CC blog

August 2010 Books (nonfiction)

These reviews all appeared originally at my blog http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology_and_learning

I'm collecting them here, so my addled brain will have a place to look back and remember what I read - as the digital book world means my books no longer keep me company.

Mary Roach's "Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void" is the perfect book for anyone who is curious about the ins and outs (literally) of space travel.
We learn:

    •    How astronauts urinate and defecate in space, and how this process has changed from the early Apollo missions to the space shuttle to the space station.
    •    How sex in space would work, and if anyone has ever given it a shot.
    •    How space food is produced and consumed, and why we would not want to have NASA take over our campus dining services.
    •    What an astronaut really does in the 99% of the time she is not in space, and what NASA (and the Russian and Japanese space agencies) look for in a potential recruit.
    •    How astronauts train, getting used to the rigors of zero gravity (think Vomit Comet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vomit_Comet), the boredom, and the need to spend 24 hours a day with your co-workers without ever being able to leave.
    •    Why Mary Roach thinks manned space exploration should continue, and why spending the $500 billion or so to get to Mars is a good investment.

I'm a big fan of Mary Roach's books. She has covered sex (Bonk), death (Stiff), and ghosts (Spook). The only problem with "Packing for Mars" is that the title is too long. 
And in the category of, "oh what a small world we live in", it turns out that Mary Roach grew up in the small town in which I now reside. Mary, you are welcome to stay at the house if you ever want to come and visit.

Grade:  A-

I decided to read Sheena Iyengar's new book, The Art of Choosing, after watching her TED Talk.
The opportunity to give a TED Talk must rank just below inclusion in the Oprah book club. Does anyone know just how big the book selling boost is for authors appearing on TED?

Sheena Iyengar is best known for her jam experiment. This is the experiment that Barry Schwartz made famous in his 2004 book, The Paradox of Choice. In the experiment, Iyengar found that shoppers were much less likely to purchase a jar of jam when presented with many choices (at a tasting booth), in comparison with shoppers who were invited to sample only a few varieties. The conventional wisdom that more choice is always beneficial does not always seem to hold true.

Iyenagar's choice research has been influential in my world of course design and learning technology. We understand that it is often preferable to limit the number of tools available to faculty in a learning management system, as installing every extension or building block may cause instructors to choose to entirely forgo the use of any tool (such as discussion boards or wikis). As the learning management system has ballooned into a central campus portal, the need to constantly "edit down" non-core learning functions continues to grow. An increasing number of campus stakeholders may request links in the LMS (everything from events to athletics), requests that we need to weigh against the costs of diminishing the utilization of tools that promote active learning.

The Art of Choosing fits nicely into a growing body of behavior economics, brain research, and cognitive psychology that explores the limits of our own decision making abilities. Dan Ariely and Jonah Lehrer have written some of the best books in this tradition. One of my big take-aways from The Art of Choosing is that we may be poor decision makers, but our difficulties in choosing are often culturally influenced. Iyengar is much better at conducting cross-cultural studies on choice and behavior than other researchers in this field, perhaps a result of her growing up as a child of immigrants.

What factors would convince you to choose to take the time to watch Iyengar's TED Talk? Have any of you made the choice to read The Art of Choosing?

Grade:  B+

Q. Why don't Yugo's sustain much damage in a front-end collision?

A. The tow truck takes the impact.

Q. Why does a Yugo have rear a window defroster?

A. To keep your hands warm as you push it.

--from "The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History" by Jason Vuic.

What can this great book about the sad and untimely demise of Yugo teach us about higher education?

Linking the Yugo to Higher Ed Economics:

    •    Cars are one of those categories where over the past five decades costs have come down significantly, while quality has gone consistently up. We can buy a much more reliable, safer, better performing, roomier, and longer lasting car for the same (real) dollars today than at any time in the past. Higher ed has clearly gone in the other direction. The Yugo story is perhaps the exception to this rule. Is the Yugo a cautionary tale about the wisdom of going for the "cheapest" educational structure?
    •    Even though the Yugo was a terrible car, we also learn from Vuic's delightful book that (at least initially) the Yugo was a popular car. People were lined up at the dealerships with cash in hand, ready to plunk down deposits. At $4,000, the Yugo created its own category of cheap transportation. Is there a similar latent demand for really affordable higher education? Or does the Yugo prove that "cheap" and "quality" are not compatible?
    •    The Yugo was so cheap because it was built on a very old (Fiat) design, and put together (badly) by very low-paid workers. Can I send my girls to an Eastern European country to go to college? The University of Ljubljana, the largest university in Slovenia with 64,000 students, might be a reasonable option for my kids when they leave home in 2015 and 2017.
    •    The Yugo did not have to be so bad. One of the take home messages of Vuic's book is how incompetent the American Yugo ownership and management was. Rather than investing dollars in the car's quality, the Yugo America founders paid themselves big salaries, plowed the money into other businesses, and rode around in helicopters. Would things have been different if those dollars were spent on the car? They also spent tons of money on advertising, money today that could be saved with smart use of the web. So maybe an educational provider that does not spend money on advertising or marketing, and keeps management costs down, could provide a quality educational start-up for a reasonable cost.

Any Yugo owners out there?

Grade:  B+

July 2010 Books

The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention by William Rosen

originally from:  http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology_and_learning/the_most_powerful_idea_in_the_world

In William Rosen's masterful new book, The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention, the most powerful idea is not the invention of the steam engine. Rather, the title refers to the development of the concept that ideas can be property, and that through the availability of patent law and capital, individuals tinkerers can become industrial scale innovators.

Rosen notes that: "From 1700 to 2000, the world's population has increased twelvefold - but its production of goods and services a hundredfold". (page 316) Will the innovations around digital technology, from cheap and powerful mobile computing devices to robust cloud based applications, bring about a commensurate rise in productivity as the industrial revolution? The steam engine allowed the cost of energy to come down rapidly, through its original use as the power source to pump out coal mines to its subsequent use in locomotives to bring down the costs of transporting coal. Today, it is less clear if digital technologies can bring about similar improvements in the productivity of education (increased access and quality at reduced costs), that the steam engine did for energy productivity in the 18th and 19th centuries.

It is ironic that the very intellectual property protections that catalyzed the willingness of inventors and entrepreneurs to invest their energy and money into the steam engine that are perhaps retarding innovations in education. Much of our current economic prosperity is built on the concept that ideas are property, yet many of the barriers to extending learning at low cost run up against this principle. Efforts to extend the infrastructure and content of learning outside of the marketplace, through open source and open educational content, have failed to significantly bring costs down or increase access.
Are we in the midst of an educational revolution powered by technology? Or are we grafting new technologies on old structures, changing education only at the margins?

Grade:  A-

The Secret Life of the Grown-up Brain: The Surprising Talents of the Middle-Aged Mind by Barbara Strauch

originally from:  http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology_and_learning/the_grown_up_brain_and_us

What if the real purpose of education should be to prepare our brains to function well throughout our lifespan? What if our explicit goals shift from creating brains that can operate well in the economy (or whatever other institutional missions we promote), to the goal of fostering cognitive reserves? What if promoting healthy brains was the best mechanism for creating productive citizens, and all the other values we believe in as educators and educational institutions were best served in service of the brain?
I'm starting to come to the conclusion that the brain, our brains, is a theme that should cut across all disciplines. That we should put the brain at the center of our educational system for purely selfish and self-interested reasons, namely that we all need do whatever we can to insure that we experience successful brain aging.

The Secret Life of the Grown-up Brain: The Surprising Talents of the Middle-Aged Mind, by Barbara Strauch is a wonderful book. Strauch is a generous and wise author, writing about the middle-age brain through a combination of stories and science that seems well calibrated to the brains of her readers.

We learn that while the middle-age brain may not have the rapid processing power of its younger version, these deficits are more than made up for by increased abilities in judgment, expertise, and effectiveness. Our middle-age brains see the world in a more positive light and accurate light, and are much better at juggling all the demands that life throws at us.

The big revelation of "The Grown-up Brain" is that we have within our power to determine much of the course of our own brain aging. Through diligent mental and physical exercise, a reasonable diet, and a positive orientation towards our work and relationships we can significantly and dramatically protect our brains against cognitive slow-downs and dementia.

A prediction: Over the next twenty-years our colleges and universities will make a change from teaching to prepare for the job market to teaching to promote cognitive reserves. Innovative educational institutions will advertise a curriculum that is demonstrated to promote long-term cognitive health. We will begin to escape from the idea of economic scarcity, and start embracing the idea of lifetime cognitive scarcity - with educational programs designed to foster cognitive abundance.

This shift will require that the study of the brain become deeply embedded throughout all of our disciplines. We will talk about the brain when we think about teaching, learning and research. We will see our fitness centers and dining halls as tools to promote lifetime brain health. We will understand the mission of our institutions as providing our students the tools, habits, knowledge and fundamentals they will need to encourage and promote successful brain aging. Our rankings will be based on brain health related metrics, on the inputs that predict cognitive surplus. We will look back in disbelief at a time when our institutions took the brain for granted, and did not design our programs and environments explicitly to promote lifetime brain health.

Grade:  A-

How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like by Paul Bloom

originally from:  http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology_and_learning/questions_inspired_by_how_pleasure_works

• How come I did not know about Yale's Paul Bloom and was surprised to come across his beautiful book, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like?
• When am I going to find the time to watch his Introduction to Psychology Class on the Open Yale Courses site?
• Who else in my learning and technology world is also reading this book, and how can I connect with them to discuss and share ideas?
• Why is it that Audible.com has such terrible social networking features around their audio books, not letting me see who else has downloaded "How Pleasure Works" and the books in their library?
• Does writing a book like How Pleasure Works that popularizes and synthesizes cutting edge academic research, much of which is done by the author, contribute to the academic career and reputation of the writer as much as a book aimed at a narrow scholarly audience?
• If reading "How Pleasure Works" provides so much pleasure (and I think opportunities for authentic learning), how come popular nonfiction academic books like this one are rarely features on course syllabi?
• What is the factor that determines if a nonfiction book will have an audio version, where other books I'd like to read, are available only in paper or e-book format?
• Where will the next great academic who can write for a popular audience come from and what are the conditions that encourage their development?

Grade:  B+

The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison

originally from:  http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology_and_learning/pushing_back_on_the_power_of_pull

I read The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion for one reason: "John Seely Brown." If JSB writes something, I'm buying. If JSB gives a talk, I'm there (at least virtually). If JSB says to "jump", I'm saying "how far." You get the picture.

The Power of Pull is one of those books that I'm happy I read but did not enjoy reading all that much. What is most instructive about The Power of Pull is that the book demonstrates how good ideas and clear thinking are necessary but not sufficient to engage us readers. What is missing from the book is precisely why I bought the book, the authors. The great ideas are filtered through a sort of omnipresent consultant speak, homo consultilis, instead of through the voice of any recognizable homo sapien. I know for a fact that the all 3 authors lead fascinating lives, but one would never know it from reading Pull.

Educators need to keep this lesson in mind. When we teach, we need to connect our disciplines to stories, and our stories to our students and ourselves. Dan Ariely does this masterfully in his latest book, The Upside of Irrationality, telling the story of his recovery from a horrific accident to help us understand the science of behavioral economics.

It is shame that the Pull authors allowed themselves to slip into consultant speak, as the ideas and lessons from Pull are worth pondering. The big argument of Pull is that a combination of globalization and digital technologies has fundamentally changed the rules of economics and employment, a big shift in which companies and institutions must draw ideas and people from the "edge" and leverage their talents to change the practices of the "core." People who will succeed in the uncertainty and turmoil of the digital economy will be those who can authentically follow their passions, connect with other passionate individuals, and re-skill themselves to compete and add-value in a globalized economy. Companies can no longer either create or forecast demand (push), but rather must offer a compelling product or service that "pulls" potential employees, partners, and customers in to mutually beneficial relationships.

I particularly like what Pull has to say about education:

"It's quickly dawning on us instead that our education was at best a thin foundation that needs to be continually refreshed in order for us to stay competitive". (page 12)

"Until relatively recently, most of us believed we had to invest considerable time and effort early in our lives navigation an educational system designed to transfer stocks of knowledge to us. As a reward for our diligence and persistence in school, we believed, these stocks of knowledge would serve us well throughout our lives". (page 52)

"We have to be willing to risk looking like we don't know the answer, or maybe the question. We've got to wean ourselves from the over dependence on expertise we've labored so hard to accumulate. To paraphrase Albert Einstein, we must avoid letting our education interfere with our learning". (page 117).

Good stuff. But I can't find much that is really all the new. A much better book about our economic and job future in a globalized and digital economy is Sonic Boom, by Gregg Easterbrook. Seth Godin has written extensively about finding our tribes and passions at work. Dan Pink's new book, Drive, is all about how intrinsic motivators always trump extrinsic ones in determining performance at work. Matt Ridley, in The Rational Optimist, explains how a globalized world organized around trade and open markets will mean greater prosperity for all of us. (You should really check out Ridley's TED Talk - "When Ideas Have Sex." And The New American Workplace provides in-depth case studies of companies that are able remain competitive through a results only workplace environment (ROWE) that allows creative people on the edge to be nurtured and thrive.

JSB - I hope your next book includes more of JSB.

Grade:  B-

Sonic Boom: Globalization at Mach Speed by Gregg Easterbrook

originally from:  http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology_and_learning/the_ed_tech_sonic_boom

Greg Easterbrook is making two big arguments in Sonic Boom: Globalization at Mach Speed.
Future Prosperity: Due to a combination of global trade, the spread of information technology, and the movement toward representative democracies, the 21st century will usher in unprecedented levels and diffusion of global prosperity.

Current Anxiety: The growth of prosperity will probably fail to make us happy. Instead, the ascendance of entrepreneurial capitalism and the rise of knowledge work at the expense of institutions, stability and security will make us all more anxious.

This seems to be a fair description of how life within the higher ed world will unfold as well. Would anyone trade the your college experience to the one that our kids will be able to receive? When I was in college the predominant instructional methodology was a lecturer talking at us for 50 minutes at a time. We had some great lecturers, and some lousy lecturers, and basically we accepted that this is how things were and we were lucky if we happened to take a course with a dynamic and passionate teacher.

Today, we are able to leverage a set of well-developed and stable technologies to build in pedagogically advanced active learning methods into a wide variety of courses and modes of instructional delivery. To be a great teacher it is no longer a prerequisite to be a dynamic and gifted lecturer. Rather, faculty can partner with learning designers, librarians, and teaching specialists to create dynamic, student-centered courses that allow students interact and create with the curriculum in ways that were impossible before the advent of technology enabled and supported classes.

However, these improvements in course quality made possible by the pairing of learning design methods and technology have brought with them a new set of challenges. Life was perhaps simpler back in the days when I first started to teach (in mid 1990s), when course design primarily meant crafting a syllabus. Yes, we had Scantron machines transparencies and PowerPoint, but we did not have the tools to enable active learning within a large course setting. We could make the lecture better at the margins, more class discussion - small groups etc., but the basic format of delivery was basically set. Today, students and progressive faculty I think expect that we can do better - and that every class is an opportunity to experiment with methods to encourage our students to transition from the passive to active mode. We know that learning is both social and requires engagement, we don't retain what we don't manipulate and create.

All these opportunities for improved teaching mean that we all end up spending more time on our classes and more time experimenting (and sometimes failing) with new teaching methods and tools. This shift also means that we need to shift resources and inputs into the teaching process, a change in the productivity equation that can (and should) disrupt the traditional economics of higher ed.
Easterbrook is convinced that the next few years will bring about opportunities and challenges that can scarcely be imagined, but will leave us all better off as individuals and as a society. I think we are in for a similar ride in higher ed.

Are any of you planning on reading Sonic Boom? I think that this would be an amazing book to teach a 1 credit mini course around. Easterbrook does a good job of reading his own work in the audiobook format. His last book, The Progress Paradox, is one of my all-time favorites. Sonic Boom is a terrific follow-up.

Grade:  A-

Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson

originally from:  http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology_and_learning/rework

The first book that I'm going to give to my learning and technology team is Rework, by the guys from 37Signals.

288 concise pages - or less than 3 hours in unabridged audio format. We need more books to be this good and this short.

37Signals is best known for its simple, cloud based project management tool Basecamp. I'm a Basecamp client, and have been using the tool productively for a few years now. If you have ever had to do a project with MS Project, or solely by e-mail and spreadsheets, than you will appreciate the simplicity, elegance, and flexibility of Basecamp.

The founders of 37Signals developed Basecamp to manage their own internal projects, only then realizing they had a service on their hands that other small teams would find useful. Basecamp requires no support from your central IT organization, no local hardware, and no expertise in project management. You can be up and running with a free 30 day trial in 60 seconds. Plans start at $24 a month.

Basecamp is not just a product but also a philosophy. Less features well done are better than many features that complicate a product. Offer services that are lightweight and agile, and resist the urge to meet the needs of every customer. Let your customer outgrow your product. Basecamp is the physical (or digital?) manifestation of the philosophy of work that 37Signals is selling in Rework. The company prides itself on keeping operations lean, costs down, working arrangements flexible, and paid marketing to a minimum. If you work for 37Signals you don't attend many meetings, don't write many strategic plans, and don't give many internal presentations. You are expected and encouraged to carve out quiet time for productive work, to share your work product early and often, and to be open to criticism. What you are not expected to do is work insane hours, sacrifice family or sleep time, or set unrealistic deadlines or goals.

It could be that 37Signals got lucky with Basecamp, and are falling into the fallacy of assuming that their work culture is an optimal culture because it produced Basecamp. The other products from 37Signals, Highrise (contact tracking), Backpack (Intranet), and Campfire (code sharing) have not enjoyed nearly the same level of success as Basecamp. We know from Leonard Mlodinow's book, The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, that we all under-estimate the role of chance in our successes and failures. Nor is the advice in Rework particularly original. Experts like James O'Toole have long been recommending more flexible and less hierarchal workplaces.

What is different about Rework is that the founders of 37Signals are pitching their ideas at a level that can work with small teams on the sorts of projects and tasks that we all do. Anyone in charge of rolling out and supporting new learning technology services will benefit from reading Rework. You don't need a top-down re-org or permission from your leadership to make our products and team interactions more like those of 37Signals. We are all in some measure complacent in meeting cultures , reliances on committees, and the putting off of "shipping" new services until that mythical time the platform meets everyone's needs.

Rework should provoke a good discussion of how your team does things differently from how the team at 37Signals approaches tasks. In the end you may not decide to adopt all of the recommendations in Rework, but I guarantee that this book cause you to take a hard look at how your group operates.

Any Basecamp users want to jump in on the service? What do you think about the idea of writing a short book like Rework that spells out your work culture philosophy and the thinking behind the services you offer?

Grade:  B

Do You iPad - links and resources

This is a long overdue writeup from our July 21 Do You iPad  brown bag session in the Faculty Academic Computing Center at Dartmouth College. We has a great discussion, and lots of useful info was passed around! So here goes: tips, app recommendations, web sites, hardware! I'm sure I missed lots of good infor - so feel free to add comments!

1. Handy tips:

• Keyboard shortcuts: to access keyboard shortcuts, pause your finger on a key for a brief instant to reveal a slide-out contextual menu. For example, pausing on the letter “e” gives you access to all accented versions of that letter. Pausing on the comma key gives you access to the apostrophe (and saves you from having to switch keyboards to type an apostrophe)
• Caps Lock: Go to Settings > Keyboard > Enable Caps Lock. Now, double-tapping on the shift key will put you in Caps Lock mode.
• Quick delete e-mail: Swipe across a message in your inbox view to get a “delete” butyon for just that message, without ever opening it.
• Bulk-delete e-mail: Choose “Edit” in your inbox, selecte several messages, then delete.
• Super bookmarks: When viewing a page in Safari, click the add bookmark button, and then choose “Add to HomeScreen”. This will create a shortcut to that page on your home screen. Handy for websites or web applications you visit often.
• Screenshots: Press the home screen and the power button at the same time to take a screen shot. Satisfying shutter sound,a nd the screenshot gets saved to your Photos.
• Street View: In the map application, drop a pin anywhere by tapping and holding. Next to the pin will be a little person icon – tap this to switch into Street View.

2. List of apps and services:

• Doceri – not released yet – a free app which will help teachers control classroom AV equipment from an iPad.http://doceri.com/
• Instapaper - $5 – via a browser bookmarklet, this service creates readable text-only versions of long web articles. These are stored in an individual’s account in the cloud, and sync with the iPad app for off-line clutter-free reading. Highly recommended. Best way to consume Educause articles. http://www.instapaper.com
• Good Reader - $1 – read PDFs, DOCs, and a number of other files on the iPad. Sync files via iTunes.   
• Calibre – a desktop applications which can converts  various file formats, such as PDF, to epub format. Converted files can then be read with ebook software on the iPad. http://calibre-ebook.com
• Zinio - free magazine reader. Pay for PDF magaznine subscriptions. Can be read off-line. http://www.zinio.com/
• Voice Memo - $2 for fully featured app – straightforward voice recorder which transforms the iPad to a digital recorder. Export files to iTunes or email them.
• Dragon dictation – free app. Transforms voice recording to text. Requires network connection, and does not save the audio file.
• LogMeIn Ignition ($30) and Jump Desktop ($20) – two apps for remote access to other machines
• TeamViewer – another remote desktop application. Pro version is $140 – free version also available.
• Citrix Receiver (free) – another way to remotely access other machines trough the iPad
• BrainPOP – a free kiddie app with educational videos.
• Office2 HD ($8) – edits Word and Excel files; synchs with Googledocs
• Documents To Go ($10-15) – another program to edit Microsoft files on the iPad; synchs with Googledocs and other cloud services.
• EverNote – free app which ties in with the popular EverNote “store everything” cloud service. http://www.evernote.com/
• PCalc Lite – a nice free scientific calculator
• Etude - $5 – “sheet music on steroids”- shows you keyboard and scrolling score as songs play,
• JamPad – free music app – jamming.
• Sketchbook Pro - $8 – a sketching/painting application, one of the best.
• Sleepmachine - $2 – relaxation/sound/alarm in one. Recommended for blocking out noisy New England birds with white noise at 4:30 am
• Brainhack - $1 – similar iPhone app
• Bump – free app, for exchanging info between two iPhones by “bumping”
• X-plane - $10 – flight simulator for iPad
• Free video apps: Hulu, Netflix, ABC player
• Shakespare in Bits - $15 – animated stuffy edition of Romeo and Juliet

3. Websites:

• Appshopper – a web service which allows you to indicate a wish list of apps; will notify you when the price of any of them temporarily drops due to a promotion. http://appshopper.com
• Poolga: http://www.Poolga.com - beautifully designed wallpaper for mobile devices

4. Keyboards/adaptors:

• Apple Wireless keyboard, $69 (very packable)
• Apple Wireless keyboard + dock, $69 (less packable, but handy iPad stand)
• Apple camera connection kit (with USB port!), $29
• Matias folding keyboard, $100, http://www.matias.ca
• Clamcase – vaporware for now, so no price – but the preview looks great! http://clamcase.com/

June 2010 Books

June 2010 was a great book month. Everything gets an A-.  Book grade inflation or just great book options - you be the judge?

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz

My mantra since reading Being Wrong is "I may be wrong about this".  Schulz is helping me embrace my inner mistake maker.  Who knew that I'd learn more and be more effective if I simply said "I was wrong" - without trying to come up with reasons or explanations.  This is a book with good ideas and a wonderful writer.  The writing may be more revelatory than the ideas (and the narration of the audiobook is simply divine), but the ideas are pretty good.  Making mistakes defines our humanity, and a tolerance for mistakes (in ourselves and others) is synonymous with maturity.  

Grade:  A-

Click: The Magic of Instant Connections by Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman

I clicked with this book.  The Brafman brothers bring the story of the power of instant connections home with a mix of great stories and a synthesis of the academic literature. 

Grade: A-

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age by Clay Shirky

Thinking back on the hours of I invested watching Hogan's Heroes, Hawaii Five-O, Cheers, Magnum PI etc. etc. is always depressing.  Shirky calls TV watching our unpaid second-job.  According to Nielsen, the average American spends 34.5 hours a week watching TV.  That is about 1,800 a year.  Among young people, however, the time spent watching TV is going down - replaced by time spent creating and interacting on the Web.  The best decision my family ever made was to decide not to have cable, satellite or broadcast TV in our home.  TV is simply too tempting.  If I had TV I'd probably be watching now instead of writing this book review.  My brain loves to relax into TV - so does yours.  Shirky argues that by allowing us all to create, to push the "publish" button, the Web is making us smarter and more connected.  My hope is that Shirky turns his attention next to the implications of the cognitive surplus on higher education.

Grade: A-

The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home by Dan Ariely

Great book.  Much more personal than his first book, Predictably Irrational, the Upside of Irrationality helps us understand the benefits of our screwed up brains and illogical behaviors.  Ariely is one of those truly inspiring people.  His story of overcoming pain, of using pain to understand and explain the world, is an amazing motivator to all of us to stop whining about our own obstacles.  I think Ariely is a genius in a very particular way - a genius in the construction of experiments to test ideas.   A craftsperson of experimentation.   

Grade:  A-

The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You've Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong by David Shenk

Sort of a companion piece to Gladwell's Outliers.  The two books go together well as Shenk is taking on an orthodoxy of thought around the gifted few - the geniuses.  Important for parents and educators to understand the potential in our kids and students to achieve if given means and motivation to practice. 

Grade:  A-

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Vintage) by Stieg Larsson

I finally got on the Larsson bandwagon.  Now reading book number 2.  Fun to participate in this weird reading cultural event.

Grade: A-

May 2010 Books

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridle

This book is almost too perfectly aligned with my core beliefs that the story of the world is one of progress.  The mental architecture that I place new learning is built around a narrative of progress.  The story is one technology driven change towards lower mortality, lower fertility, better nutrition, and better health.  My training in both demography and history has taught me to be weary of any talk of "better days or golden ages" - as I appreciate lower child mortality, the spread of democracy, and expanded access to education. 

So Ridley has written the book that conforms to almost all my prior beliefs - although he arrives at his conclusions by routes I probably wouldn't go.  First, Ridley is clearly leans libertarian.  He is suspicious of the role of government in promoting progress.  I'd be interested in how he explains away government led policies that are responsible for so much of the progress we have enjoyed, everything from sewer projects to social security, civil rights legislation to medicare, medicaid, and the recent health care bill.  I think Ridley does not give enough credit to the role of organized labor for contributing to spreading the benefits of capitalism to more people, nor does he seem to grasp the importance of government in supporting education at every level. 

His dismissal of global warming as a major concern will get lots of attention for being basically wrong-headed, and I'd agree that he oversells his case and therefore gets the actions that we should be taking basically wrong.  (My take…worry less, invest prudently).  I like that Ridley comes out as a fan of hydrocarbons and big oil (timely given the BP disaster), and his critique of ethanol is accurate and devastating.  But he misses the importance of investing in alternative energy as an engine to insure innovation, seemingly blinded by the idea of a zero sum game of social investments (which is strange as he rails against zero sum thinking).  I like a book where I agree with the conclusions but disagree with how the argument is derived.  This tells me that the fundamental truth of the progress story is intact - and where we need to argue and debate is around the means rather than the ends. 

Grade:  A-

The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity by Richard Florida

In Florida's new book, The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity, places like Phoenix represent much of what has gone wrong with the American economy and social arrangements over the past 40 years. Florida argues that we need to move away from the model of low-density, car based, and spread out suburbs that Phoenix embodies. This model, according to Florida, is both unsustainable (for environmental and economic reasons), and undesirable to the emerging "creative class" of workers. 

The great recession has refocused people's priorities away from owning the ever-larger home and the ever-bigger SUV towards a desire for economic agility and embeddedness in thick social/economic networks. This agility and embeddedness is best achieved in walkable cities and close-in (first ring) suburbs, ones served by mass transit and characterized by high proportions of educated knowledge workers. People want to rent rather than own, take high-speed rail and zip cars as opposed to garaging the big SUV, and be free to spend their energy on resources on human capital enhancing actives such as education, creative work, and the arts. 

note - originally published in A Phoenix Future?  http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology_and_learning

Grade A-

Crash Course: The American Automobile Industry's Road from Glory to Disaster by Paul Ingrassia 

Some day I'd like to teach a course on industries that implode.  I hope we are not talking about higher education in this course, although we should probably learn from the music industry, newspapers, and the American car industry.  Ingrassia's book is the best description I've read on the rise and fall of the former Big 3.  Could have things been different?  One lesson I took from "Crash Course" is that a fuel of failure is insularity.  The car industry failed to take in new ideas because it failed to listen to any voices of outsiders.  These voices included first the competition, and next their customers.  What sets this book apart is how even-handed Ingrassia is in assigning blame.  The unions do not get off any easier than management.  Should our government have saved G.M. and propped up Chrysler (to hand over to Fiat)?  Will the American auto industry recover to be able to compete effectively?  Ingrassia is fairly positive on both these questions, and I find myself somewhat hopeful as well. 

Grade:  A-

The Untold History of the Potato by John Reader 

The best of "one subject / one food" books that I've read (and I try to read them all).  The way my brain works is that I understand the world best through a narrow lens.  The potato is a narrative in which it is possible to hang the major changes of civilization, including the move from subsistence to surplus farming, industrialization, and migration.  Did you know that China is now the largest grower of potato's?  Or that it was the potato that allowed Europe to finally escape the Malthusian trap of population growth and starvation?  Wonderful, amazing and beautiful book.  Since reading I've considerably upped my potato consumption (a great source of vitamins and energy with little poor effects).

Grade:  A-

The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread by Maria Balinska

A short book for bagel lovers and those interested in understanding how Jewish history and the bagel are intertwined.  My bagel consumption has increased with my knowledge of both my people's history and my families staple brunch food.  Not a wonderful book in terms of scale, sweep, or narrative alacrity.  But the best bagel book I know about - which makes it worth reading for that reason alone.

Grade:  B

The Hamburger: A History by Josh Ozersky

The last of my "history of the world as seen through this food" book this month - and while cannot compare the majesty of the potato book, the hamburger is a worthy addition to this library.  This books seems to come out of a series of concise books on the role of specific foods in culture and history.  The hamburger story provides a window into the changing food production systems and eating habits of Americans, as well as the rise of the industrial fast-food system that was largely built around the hamburger.  

I first experienced White Castle in college in St. Louis, a place that required minimal dollars and sobriety.  If I had known the White Castle was the first mass market hamburger chain I might have thought of the experience of eating their mini burgers (sliders) somewhat differently.  The story of McDonald's is beautifully told - both as a case study in post WWII capitalism and for the larger economic and social implications of mass-produced food.  We have become so negative about McDonalds, with all of us reading the Omnivores Dilemma and Fast Food Nation (and watching Food Inc. and SuperSize Me etc.).   It was good to read a book that explained the rise of McDonald's and the other fast food hamburger joints as a part of a larger story - one that we should not condemn even if we choose not to participate.  Lovely writing, good length, and a necessary complement to our understanding of how we produce and consume our food.

Grade:  B+

The Male Brain by Louann Brizendine  

The companion book to The Female Brain (which I think helped me understand my wife, daughter, and mom - although they are yet to agree).  Being the owner of a male brain myself, I was pleased to receive an owners manual (seems a little late at 40 - but shoos complaining?  Turns out that all the ways my brain fails to help me make good decisions are understandable, if not excusable, by the mix of hormones and wiring that evolution has left my brain to cope with my environment.  My male brain changes as I age due to the effect of age related hormones and changes in biochemistry.  

Understanding the biological and hormonal routes of my emotions may help me recognize a gap between the reality I perceive the reality that those around may be interpreting.  Like most brain books, the central message is that we are dealing with an enormously complex apparatus that may not always cause us to act in our best interest (as evolution cares about passing on genes, not making us or those around us happy).  In the future I'm going to use my brain to think about the hormones and molecules being released at any given time when things start to fire wildly (causing stress, anxiety, anger, etc. etc.) - in an effort to recognize that with the passage of time the world may feel somewhat different.  

The Male Brain has been pretty well panned in the reviews I've read.  My advice is that if you are not a neuroscientist to start than you will get lots out of the book (I did).  Brizendine is a good writer and a good storyteller.  She may simplify - but simplification in this case advances rather than detracts from understanding.  

Grade:  B+

The Ask: A Novel by Sam Lipsyte

If you fall into any of the following categories please consider reading "The Ask".  Work in higher education.  Born between 1965 and 1975.  Want to laugh your ass off.  

You can read more thoughts on The Ask at my IHE blog - http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology_and_learning/an_ask_for_a_new_digital_model   

Grade:  A-

Next: A Novel by James Hynes

Another GenX sort of higher ed guy story.  A genre in which I can relate.  Nice companion to The Ask.  A good reminder to perhaps take ourselves and our institutions a little less seriously (as Hynes show the consequences for not doing so can be dire indeed).  Absorbing and smart - Next is a novel to be read first.

Grade:  B+

Lowboy: A Novel by John Wray

Lowboy is probably technically good (what do I know) but too depressing and mannered for my tastes.  Well-reviewed and well-crafted, not my idea of a good time.

Grade:  B-

The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal by Ben Mezrich

Originally published in my InsideHigher Ed blog http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology_and_learning/read_the_bad_facebook_book

This recommendation is only for people who work in higher education. Civilians should stay away.

I have 3 reasons why you should read The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal, by Ben Mezrich. (None of these reasons have anything to do with the book helping you figure out your Facebook privacy settings).

But before I jump into my 3 reasons to read the book, I'd like give you 3 reasons as to why this is not a good book:

Bad Book Reason 1 - Accuracy: You can pretty well assume that many (if not most) of the details in the book are inaccurate. Zuckerberg did not agree to be interviewed, so therefore all of the first person accounts that the narrative is based on will be largely self-serving and one-sided.

Bad Book Reason 2 - History: This would have been a much better book if Mezrich had done his homework better about the history of Internet startups and the technologies and companies that preceded Facebook. We learn little about either, although both are critical in understanding the rise and impact of Facebook.

Bad Book Reason 3 - Sociology: Mezrich's description of both campus and start-up life resemble neither reality that

I'm familiar with. It is as if he telling the story of someone else telling a story of college and company life, as opposed to actually going and spending time in either environment.

Now that I've told you the 3 reasons why this is a bad book - I want you to forget them all and read the book anyway.

Here are my reasons to read:

Reason to Read 1 - Lessons: Despite every shortcoming, I was left with a powerful feeling that we (people who work in higher education) should be doing everything we can to catalyze (fertilize?) the next Facebook. The Accidental Billionaires is really the story of a bunch of college kids who spent most of their time doing non-college type things (classes, studying, etc.), while devoting the bulk of their attention to their start-up ideas. This is not an original thought, but what if we could harness "the propensity to truck, barter and exchange" (Adam Smith) directly in our curriculum?

Reason to Read 2 - Therapy: As a survivor of the original dot-com bubble (1999 to 2001 with Britannica.com Education), this book helped me work through my own deep-seated psychological issues. Okay, maybe this is a slight exaggeration. But it was fantastic to revisit again the pure excitement of taking an idea, starting up a new business, and having people throw money at you.

Reason to Read 3 - Fun Factor: This bad book is a blast to read. Fast paced, absorbing, and often funny. If you keep your expectations low (the secret to happiness in all things), you will enjoy spending time with the Accidental Billionaires.

Have any of you read the book?

Grade:  B-

April 2010 Books

The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050 by Joel Kotkin

I have a category of books that I want my Dad to read.  These books share the theme "the world is getting better, not worse - and the future is brighter than the past".  My Dad begs to differ.  He is wrong, but he is entitled to his misguided views.  (The next book on this list will be The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley  - other books include The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse by Gregg Easterbrook  and The Birth of Plenty : How the Prosperity of the Modern World was Created  by William J. Bernstein

Kotkin grounds his optimism in solid demographics (my Dad's profession - one reason why I'm so excited to hear from him where Kotkin gets it wrong).  Kotkin's basic argument is that the United States will reap a demographic dividend of relatively high fertility and immigration rates, one that will result in growing demand for goods and services and an expanding pool of talent, energy and innovation.  This growth will be centered in our increasingly vibrant and diverse suburbs, but even the old industrial cities will benefit as their low costs drive in-migration. 

Kotkin takes the "anti-suburb and anti-growth" pundits head-on, noting (accurately) that people choose to move to suburbs for amenities such as good schools and good housing.  Jobs and culture tend to follow the people, a cycle that increases both productivity and brings new opportunity.  The description of Manhattan, Boston, and San Francisco has "luxury cities" is priceless - with Kotkin arguing that the new cities (concentrated in the South West spread all over) may get less cultural attention but will be the places of opportunity for our children and their immigrant neighbors. 

Grade:  A-

Next Stop, Reloville: Life Inside America's New Rootless Professional Class by Peter T. Kilborn


People who work in academia tend to have little understanding about how the rest of the world makes a living.  I'm doubly worse, haven grown up in an academic household.  I'll never forget my first non-academic job (for Britannica.com during the bubble), when I was shocked that people actually worked all summer.  So I particularly cherished each page of "Next Stop, Reloville"  (yes page…sadly no audiobook version is available) - an amazing piece of long-form reporting that brings into focus the invisible class of "relo's".  A "relo" is a worker (or their family) who relocates for work.  The culture in corporate America is to move employees from job-to-job-to-job, in promotions that often require a move to another city.  Whole communities in and around of Atlanta, Phoenix, Dallas and many other places have become "relo" destinations, prized for their affordable real estate, business friendly tax structures, and proximity to growing markets.  Climbing the ranks of corporate America usually means being willing to relocate every 5 to 7 years, bringing spouses and kids in tow.  At the highest levels, relocation may mean an international move as well.  These people are largely invisible because nobody track their aggregate movements, and the "relo's" themselves often do not lay down deep enough roots in a community to cause much disruption when they leave.  This is a terrific book - combining sociology, economics, and history - essential for understanding how professional and family life have changed in response to larger economic forces.

Grade:  A-

This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All by Marilyn Johnson


Some Takeaways - originally published at my IHE blog.  http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology_and_learning/some_takeaways_from_this_book_is_overdue

I think if I were an academic librarian the book might be somewhat annoying. Johnson's strength and her weakness is that she is not a librarian, rather a librarian groupie. She has an outsider's appreciation for the librarian profession and the workings of a library. As an outsider, however, I think she misses some (if not most) of the big issues, challenges, and trends facing the discipline. This goes doubly so for the world of academic libraries. I hope that Johnson's passion and respect will inspire someone embedded in an academic library to write an account of this world for the non-specialist reader.

--The more time I spend thinking about the library world the more I realize how little I know and understand. I'm not sure if my lack of understanding is due to my own limitations of perspective (coming from a teaching and technology background), or due to some inherent insularity of library culture. An example of my own lack of knowledge about library culture and structure is how struck I was by Johnson's description of the growing cadre of disruptive librarians. These are librarians, some of whom are academic librarians, who are engaged in challenges to the library and institutional status quo using online tools such as blogging and social media platforms. What surprised me is how much more diverse (and sometimes radical) librarians are compared to both my image and my colleagues in computing. The fact that librarians are so engaged in rethinking their profession and institutions probably would not come as a surprise to any librarian, but to an outsider this is an eye-opening notion. You will have to tell me if this observations means that librarians should be spending more time talking and engaging to non-librarians about their ideas and plans for change and re-invention, or if non-librarians need to spend more time hanging out with our colleagues (at library conferences, library blogs etc.).

--My other big takeaway from This Book is Overdue is a new appreciation of the centrality of the moral code that motivates librarians. I had not fully grasped the degree to which librarians are dedicated to the the non-market distribution and availably of information. Nor had I fully understood the central librarian ethic of privacy and confidentiality. Does academic computing have anything comparable in terms of outlook and orientation. We have debates about open source, transparency, and open curriculum - but I don't think we have anything close to the cohesive philosophy that peoples access to information should not be dependent on resources, status or position that seem to be universal amongst librarians.

For those of you thinking about reading This Book is Overdue, I'll warn you that the first half of the book is much better than the second. Again, I hope that my academic librarian colleagues do read the book, if only to discuss and make plans to write a better one.

Grade:  B

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis

Now I finally understand the sub-prime mortgage meltdown.  I mean, I understood that in general too many people took out mortgages they could not afford, and when housing prices stopped going up each year that many of these people could not refinance or sell and therefore could not pay their loans.  What I did not understand, prior to reading The Big Short, was the credit default swap and how Wall Street and the big insurance companies got themselves in so much trouble that they needed to be bailed out.  This is a fun book to read because Lewis is at the top of his game as a storyteller.  In lesser hands, the people profiled in the book to advance the sub-prime meltdown narrative would not have been nearly as compelling.  With Lewis telling the tale, however, we learn about the antecedents of the great recession through the personalities of a marginalized and somewhat anti-social group of traders and analysts whose outsider status let them see what nobody else saw, and make millions in the process.  This is really a story of how sometimes the outsider, willing to go against the conventional wisdom and the customs of the dominant elite, are able to over turn entire systems while shedding sunshine on uncomfortable realities.  I'm going to make it a point to seek out the eccentrics in higher ed, and listen to what they have to say.

Grade: A-

The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science by Norman Doidge


A worthy addition to the brain bookshelf.  Not quite as good as Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School by John Medina , on par with Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life by Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt.  The stories of our brains plasticity will, well, blow your mind.  The fact that so much of what science thought about how our brains worked turned out to be wrong tells us how difficult it is to understand those 3 pounds sitting inside of our skulls.  The idea that our brain's inherent neuroplasticity holds out hope for greater wisdom and intelligence as we age is a hopeful one, while at the same time we must recognize our brain's unhelpful tendencies to form patterns of thought that are sub-optimal.  Doidge has a good story to tell, he understands the science, but is somewhat limited by his skills as a storyteller.  The story of our changing understanding of the brain is one that deserves to be told by our very best writers.

Grade:  B

The City and the City by China Mieville

My colleague Laura Librarian recommended this book,  thank you.  The whole category of speculative fiction is not one that I knew existed.  She compared it to The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel by Michael Chabon.  Apparentely Mieveille has a loyal following, and has a pretty interesting background. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Miéville

The City is challenging and rewarding - a book that takes some time to get one's head around (at least for me).  A novel set in a counter factual but seemingly real world of geopolitics, customs (and sometimes technology), calls into question some beliefs about how the world is set-up.  Part police procedural, part social commentary, and part something else (sci fi?), this novel is impossible to characterize, difficult to put down, and hard to get out of my head. 

Grade:  B+

Solar by Ian McEwan

'It's a catastrophe. Relax!'  - originally published at my IHE blog - http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology_and_learning/it_s_a_catastrophe_relax

So Nobel laureate Michael Beard assures us all of the the inevitability and consequences of global warming, in Ian McEwan's smart and hilarious new book Solar.

Sometimes I feel faintly embarrassed, spending all this time and energy on learning technology while doing nothing to contribute solutions to the world's most pressing problems: hunger, poverty, climate change etc. etc. Shouldn't we be talking about more important matters than Blackboard and the iPad?

I guess with a stretch we could argue that education is the key to progress, and advances in education are increasingly catalyzed by technology, ergo our work in educational technology is driving progress. Ridiculous, I know. We do what we do because nothing is more fun than working where learning and technology meet - if any improvements come out of our work then this is a nice benefit.

How do we get authors who are somewhere in the same ballpark of McEwan to turn their attention from global warming and theoretical physicists to educational technology and learning technologists? McEwan clearly studied up on his physics and climate change facts to write Solar, making the story of the 5 time divorced, seductive and corpulent Dr. Beard simultaneously fantastical and educational. We need a novelist to tell our story.

Grade:  B+

Learning spaces at MIT

I had a chance to see a number of interactive and projects-based learning spaces at MIT yesterday, both formal and informal. Jim Crain from the Office of Educational Innovation and Technology gave me a quick tour. Below are some observations/images/impressions from that tour; my main takeaways in a nutshell are:

• it's really important to have lots of old technology writing surfaces (whiteboards, chalkboards) that can, ideally, also be shared
• to make courses in these spaces successful, significant resources went into course redesign

Here are the spaces:

1. Biology projects-based lab space, housed in what used to be a personal computer lab. A bare-bones, cheap, but successful renovation in an old room - total cost was about 25K, most of it for new furniture, and for a rolling sink unit to get water into the room. Microscopes wrre already owned. Existing computers were re-used. The room is used for a freshmen projects-based bio course; only about 18 students. There are several TAs, so the ratio of teaching staff/students is about 1:2. Very successful course; the first time it was run 3 successful patent applications came out of the projects work.

2-4 students share a work table, microscope, computer.

The area at the far end of the room has a large sitting area, whiteboard, projector - this is where the class gathers when it comes together to share/discuss.

2. Dept. of Urban planning and design
Just walked through here on the way to Physics dept. - this space is a good example of the move towards glass and transparency at MIT. The brand-new media lab is the most striking example of that, but even old departments/spaces are being transformed:  solid walls separating meeting rooms and classrooms have been replaced; the work and collaboration becoms visible. This gives the are a very different and much more dynamic feeling. In the pictures note: pin-cushion walls onto which posters can be affixed; both ceiling-mounted projectors and large display monitors. Display monitors seem to be more popular

 

3. Hallway spaces in Physics dept.
What's notable here, other than more glass-walled open rooms, is the proliferation of chalk-boards throughout the hallway spaces, interspersed with seating areas and glassed-in rooms. Chalkboards were used, and all were stocked with chalk and erasers

 

4. TEAL room 1:
The TEAL rooms are at the other end of the spectrum form the small and staff-intensive bio lab - they seat 100+ students for large Physics intro courses. There are 9 students to a table, i.e. 3 groups of 3. Each 3-person group has a monitor. Numbered whiteboards line the room. There are multiple ceiling-mounted projcetors and projection screens which can be lowered. The numbered whiteboards have fixed cameras trained on them - so it is possible (and apparently often done) to share one whiteboard with the rest of the class via projection. The central console for this room was located in the middle, not the front. Note the cameras for whiteboards and projectors in the images below.

 

5. TEAL room 2:
Similar to the other TEAL room - but had a class in session. Students working in groups; projection was being used to throw up the problem they were working on. Whiteboards being used by some students to solve problems. One instructor and one TA circulating in the room, helping direct students. Central classroom technology not being used very intensively, if you think about it - spatial organization of the room, project-based approach, availability of whiteboards much more important.

March 2010 Books

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

If you are in the business of change management this is the book for you.  Want to alter the status quo?  Want to build new things?  The Heath brothers are great.  I wrote about this book on my IHE blog , as Switch is a good read for people in learning technology.  The Heath brothers have the popular nonfiction, synthesis, storytelling, and research based conclusion format down.  Entertaining and illuminating.  Quick and satisfying.  

Grade:  A-

False Economy: A Surprising Economic History of the World by Alan Beattie 

If you like reading the Economist (and I do), you will love False Economy.  Popular economic history in all the best ways.  The big question is always, why are some countries so rich and some countries so poor?  Beattie takes on this big question, answering lots of smaller questions along the way.  His basic answers have to do with choices and institutions, a thesis he explores while teaching us why Argentina did not get rich, oil is more trouble than it is worth (usually), why cocaine is not grown in Africa, and why we pay so much for Peruvian asparagus (and subsidize rich American peanut growers).   

Grade A-

Juliet, Naked: a novel by Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby is one of my favorites.  The prince of lad lit.  Juliet find Hornby back in top form - and surprisingly writing in the voice of a young woman (at least for half the book).  As an obsessive blogger I enjoyed having my tribe skewed, and as a guy I can't argue with any of Hornby's observations about the shortcomings of our gender.  Bad long-term relationships, reclusive rock-stars, complicated families, museum politics and small English coastal cities - Hornby keeps it all light, balanced and delightful.

Grade:  B+

Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? by Seth Godin 

It seems whatever Godin is selling I'm buying.  Gotta give him credit for that.  My advice for Linchpin is to make it through the first half of the book - as the second half is really where the action is. Stick it out.  Godin might have something to sell, but that does not mean he is wrong.  His basic point that, that the economy has ripped away any security of careers or institutions, and that we need to change our outlook towards work, is probably exactly right.  The question is what do we do with this knowledge.   I like Godin allright, some folks may hate him, I think he is worth reading to generate a great discussion.

Grade:  B

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang

Would have made an excellent Atlantic article - not enough for a book.  It is good that Chang challenges the conventional wisdom of the Washington consensus on free-trade.  As an Economist reader I'm happy to my assumptions challenged.  The best chapters are routed in history - not argument.  I very much enjoyed hearing a first-hand account of the risk of South Korea, from one of the world's poorest countries to one of the wealthiest - and the policies that allowed this transformation.  This story is particularly interesting to me as my in-laws are Korean immigrants.  But Chang does not have enough new to say for a whole book, and ends up repeating himself and his argument far too often.  

Grade:  B-

7 Days with the iPad

[Originally posted on my Vox Blog]

Ever since I started watching Star Trek TNG I’ve been expecting (okay, hoping) to use the technology similar to that which arrived in my office a week ago, the Apple iPad. Well, the future may be here at last (except for my flying car, of course), but this jury of one is still out on the iPad. It is a device that I really want to love, and yet something holds me back. It is a device that I feel really does have a role to play, but not all niche fillers are runaway hits. I do believe that Apple will sell a ton of them and that they will thrive in the market, and that developers will continue to develop outstanding apps for them. I just don’t know if I’m ready to adopt one formally for my personal use.

What’s the problem? Well...size matters. And, in the case of the iPad, that is both its blessing and its curse. It’s the middle child, the Jan and Peter of Apple’s Brady Bunch of products. It the bizarro world version of Goldilocks’ chair, bed and porridge--just right, and somehow not right at all. It wins by being both more portable than my MacBook (smaller, lighter and easier to carry) and more functional than my iPod Touch (larger, faster, easier to type). And yet, it fails, too, because I don’t see the iPad replacing either of the other two devices in my life. Maybe you can’t quite tell, but I’m having a real love-hate relationship with this product, despite the fact that it is so good in so many ways. Perhaps I need to take a more Zen approach and accept that the iPad way is the Middle Way of technological enlightenment.

Okay, more precisely, the first generation iPad may be the first step on that particular path. It’s not slate-tech nirvana yet. Nevertheless, here are some of my first observations, based on the notes I’ve made to myself during this first week, along with some app reviews to round out the experience.

• The standard iPad applications are fully functional and generally benefit from the larger screen size. One minor disappointment, though, is the Mail app. Others have noted this as well, but while I like the hovering mail and folder navigation, I would prefer not to have the last mail message read be the default entry point for the application. Take me to a folder or list view, please. I want to be able to close out of reading my mail messages without exiting the application.
• Pages is a beautifully designed and very functional word processing and page layout application. Period. However, text input is still a chore without a physical keyboard (yes, I know a keyboard dock exists, as does Bluetooth, but at that point, give me a laptop!). Typing on the iPad is joy compared to the iPod Touch, since the added real estate benefits not only iPad native apps, but zoomed iPhone apps as well. That said, I desperately miss keyboard navigation keys, keyboard shortcuts, and even the Tab key. Also, a touch screen means no resting your fingers on the home keys.
• The New York Times Editor's Choice app and USA Today app offer great digital newspaper reading. The USA Today even includes quick polls that its readers can participate in and the New York Times free edition includes enough headline stories and photos to stay abreast of the latest events. Likewise, the BBC app has a nice mix of both text articles and live streaming audio. And the NPR for iPad application allows you to listen not only to favorite shows, but also broadcasts from your favorite NPR affiliate stations.
• The Guardian Eyewitness application serves up visually rich, beautiful photos that look fantastic on the iPad screen.
• The ABC Player is very good and the Netflix media player is at least satisfactory. I had some trouble with playback on the Netflix app, however, and navigating to watch multi-episode series was a bit of a chore. Sometimes the app would just crash back to the iPad main screen, but for the most part things went fine. Some queue management features are not available in the Netflix app, unfortunately, so reordering was a bit of a chore. This app will eventually work out its kinks though. I’m fairly confident of that. If anything, I think NBC and CBS need to get on the ball, or at least push Hulu to the iPad in short order. And while we're at it, Tivo should release a stream player for the iPad as well.
• The Marvel Comics app is beautiful. I like the option of reading page-by-page or in the more dramatic panel-by-panel mode. Unfortunately, I don’t see myself as a long-term customer. On the one hand, that comic consumption phase of my life has largely passed, and on the other, the comic world is much bigger than Marvel alone. Plus, how will comic collectors thrive in a world without sharing and trading?
• For digital books, iBooks and GoodReader are must haves! iBooks takes the prize for a generally faithful reproduction of the book reading experience, minus the smell and feel of paper. Buying books online with iBooks is a snap, and sample chapters of books are also readily available.  I’m sold on the idea that the iPad and technical books especially are a match made in heaven. If you are familiar with technical books, you know that they can weigh in at several pounds and 500-1000 pages, with color and text variations to differentiate narrative, code, and other highlights. The iPad’s ePub format presents the books perfectly without the excess weight and with no effort needed to keep the book opened to the desired page while you type out the code. I can’t tell you how often I search for something around my desk to keep pages from flipping on real books. GoodReader expands one’s digital library by allowing you to load up PDF documents to go. Again, the documents look great, even if the faux-book eyecandy of iBooks is missing here. To be fair, the heft of the iPad is considerably more than a Kindle, and a Kindle is much easier to read outside, but for visual reproduction, iPad is great. I’d liken the Kindle to a paperback in terms of portability and the iPad to a good hardcover. You may prefer to take the Kindle to the beach, but I read more at home and in the office, so the iPad works for me.
• I really need a cover for this device, something like the Kindle leatherette, but it needs to be thin, fold complete behind the device when open, have a kickstand, and perhaps the tilt-slant support option that Apple's cover has, for typing on a desk or lap.
• On the fun and games side of things, the extra screen real estate is a boon to game programmers, and older eyes, and a few of the first-to-store iPad games are quite entertaining. Harbor Master HD is a fun line drawing ship management game. Tap Tap Radiation, a tap-to-the-music game, is much easier for me to play on the larger screen that the Tap Tap Revolution games have been on the iPod Touch. I was really enjoying the match-three game Aurora Feint 3, which uses the tilt sensors to good effect in changing the game, until the in-game offer to BUY more lives popped up as I was about to die during a battle. I understand the need to make money through downloadable content (DLC), but I'm not going to spend a buck to add more lives to my game. My quarter-dropping arcade frustrations are years behind me. By far the most enjoyable game has been Mirror's Edge for iPad. The developers have created a beautiful, easy-to-control, yet challenging side-scroller game. It costs more than I would have liked to spend, but it has been a lot of fun and a good example of where games can go on this platform.
• Google-PLEASE enable Google docs editing on iPad. This is the perfect cloud computing device, but you're crippling it.
• We know that multitasking is on its way, so that's not even worth criticizing at this point, I feel. The only reason I wanted multitasking was so that I could have a persistent chat application open in the background, or a Twitter feed. Other than that I actually appreciated not being interrupted by push notification while reading a book or watching The IT Crowd on Netflix.

So, at week's end what does it come down to? The iPad is a great device to have on the coffee table, the bedside table, in the car, in the kitchen and, potentially, in another room in the house where reading sometimes occurs. The size, portability, battery life, functionality and purpose are all perfectly aligned for this device to have a home in your home in these areas. I’ve used my laptop, iPod Touch, and even a netbook in all of these locations and I really feel that the iPad wins hands down in these arenas (with the exception that for some tasks that I do in the living room, such as writing this post, my laptop may actually be a better choice). The iPad is a great device for reading, surfing the Internet, watching movies, playing casual games, finding and using recipes, streaming audio, and mapping out a trip. Unfortunately, the iPad will not accompany me to the dentist's and doctor's office, at least not yet, and probably not ever if I do get around to trading in my iPod Touch for an iPhone. Also, the iPad will not soon replace my desktop or laptop for getting "real" work done. I bounce in and out of too many simultaneously open applications as I write and edit, and managing all of that is still easier and faster to do with a keyboard and mouse.

As Apple has done in the past, the iPad will likely reinvigorate the tablet computing market and I'm looking forward to the competition from Android, in particular. For students, the iPad is a great starting point as textbooks go digital, and as more ruggedized incarnations appear I can see this form factor being a great alternative to the back-breaking volumes that K-12 students lug around. It will take some time for all of us to become comfortable and familiar with these devices, but I think it will happen, probably quite rapidly, and probably sooner than the appearance of my flying car.

February 2010 books

The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (Issues of Our Time) by Louis Menand 

I originally wrote this review for my IHE blog.  http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology_and_learning/on_the_marketplace_of_ideas

3 Reasons to Read Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas:

• Reason 1: If we want to change the academy we first need to understand it. The Marketplace of Ideas situates the current governance and major challenges of academic institutions within their historical context. The absence of pedagogical training in graduate school has deep roots in how our Ph.D. granting research institutions and the training of faculty members evolved. Learning technology can provide a catalyst for change, but only if we fully grasp how the current system came into being and what supports the continuation of the status quo.

• Reason 2: Menand writes beautifully. The audiobook is read by Michael Prichard, a master of the art form.

• Reason 3: The book is concise. 4 hours and 7 minutes in audio format. 176 pages. We should have more short books on big topics. The length of the book, combined with the elegance with which it is written, means that most of us can actually get it read. The Marketplace of Ideas would make the perfect choice for a book club discussion sponsored by your teaching and learning center.

The critique I'd offer for The Marketplace of Ideas is that Menand spends almost all of his time looking backwards instead of to the future. The opening up of higher education to new paradigms of learning and a new set of digital tools has the potential to disrupt what has been created. The open learning movement, online education, and the development of learning platforms around constructivist learning theory are but three examples. It is not clear to me that the institutions that have historically led the way in shaping the norms and structure of higher ed. will continue to do so in the future. Rather, our community colleges, online units and for-profit institutions institutions might be where we find successful innovations and new models that better meet the changing demand for higher education. Certainly the new models that the 'non-elite' institutions of higher learning are experimenting with are an important part of the story in understanding the direction of higher education.

These critiques, however, should not discourage you from reading the book. In fact, I suggest using The Marketplace of Ideas as a starting place for a faculty / academic librarian / academic technologist / administrator discussion on the past and future of your institution.

Grade:  A-

In CHEAP We Trust: The Story of a Misunderstood American Virtue by Lauren Weber

Perhaps the recession and the breaking of the economic contract between employers and employees has spawned a new sub-genre of anti-consumption.  Weber's book is best read as a companion to Shell's, "Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture" and Anderson's "Free: The Future of a Radical Price".  Weber's main message is that consumerism is a choice, and the consumer industrial complex is a creation and not a given, and that in understanding both the history and psychology of spending we can choose to opt-out.  Easier said than done - but learning about individuals and groups who have made this choice in the past makes contemplating voluntary cheapness more appealing.  

Grade:  A-

Fly by Wire: The Geese, the Glide, the Miracle on the Hudson by William Langewiesche

Every time I read one of Langewiesche's "pilot books" I feel much calmer about flying.  Going on a commercial airline flight is about the safest thing we can ever do.  Particularly if we are flying on a big modern jet.  The story of how the career of an airline pilot has morphed from a high-status / high-pay profession to one barely paying professional wages is particularly dispiriting.  Apparently, nobody likes working for the "legacy" carriers - one of the reasons why nobody likes flying them either.  If you think you know the whole story about that famous landing in the Hudson (I did), than you are in for a treat.  Langewiesche uses this freak event to tell a much bigger, and much more important, story about how airplanes and the airline business has changed.  

Grade:  A-

The Magicians: A Novel by Lev Grossman 

I can think of no reason not to read this book.  Who doesn't want magic to be real.  Who wouldn't like to escape from the human struggles so as to fight bigger battles.  Who wouldn't want to be a goose - if only for a little while.  Who amongst us are the magicians?

Grade:  A

Under the Dome: A Novel by Stephen King

1074 pages.  The biggest impression that this book leaves is its bigness.  If any book ever cried out to be Kindled (Kindleized?) or Ipadded it is the Dome book.  I couldn't quite figure out a comfortable position to work with it.  Too heavy to hold above my head in bed.  But reading on one's stomach is maybe a younger persons tactic?  Sitting in a chair was okay until my arms tired.  A workout and a story - all in one.  Oh - the story.  I haven't read King since the Stand (1,141) pages.  Reading "Dome" is a similar physical achievement to King's earlier masterpiece.  If Dome doesn't quite live up to the Stand - it is still an enjoyable town to be trapped in.  King goes fast enough to divert - although I never quite understood how these folks got themselves in their predicament.  Who wouldn't love a local politician / used care salesman / biggest crystal meth producer in the NorthEast.  The dome seems like the least of this town's problems.  Try passing a local property tax budget to fund your schools, that is where you will locate the horror.

Grade:  B

January 2010 books

Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin

Revisiting the HOPE that Obama's election inspired may not be the ideal recipe for emotional well-being post the recent Massachusetts Senate loss, and the dimming prospects for health care reform due to Republican filibustering.  Don't worry - take the plunge.  If you though (like I did) that you know basically all their is to know about the 2008 presidential race than you are in for a pleasant surprise.  These reporters, writing at the "in-between' area between reporting and history, give us the inside and unvarnished scoop. 

This is a story about the people, not policies.  The flawed, the ambitious, the crazy, the mean, the brilliant, and the dim-witted. Candidates are like all of us, except more so in everything.  You will have renewed faith in Obama's abilities, renewed thankfulness that the election did not go to any of the other candidates, and a renewed wonder that anyone would be willing to ever run for president. 

I think Hilary actually comes off quite well in the book (her campaign not so much).  So I'm going to predict here that in 2012 Hilary and Biden will swap jobs, and that Hilary will be elected to the top gig in 2016. 

How did someone as basically solid as McCain pick someone so obviously unqualified for (any) high office as Palin?  (The answer….desperation).   The chapters on Palin are hilarious - worth the read alone.  On the other hand the reporting on John Edwards and his wife (and mistress etc. etc.) is just depressing.

An instant classic. 

Grade:  A-

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink

Drive got trashed by the Economist  - you should read it and make your own judgements. 

Drive falls squarely in the "strengths" literature - a field I know best from the work of Marcus Buckingham.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Buckingham  The basic premise is familiar.  Traditional management strategies of incentives and sanction (rewards and sticks) are at best ineffective and at worst counter-productive in motivating performance.  Effect motivation needs to be intrinsic.  People need to do work that is meaningful, and they need be given both autonomy and responsibility for their jobs.  Workplaces (and educational environments) are best set-up to focus on results rather than means.  People will perform well if their job (or education's) matches their strengths (passions) - efforts by management to focus on and correct weaknesses are bound to fail.

Personally, I find this philosophy both correct and liberating.  Drive is a book that I hope is read and discussed in both higher ed. and in other workplaces.  

Grade:  B+

Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town by Nick Reding


Methland should be read as a companion piece to Caught in the Middle: America's Heartland in the Age of Globalism - the micro results of the macro trends that have decimated once thriving agricultural and manufacturing towns in the midwest.  As Reding tells the story, meth is a symptom of a larger economic and social story rather than a cause.   True, meth addiction and the meth economy feeds the beast of social decline and dysfunction, but the roots of meth's rise as the working class drug of choice, and the states inability to deal with either the producers or the addicts is structural.  Reding's reporting strategy is personal and visual.  We meet the people on all sides of the meth epidemic as full drawn and realized personalities.  Anyone who reads Methland will have a hard time thinking about crystal addiction, manufacture or distribution as one only of personal failure.

Grade:  B+

Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan by Jake Adelstein

I like the idea of Tokyo Vice better than the actual book.  The set-up is great.  American guy (my age) goes to college in Japan and stays on to join the countries biggest newspaper as a crime reporter.  In the process he illuminates aspects of Japanese culture and society that have been previously hidden to non-Japanese, including (but not limited to), the Japanese newspaper culture, and the Japanese crime culture, the Japanese strip club / prostitution / vice culture.  The problem is that this book would have been much better as a novel than a piece of non-fiction.  Adelstein, I'm guessing, was simply too constricted by real life (namely a real life spouse and children) to either get really dirty and go native in the Tokyo vice scene, or to tell about it if he did indeed descend into the moral darkness.  What is interesting about the story, and precisely the part that Adelstein hints at but always seems to shy away from, is the raunch, sin, violence and sex.  We really don't think the story of a Japanese crime boss getting a liver transplant stateside is all that interesting.  What is fascinating is seeing a gaijin penetrate, and succumb, to the temptations of hookers, strippers, drugs, booze, thugs, and story telling that should be a Tokyo vice reporters life.  We want to know more about the underside of Japan from a perspective (American, male) that we can relate. 

Grade:  B

December 2009 books

Trade-Off: Why Some Things Catch On, and Others Don't by Kevin Maney

A book that everyone working in the educational technology industry should read.  Where does your companies products or services fall along the fidelity (quality) and convenience spectrum?  Four-year residential colleges are a high fidelity / high cost experience - with bundled learning, living, and socializing.  University of Phoenix aims to be a high convenience provider.  Maney argues that companies need to choose to specialize in fidelity or convenience, or they will fall into the "fidelity belly" where their products and services are neither loved or required.  Expensive products or services (high fidelity) need to be ten times as good as convenient (cheap or free) services to survive.  Newspapers gutted themselves by laying off reporters and closing branches, therefore diminishing their fidelity.  We all need to make hard choices and trade-offs, and figure out where the product/service we deliver meets the demands for fidelity or convenience.

Grade:  A-

Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son by Michael Chabon

Fatherhood is about constant failure.  We will be impatient when we should be wise.  Focussed on trivial matters when we should be hanging out with our kids.  Talking when we should be listening.  Distracted when we should be focussed.   Chabon is one of my favorite novelists, a beautiful and funny writer.  His stories of growing up in a divorced household in the 1970s rang true to my own (although Chabon is about 6 years older) - we  both swam through endless amounts of pop culture crap.  His attempts to create a stable and invigorating home life (4 kids and a writing spouse) provide a funny roadmap and mirror the rest of us amateur dads, husbands, and guys.

Grade:  A

Googled: The End of the World As We Know It by Ken Auletta

Googled is best when Auletta uses his extensive knowledge of the media world to analyze how Google is disrupting the news, advertising, and entertainment businesses.  I wish Auletta knew as much about education as he does about newspapers and media, as it would be fascinating to speculate how Google will disrupt academe.  I was less interested in the exhaustive biography of the company, its founders, its executives, and its early history (although all of this is well told).  Googled is worth reading because Auletta is able to look at the emergence of Google from the perspective of the newspaper execs, telecom managers, ad men, and technology companies whose businesses have been swept away and along by the Google tsunami. 

Grade:  B+

Caught in the Middle: America's Heartland in the Age of Globalism by Richard C. Longworth

I hope that this book is being included in the curriculum of a range of courses at Washington University in St. Louis (where I majored in history and graduated in 1991).  Longworth asks, "is anyone dying to move to St. Louis?"  Longworth is a longtime Chicago journalist with an important story to tell about the failure of the Midwest to compete in a globalized economy.  States, cities and towns that fail to attract creative people, knowledge workers, and the educated and industrious foreign born are doomed to marginality and irrelevance.  The political organization of Midwest states has hampered a regional approach to education and economics, insuring that the loss of high-paying / low-skills manufacturing jobs lead only to the death of communities.  Where other regions have been able to diversity and reinvent themselves, most Midwestern cities fail to make the hard choices to invest in education, culture and advanced industries (such as biotech or green engineering), preferring instead to try to hold on to dying industries (such as manufacturing) with ever larger tax subsidies and rebates.  The U.S. can't simply write-off the Midwest (for one thing the Midwest contains the largest concentration of institutions of higher learning in the U.S.), we must learn from the regions failures, widely apply it successes, and invest in insuring that the left-behind cities like Detroit and Cleveland receive the attention and investment they deserve.

Grade:  A-

Slackonomics: Generation X in the Age of Creative Destruction by Lisa Chamberlain


My wife and I were both born in 1969.  We are firmly Generation X'ers.  We've been active perpetrators and victims of the dot-com and housing boom and busts.  Slackonomics might not be a great book - but it is a good enough book - and I recommend it to anyone born between 1965 and 1975.  We are children of the divorce and internet revolution.  The rise of the PC and the Web, the demise of the stable job or predictable career, and the erosion of middle-class wages.  Entertainment is way better then it was for us growing up in the 1970s - we have Netflix and premium cable.  We spent maybe a million hours growing up as latch-key kids watching bad television (did I really watch re-runs of Hawaii Five-O after school each day?) - today our kids spend maybe as much time on YouTube and with their iPods.  It was our generation that was supposed to ride the advantages of a baby bust - both more educated then any previous generation with a multitude of available jobs left opening by the retiring boomers.  It didn't quite work out that way - we got the economic (bubbles, recessions) and social stocks without the jobs.  But we are lucky in that our priorities and aspirations are pointed towards our families and our creativity, as we have seen the dangers of relying on employers and institutions.   Keep your expectations for analytical and economic analysis low, and enjoy hearing our story.

Grade:  B

The Delivery Man: A Novel by Joe McGinniss Jr.


Beautiful Children: A Novel by Charles Bock

For some reason my December fiction reading centered around dysfunctional family live in Las Vegas.  Drugs, sex, absent parents, strippers....what else can you recommend in the genre?

Grade:  B for both

November 2009 books

Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil by Peter Maass
http://bit.ly/50xZFh

This is not a typical "end of oil and the economic apocalypse is coming" type book.  Yes, Maass believes that we will see the end of the oil age in our lifetimes, but he sees this development has mostly a good thing.  Maass develops a compelling case for the "resource curse" by detailing the oppression, corruption, and stagnation present in oil rich countries.  From Nigeria to Saudia Arabia, Russia to Venezuala, countries most blessed with large oil deposits are cursed by high unemployment, structural inequality, violence, and unsustainable development.  American oil companies, U.S. consumers, and the U.S. government has been complicit in all the evils done in the name of petroleum extraction.  I wonder if a more balanced and nuanced story could be told about the impact of oil on our world?  I wondered how much oil has supported "good" economic growth as well as "bad" consumption.  But overall Maass' indictment of oil, oil industries, and oil regimes provides a compelling set of reasons (as if we needed any more reasons) to reduce our dependency on oil through incentives (taxes), conservation, and research. 

Grade: A-

SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
http://bit.ly/7N1Xpx

No points for originality, but reliably smart and entertaining.  I'm a sucker for academic theory and academic research packaged into narratives for the non-specialilst.  Economists and evolutionary psychologists seem to take up the most room on the bookshelf (and have sort of merged with behavioral economists), although primatologists and sociologists may be poised to make a run.  Does Levitt have any book length ideas inside of his head?  Dubner is a good writer and journalist, I wonder if their partnership has run its course.  Don't get me wrong.  I super-recommend SuperFreakonomics.  Read, enjoy, and bow down to the wisdom of incentives, the wisdom of the economist.

Grade:  B+

The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army by Greg Jaffe and David Cloud
http://bit.ly/6kUaX2

I first blogged about this book at my ed. tech blog:  http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology_and_learning/learning_from_the_military  Briefly, I think it is important to understand the military because the armed forces provide a case study in institutional change.  The Generals profiled in this book had to overturn an entrenched military culture (overwhelming force etc.) with a new model (population protection) in order to have a chance to prevail in Iraq.  In education we need to replace a model of knowledge scarcity with that of knowledge abundance.  And as this book makes clear, we are not as smart, hard-working or disciplined as our nation's top military commanders. 

Grade:  B+

Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know by Alexandra Horowitz
http://bit.ly/8Lm4Ph

Don't read this book unless you live with a dog.  If a dog is part of your family, then I recommend that you read it together.  Understanding your dog from her perspective will make you both happier.  And when you read the book please do not take it out of the library, but spring for the audio, digital or dead tree version.  We want the author to get the money, as she deserves some tangible rewards for being brave enough to break convention and make the study of the house dog a legitimate field of scientific inquiry.  The best parts of the book debunk the myths of dog training (the Dog Whisperer does not come off very well) by diving into the biology and evolutionary history of our canine companions.  For instance, wolves (who share a common ancestor with dogs) do not live in hierarchical but familial packs.  And if you want to understand your dog, you have to get on your hands and knees and smell the world. 

Grade:  B

When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present by Gail Collins
http://bit.ly/6ODNku

I think the world of 1960 will be as far away to my daughter's experience as 1560 is for me.  It is hard to believe how far we have come in terms of equality and attitude about gender in the past 50 years.  Perhaps the most important social change in my Mom's lifetime.  We are all the beneficiary of the hard work done by the heroines of the women's movement.  I am grateful that my girls will have choices not limited by their gender.  There is not much new or groundbreaking in this book, but the story is both important and well-told.

Grade:  B

Goodbye and Hello...

Hi,

If you have not arrived here from a link in a recent email list post, the impetus for this blog entry is that I have left my position at Dartmouth College effective November 22, 2009 to become a member of the Product Management team at Blackboard, Inc. as their Technical Product Manager. In this role I will be responsible for product management around developer infrastructure and APIs, System Administration features, standards implementation, and the technology stack. 

Over the past twelve and a half years at Dartmouth I have had the privilege to work with many talented and forward thinking individuals. During that time I grew as a developer and system administrator. I also realized in myself a passion for pragmatic and deliberate application of technology in education. For those opportunities I am eternally grateful.

So what does the future hold for me at Blackboard? Can anyone predict the future with certainty? No. What I do know for certain is that while working for Blackboard, just as when I was working for Dartmouth, I will be working with the same great folks from .EDU and Blackboard whom I have met during 12+ years of meetings, conferences, phone calls, and emails. Nice.

As the Technical Product Manager I will be the champion for our community of Blackboard developers within Blackboard Product Development by actively engaging and building relationships with the Blackboard developer community through client visits, user group meetings, and conferences. I'll oversee and execute programs designed to engage Blackboard developers throughout all aspects of the development life-cycle to ensure our new product releases meet or exceed client expectations (BTW: suggestions welcome!).

Why Blackboard?

Over the past couple years I have watched Blackboard as an organization, through changes in the product and involvement on standards committees, deepen its commitment to openness and standards. To me this shows that Blackboard is responding to the challenges of making the Learn platform better for the developer community. Additionally, it has become apparent to me over the last several months that Blackboard is keen to improve the quality and transparency of communication with this important audience. Finally, it is my (and Blackboard's) hope that through my experience and direct involvement with the product, and developer and administrator communities, I can help channel the needs and priorities of the technical community to enable the best possible product that meets the needs of the community.

 

But How?

Well... having never previously worked in the corporate world I am certain I will have some adjustments to make. But the following pretty much sketches out my philosophy:

I am a fan of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. Considering their ideals and what they accomplished with their relatively humble beginnings in Dave's garage on Addison Avenue in Palo Alto California, it is hard to not be impressed. One of my take-aways from their early startup story is the list of rules (according to legend) that they had posted in that garage:

Rules of the Garage 

Believe you can change the world.

Work quickly, keep the tools unlocked, work whenever.

Know when to work alone and when to work together.

Share tools, ideas. Trust your colleagues.

No Politics. No bureaucracy. (These are ridiculous in a garage).

The customer defines a job well done.

Radical ideas are not bad ideas.

Invent different ways of working.

Make a contribution every day. If it doesn’t contribute, it doesn’t leave the garage.

Believe that together we can do anything.

Invent.

Powerful stuff.

When one considers these “rules” it becomes apparent that they may be applied to many things: Hardware startups, software development, and even life. But, it is their application to our efforts in creating innovative solutions for educational technology that I feel they carry immediate significance. For it is when we as a community pull together in conversation and collaboration as colleagues sharing a vision for the betterment of educational technology that these rules carry more meaning than just words on a page; they serve as goals and guide posts.

There is currently a great deal of conversation taking place in the educational technology space which places our community in conflict. I believe firmly that while perhaps uncomfortable as these discussions may be at times, we are better for them as a community and therein lay solution and opportunity for improving the use of technology in education. I believe this because I believe in the 'rules' and because I believe we share a common bond. Specifically that the bounds of teaching and learning can be expanded with technology; that prudent and deliberate use of technology can enable the art of education and that we all share a passion for this art.

I am thrilled to say that I will be able to continue to play a small role in this community, for these are exciting times of change in education and the future hints at being even more exciting.

So, I extend a hearty “Thank You!” from me in my new role at Blackboard to everyone who participates in improving educational technology, and especially to all who participate in the “Garage”.

Cheers,

-m

October 2009 books

October is the month where Amazon finally linked its Audible subsidiary to its main Amazon book search.  In theory this should make finding Audible books much easier, as the Audible site continues to be as atrocious (slow, poorly organized, anti-intuitive) as the Amazon site is wonderful.  But....the linking is unreliable.....inexplicably sometimes Audible editions don't show up.  Still - a step in the right direction.  Oh Amazon....are you too distracted by e-readers to give proper attention to Audible?

Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters by Scott Rosenberg

Will change how you think about the Internet, blogs, and what it means to be a writer.  Sure, the history of blogging is interesting - and Rosenberg narrates this story beautifully.  But the true value of the book lie in the authors arguments about the significance of blogging.  This is the book that convinced me that the best thing we can do in higher education and learning technology is to get every student their own public blog.  This is a book that helped me understand the beauty of a world where the pleasures of publishing are open to all of us.  The power to self-publish, to blog, will over time be seen as important as the printing press and the mass spread of literacy.

Grade:  A

What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures by Malcolm Gladwell

A pleasure from start to finish.  Why:  A) Gladwell reads his essays, and Gladwell reads just about as well as he writes.  B) If you love Gladwell books: Outliers, Blink, Tipping Point (as I do) then you will love this book as well.   C) If you gave up your New Yorker subscription (or are just hopelessly behind) here is your chance to read Gladwell's favorite essays from the magazine.  D) Gladwell basically invented (at least in my lifetime) the popularizing of social science research.  As such, the world is a much better place.

Grade:  A-

That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo

Russo is back to form.  Funny and smart book about long marriages, aging parents, academia, real estate, and the Cape.  What else is there?

Grade:  A-

The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific by J. Maarten Troost

The narrator, Simon Vance http://bit.ly/3scvfd, moves this book from mildly diverting to something closer to wonderful.  The story of the slacker boyfriend accompanying accomplished partner to remote Pacific Island is a classic of the literary form.  Probably a big hit among the development economist set.  Think I'll have to read the rest of the Troost/Vance oeuvre.

Grade:  B+

True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society by Farhad Manjoo

Got this on a $4.95 Audible sale....happy I did.  Probably would not have read otherwise because of the lack of buzz.   Manjoo's big story that the diffusion of media and the disruption of the Web has eroded the enforced moderation of the Cronkite / NYT dominated mediascape will not come as a new story to anyone half-way paying attention.  But he tells the story well, supports his arguments with evidence, and writes well enough to keep the reader (listener) engaged. 

Grade:  B

Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler

Would have been much better if the author had not read his own book.  Author read books seldom work (unless you are Malcolm Gladwell) -  reading for audio is as much of an art as writing the book.  The book?  I recommend Connected even though it is not a great book.  The essential truth of the power of networks, and the science done by the authors to tease out their salience, are both sound and ground-breaking.  Methodologically strong and epistemologically important.  We need to think about our worlds from the perspective of networks.  Connected proves that not every good academic can write a popular book based on their work.  Can't blame them for trying.  Advice...buy in paper....skim through...and share the ideas.

Grade: B-

So you want to take some notes?

I recently purchased a 4GB iPulse made by Livescribe.

Wow. This has got to be the most awesome device to hit the streets in recent years. (and no I have no financial interests in Livescribe)

In a nutshell the iPulse records audio while you are taking notes (more on this in a moment) and time sequences your notes and drawings to the audio. You can also just record the presentation, and later play it back and take notes. (The 4GB purports to be able to store upwards of 400 hours of audio and notes at low quality audio settings).

Notes are stored as a form of digital ink - want to know what was being said when you wrote "Read Emerson's Nature" or sketched a cell? Simply tap your note and the audio jumps to that portion of the recording. How sweet is that? You can even add more notes while re-listening to the audio!

I think this is significant edutech for many reasons. One outstanding reason is that you can record content and actually focus on what is being presented instead of trying to capture every single statement - you only need to write notes on your immediate thought process and later revisit (as many times as you want) to further elaborate on your notes. The notes and audio are savable as flash based content for visual review at your computer - though you can get quite a bit done not using your computer, just interacting with your notebook and the pen itself. Another reason is that you do not need to take your laptop to class to take notes - take your notebook and pen - that is it. If you want you can later convert the digital ink text to e-text via a third party application for use in your favorite text editor. (I have not yet tried to export sketches out as images yet.)

Livescribe even provides a software development kit for those of us who like to get down with writing code. The pen has a built in microphone, but also uses a special set of earbuds which contain microphones enabling the capture of audio in "3D".

So far I can identify only two downsides to this product - it requires a special paper to get the deed done and is bound to a single computer so you cannot use it (or at least this is not obvious) on say an office and home computer - it works a bit like the iPod in this regard.

While you can upload your flash notes to a private space on their server, convert pages of notes to PDF, and export audio to aac, mp4, or wav files for review on capable mobile devices. lt would be wicked swell if it supported syncing chunks of audio/notes to mobile devices such as android-based phones or the iPhone - eliminating the need for a laptop. This could mean all you would need for study would be your phone, iPulse notepad, and the iPulse. Archiving to your laptop when necessary.

It would also be swell if, while reviewing/working with notes on the Desktop if it could interact more with software on the computer - click a URL? Open a Browser. Click a formula? Open MatLab. etc. etc.

In the future we will travel light, miss nothing, get good work done well - nice.

Oh wait - the future is now.

Cheers,

-m

Verizon Android...

I am not a fanboy of the iPhone for many reasons (see this from my UI hero Bruce Tognazzini for a few: http://www.asktog.com/columns/080Springboard.html ) and I have a love-hate affair with my G1 (great apps and platform vs somewhat spotty t-mobile service, slow dialing, and somewhat weak battery performance).

Bearing this in mind I am following the hyped up DROID offering from Verizon - I am hoping that failure to meet the hype (as is often the case) will not result in folks shying away from the android platform. This is the nice thing about how T-mobile handled the G1 release - not much hype so the phone sells to interested parties on it's own merits (and acceptable defects). Anyway, as I /still/ have not canceled my verizon account for my blackberry, I am looking forward to seeing the new offering from Verizon (http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/Verizon-Wireless-Hypes-Motorola-Droid-Phone-As-Everything-Apple-IPhone-Isnt-331506/). Maybe a phone upgrade is in my future.

EduTech content? Yet, another (widely available) platform for the development of mobile apps and distribution of 'want-it-now' content.

Desire2Learn reports more success in legal battles with Blackboard

Here's an extract of Desire2Learn's patent blog: (http://www.desire2learn.com/PatentInfo/)

"Court of Appeals Denies Blackboard's Rehearing & En Banc Petitions    Oct 15, 2009 3:22 PM

We received news this morning that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit denied Blackboard's combined Petition - one for a Rehearing and one for a Rehearing en banc. ...There's no opinion - just a listing on the Federal Circuit's website. ...We expect that the Court will be issuing its mandate in the near future.

The effect? All positive for Desire2Learn:

   1. We expect that Judge Clark will dissolve the injunction (he's already suspended it)
   2. We'll be receiving repayment of the judgment we paid to Blackboard - plus interest - plus costs associated with the action
   3. We're delighted to put this chapter behind us, once and for all!"

Will our Blackboard fees be going up even more?

"No kindergarten classrooms!"

Last week I worked with Ellen Marie Murphy of Plymouth State and Andrew Milne of Tidebreak on a NERCOMP SIG with the title "Classroom of the Future."  For the first couple of hours, Andrew and I presented -- ho hum -- but then we gave them glue sticks, scissors, foam paper, and other materials, and had them develop classroom designs in groups of 5-6. 

It amazed me how successful this cut-and-paste activity was.  Everyone was very into it, energetically gluing, cutting, debating, etc.  For the last 45 minutes they reported out on their projects.  All were received and delivered with enthusiasm.  It's clear that the folks who work on classrooms at all these institutions care about their work and are thinking a lot about the challenges in classroom design. They brought their energy with them.

What is a bit ironic about this is that at our recent ELI focus session on collaboration, Jenn Stringer at Stanford reported on story at Stanford.  Jenn does classroom support at the Stanford Med School and they are in the process of building new learning spaces.  When Jenn proposed a design for a room supporting highly interactive engagements, one prof objected, saying "no kindergarten classrooms!"  Ironically, turns out that for these SIG attendees, the kindergarten aspect of the day was the more rewarding.

My slides are on Slideshare. Pix from the session below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blackboard Building Block for NBC News Archives on Demand

This press release describes a Bb building block to access NBC News Archives on Demand, with historical and current photos, videos, etc.  Could be useful for instructors and for those student video projects.

The NBC service has a fee, although the building block is free, and "... some limited uses of NBC News Archives on Demand are free, including searching and browsing, creating playlists and mashups, viewing short previews of footage, and embedding multimedia in Blackboard courses."

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2009/10/08/nbc-blackboard-bring-free-multimedia-resources-to-lms.aspx

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/blackboard-adds-multimedia-content-from-nbc-news-to-the-blackboard-learn-platform-63751562.html