John Jones

The Ohio State University

New DMLCentral.net post: “Online Learning and Teaching Writing”

John Jones

via archive.org

For whatever reason, discussions of online education are in the air. Cathy Davidson frequently writes about the challenges facing our education system on this blog, and when a consortium of top universities combined to create an online course initiative, it seemed that online education had grown past its infancy as was ready for mainstream acceptance.

That initiative, Coursera, has clearly excited the public, as it now boasts over one million students taking free online courses. Yet it has not been without its critics. Recently, Adam F. Falk has argued that solutions like Coursera offer students an incomplete education because they lack the one-on-one attention that students can get from teachers. In the case of that old standby, the essay, Falk criticizes the site’s peer-grading model, writing, “as if averaging letter grades assigned by five random peers were the educational equivalent of a highly trained professor providing thoughtful evaluation and detailed response.”

Yet, there are reasons to doubt the educational value of the essay-writing most students do—whether graded by a “highly trained professor” or “random peers.” Thomas Kent has argued that because communication is always situated in particular contexts, it isn’t possible for the typical in-class essay to teach a student what she needs to know about real-world writing using this method.

Alex Reid makes a similar point when discussing critical thinking, arguing that “critical thinking” is a term without a lot of value, for the “thinking” required by different disciplines and professions is “situated and [is] not easily practiced outside of” the context of those fields. Like Kent, Reid argues that writing instruction faces a similar problem, as the writing skills needed in different contexts outside the classroom are difficult to teach when they are divorced from that context.

Which brings us back to Coursera and online learning. While I agree with Falk that having real teachers interact with students is valuable, when teaching writing, neither an audience of teachers nor an audience of peers can be the solution to good writing. Rather, the solution is to teach students writing that is situated in real (or simulated) contexts with real audiences and feedback. The future of projects like Coursera, if they are to be successful educational alternatives to the traditional college classroom, is to harness the collective intelligence of the Web to connect students with these audiences. What the Internet has proven with resounding success is that it can connect writers with real audiences. Any approach at online education (or offline education, for that matter) that ignores this feature of the Web adds nothing significant to the process.

“eBooks, Writing, and Ownership” at DMLCentral.net

John Jones

I have a new post up at DMLCentral.net on Apple’s iBooks Author and the trend of web services—and now, design companies—placing heavy restrictions on the media that we create with their tools.

First, Apple’s actions are a major bummer. I’ve started playing with iBooks Author a little to get a feel for it, and it seems like an excellent tool. Well designed, easy to use, and with a lot of neat features for creating digital books. It’s just too bad that the company crippled the software by not allowing users to export books as .epub files and restricted sales to the iBookstore.

Second, what strikes me whenever Facebook changes their users’ privacy policies without warning or when Apple tries to lock down all of the books made with their software to their store is the predictable way in which these companies are following the guidelines of O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 manifesto: they want to own the network, whether that network is social media users or exclusive iBooks. As O’Reilly points out, if you own—or have exclusive access to—the most data, you gain a competitive advantage by having the best network. But it’s one thing to build a network on user-reviews, as Amazon does, and quite another to assert control over the complex and demanding work that goes into creating a book, as Apple is doing. The only benefit to this move is that as more and more of our digital work is siloed like this, the ethical implications will come increasingly to the forefront, and, hopefully, affect some positive change for users.

Update: Here’s the original post—

One of the great promises of the internet is that it allows for writing to be distributed outside of the restrictions imposed by traditional publications. On the internet there is no scarcity of resources, no oversight by editors, and no need to tap a pre-identified audience, and these features of web publishing have made it possible for anyone with access to post nearly anything to be read by potentially anyone else.

However, while the gains for writers have been very real, there remains a distinct hierarchy between the products of the traditional publishing industry and web-based writing. Consider what is arguably the greatest textual achievement of the internet age, the multi-language encyclopedia, Wikipedia. Even though it has moved past being an object of general derision in public discourse to being generally accepted, even now many mentions of the site in popular discourse come with qualification, the real or imagined “I found this on Wikipedia, but…” In many quarters, writing on the web still does not get much respect.

But this distinction may soon be a thing of the past. Since the introduction of Amazon’s Kindle eReader and its various competitors, the last main physical distinction between web writing and the publishing industry—the printed book, newspaper, or magazine—has been slowly losing ground to the digital text. What makes your book better than my blog? One obvious answer is that it is, in fact, a book. However, when both are rendered in similar formats on the screen of an eReader, this distinction disappears. In other words, when our texts are in the same format, all that matters is the content.

These are some reasons why Apple’s recent announcement of iBooks Author, an application for creating rich-media ebooks for the iPad, is so intriguing. While it has been possible for individuals to create their own eBooks for some time—just as eReaders were available for some time prior to the release of the Kindle—iBooks Author could signal a change: a well-designed, easy to use program that allows for the creation of rich-content books that are directly connected to the distribution channels of an influential player in digital media. Now writers have a new and very powerful tool for not merely adding their text to the web, but for competing with major publishers in the eBook space.

But many commentators noted a restrictive section in the license agreement for iBooks Author that dictates that, while free versions of books created with the program can be distributed anywhere, authors who wish to charge for the books they create in iBooks Author can only distribute them through Apple’s iBookstore. Further, although Apple’s iBooks format is incredibly similar to the ePUB standard, it is currently impossible to output rich-media books from iBooks Author in any format other than Apple’s proprietary one. This is part of a disturbing trend in online communication where social networking and other services increasingly restrict or make claims on the media that their users create. Increasingly, the writing we do online is not our own, and, rather than taking the opportunity to open up that ecosystem to more participation, Apple has chosen to restrict it.

This is an area of grave concern. While it is true that the web has democratized publication and the new popularity of eReaders has lowered the barriers for independent authors to compete with major publishers, when this process comes at the cost of giving away our rights as writers, we should be extremely wary of what we are giving away and the long-term effects of those actions. iBooks Author has a lot of promise, but, at least for now, that promise is greatly diminished by the restrictions Apple has placed on the program.

New DMLCentral Post: “Social Reading and the Foundations of Digital Literacy”

John Jones

I’ve got a new post up at DMLCentral.net: Social Reading and the Foundations of Digital Literacy.

Update: My DMLCentral blogs are no longer online, so I have reposted them here.

*****

Not long ago, I was on an airplane waiting for takeoff. Due to the completely reasonable FAA restrictions on using electronic devices, I was reading the print version of a magazine while we waited to taxi to the runway. I soon found I was absorbed in the content of the article, and, when a passage caught my eye, I reflexively tapped the page with my index finger in an attempt to highlight the passage, just as I would have done when reading on my tablet computer.

Of course, I quickly realized that print does not work that way, and luckily no one noticed my gaffe. Yet, my readingFAIL is illustrative of the way that digital technologies and digital networking have changed my reading habits. In short, my most important reading is social. If I had been reading on my tablet, I would have highlighted the passage and shared it and the link to the story on either my Facebook or Twitter accounts, or both. But, as it was, I kept reading, and I didn’t share the story. This meant I did not have a record of the link or the interesting passage, nor did I have any enlightening discussions with my friends and followers about the story. No record, no notes, no conversation: it was pleasure reading at its most basic, simply killing time until we hit 10,000 feet and I could get back to work.

Of course, most of us first experience reading as a social activity. Whether having stories read to us as children or the collective reading that characterizes early reading instruction, reading begins as a social experience. It is only as we grow older that reading becomes a private, individual activity, one often divorced from contact with others. There are certainly many avenues of social reading that exist prior to digital networking—book clubs come immediately to mind—but the pervasive nature of digital technologies has the potential to transform all of our reading into a social experience.

So, what is social reading exactly? It is reading that is defined by the act of sharing the reading experience within a community and that is subsequently shaped and informed by that community. The community in question could be as small as two people or as large as a country; it could be grounded in a physical location, or exist wholly online.

One of the reasons I believe it is important for us to highlight social reading is that, because students experience reading as a social activity from a young age, it can be an effective means of scaffolding those students’ experiences with other forms of social learning. One of the saddest revelations in Brandt’s Literacy in American Lives is that while reading is widely encouraged and supported—by families and schools—among the people she interviews, writing is seen as a source of secrecy and shame, and most of those interviewees who did write went out of their way to keep this fact hidden from their families and friends. The ways in which digital technologies foreground the social features of communication serve as a concrete means of demonstrating the inherently social nature of learning for our students, and helps socialize them in a society that values this community behavior as one of the foundations for media literacy.