Day: May 21, 2020

Ethics and failed understanding

When I was doing the research for my previous post and doing some searches on my own content I came across this site.

What this site provides is a way to download at no cost, our textbook. You can get it as a pdf, mobi file, and a couple of other options. Going through the letters of appreciation (not to me) and the notes about it being provided under a CC option (creative commons), I could not help but become a little frustrated and a bit angry.

This content was stolen. Our book is sold through Amazon for $9. We sold previous versions of this book through first Houghton-Mifflin and then Cengage for well over $100. We opted out of that arrangement which was quite lucrative because we were unable to convince Cengage to go to a $29 model consisting of a paper Primer and a free web site. Through an arrangement that returned our copyright, we moved our Primer to Amazon ($9) and offer our supplemental resources at no cost on our own server. If you are interested in the logic for our model, search this site for book (I will tag this post so you can read our explanation). In short, there are advantages to our model that include lower cost, less dated content, and greater flexibility in what instructors can assign. This was not a decision we made intending to make more income and without the promotion of a major publishing company we receive a fraction of the income generated by our original paper textbooks.

I find it hard to believe that college students cannot afford to purchase this textbook for $9. Whatever anyone thinks of the cost of textbooks and what complaints one might have about this industry, these issues do not apply to us. Because this is a textbook intended for practicing teachers involved in graduate education and preservice teachers, I find it disturbing that people in this line of work would be so unethical as to steal a $9 book.

Maybe I am being too hard on the students who did this, but I assume they know or don’t want to know. This is a current book and not a book developed through a source of external support to warrant the phony creative commons representation that someone other than me has claimed for this work.

OK – end of rant. Just be honest and respect the effort and skill required to generate the content you use.

P.S. – The day I wrote this post I also responded to the site using a form that was provided. I kind of knew that if the site wanted responses in this fashion instead of via email I was unlikely to receive a response. I have not and the pirated book is still available.

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Search limitations

I have had this question about the power of search that I finally thought of a way to investigate. My question involves the power of search to locate content in sites that use a database backend. So, instead of independent web pages this would be systems that generate a web page on the fly by accessing a database to retrieve content as requested. Blogs work in this way. So do content management systems such as Concrete5.

I am guessing that the search spiders find the static front page of a blog or content management system, but would not necessarily trigger that source to pull up content from the database so that it could be indexed. My concern has been that resources I offer within a content management system are not going to be located when someone searches for something the stored content might address.

Here is how I tested my concern. I recently switched from content stored as individual web pages to the same content stored in Concrete5 (a content management service). I did this so I would not have to continue paying for Dreamweaver to add content to my existing site or to modify existing content. Blogs (e.g., this WordPress site) allow a user to save content as pages instead of posts. These pages can be linked and thus can provide the same functionality as a site constructed page by page using an authoring environment such as Dreamweaver. Blogs and content management systems now provide access to themes and other features that make content creation far easier than used to be the case. If your content is fairly standardized (most pages look the same) and require only the presentation of content (text, video, images), why invest in an approach that allows far more flexibility but at the cost of efficiency and funds? There may be an answer to my question – searchability.

Anyway, my server presently contains redundant versions of book resources one in the form of independent web pages and the other in a database enabled content management system. What I realized was that I could do was conduct a search on a paragraph from this content (both sources) and see what was returned. Google advanced search allows you to search for an exact phrase (see second image) which I copies from a page within the database-based system. The same paragraph appeared on the original page-based site created with Dreamweaver. Instructors may have used this same technique when concerned that students have copied content from the web to include as part of their own writing.

The results of the search confirmed my concern. The search located the page with the target paragraph, but not the same content from the active content management system.

I am now trying to figure out how to promote my content when it can no longer be located through search.

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