“Warning: This is not college.”

Among the many things I’ve been doing since my semester ended is start another MOOC: Nutrition, Health and Lifestyle out of Vanderbilt. Why? Not only does it remind me of my dear, departed sabbatical, I teach food history. In that class we end up spending more time in the present than in any other course that I’ve ever taught and this MOOC is all about the food present.

I’ve almost completed the first week of six or seven so far and it has been very enjoyable. The production values are terrific. The superprofessor, Jamie Pope, is a good lecturer. There’s even a fair bit of history in it. If there’s a structural change between this course and the others I’ve taken, it’s the fact that the multiple choice questions come in the middle of the lecture rather than the end.

What hasn’t changed is the work level. As with the history MOOCs that I’ve taken or observed, there is no required reading in this class whatsoever. I admit to knowing absolutely nothing about nutrition as a discipline (which is one of the reasons I wanted to try this MOOC), but I have a hard time believing that there is a face-to-face nutrition course anywhere in the country that doesn’t have some kind of required reading. After all, reading is an important part of education of all kinds because the act of reading reinforces the learning process. I guess you could argue that the MOOC is nothing but a jazzed-up textbook, but how many other textbooks can you get a certificate for reading?

As I anticipated, Coursera/Vanderbilt is doing practically everything possible not to scare anybody off. Indeed, that’s why some of the lines from the syllabus border on pathetic. For example, after noting that the textbook is not required, the syllabus states that the video lectures provide the “core content for this course.” From what I can tell, the weekly assignments do not require writing (which seems understandable for nutrition), but you can still earn a “Statement of Accomplishment” without submitting any of them.

In one sense, this situation isn’t hurting anybody. 70,000 people are learning about nutrition, gaining knowledge that can improve every person’s life. This is certainly a good thing. In another sense though it may harm a lot a people. This class is on the Coursera Signature Track. While Coursera is clear that completing a class like this earns no college credit, they’re also clear that handing over $30-$100 per course to get your identity and performance verified does have value. Introducing this option, the company wrote on its blog:

We hope that offering verified certification for our courses will open up many new and valuable opportunities for students…

What are those opportunities? Perhaps they just mean professional development, but if you doubt that somebody somewhere is going to try to get college credit out of that certificate then you must have been born yesterday. The same thing goes if you doubt that some college somewhere will be delighted to award credit for that certificate – at a price. [Measured "competencies" anyone?] If enough people take MOOCs on the Signature Track, there may even be a movement to demand it.

If MOOCs could be limited to nerdy edu-tainment, I wouldn’t be writing this. If we could slap a label on every MOOC that says, “Warning: This is not college,” perhaps I would have no problem with them. I know superprofessors believe that they are doing a great public good by putting their lectures online and in a limited sense they are, but MOOCs do not exist in a vacuum. One person’s outreach is another person’s college substitute. That means that one superprofessor’s public service can also be an ill-informed administrator’s deadly weapon against the rest of us and against rigor in higher education in general. To think otherwise is the height of both naïveté and short-sightedness.

Will Coursera make us stupid?

In 2008, the contrarian tech writer Nicholas Carr wrote an article entitled, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Upon recommending it to a roomful of teachers the other night, I noticed that this article is famous enough to have its own Wikipedia page. I think of it as a kind of prequel for Carr’s less-famous book, The Shallows, but since I probably can’t convince you to read that before you get to the end of this post I’ll work off his article instead.

The main point of the article comes near the beginning:

I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

In short, the Internet has a negative effect on everyone’s attention span and Google thrives on that effect.

First, all reading gets chopped down to discreet chunks. Next, all the lectures get chopped down to fifteen minutes. Then students watch those lectures at double-speed so that they can get on to what they really want to do (assuming their not Facebooking in another browser window already). You know where I’m going with this, but that would be a far too easy post to write. Therefore, I’ll go in a Carr-inspired rather than Carr-analogous direction.

Carr is more than smart enough to recognize that there are advantages to having the Internet (and by implication, Google) available. “For me, as for others,” he writes (or is this so old now that I should write “wrote?”):

the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded.

This is the reason I’ve changed my teaching methods in recent years. When I was growing up, history used to be all about how many facts you can memorize. In some places, I’m sure it still is. Certainly, students still have to know something about facts. You have no idea how depressing it is to ask a class who Robert Wagner was and get the answer that he used to be on “Hart to Hart.”* But Senator Robert Wagner is important not just for the sake of knowing who Robert Wagner was or what he did, but for knowing what he represented and still represents in America today. You are never going to get that from just a Google search, and, alas, you’ll never get that from a Coursera MOOC.

Read the last eight months of this blog if you want to understand my problems with Coursera’s format, but I’m not just talking about the format here. I’ve learned not to stake my life on a quick reading of anything MOOC. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of the courses that they offer seem to be introductory. [Seriously, are there any prerequisites for any MOOCs anywhere? Wouldn't that mean that they'd no longer be open?]

Granted some of those introductory courses might be very difficult (like machine learning, for instance), but what do you do if you want to take your MOOC education to the next level? At Cal State, you can pay tuition and get on-campus courses, but if MOOCs are really the future of higher education, what’s going to happen to all those less popular upper-level courses that we teach every semester when most schools go all MOOC, all the time (kind of like this blog)?

Unfortunately, specialized classes are very un-MOOCish. After all, fewer people are going to be interested in Agricultural Economics than Introduction to Micro almost by definition. Fewer people means less opportunity to make money from whatever data they’re willing to give you. Perhaps more importantly, the way that upper-level courses tend to be taught (at least in my experience) serves as a stark contrast to the MOOC M.O. These courses are often structured around required reading, that reading tends to be deep reading, and it requires the active participation of a professor in order for students to be able to apply the principles they learned in intro courses to this new material in the most interesting ways. To put it another way, does anyone assign Milton in Intro to Poetry?

That’s why giving the impression that you can get the equivalent of an entire college education by scratching the surface of absolutely everything is a fraud upon the learning public. Yet the public is conditioned to think that way by the way that the WWW is structured, a mile long and an inch deep.

Of course, to blame only Coursera for potentially making us stupid is patently unfair. From their perspective the customer is always right (even when they’re not) so their business plan is a reflection of the values of their best paying customers, namely university administrators. As Bob Samuels argues:

“[T]he push to base university funding on degree attainment rates applies a factory model of production to the complicated world of instruction. Instead of pushing for innovative creativity, we are re-imagining education as a technological machine that spits out graduates at a faster rate. Yet, students are not widgets, and faculty are not assembly line workers; instead, we need complex solutions to complex systems.”

Unfortunately, we won’t find those solutions to our problems by Googling “MOOCs,” “Higher ed reform” or even “Edtech flavor of the month.” In fact, I don’t think we’ll find those solutions on the Internet at all. Some might say that makes me contrarian too, but that I would argue is the whole problem with higher education right there.

* In case you’re wondering, that’s a true story.

Real college classes have writing assignments and required reading.

Do most MOOCs have required reading? I’ve been conversing with the proprietor of the blog Capitalist Imperialist Pig about that question in the comments here. They challenged me to look at all the excellent readings in two MOOCs, Gregory Nagy’s Ancient Greek Hero and Dan Ariely’s Coursera MOOC from Duke, so I did.*

Here’s the “Suggested Reading” statement for Ariely’s MOOC:

I will cover some of the material that is in my 3 books Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (2008), The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home (2010), and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone—Especially Ourselves (2012).

In other words, there’s no required reading, and one writing assignment which is (of course) peer-graded.

The Nagy course is better on reading. There’s a lot of free downloadable translations of Greek texts that you clearly need to read in order to pass the typical mulltiple choice lecture quizzes. But here’s the assessment and evaluation portion:

Students will be evaluated on assessment performance and participation. Assessments will be conducted each “hour” of the course. These will consist of quizzes on the reading (names, places, who is speaking to whom, etc.), as well as the application of principles and concepts central to the course.

Class participation, multiple choice quizzes and no writing at all.

Do you see a trend yet? Then consider this:

From #UTAustin #MOOC on 20th c. ideas: "While not formally required, prior to or during the course, you might wish to read the book" #USIH—
LD Burnett (@LDBurnett) March 30, 2013

Yes, that’s right. You can learn all about great 20th Century ideas at the University of Texas without having to read about any of them. And don’t forget about Harvard lite (law school edition)!

The trend should be clear now: MOOC providers don’t want to scare off potential students with too much work. Talk about teaching in a strait jacket! This is exactly why higher education should never be privatized in the first place. It degrades the quality of the product…a lot.

I’m sorry if this bursts anyone’s bubble, but watching videos on the Internet and maybe writing a few very short essays that the professor never sees isn’t college. Real college classes have writing assignments and required reading. Real college classes require access to the professor. To say MOOCs like these can somehow replace an actual college education is tantamount to fraud.

But that fraud isn’t just going to hurt students left with no access to college but for MOOCs. It’s going to hurt society in general too. This is from UW-Madison History Professor (Go Badgers!) Bill Cronon’s presidential address to the last American Historical Association convention (no subscription needed). [Warning: this story will make any real English or History teacher (and probably more than a few others) cry.]:

Still more poignant and worrisome was the young man who came up to me after a lecture I had just given at another university introducing the major themes of the very long book about Portage, Wisconsin, on which I have been working for longer than I care to admit. I sometimes describe that book as “Michener-length,” though that is a reference few students born in the past thirty years would recognize. So I usually add that I expect the final book to be at least five or six hundred pages long, covering as it does the history of this small Midwestern town from the glacier to now. The illustrated talk I give about Portage is intended to be a crowd-pleaser, with lots of engaging images and stories, and at the end of this particular lecture, a shy young man came up to say how much he had enjoyed it. I thanked him for his praise, but was then mystified when he added that he was very sorry he would never be able to read the book on which my talk was based. I sheepishly told him that although I was taking a long time to finish it, it would eventually be published, and he would certainly be able to read it then. He shook his head and said that was not what he meant. He reminded me that I had described the book as being more than five hundred pages long. Then, with a sad and embarrassed look on his face, he said he was simply incapable of reading such a book, that he had never in his life read anything so long. I was taken aback, but I am quite certain he was speaking in earnest, and that his regret was quite real.

Educating the masses without fixing the problem which that story represents isn’t really educating the masses, no matter what the MOOC maniacs tell you. At least we can blame the delusions of the venture capitalists on self interest. What’s the excuse of everyone in academia who should actually know better?

* These MOOC syllabus links require accounts from the MOOC providers in question. And yes, if you’re wondering, I did get an edX account in order to write this post. [The things I do for this blog!]

Update: A reliable source tells me that I screwed up in my quick read of Professor Ariely’s syllabus. Apparently, there is a substantial list of regular readings scattered around the Internet that I didn’t see. That would make his class more like Professor Nagy’s, a MOOC with a higher workload than most. My apologies to both Professor Ariely and CIP. In defense of my overall point though, I’ll note that the two Coursera world history courses that I’ve been directly involved with have no required reading at all.

Late Update: Since this post is getting a lot of late attention from people who are likely new visitors here, they might also want to read my follow up post on this subject, Some MOOCs are more inferior than others.

MOOCs are to reading as Kryptonite is to Superman.

I went to a meeting last week with a room full of scientists.  At one point, the guy at the front of the room lamented the fact that nobody wants to read anymore.  ”You have no idea,” I said reflexively to no one in particular.  On second thought, I realized that they did have some idea as they’re probably trying to coax their students into reading boring textbooks.  I can at least pick interesting monographs.

Either way, we’re all at least on the same team.  So is Philip Zelikow (sort of).  From the WP article I cited on Friday:

“For about 80 U-Va. students, there are required reading, quizzes, written assignments, a midterm and a final exam.  That is all fairly standard.”

Indeed it is.  Zelikow also runs sections with his students, which is why that article is all about his flipped classroom.  Zelikow’s MOOC students, on the other hand, are required to do none of these things, which is a shame as Zelikow has an excellent reading list. Those books are only recommended for his MOOC students (as was Jeremy Adelman’s textbook) because they have no incentive to actually do the reading since they’re only being tested on the MOOC lectures.  University of Virginia students read books and watch lectures because they’re getting real credit from a real college for doing so, but only the most committed MOOCer would ever do all of that. Requiring everybody to handle a UVa workload would make Zelikow’s MOOC a lot less massive.

I’ve seen plenty of people claim that MOOCs are just like textbooks.  In fact, they’re not like textbooks at all.  They may perform the same function of conveying information, but watching videos requires a lot less effort on the part of students and therefore results in a lot less reward.  As a guy from the Gates Foundation told the Chronicle back in November:

“In that way, Mr. Jarrett said, MOOC’s may turn out to be a high-tech replacement for a textbook.

“We think in the short term the blended, flip-the-classroom model is going to be the one that’s most effective for the first generation, low-income students, the kind of students that we work for,” he said.”

[emphasis added]

Let me get this straight:  First generation college students get to earn degrees without reading, while kids whose parents know better get sent to real schools with required book lists?  What kind of education is an education without reading?  A lousy one, of course, but Coursera’s future profits depend upon a steady stream of eyeballs, not on whether the brains behind those eyeballs actually learn anything.  Therefore, the “customer” (who isn’t actually paying anything) is always right.  It’s this give-the-people-what-they-want mentality behind MOOCs that make them death to textbooks.

Honestly, I wouldn’t mind one bit if MOOCs only killed textbooks.  Textbooks are boring and almost nobody reads them – including the professors who assign them.  However, if MOOCs ever manage to killing reading in its entirety, I’m going to pack it in and find another line of work.  After all, how can you teach college history without monographs or English without novels?  In fact, how can you teach anything above an introductory course in any humanity without assigning required reading?

Of course you can’t, but maybe that’s precisely the point.

A dull, wonkish post about technology and historical research.

Today I’m starting the second (and last) week of my research trip in and around DC. Last week I was at the Library of Congress. After I leave this Panera, I start in at Archives II, assuming I can figure out the bus schedule.

Most of the papers that I’ve been looking at have turned out to be obscure published speeches and government reports. As I don’t have much time here in the great scheme of things, I’ve found myself checking Google Books to see if everything in front of me was already there. Some of it was. Some of it wasn’t.

I can’t tell you what an enormous change this has been for me. Normally, I’d be taking everything I’m sure I’d use eventually up to the copier and copying like crazy. Now, the LOC has put in the best book scanners that I’ve ever seen (both in the Manuscript Reading Room and in Adams) which you can use for free as long as you have a thumb drive to store your results. Free stuff from the government! Somebody tell Paul Ryan!

I scanned a few pamphlets, but for visual material it’s just priceless. Indeed, I’m also deep in the throes of picking pictures for this book and I’ve basically had to go by memory. Next time it’s going to be different. Of course, this is all to save the spines of the books, but I still feel like I hit the lottery.

I may be alone in this feeling because it seems that most people have gone entirely to cameras. I’ve seen some mounted on tripods, while some people it seems just bring in the same $90 Samsungs that they use on their vacations and snap away. I even saw one woman snapping pictures of her microfilm reader. [It may sound logical, but it sure looks funny.]

I was prepared to start using a camera and a tripod before this sabbatical started, but a few weeks back I changed my mind. Most of the sources I’m using using are pre-1923 and published. Indeed, I really can download most of them for free with a lot less hassle.

For the one-of-a-kind published and archival material (and you know, as more books are becoming available to everyone this is what will set great works of history apart in the future) I’ve got Zotero, which still beats the heck out of note cards. This is going to be my first all Zotero book, and I’m certain it’s going to take months off the writing process. After all, it’s having intellectual control of your research that’s most important when technology makes it easy to flood you with material.

Perhaps it’s a sign of my advanced age that I’ve chosen to avoid swimming in document snap shots. When I do research, I actually enjoy reading what I find in folders rather than just snapping them or even trying to copy it all. In fact, I think I do some of my best thinking that way. And in case you didn’t notice, I hate reading off a computer screen when it can be easily avoided.

Is it any wonder then why I don’t want my entire job to turn out that way?

“Has he lost his mind?”

So I signed up for a MOOC. Seriously. A History of the World since 1300, taught by Jeremy Adelman from a certain university located in my hometown of Princeton, New Jersey.

Why would I of all people do such a thing? Well, I’ve had something of a complex about my overspecialization in American history since my first teaching job at Whitman College. Unlike Wisconsin, which had Americanists coming out of its ears, Americanists were in the minority at Whitman so the old Europeanists teased me for having such a limited knowledge base. I’ve rectified that somewhat through independent reading, but I could definitely stand to learn more specific factual knowledge from outside my country of specialty.

Then I watched this TED talk by Coursera’s Daphne Koller and got a little excited. I had never seen so detailed an explanation of the mechanics of MOOCs, and it seems as if they’ve gone to great lengths to help students learn the kind of factual knowledge that I’m missing when it comes to world history.

Have I lost my mind? Nope. Am I pulling a Whittaker Chambers or a David Horowitz on the subject of MOOCs? Nope. As anyone who’s ever watched a TED video knows, there are parts of every such speech that make you want to take a hammer to your computer screen (and I’ll get to that one for me in this speech in just a second). However, as I’m on sabbatical for this coming this semester, learning world history seems like a good use for some of my extra time.* In fact, there’s a place on my annual performance review for extra education which I’ve never had occasion to mark before. I’m absolutely going to put this down.

So what’s the problem? Well, for starters the course has only one text and even that’s only recommended. Is there a history class anywhere in America (let alone Princeton) which has no required reading? Seriously, I have a question for all the education geniuses out there who want me to flip my classroom: When are students going to do the reading I assign them? After all, history is a literary art, not a trivia game.

Now here’s the part of that Daphne Koller video that came close to inspiring me to violence (my transcription):

“Well, of course, we cannot yet grade the range of work one needs for all courses. Specifically, what’s lacking is the kind of critical thinking work that is so essential in such disciplines as the humanities, social sciences, business and others. So we tried to convince, for example, some of our humanities faculty that multiple choice was not such a bad strategy. That didn’t go over really well.

[Audience chuckles]

So we had to come up with a different solution. And the solution we ended up using is peer grading. It turns out that previous studies show, like this one by Sadler and Good, that peer grading is a surprisingly effective strategy for providing reproducable grades. It was tried only in small classes, but there it showed, for example, that these student-assigned grades on the Y-axis are actually very well-coordinated with the teacher assigned grades on the X-axis. What’s even more surprising, self-grades, where students grade there own work critically – so long as you incentivize them properly so that they can’t give themselves a perfect score – are actually even better-correlated with the teacher grades. So this is an effective strategy that can be used for grading at scale and is also a useful learning strategy for the students because they actually learn from the experience.“

I’ve covered this precise subject before, but this sounds even worse to me now than it did then. When testing becomes the be all and end all of American education at all levels, we act like it’s OK to care only about the math and not about actual learning.

How are students ever going to learn anything about critical thinking in any subject without good, thoughtful comments? The students are incentivized to get done with their peer grading as soon as possible because it’s not their grade. When I grade, my salary incentivizes me to actually explain to my students how to do better next time. As further incentive, when my comments actually help, it makes grading their papers easier in the future. That kind of attention will never scale up. Period.

I only worry if anyone will care. I guess I don’t care for purposes of what I want out of this class, but presumably I know something about critical thinking already.**

* No lazy professor jokes, please. As anyone who’s ever been on sabbatical knows, it’s not a work-free period. It’s a period when you do different kinds of work. I’ve been telling people that I’ll be a professional writer until January. I have a new research project to work on, but of course I’m going to write about taking this course too.

** If I can’t ace this course I’m going to be so ashamed.

Has it really come to this?

If I were a good history blogger, I’d tell you about the two all-star Progressive Era politics panels I saw while I was at the OAH in Milwaukee last weekend. I’d mention that despite the aforementioned all-stars, the best paper I heard all weekend was from Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Director of the Schomburg Center For Research in Black Culture. Maybe I’d even throw in the fact that Daniel T. Rodgers lives in the house where I grew up.*

But I’m not a good history blogger. That’s why I bypassed a session on early 19th century industrialization so that I could watch two extremely dedicated (but also jaded) history professors from the College of Southern Nevada describe what it’s like to teach the U.S. survey online. Here is a selection of my three+ pages of notes:

* They test students’ ability to find correct, reliable information.
* Students have no clue what a reliable source is.
* Open book, open note testing is basically required [in an online course].
* “If we’re all doing a canned course, where is the student going to go who has a different learning style?”
* Teach a canned course and you’ll be bored the second time you do it.
* Your course always has to have a little bit of you in it.
* Start your course with a syllabus quiz.
* They have to tell students not to upgrade their browsers, otherwise they won’t be compatible with the LMS.
* You have to do your own tech support.
* You have to be available more than just office hours.
* One administrator there asked for “online office hours.” They revolted and won…for now.
* Self-paced students will skip around.
* Their LMS looks like someone else’s Google home page. [I think it was called "Angel."]
* It is possible for students to see when you are online.

Now here’s the stuff that really got to me:

* “Students don’t read text.”
* They are conditioned to look for icons, so you have to include icons.
* Apparently the business school in Nevada is telling students that it’s OK to cut and paste from the Internet in their papers because that’s what you do in real life.
* You can’t have more than three paragraphs on any single page otherwise they won’t read it.

That last one is when I piped up, almost involuntarily. “Has it really come to this?,” I blurted out, without even raising my hand. “Yes,” they both replied in turn, it has.

In an excellent speech during one of those Progressive Era sessions, Jackson Lears from Rutgers quoted one of my favorite icons of that time, who I have mentioned elsewhere on this blog more than once. “Do not worry over the charge of treason to your masters, but be concerned about the treason that involves yourselves,” said Eugene V. Debs. “Be true to yourself and you cannot be a traitor to any good cause on earth.”

How anyone can teach online and still feel as if they’re being true to themselves completely beats me.

* Yes, I am from Princeton, but I prefer to say that I’m from New Jersey. Otherwise, it destroys whatever credibility I have with other members of the working class.

Distractions 2. Reading 0.

People showing up in my Twitter feed seem to think this is a brilliant response to the NYT article on reading e-books that I wrote about this morning:

We notice when we are distracted by some newfangled app on a Kindle Fire. We do not notice when we are distracted by vacuuming the rug or going to watch television or daydreaming. Having read thousands of books in my day — on paper — I can assure you that the phenomenon of getting distracted while reading a book is not limited to e-books.

Of course that’s correct. It’s also beside the point.

You can get distracted by vacuuming or daydreaming when you try to read a physical book. You can also get distracted by vacuuming or daydreaming when reading an e-book on your Kindle Fire. You cannot, however, open a new window on your browser and check your Facebook feed when reading a physical book unless you get up out of the chair and turn on your computer or your phone. The Internet is an immediate distraction when you’re reading on an Internet-enabled device. When you are reading a physical book, it falls into the category of all the other things that you might be doing should you close the book and choose to do them.

For those following along at home, that’s two kinds of distractions that make it hard to read an e-book and only one kind of distraction when you’re reading from paper. Teaching students in a literary discipline facing one kind of distraction is hard enough. Do we really need to face another one too?

Distractions 1. Reading 0.

I don’t own an e-reader or a tablet. Nonetheless, this is not news to me:

People who read e-books on tablets like the iPad are realizing that while a book in print or on a black-and-white Kindle is straightforward and immersive, a tablet offers a menu of distractions that can fragment the reading experience, or stop it in its tracks.

E-mail lurks tantalizingly within reach. Looking up a tricky word or unknown fact in the book is easily accomplished through a quick Google search. And if a book starts to drag, giving up on it to stream a movie over Netflix or scroll through your Twitter feed is only a few taps away.

Why isn’t this news to me? Because every computer user in America (including me) has to fight the urge to open a new tab and read something more fun than what they’re currently looking at every time they read or watch anything online.

Now imagine that you’re a college student taking an online course that you don’t want to be taking. Wouldn’t you have that same feeling nearly all the time? How often do you think you’d give in temptation and check Facebook or Twitter (particularly since nobody is watching you watch your course materials)?

By the way, the people interviewed in that story are experienced readers who, presumably, want to read the e-books they bought and downloaded onto their Kindle Fires and iPads. How do you think the students in your class who don’t want to read what what you’re assigning are going to respond under the same circumstances?

Jonathan Franzen is right about e-books (but for the wrong reason).

Unless you’re the only book lover in the world who lives under a rock, you know that earlier this week the novelist Jonathan Franzen denounced e-books as “damaging for society.” I haven’t seen the original version of his remarks, but the Guardian suggests that the primary reason Franzen is worried about e-books is their lack of permanence. That bothers me too, but I think society should worry about the present before it worries about the future.

What have we got to worry about? Reading an e-book with hyperlinks and other accoutrements embedded in it isn’t really reading. It’s web surfing. Proponents of e-books seem to think this a good thing, like this guy responding to Franzen at Mashable:

[E-]books are the future. They’re cheaper to produce, easier to distribute and, dare I say it, probably promote reading better than your local library. And while Franzen is concerned about ebook versions differing from their real-world counterparts, I’m cheering the emergence of new kinds of ebooks that take the IRL reading experiences to places we scarcely imagined on the printed page. One need only look to interactive children’s books and etextbooks for evidence.

Since I’m a college professor, I’ll focus on the part about e-textbooks. A lot of people seem to think that paper textbooks have become obsolete. Take the Obama administration, for example. This is from USA Today:

Karen Cator, the U.S. Department of Education’s technology director, says moving classwork onto devices such as tablets gives students the ability to do research, check their work and get feedback from teachers, among other uses. “One of the opportunities to extend the school day is by providing students with interactive and engaging environments outside of school,” she says.

I thought the purpose of textbooks, the subject of that article, was to learn the information inside them. So what do the kinds of alternate objectives fostered by interactive, engaging environments inside a textbook (or any kind of book, for that matter) do to actual reading skills? They destroy them.

This subject makes up a huge chunk of Nicholas Carr’s book, The Shallows. While I think his subtitle, “What the Internet is doing to our brains,” is unfortunate, he has plenty of evidence for what the internet is doing to our attention spans. As long as e-book readers serve double duty as internet delivery devices, results like those that Carr describes are inevitable.

Here’s an extended excerpt from Carr’s section on the research about reading hypertext vs. text on paper (pp. 126-27, endnote omitted):

A 1989 study showed that readers of hypertext often ended up clicking distractedly “through the pages instead of reading them.” A 1990 experiment revealed that hypertext readers often “could not remember what they had and had not read.” In another study that same year, researchers had two groups of people answer a series of questions by searching through a set of documents. One group searched through electronic hypertext documents, while the other searched through traditional paper documents. The group that used the paper documents outperformed the hypertext group in completing the assignment. In reviewing the results of these and other experiments, the editors of a 1996 book on hypertext and cognition wrote that since hypertext “imposes a higher cognitive load on the reader,” it’s no surprise “that empirical comparisons between paper presentation (a familiar situation) and hypertext (a new, cognitively demanding situation) do not always favor hypertext.” But they predicted that, as readers gained greater “hypertext literacy,” the cognition problems would likely diminish.

That hasn’t happened. Even though the World Wide Web has made hypertext commonplace, indeed ubiquitous, research continues to show that people who read linear text comprehend more, remember more and learn more than those who read text peppered with links.

I could go on, but do I really have to? Many of you were probably clicking distractedly through the World Wide Web long before now because this post is so long. The Internet is designed to encourage that behavior. I’m not saying you have to stop doing this, only that it might be nice to cultivate an ability among students for deep reading as well.

I’ve seen a number of e-book fans denounce Franzen for elitism. I guess this is inevitable since he’s the guy who snubbed Oprah. I also get the distinct impression that Nicholas Carr isn’t too popular in techie circles even though he is no Luddite. But let’s focus on the argument here, not the people who are making it.

Why should I as a teacher endorse a technology with embedded distractions when one of my primary goals as an instructor is to get students to become better readers? If e-books make achieving that goal harder than it is already, aren’t they damaging society? Seriously, I’d love to hear a good answer to either of those questions.