Month: August 2010

Real Reading on the Kindle

I differentiate reading for pleasure and reading for work. As an academic reading is a big part of what I do. I sit around and read stuff – books, journal articles, and some web content.

When I read for work, I am reading to understand, but I am also reading as a way to accumulate information for future use. I was never one who could remember names and date so I must generate an external record of what I have read. I must generate an external record of what I think may be helpful to me in the future. In the old days (and with me that means before the Apple II), I used to highlight everything I read and I used to create note cards. The note card would contain a brief summary and the highlighted original would offer greater detail should the comment on the note card indicate the article might be  useful. At some point, the note cards were replaced with some method for storing content on a computer. I still have digital versions of note cards I initially generated on the Apple II and the found a way to pass forward as word files over the years.

My strategy for journal articles has changed a lot. I do not really read the physical journals anymore. I have some journals dating back to when I was a junior in college (1971). I do not get out of my chair to walk across my office to my shelves anymore. I download anything I read from a journal as a pdf. This is how I use the college library – the library offers this service. I store the pdfs using a program called YEP and I annotate them using a program called Skim. I should probably describe this process – maybe a future blog.

More and more I am reading books on a device. I started to do this to see if I could. So, in exploring issues such as whether college students could actually read their textbooks from a device, I decided I should have the experience myself. Between Cindy and I we own a Kindle, iPod Touches, and iPads. I can say I have read at least one book on each. Both the Kindle and the iPad provide very acceptable reading experiences as far as I am concerned. By that I mean the visual experience of reading from the screen and my ability to read for extended periods of time are fine. What has been missing is the opportunity to take a more active approach involving highlighting, annotating AND externalizing for future use.

I realize that highlighting and annotating can be accomplished, what I was looking for was a way to generate what Skim lets me generate for pdfs – the external record. I knew there was a way to do this with the Kindle. Thanks to a post by Will Richardson I learned that the Kindle was capable of some things I had not discovered. I am describing the use of Kindle software on the iPad in this case. It turns out that the Kindle software uploads your notes and your highlights back to Amazon. I wondered how they did that popular highlights thing. Amazon must know what thousands of people have highlighted within a given book. You can access this content. The system as is does not provide a way to download this content, but you can save the web page as a text file. This is not a perfect system, but it works.

Kindle highlights and notes can be found at http://kindle.amazon.com/your_highlights . You log in and you should see your collection of books and related notes.

It did occur to me that there is some danger here. You may not like Amazon storing this content. Amazon may not like you downloading the content as I have described. I have no idea if I could highlight and download an entire book. I have no interest in doing that, but it did occur to me that Amazon should probably limit the amount of highlighted text that can be stored.

It turns out I prefer the iPad to the Kindle for this form of active reading. I find the process of selecting chunks of text a bit cumbersome, but I am getting better at it. The iPad seems never to know quite what I intend – when I am selecting text and when I want to highlight the text selected seems to be difficult for the device to differentiate.

Clearly what I am describing here may be different from what you think of when considering how you read a book. Perhaps reading as research might be a way to label what I have described here. I expect that we will all be looking for ways to use the advantages of technology in solving our personal information problem solving tasks. More and more I am thinking in terms of work flow and how to take ideas from what I read and make them my own.

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Back to school post – college student study

I pay attention when the general public is told something about higher ed. I am an educational psychologist so the topics are sometimes relevant to my teaching or research. I also am interested in how the area in which I work is presented to the public.

In 1961, the average full-time student at a four-year college in the United States studied about twenty- four hours per week, while his modern counterpart puts in only fourteen hours per week.

In mid-summer, the results of a research study by Babcock & Marks (prepublication PDF) received general attention. This does not happen often. The lead sentence from the abstract appears above. The amount of time college students spend studying has declined dramatically. (BTW – the authors use the word “curmudgeon” in the first paragraph of their article. How often does that happen?). The authors examine and reject some possible explanations. For example, technology does not appear to have made students more efficient learners. Only a fraction of the decline can be attributed to a higher proportion of college students who work.

So even though we lack the data to observe directly whether college has been “dumbed down,” we are able to draw from the data a solid conclusion about university practices: standards for effort have plummeted—in practice, if not in word.

I think their conclusion translates as – whatever has changed on the instructional side, college profs have lowered standards resulting in less student effort.

Now, this could have been the end of this story (and my post) – BUT NO!

UND, my institution, topped one of the lists generated by the Princeton Review. We are #1. We are #1. We study the least. Wait, this may not be a good thing. Just so those in the area do not scoff. We are also the only ND school Princeton Review considers for any ranking.

So, studying is declining. This decline may indicate a lowering of standards. UND students study the least. I am not sure I like where this logic exercise is going.

This topic (the general finding, not the UND data point) has generated a good deal of discussion and analysis.
Boston Globe
Atlantic Wire
Mother Jones

I do think this should be treated as a serious topic (generally and locally). I am not a big fan of survey data – participants can exaggerate or give answers to create an impression. Is indicating you don’t study much at your school fall within the same category as bragging that you school is a great party school?

Here is my take (no data here) as a prof. I think profs are pressured from two directions. First, there is the “I don’t want to buy and then read that expensive and large book” complaint. This is student pressure. Then there is the colleague pressure (with support from some students) that condemns lecturing as boring and passive. We should expect students to read and then discuss and explore in class. The combination may be deadly. If there is a resistance to reading and there is a resistance to presenting what you have left is discussion of personal opinions. We used to call this shooting the bull (not sure why – I did attend a land grant college) and it was what you did after studying when you walked to the campus town bar for a nightcap. I tend to think of a heavy emphasis on class discussion as “studying with your students”. This is not necessarily a bad thing if students come to class with something to study. Perhaps out of class and in class studying should be combined as a single variable. But, just what would be the focus of such effort?

I really hope this topic receives more attention. … enough of this writing stuff, back to reading the student’s book for the semester. …bah

[Cross posted from Curmudgeon Speaks]

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Adventures in Reading

My start in combining educational technology and research was many years ago – the mid-1980s. I was interested in the development of reading skills (upper elementary) and was attempting to develop games that would both develop skill and generate data on performance. At the time (Apple II and II+), the technology experience for the user was predominately text-based. For someone interested in reading, this seemed perfectly acceptable. What the computer offered was  interactivity and it was this combination of words and actions that was appealing to me. Early on exploring the new world of personal technology and learning to program in the process, I encountered text-based adventure games. For me, a basic concept began to emerge. The moves one makes in adventure games depends on your comprehension of the text. Existing games involved more than basic comprehension, but this was mostly a function of purposeful vagueness used to make the games challenging for older players. To emphasize reading skill, we decided to create games in which understanding the “story” made certain moves more productive. Success (leveling up, solving problems) should be associated with comprehending the text of the game. So, our earliest games were a combination of the text-based adventure games of the time and “choose your own” adventure books. I found an early entry in my vita related to this research.

Grabe, M. (1988).  The instructional potential of microcomputer adventure games. Journal of Computer-Based Instruction, 15, 72-77.

I don’t think the journal is still alive. It was the research outlet for an organization I remember as ADCIS. I know this organization was absorbed by another. At some point, technology became main stream and we started publishing in more traditional research journals.

I still like the idea of connection understanding to action; i.e., because I understand what I have read I can do something more successfully. The connection is immediate and embedded when understanding can be applied to making a better choice.

This is a long and possibly unnecessary connection to something I discovered just yesterday. I was scanning the links that “magically” appear on my personal desktop home page and noticed a reference to adventure games on the iPod (actually the reference was to the iPhone but those of us living in North Dakota do not purchase iPhones). The link was to an NPR story on U-Venture repurposing classic “Choose your own adventures” for the iPhone and iPad. It is an interesting interview (read or listen). I immediately spent $3.99 to give it a try (there are other text adventures available, but I was interested in the U-Venture approach).

This is an interesting example for anyone who wants to explore the experience on an iPod or iPad (or iPhone if not in ND). The notion of
reading with a purpose (and a consequence) still makes sense to me. To me, there is something unique in the “choose your own adventure” genre
(what qualifies as a genre anyway). So, if you are looking for content to address the development of comprehension skills and maybe ESL skills,
I think there are some interesting possibilities here.

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New news on neutrality

Recently Google and Verizon issued a joint comment on net neutrality. This proposal has generated a great deal of buzz (some links provided at the end of this post) and Google has responded in defense of the proposal.

So, what is network neutrality and why should you care.

I would suggest that the core idea in net neutrality is that companies who provide access to the Internet will not advantage themselves or other companies. How might this happen? Filtering and traffic prioritization would be examples. If you are in education, you are likely familiar with filtering. A school, for example, often filters some web sites preventing students using the school network from accessing these sites. Traffic prioritization means that the rate at which packets of a certain type (e.g., video, content from a given service) are passed on is modified relative to other packet types. A contrasting position would be that the company providing access simply treat all content as equivalent (neutrality). Of course there are reasons for exercising control. Schools already filter. My university prioritizes when necessary to keep the demand from the University under a certain predefined limit (for a cheaper rate from the provider). Institutions, however, are really not functioning as commercial providers. When you pay a monthly fee to the cable company, you probably do not expect you are operating under such controls.

There are obvious ways in which providers could operate in their own self interest. DSL is likely provided by a company also making money providing phone services. If you get your Internet service from a cable company, you likely also get video content from that same company. The cable company loses a revenue opportunity if you decide to stream netflix movies rather than watch movies on demand from the cable provider. The phone company loses a revenue opportunity if you make use of Skype rather than a long distance service. Companies would be violating net neutrality if the company made it more difficult to use VOIP or streaming.

The neutrality issue is different from the issue of data caps. Data caps concern paying different amounts of money depending on how much content you access. While a content category such as video would certainly burn through the capacity allowed more quickly, the provider should not block or slow access to this category.

All of this gets even more complex because companies can use different reasons for applying a specific control. For example, a cable company may contend that video downloads are taxing the system and as a way to maintain quality service argue the need to downgrade the rate at which video packets are passed on. Of course, the video service offered by the company would also benefit as a consequence.

The joint Google/Verizon proposal is difficult to interpret. The proposal begins by advocating for net neutrality. Then come the additional suggestions. My take on the controversy is that the additional suggestions leave open possibilities that may undermine the initial commitment. Excerpts from two suggestions follow.

  1. Network Management: Broadband Internet access service providers are permitted to engage in reasonable network management. Reasonable network management includes any technically sound practice: to reduce or mitigate the effects of congestion on its network; ………
  2. Additional Online Services: A provider that offers a broadband Internet access service complying with the above principles could offer any other additional or differentiated services. Such other services would have to be distinguishable in scope and purpose from broadband Internet access service, but could make use of or access Internet content, applications or services and could include traffic prioritization.

For the paranoid:

  1. does this mean that a company that controls the capacity of a network could hold at the present level of capacity and then “manage” traffic when capacity is congested
  2. does this mean a company could stop investing in the present type of infrastructure driving traffic to premium and online services where profit opportunities and control would be greater.

There are many sites weighing in this issue:
ReadWriteWeb
Wired
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Engadget

Moveon.org has organized a campaign urging Google not be evil

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Keeping Positive

I was in a good mood Sunday morning. Our youngest daughter was married Saturday evening and there is something that is so positive about the celebration of a couple beginning a life together. My feet hurt, but life felt good. Then, I made the mistake of turning on the television to watch some Sunday morning political news and banter. What a downer! I understand the country has some serious problems, but to listen to the various positions it would seem like there are no possible solutions. It sometimes seems like a reality TV show in which comic and self-absorbed characters purposefully encourage drama rather than behave in a rational fashion. How can problem-solving emerge out of such a situation?

David Warlick seemed to be having a similar crisis of faith and I like the perspective he ended up proposing. I think we have a responsibility to others that requires those who have acquired more to give more back. I support universal health care – it seems hideous to me that anyone would be willing to turn his back on the basic needs of others. I don’t know if attempting to salvage the investment banking system was the right thing to do or not, but the problems here were not created by the lower or middle class citizens. I am also tired of the complaints directed at educators. It seems unfair to lay blame for poorly performing schools while simultaneously cutting staff and funding. Ante up folks – you have a responsibility for the other guy.

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