew] McAfee conclude their book by arguing that the same technologies now making industry far more productive should be applied to updating and improving the educational system.

But turn higher ed into vocational technological ed and you’ll replace the structural problem of too few jobs with the structural problem of too many qualified applicants seeking the same limited number of jobs. Wages will plummet. Inequality will stay the same. The beauty of a liberal arts education, at least in theory, is its flexibility to meet whatever economic circumstances its recipients face.

I know that it hasn’t worked out well for many recent liberal arts grads, but maybe their education isn’t the problem. Back in October, Ezra Klein wrote:

[C]ollege debt represents a special sort of betrayal. We told you that the way to get ahead in America was to get educated. You did it. And now you find yourself in the same place, but buried under debt. You were lied to.

You can’t fix higher education until you fix the inequality.  The unfettered control of technology by organized capital is a major cause of that.  Apply the same principles from the outside economy to higher education and things will get a lot worse for a lot more people (including professors of all kinds I might add) before they get better.

No wonder some of us have suspicious minds.

*  Unfortunately, after that first gig he started playing the theme music from 2001 before going out on stage, and his act went downhill from there. By the end, he was babbling incoherently in front of people in huge rooms who had spent a fortune to hear him. Of course, I know some professors like that too.

An Elvis analogy.

In her year-end post, our pal Kate mentions my fondness for historical analogies. Her historical analogy in that post is union musicians protesting their replacement in movie theaters by pre-recorded tracks.  While I love that story, I’m not sure it’s a good analogy for edtech as it has a happy ending. Theater owners (who were mostly the Hollywood studios at that time) make money, customers get cheaper movie tickets and the musicians’ union didn’t disband because there were still plenty of places for them to play live music. Indeed, I suspect if you work for the local in Nashville, LA or Vegas, you can make a fair chunk of change as a union musician still.

Speaking of Vegas, I was on my way to Christmas in Vegas with the family (not a bad idea at all, really) when I first read Kate’s post.  In honor of that trip, I was reading Peter Guralnick’s Careless Love:  The Unmaking of Elvis Presley. That’s the second volume of a two-volume biography of THE KING.  The first book, which I read years ago, is quite wonderful for understanding just how important Elvis was musically. The second is mostly depressing, like Nick Cage in Leaving Las Vegas, but still a great read.

I don’t remember most of them, but it’s clear from the book that Elvis movies are almost all pretty awful. Guralnick blames Elvis’ manager, Colonel Tom Parker, for that mostly. Early in the book, Guralnick explains the way Elvis’ contracts were structured.  Elvis made between $750,000 and $1,000,000 per picture.  That was almost as much as Hollywood’s top star at the time, Elizabeth Taylor.  But then Elvis and Parker split 50% of everything the picture made after it earned back its costs.  Since the kiddies were going to see Elvis in anything he did, that gave Elvis every incentive to make his pictures as fast and as slipshod as possible.  The scripts were awful (Elvis played a race-car driver in three different movies), the music was often ill-chosen and he certainly never got a chance to develop as an actor.

So who did this hurt?  Elvis, of course.  Not financially. He made lots of money, but doing nothing but acting in movies with dumb stories and recording soundtrack albums with bad songs on them made him miserable.  This is Guralnick, p. 207:

“It was clear that he himself was neither interested in, nor satisfied with, the music that was being released in his name, and for all the Colonel’s pep talks and recitations of figures and numbers, and deals, there was no getting past the fact that the records were no longer selling as they once had , they no longer mattered as they used to.  He admired the Beatles, he felt threatened by the Beatles, sometimes it made him angry how disrespectful the Beatles and Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones were toward the public and their fans – but most of all he was envious of the freedom they evidently seemed to feel and to flaunt.  He, too, had once enjoyed that freedom, he, too, had once been in the vanguard of the revolution, and now he was embarrassed to listen to his own music, to watch his own films.”

In case you’re wondering where I’m going with this, professors are Elvis. Students could be our adoring fans, but they’re being encouraged by the Colonel to demand the same bad movies over and over again.  Take this particular money-making idea, for example:

MyEdu is an online tool aimed at helping students better plan and manage their college experience. It was originally founded in 2008 as Pick-a-Prof, a website that allowed students to rate their professors; the following year the Internet startup was rebranded as MyEdu and its mission became more comprehensive. Through tools that track students’ course requirements each semester, provide detailed degree planning and rate faculty members, the site aims to improve students’ return on education by increasing graduation rates and decreasing the time it takes to earn a diploma.

“Going to college is much like investing in your portfolio; you have to keep an eye on how much return you’re getting on your education investment,” says Frank Lyman, MyEdu’s senior vice president.

Is this really what we want to teach them?  Now that President Romney has promised all our students jobs when they graduate, they’re going to end up being insufferable. Is going to college a good idea if you go for the wrong reasons?  Here’s Guralnick quoting Elvis (p. 468) looking back on his film career, before the pills eventually killed him:

“It was a job.  I had to be there at a certain time in the morning and work a certain amount of hours, and that’s exactly how I treated it.”

I think professors and students alike could learn a lot from Elvis’ experience. If you do what you love for the wrong reasons you will no longer love it.

“Now we see the violence inherent in the system!”

As your king, I’m sure you’re wondering where I stand on the Grafton-Lemisch history job market controversy which Tenured Radical explained so eloquently for us yesterday. I think they’re both right! I believe that everyone who gets a Ph.D. should get a job that puts the skills acquired during that long, difficult journey to best use. Whether that job is at an academic institution or some other place that’s interested in history really shouldn’t matter as long as it pays a living wage. I also agree, as Lemisch suggests, that “an acceptance of things as they are” would be a terrible, terrible thing.

My problem with this whole discussion though is that the AHA is probably not the best place to be having it. That’s because the crisis in question isn’t discipline specific, it’s…wait for it…systematic.

I hate to sound like a broken record here, but there isn’t a shortage of tenure track jobs in the humanities or elsewhere. The problem is a longstanding, systematic restructuring of academic work that devalues the contributions of individual instructors, both on the tenure track and off. When those on the tenure track catch cold, adjuncts get pneumonia. Recently, some of this problem has become technological, but it’s mostly a logical outgrowth of the systematic starvation of academics in favor of spending on things like sports and unnecessary new buildings at public and private universities alike.

My fear is that the more time we spend arguing with one another about the best way to approach this decades-old problem that we can’t solve by ourselves, we’ll forget about the common enemy. No, not the Judean People’s Front! I’m talking about the Romans!!! I realize I’m mixing my Python movie analogies, but you know who the Romans are here, right?

There I go bringing class into it again. I really would make a lousy king. My heart is with the bloody peasants even though I’m only moderately repressed.

Even with technology, students cannot teach themselves.

I first heard about the “If I was a Poor Black Kid” controversy on NPR of all places. Since the racism involved was obvious and ham-handed, I didn’t actually read the Forbes column in question until I saw that my friend Jeff Hess* had written about it. Here’s the part of that column that I found most interesting:

If I was a poor black kid I’d use the free technology available to help me study. I’d become expert at Google Scholar. I’d visit study sites like SparkNotes and CliffsNotes to help me understand books. I’d watch relevant teachings on Academic Earth, TED and the Khan Academy. (I say relevant because some of these lectures may not be related to my work or too advanced for my age. But there are plenty of videos on these sites that are suitable to my studies and would help me stand out.) I would also, when possible, get my books for free at Project Gutenberg and learn how to do research at the CIA World Factbook and Wikipedia to help me with my studies.

I would use homework tools like Backpack, and Diigo to help me store and share my work with other classmates. I would use Skype to study with other students who also want to do well in my school. I would take advantage of study websites like Evernote, Study Rails, Flashcard Machine, Quizlet, and free online calculators.

Leave the racism aside here (and I know that’s pretty hard): The whole column isn’t entirely about technology, but it’s pretty close. The word “teacher” doesn’t appear in it once, but there certainly are a lot of web sites that get name-checked.

Jeff takes care of the problem with this approach to education very quickly:

The advice…reminds me of an experiment I conducted several years ago. I wrote a letter to my 13-year-old self, filled with advice on how to make my life easier and future self a better person. That letter too was filled with solid advice. Guess how much my adult self implemented? Not much.

This whole controversy reminds me how much I hate the term “digital native.” My 7-year old has been giving me lessons in how to play Super Mario Brothers on the Wii. Trust me, it is a truly humbling experience. However, if he’s taking his online reading tests before the school bell rings in the morning, I’m the one who has to explain to him that the reason it’s not working is that he pressed the wrong part of the two-button mouse.

The ability to surf the web, write an e-mail or download an app only comes with experience. More importantly, it requires a mindset of experimentation that only comes with years of trial and error while acquainting yourself with many different applications and programs. Just imagine what it’s like for a 95-year old person to get online for the first time. It’s the same for children of any race, especially children whose schools might not offer them a whole lot of computer time to get the hang of things.

Teachers (and in my son’s case, his father) are there, in part, to help students get acquainted with the ins and outs of the online world. Handing a kid a mouse and expecting he or she to educate themselves, by themselves, is like dropping an 18-year old in a library and expecting them to spend four unsupervised years there getting their B.A.

It’s not going to work. And it’s no coincidence that the only people who think it might work are not professional educators.

* I know Jeff from years of writing a blog about Walmart together. If you are interested in such things and have plenty of time on your hands, you should check out our archives sometime. If you want to see my favorite stuff, read what’s listed under the category “meat.”

The invisible supply chain in higher education.

There are books you don’t have to like, but you have to acknowledge that they capture the zeitgeist of their respective eras:  Jonathan Livingston Seagull, The Passing of the Great Race, and then there’s The World Is Flat by Tom Friedman. Despite the fact that the guy admits that he did research with just Google for some sections of the book, he really was describing globalization in 2005, long before that term became cliché.  The problem with the book is not the reporting.  The problem with the book is Friedman’s childish enthusiasm for anything technological, accompanied by his complete disinterest in the effects of whatever he describes on workers rather than consumers.  Take his description of the Walmart supply chain (p. 133):

In improving its supply chain, Wal-Mart leaves no link untouched.  While I was touring the Wal-Mart distribution center in Bentonville, I noticed that some boxes were too big to go on the conveyor belts and were being moved around on pallets by Wal-Mart employees driving special minilift trucks with headphones on. A computer tracks how many pallets each employee is plucking every hour to put on trucks for different stores, and a computerized voice tells each of them whether he is ahead of schedule or behind schedule.

Sounds like a great way to work, huh?  Well, teach online and this is your future. You will become a mere tender of machines.  Real human relationships?  A luxury that we can no longer afford. Even during the age of austerity, rich people can still afford a real education.  Everyone else gets a computer program – students and teachers alike.

I’m beginning to think that higher education is beginning to reach its Tom Friedman moment.  We can either accept the fact that some students will get a quality education, while others won’t or we can fight back against what the people with power claim is inevitable.  I’m not really a big fan of the term edu-bubble because there’s no question a good education pays still pays dividends in the long run, but a future of students paying through the nose an education conducted entirely over Blackboard is simply not sustainable.

The people in the best position to point this simple truth out are, of course, faculty.  Even if you have a (comparatively) cushy tenure track job, you’re fooling yourself if you don’t think the forces of austerity will threaten your livelihood eventually.  That’s why I bookmarked WE ARE NOT CONTINGENT:  An Adjunct Manifesto the moment I saw it. Here is the beginning:

We are the non-tenure track faculty who now constitute two-thirds of the instructional workforce at universities and colleges across the nation. We are frequently invisible to administrators, yet we are the first professors and instructors that undergraduate students meet on their journey to becoming engaged learners. We are the majority. We have been silent too long, and it is time for us to reclaim our voices and outline our demands.

Unfortunately for higher education’s 1%, it is impossible to keep your supply chain silent if it consists of human beings with rights who refuse to stop telling the truth to power.  When I was listening to Marc Bousquet a couple of weeks ago, I thought wouldn’t it be great if adjunct faculty had their own “We Are the 99%” Tumblr?  I bet it would be a sensation, because most faculty – heck, most STUDENTS – are totally blind to what most faculty have to do to just survive. Indeed, as Marc himself suggested, we are all blind to everyone else’s terms and conditions of employment in academia and that’s exactly how administrators want it.

The only way to stop all us losers from talking to each other is to enlist our student-consumers into their war as our enemies. This piece in the National Review (which deserves its own special takedown) on how teachers unions are destroying online education in California’s public schools is a classic example of that. But what I liked most was this throwaway line:

Online courses are valuable because they customize curricula to students’ individual learning needs, allow students to access teachers at virtually any time of the day or night, and produce immediate and transparent progress reports on students’ performance.

[emphasis added]

Um…who are they going to get to staff those LMSs in the middle of the night to answer all those student homework questions?  Indians?  You just know that would get Tom Friedman all excited, but even Friedman recognized that globalization has its limits. “If societies are unable to manage the strains that are produced by this flattening,” Friedman wrote on p. 296 of The World Is Flat:

there will be a backlash, and political forces will attempt to reinsert some of the frictions and protectionist barriers that the flattening forces have eliminated, but they will do it in a crude way that will, in the name of protecting the weak, end up lowering everyone’s standard of living.

But what if it’s “progress” that’s destroying everyone’s standard of living?  What if the virtual product is inferior to the actual good? More importantly, if the poor need protection in the short term, why should they have to wait for the trickle down fairy to spread the wealth?

The invisible people in the higher education supply chain are the ones best suited to answer that question, but apparently nobody wants to listen to what they have to say.  It works the same way at Walmart.  Unfortunately, a Walmart-style education will still set students back thousands and thousands of dollars.

Everybody thinks they know more about teaching than teachers do.

By now, you’ve almost certainly read the epic takedown of the virtual secondary school company K12 in yesterday’s NYT.  This is exactly the kind of day-to-day mechanical information about how virtual education operates that I’ve been trying to describe in this space for the last six months or so and it’s incredibly damning.

Rather than do a lame recap of a long article, I just want to pull at one thread from the piece that I found both particularly interesting and quite new, namely the idea of parents as teachers:

Parents, called “learning coaches,” do much of the teaching, prompting critics to argue that states are essentially subsidizing home schooling.

“Learning coaches?”  To me that’s like trying to run a university with classes staffed entirely by work studies. Not TAs, work study students. Undergraduates. Yet the fact that K12 has that name for parents demonstrates that this kind of free labor is built into their business model.  Face time with actual teachers apparently isn’t valued at all:

For most students, attendance is recommended but not mandatory at what are called synchronous sessions — when they can interact online with the teacher. A new grading policy states that students who do not turn in work will be given a “50” rather than a zero. Several teachers said assignments were frequently open for unlimited retakes.

The obvious implication from the article is that some parents do the assignments for their kids. Even if they don’t, the argument that all companies like K12 provide is subsidized home-schooling is impossible to escape from this anecdote:

In a neighborhood teetering on the edge of middle class, Ms. [Denita] Alhammadi has converted her living room into a classroom. Two desks are for her children, Romeo, 13, and Yasmine, 8. Another is for Ms. Alhammadi, a former Army supply officer who is also studying online, through Kaplan University.

Within weeks of attending a K12 information session, Ms. Alhammadi had become parent and teacher, wrapped into one. She spends as much as six hours a day as the official “learning coach” for her children.

I mean no disrespect for any particular parent here, but if the test scores of the schools cited in this article mean anything it’s that professional teachers do a better job teaching students than parents do. Therefore, it’s not crazy to assume that the more direct contact hours you have with a living, breathing teacher, the more a student learns. This should really come as no surprise as teachers actually have to go and get advanced degrees to teach kids while parents don’t.

Yet everybody still thinks they know more about teaching than teachers do.  Parents, politicians, edtech entrepreneurs – so many of them have no respect for any teacher’s professional expertise. Teacher salaries in the United States are just the most obvious manifestation of this systematic belittling. The rush to replace teachers of all kinds with computer programs is another.

I write this despite having had no formal training in teaching whatsoever myself.  I’m a big believer in learning by doing, but it took me many years of teaching for me to feel as if I had any command of the practice whatsoever. Seriously, it’s not at all as easy as it looks. Try doing it through a learning management system with students you never meet in person and I’m guessing it’s going to be even harder than usual. Six hours a day of videos, web-surfing and drills might not be enough to make up for the difference.

“To the casual observer, an academic conference must appear to be one of the strangest of modern rituals.”

I believe that the anonymous author of the blog “100 Reasons NOT to Go to Graduate School” is an absolute bloody genius, and certainly more deserving of higher education industry-wide fame than that Pannapacker dude. To me, this post on academic conferences (#74 for those of us who are counting) stands out as the crème de la crème of one of the great academic blogs of all time:

The ostensible purpose of an academic conference is to provide a forum in which scholars present and critique research. Rarely, however, is the emptiness of academe put on more public display than in the context of an academic conference.

To the casual observer, an academic conference must appear to be one of the strangest of modern rituals. At various sessions, speakers present their own research by reading aloud to an audience. Someone who has attended a full day of sessions will have listened to people reading for five or six hours. How well do you suppose the audience members are listening? They sit politely and at least pretend to listen, because when their own turn comes to stand up and read aloud, they would like others to extend the same courtesy to them. Sparks fly occasionally during question time, which can be mean-spirited or (less often) enlightening, but decorous boredom is typically the order of the day.

I have already come out against reading conference papers here and here. To me, the sort of bemused detachment present in reason #74 really drives home how stupid reading a script for twenty minutes would look to anyone but an academic. Indeed, as my brother the economist loves to point out, absolutely nobody in his profession ever does this. Therefore, it’s actually just a few of us academics from a limited number of disciplines who seem to like to torture one another. Seriously, would you ever consider teaching this way? Ever? Then why subject your colleagues to this kind of cruel and unusual punishment?

That said, as I’ve been not reading papers at a lot of conferences lately, I’ve noticed another really interesting development that has to do with technology. Powerpoint is now practically required at all the conference sessions I’ve attended lately. If you’re a participant in the session (or even if you just go in about ten minutes before start time) everybody will be dutifully loading their presentations onto someone’s laptop so that they too can seem as 21st century as possible.

Yet they still read their papers from a script. I am always part of that PowerPoint ritual when I do papers now, but I have resolved to do conference presentations the same way I teach lecture courses. The slides are almost entirely pictures (with the occasional film clip) and they serve as prompts for me to talk off the cuff about my topic. I do not read anything verbatim.

My colleagues who read their papers, on the other hand, have to stop their reading in the middle to advance the slideshow and talk about what’s on the slide. This seldom jibes with whatever they happen to be reading at that moment, making the entire exercise even more awkward than simply standing up and reading from your script. At least if you go totally old school, there’s no chance of getting lost. Clarity inevitably suffers otherwise.

The other funny thing about PowerPoint in conferences is how the whole layout of sessions has to change in order to accomodate the technology. If everyone is showing PowerPoints and the screen is at the front, then the entire panel has to sit in the audience in order to see them. Those waterglasses on the front table? Useless. And do we really need all those chairs up front for just ten minutes of questions?

Yet there the old setup remains, which should make the entire ritual of the academic conference seem even stranger to any casual non-academic observer who cared enough to visit. By the way, did I mention that I’m going to the AHA in Chicago this year? Just try to tell me that going to Chicago in January isn’t bizarre. I dare you.

“It’s good to be king.”

A week or two ago, Mickey Levitan of Courseload challenged me to explain what my vision of a 21st Century classroom would look like. Well, now that I’ve turned in my grades, I’m willing to play king and lay down a few initial pronouncements in that direction:

1. The 21st century classroom shouldn’t destroy the 20th century classroom. I blame the Clinton administration for the notion that the Internet will save education all by itself. Yes, it can put an infinite amount of information at your disposal, but learning facts is not education. Sometimes the Internet has to be turned off. Therefore, when I’m king, all the wifi in our classrooms will have an on/off switch. And if I were King of the World I’d make those Internet jamming thingies legal so that professors could disable everyone’s phone if they were so inclined.

2. Standard devices for e-book reading. This way everyone could be on the same page at the same time. The university would buy everyone’s e-reader in bulk and give them out when students enroll. Obviously then, whatever device everyone used would have page numbers. That device should also be vendor-neutral, by which I mean that teachers should be able to assign whatever books are available in an e-book format and (as with Courseload at Indiana) opt-out if they can’t get the books they want.

3. Mandate hybrid classes. This edict comes in 2 parts:

a) No purely online courses. A purely online education is an inferior education if for no other reason than that the connection between student and teacher (despite what Clayton Christensen says) is less-human by definition. Therefore, everyone would have to show up in a classroom for at least some part of the semester. Preferably this would include test time so that my kingdom wouldn’t have to be a police state.

b) No purely face-to-face classes either. Every class should have an online component, but this edict should be the starting point of a reconceptualization of every course in the curriculum. Don’t do what you do already and put some of it up online. These new classes should be developed from scratch with a whole new conception of time in class vs. time out of class. I remain very influenced by what Britney argued about writing online feeling like a burden to students. If you just tack on a few online assignments, the students will resent it. The entire boundary between homework and classwork needs to be rewritten with the professors doing the re-writing, not the administrators just counting on as much tuition money as they can possibly get.

4. More money for technology. When you starve academics for buildings and sports, it’s not just faculty salaries that suffer. The budget for technology suffers too. The operating system on my Windows desktop is copyright 2005. The Dells in our classrooms date from the same era. Someone who knows about these things told me a while back that we’re running the old version of Blackboard because we don’t have the server capacity to run the latest. And let the faculty help pick the tech for heaven’s sake as shared governance is important in just about all situations on campus.

5. Pay for some training. Teachers get professional development time in all this stuff. So should faculty. Despite the occasional call of Luddite in my direction, I make a serious effort to keep up on educational technology and digital humanities developments that I think may be of use to me. With very few exceptions, I have to learn about all this stuff entirely by myself. Not only do I get no help in these matters, there isn’t even a line on my annual performance review where I can list the various digital skills I’ve learned. I have to weave them into my “teaching statement” or my “research statement.” Even then, I’m not really sure if the people above me in the chain of command have the faintest idea what I’m talking about.

6. No more paper syllabi. At my last school (a long, long time ago) which had this kind of training, I learned both Excel (which was, as always, incredibly helpful filling out my grades this weekend) and what was then called FrontPage. My web pages have never been pretty, but they’re really functional. I haven’t handed out a paper syllabus since the 20th Century, yet I heard one nursing professor ask at some point, “Is it legal for us to do that?” The paper syllabus is the one piece of traditional teaching whose passing I know I will not mourn. Putting it up on the web not only saves paper, it allows you to adapt it as your class goes along and post announcements, links and readings. By posting links on it, I’m also highly integrated with my online reader/textbook, Milestones Documents.

As your king, I’m sure I’ll have some more pronouncements on this matter at some later date.

PS Of course, it should go without saying that, “I’ll be king when dogs get wings, but can I help it if I still dream time to time?”

Nobody wants to read an entire book on a computer screen.

This starts off as another grading story, but doesn’t stay that way. Google Books has not only been a Godsend for my own work, it has substantially improved the quality of the research papers I have to read at this time of the semester. So many excellent pre-1923 sources are so readily available that I can be certain that any student with a topic before that date who doesn’t have at least five primary sources in their bibliography wasn’t trying very hard.

However, there’s sources they read, and sources they don’t. By way of illustration, a really good student of mine cited Frederick Douglass’ second autobiography twice in her paper for my grad class on slavery. Once the citation came from the book itself, the other time it was as a quote excerpted in a secondary source. To me, this is a pretty good indication that she didn’t read the entire book.

More obviously, I’m pretty sure this is the same reason why two different students both told me that Theodore Dwight Weld was a slave. They didn’t look beyond whichever page of American Slavery As It Is that Google led them to in order to see that its subtitle is “testimony of a thousand witnesses.” I can’t say I blame any of them though as nobody wants to read an entire book on a computer screen.

When I was an undergrad, one of my TAs told us that the key to success in history was not knowing what to read, but knowing what not to read. In other words, he was advocating skimming. By giving us the ability to search whole texts by the word, Google Books eliminates the need to do precisely the kind of single subject-centered skimming that my old TA was recommending. The problem with this new ability though is that it means that students (or historians for that matter) citing out of Google Books risk losing the context for their quotes unless they read the whole thing and the interface in Google Books is not exactly reader friendly. It’s bad enough having to page back through a scan of a late-nineteenth century magazine to get the volume number for the citation you need. Who wants to read an entire book that way as long as theirs a paper alternative?

Maybe using an e-reader might make this process easier, but most students don’t have Kindles or Nooks…at least not yet. They access their electronic sources mostly through laptops and the desktops in the university library. I suspect they’d often be better off getting the paper copy of the book and taking it home. After all, contextual knowledge is often more useful than any particular quote they might find, but then again sustained, critical reading is so Twentieth Century.

Larry McMurty has a short review of a book about Amazon.com in the new Harper’s that I think is highly relevant here. As I write this, it’s not even on the Harper’s subscribers-only web site yet, so you’ll have to trust my transcription from the paper magazine that arrived in my soon-to-be-extinct mailbox yesterday afternoon:

“Jeff Bezos and his colleagues are free to make and sell as many Kindles as they can, but Bezos shouldn’t be persuaded that our Gutenberg days are over, at least not from where I sit. One thing we offer [at McMurtry's gigantic used bookstore in Texas] that he can’t is serendipity – a book browser’s serendipity, the thrill of the accidental find. Stirring the curiosity of readers is a vital part of bookselling; skimming a few strange pages is surely as important as making one click.”

Serendipity is also an important part of historical research. I still remember the thrill of the first time I went downstairs into the stacks at the Hagley when I got my first fellowship there. I just pulled stuff off the shelves and browsed for hours, counting only on the titles on spines and the proximity of Library of Congress numbers to guide my wandering. I can’t tell you how much great stuff I found that day for my dissertation that I wouldn’t have found otherwise, but I’m sure it was a lot.

To play off McMurtry some more here, stirring the curiosity of students is an important part of any history professor’s job. I certainly hope our apparent post-Gutenberg future doesn’t kill that feeling entirely. I am certain of this though: Jeff Bezos doesn’t care one way or the other as he’s only in it for the money.

What is the difference between MLA and Chicago anyways?

Like many of you, I’ve been grading a lot of student research papers lately. I don’t know about y’all, but I’ve noticed some key changes in their bibliographies this semester for the first time ever. For example, a couple of grad students did there bibliographies through something called bibme.org. I know this because bibme.org leaves a note on their bibliographies that reads something like, “This bibliography was compiled through bibme.org.” [I can't be sure of the exact wording because I've already handed back those papers.]

They were both perfectly good bibliographies except for one problem: They were in MLA format. “In history, we use Chicago Style,” I explained dutifully when one of those students turned in their draft. “What’s the difference between MLA and Chicago?,” he asked reasonably in return. I know it has something to do with the order of the information, but I couldn’t answer him exactly. “In history, we use Chicago Style,” was all I could say.

I have all major citation formats for Chicago/Turabian pretty much memorized by now, but it wasn’t always like that. I went through graduate school using a 6-page yellow pamphlet I got when I was a Freshman in high school. None of my professors cared. When she was reading my dissertation draft, Colleen Dunlavy, the last of my readers I added from inside the history department at Madison, said to me, “You know, historians tend to use Chicago Style. You should probably convert your footnotes and bibliography to that.” It took me about 24 hours to get that done.

Many of my colleagues (some of whom who have been known to read this blog from time to time) have a reputation among our students for being “footnote fascists.” They see the comma in the wrong place, and they’ll demand it be moved for fear of offending Kate Turabian’s sanctified memory. I used to joke all the time about a now-retired professor here who graded with a ruler which he used to measure the margins on title pages.

I have never been a footnote fascist. My sole concerns have always been that the footnote or bibliographical entry had enough information in it so that I can find the source if I am so inclined and that the style is consistent throughout the paper. Some of this comes from the wide variety of journals in which I’ve published. I’ve been in more than one economic history journal that uses some strage variation of APA. I’ve also been published in Technology and Culture, which, if I remember it right, has an attribution style that I’ll just describe here as uniquely its own.

So on one level, I really don’t care what the difference is between MLA and Chicago as long as students follow my rules as outlined above. But there was another “innovation” in bibliographies that I first encountered this semester. A whole bunch of students in my survey class turned in papers with the words “print edition” after each book in their bibs. At first, I figured that the English 102 instructors had all started telling students to do that because of the rise of e-books. Then I asked the one student in my upper-level class who had the same phrase in his bibliography why he did it that way.

He introduced me to EasyBib.com. I haven’t played with it at all yet, but I do understand why students might want to use a site like this. After all, if they’re facing the footnote fascists, a computer program should assure them that all those stupid little rules are getting followed.

But what if your appreciation of why attribution is so important gets lost (like the dodo) by doing your bibliography this way? More importantly, what if the program doesn’t attribute your sources right (due to poor data entry or some technical glitch)?

Then there’s the matter of pure spite. I see that while MLA citations are free at easybib.com, you have to pay $19.99/year in order to cite material in the Chicago/Turabian format. Which one do you think most students will use now? Why should we have to accept the bibliography format that English professors want rather than the other way around? Are English professors happy that their entire discipline is now a loss leader?

I think I feel a bout of footnote fascism coming on fast.