Category: General

A model for ethical behavior

I took a little walk to the University of North Dakota Barnes and Noble bookstore this afternoon. I started class today and there seemed a mix up with the book I use in Educational Psychology. I wanted to see what was on the shelf.

When at the bookstore I also take a walk down the aisle where our book is displayed. It is fun to see it there. The book has been out for a year so nearly all of the books in the stack now have a used sticker. That is the way the course book market goes.

There were a couple of books in the stack that looked like the covers had been reattached with duct tape and that seemed kind of odd. When I pulled one to take a look, I found most of the entire cover had been covered with this kind of plastic mask. I recognized that the image showing through the mask was different than the cover of the other books and it then dawned on me why the plastic had been attached to the cover. I took a picture with my cell phone and headed home.

masked book

The bookstore was selling books intended as examination copies for instructors. The printing on the cover clearly states that the book is an instructor’s copy, is provided free of charge for the purpose of examination, and sale or resale is prohibited. Pretty hard to miss the assumptions made by the publishing company in providing a copy to the instructor.

masked book

If you look closely at the repurposed copy, you will see a comment “support recycling” and an assurance that all of the pages in the book are still there. The publishing companies have a recycling plan too. Most examination copies now come with a return label so that the instructor can ship the book back to the publisher at no expense if there is no reason to keep the book on his/her shelf. No one says the rejects must accumulate in local land fills.

I wonder about the reason for the mask. Is the book store embarrassed to admit they sell books clearly not intended for sale? Would such a message be contrary to the values supposedly promoted by educational institutions?

I wonder if institutions such as mine condone this practice. A recent edict made it clear that faculty members cannot accept gifts/payments associated with the adoption of a textbook. Ironic isn’t it – it is unacceptable to accept a couple hundreds bucks as payment for serious consideration of an adopted book, but perhaps fine to make far more selling the books you don’t adopt.

P.S. This post prompted considerable discussion among my faculty colleagues. One who obviously is more familiar with the official expectations of our university than I am sent me the following.

11.2 COMPLIMENTARY TEXTBOOKS
The University Senate strongly recommends that complimentary textbooks which are not being retained not be resold. These books should be donated to the appropriate UND library, a colleague, or another nonprofit institution or otherwise appropriately disposed of without infringing on the right of the publisher and/or author. The University Bookstore is requested to refrain from selling complimentary copies of textbooks.
Approved: UND Senate, 02-01-90

(I bolded the last sentence.)

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First Day of a New Year

I really love this time of year on a college campus. No matter what my age, the beginning of classes brings the same excitement year after year. I hope students share this excitement. Those of us in this environment have the luxury of focusing on our own improvement for an extended period of time and this opportunity should be appreciated.

David Warlick raised the question about our ability to relate to new students in an interesting way and one that seems to have generated a wide variety of comments and related posts. His daughter (if I remember the post correctly) is taking several Methods courses and he recommended that she wait until the end of the opening remarks – the time when the prof asks if there are any questions – and then:

Would suggest that someone ask,

“What blogs do you read?”

If the instructor stammers or in any other way answers in the
unknowing or the untrusting, then there’s opportunity for everyone in
this class to learn.

Of course, you do not want to be the one who asked the question that
the instructor couldn’t answer — especially if it might seem, in any
way, loaded. So immediately ask what journals he or she reads. Save
face!

To save students from my class the trouble – here is my feed. My list is not very long – in contrast my wife who reviews approx. a hundred feeds. We take a little different approach. She reads more and I write more (this our own version of the Read/Write web). I would also probably not be able to remember the names of the blogs I read or in most cases the individuals who generate the content. As Warlick suggests, I would be more specific regarding the journals I follow. I find blogs stimulating, but I read the journals for the more data oriented approach I need to balance the observations and opinions.

I am not sure it matters what the source is as long as one has a regular flow of inputs (quality ideas from a variety of sources) and one takes the time to think about these inputs.

Rather than ask about blogs, I think my questions of students would be “What is the last nonfiction book you read?” “What was the last trip you took that changed the way you think about the world?”

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Jott

I am not a big cell phone user and I have one of those phones and those accounts that is pretty expensive. I encouraged the high price plan because my cell phone offers a way to access my email remotely and this does come in handy on occasion. My wife went along (actually encouraged) the idea because somehow talking on the phone is a virtue and unfortunately one of those virtues that does not come naturally to me.

My wife does keep trying and I have to give her credit – the newest suggestion seems interesting. Her constant attention to hundreds of blog messages has uncovered Jott.

Jott is a beta online service. You connect to a number and speak the name of an individual – you say “me” if you want to send a message to yourself. The recommendation is that you set a speed dial on your cell phone – like I would know how to do that ;). You speak for up to 30 seconds. Jott translates speech to text and stores the text message and the audio in the Jott account of the individual you have identified. It actually works.

Jott

Perhaps I think in text rather than audio. Jott is perfectly suited to my “style”.

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Skim

I think I prefer to assimilate rather than to accommodate (Piagetian terms so ignore if my way of thinking makes no sense). I like to find ways to fit new experiences into my existing ways of doing things. I have always done my academic work by taking notes and highlighting. The articles in the journals on my shelves are highlighted. I guess I am not sure why I think the highlighting in the books and journals and the notes I have accumulated in digital form for the past 30 years (some I had to enter when I started working on computers) really save me much time. When working on a project, I typically have to reread the original works anyway.

The move to online resources has caused me some frustration. While I can download nearly any article to my desktop as a pdf from my university library, I have been struggling with what to do next. I have settled on a system for storing, tagging, and searching pdfs (see comment on Yep), but there is still the matter of “processing” the material I collect. For me reading is not enough.

I have found a new tool that looks promising. It is called Skim. I don’t mind paying a reasonable fee for the tools I use, but this one is free. Skim allows annotation, highlighting, and some other methods for marking up pdfs (see below).
Skim

When saved, these additions are available to Skim, but apparently not to other pdf readers (or at least the ones I tried). At least other pdf viewers can open the files modified by Skim. I would hate to invest a lot of work in a system that relies on a proprietary file format and then find one day that the company decides not to upgrade their product.

What is kind of interesting is that the marked text content can be exported in various forms including RTF. The material marked in the image above resulted in a file with the following content:

• Highlight, page 1

External storage provides a way to deal with the typical delay between listening to a lecture and studying lecture content.

• Circle, page 1

Mark Grabe *, Kimberly Christopherson ent of Psychology, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, ND USA 58202,

• Text Note, page 1

Students who are more likely to skip class use online notes differently.

The combination of a system for marking up pdfs (without eliminating the opportunity to read the pdf using another tool) and the ability to export notes and highlighted material for the development of personal resources looks promising.

This is a Mac only product – don’t have to say that very often. 😉

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Concerns regarding new iMovie

You might want to read this link from AppleInsider before changing over from iMovie06 to the new iMovie08. It appears that some features you may have grown used to in the ’06 version are no longer available. The post at AppleInsider makes it sound like Apple went for simple almost assuming the most common interest of iMovie users was to post something to YouTube.

I can’t say I have had the opportunity to work with the new product yet, but I would be concerned that movies would lack chapters. Since it might be time to load software into school labs for the Fall, those considering the new version of iLife might want to take a little time to investigate this issue.

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Social Networking Fears Unwarranted

Summaries of a recent survey of students, parents, and educators concerning social networking have been appearing on educational blogs (e.g., 2 Cents Worth, TechBlorge). The reason the results of this survey interest these other bloggers and me is that the survey seems to indicate the response of schools to the assumed dangers of student social networking exaggerates the dangers as reported by students and parents.

The survey, titled “Creating and Connecting makes” (pdf available from National School Boards Association) three main points:

  • Use of social networking among age group is increasing (some data from present study contrasted with 2002) and students make a surprising amount of use to accomplish educational tasks on their own.
  • Safety issues and inappropriate experiences associated with social networking do exist, but are lower than many adults assume – especially educational officials.
  • Online experience may help students learn to deal with inappropriate experiences.

Those looking for recent statistics may find the report helpful. The survey data include:

  • reports of the frequency of social networking activities and changes since 2002
  • frequency of several categories of inappropriate and dangerous experiences
  • proportion of schools blocking or forbidding various types of online experience while in school.

I wish research of this type were more commonly funded to be conducted by researchers at educational institutions whose goal was to publish their data in peer reviewed goals. To gain full access to the data collected by Grunwald Associates it appears you must pay several thousand dollars. More information about the questions asked in the survey are available from the Grunwald Associates site. What I wish I had the opportunity to review are the details of the methodology. The published pdf describes the student sample as consisting of 1277 9-17 year olds who responded to an online survey. The Grunwald associates site describes a nationally representative sample of 1000 teens/children. An online survey could mean different things and many approaches would not really generate a representative sample of all youth.

To have the National School Boards association behind the position that schools are overreacting to the dangers of participatory web activities and missing out on activities that interest students seems a good thing.

P.S.

Andy Carvin’s post in response to this report.

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No sub $1000 iMac

The new Apple products were announced today and while the new iMac upgrade looks great there is no “low end” machine. It looks like 20″ and 24″ models with the low end (educational price for individuals) at $1149.

I am just concerned that this may seem a little too much machine for K12 labs and older Macs will not be replaced with the 20″ model. The Mac mini still exists (supply your own monitor and keyboard) at a significantly lower price point and I was not confident this line would be continued. I guess this or the smaller MacBook are the alternatives from Apple’s perspective.

The new iLife08 tools in combination with a .mac account (still $100 per year I think and now at 10 gig of storage) would seem to offer some great opportunities.

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