General – Page 2 – Learning Aloud

New Project

I am trying something different with one of my longer writing projects.. My wife and I had a 15 year run with a commercial textbook for the “technology for teachers” undergraduate teacher preparation course. Fifteen years translates as 5 editions of the book. This course does not generate the review of a large lecture course (e.g., Introduction to Psychology), but there is less competition in the area of our book and we did well financially.

As we gained a lot of experience allowing us to analyze the textbook industry and the niche in which we published, we became very aware of the backlash against textbook costs (ours sold for $140 to students) and began to identify issues a traditional textbook for this niche could not address.

We came up with a plan to publish a much shorter version we called a Primer and wanted to match this with online resources. We proposed a $29 Primer and intended to serve the online content ourselves. I still think some of our arguments for this approach make sense. For example, those intending to teach high school and early elementary have very different interests in what to do with technology. Why not provide the basics in a Primer and then a larger variety of content for specific content areas and grade levels online? Technology is a field that moves quickly and keeping content current is a tremendous challenge. Not only did we publish once every three years, but 9-12 months were set aside to generate the next edition. You see the time lag that is created. Why not write online continually to keep a given textbook current?

Textbook companies think differently about their relationship with the authors they hire. A proposal such as paying someone to write continuously does not make sense to them even though they might appreciate the issue of keeping content current. They typically have a couple of books in a niche and their field reps encourage the adoption of the most recent book in a niche. This is more because of the used book market than the issue of currency and the issue of a general approach rather than what would be best for a given book is the perspective they take. At the time (this has changed since), combining online content with a physical product was also a foreign idea that did not translate as easily into income.

Anyway, we agreed to go our separate ways and were given our copyright back so we could pursue our interests with another company or with an outlet such as Kindle.

We continue to offer a version of this textbook through Amazon. I developed a second resource (Layering for learning) which was not really a full-length textbook, but concentrated on specific online services I proposed educators could use to make more effective use of web pages and online videos. It is this second “book” that I have decided to take in a different direction.

My professional writing activities have long been mostly a hobby. We made our money on our original textbook, but now my work is mostly about exploring topics in online publishing. Instead of $140, the online textbook sells for $9. Same basic book. I think it appropriate content that takes considerable time to create be treated as having value and I have always require some payment for my professional work even if mostly symbolic. So, what other outlet and approach can I explore as an alternative to Amazon?

Here is my new project. I am updating my layering book and serializing it on Medium. If you have not used Medium directly, you may have encountered work offered on Medium through a search engine. Sometimes you could read what the search engine found and sometimes you may have found that the content was behind a paywall. There are two competitors in this space – Substack and Medium. With Substack, if an author wants to be compensated for her work, she requires readers to subscribe to her work for a price. A reader makes a specific commitment (usually $5 a month or so) to specific authors. With Medium, you pay a subscription fee ($50 a year) and then read whatever you want from as many authors as you want. Medium takes a cut and then allocates the rest to the authors based on several variables they use to define value. Like other social outlets for the vast majority of writers, you receive little money (I hope to make enough to cover my own Medium subscription fee). I think of it as a way to keep score. Do people find what I write interesting and of value? What are the options for those who generate the kind of content I create and how do different options compare?

If you are not a Medium users, I think you are allowed three free reads a month and the Introduction to my serialized book is explained in greater detail.

To Win the War, Defeat Hamas and Stop Settlements

I write this post in response to comments made during last evening’s Republican debate during which several participants were very negative in response to the discussions on the Israeli/Palestinian situation occurring on many college campuses. The tone advocated that university officials shut down students voicing their concerns that the military actions of the Israelis were indiscriminately killing a large number of Palestinians innocent of any aggression toward Palestinians and voicing recognition of the abuses the Israelis had visited upon those of other faiths in the West Bank and the region. Of specific concern in these vocalizations has been the complicity of leader Netanyahu in using the support of leaders of Israeli extremists in order to gain political power. I support this concern of the students and see little hope for the region unless the overreach of all extremists in the region are not eliminated.

I think students are idealistic and see the hypocrisy in the positions taken by many politicians. Whether these politicians see their position as pragmatic or not is not the issue for me. Pragmatism can easily become a way to ignore legitimate complexity that is acknowledged by others. You do not have to condone atrocities to understand that people placed in impossible life circumstances are easier to convince they have no choice other than to resort to violence. My point is that the students recognize that simplifying a complex situation to justify a given response is unlikely to have long-term success.

In reacting to the simplicity of the Republican candidates in reacting to the present world situation, I happened to read an NYTimes piece by opinion writer Thomas Friedman. Thomas Friedman is one of the few authors who generates content I find so valuable that I purchase any book he writes. This interest goes back many years. I have found his commentary on globalization, climate, and education very insightful. Before these topics were integrated in what I think of his “World is Flat” books, I read his books about what I have always called the Middle East and I believe this area of the world and his experiences covering issues related to this region established him during his early career. One can find posts on this blog going back many years based on my reading of one Friedman book or another.

Friedman’s argument seems to me to encapsulate the position of the students and reflects a more nuanced and I would suggest an informed analysis of the crisis. His position seems captured in his title – To Win the War, Defeat Hamas and Stop Settlements [I think this link should work whether or not you have a digital subscription to the NYTimes]. I think of this argument as suggesting that to solve a problem of this nature you need to assure all participants that you are willing to put yourself in the position of taking the moral high ground. The crisis will not go away until there is a legitimate two-state solution and the extremists in Israel recognize and eliminate their abuse and aggression toward others who have legitimate rights to exist in the region. This is not a matter of determining which side has committed the most egregious acts, this is a matter of suggesting that wrongs exist on both sides and conflict will continue and be defended by one side as long as this is the case.

Patagonia

I haven’t posted in a while and it will be a while until I post again. I did not want people to think I had abandoned my blog. We are on an expidition cruise ship exploring Patagonia.

I have a separate blog for our travels and if you are interested I would invite you to take a look. My wife and I are heavy tech users no matter the activities we are engaged in and you may find things you will enjoy.

The following is the Pios XI glacier in Chile and the video shows the glacier calving.

The Power of Collaboration: Enhancing Your Note-Taking Experience

This post is intended to be the final contribution in my series of posts describing generative activities and classroom applications. My previous contributions identified two hierarchical systems, SOI (selective, organizing, integrative) and ICAP (interactive, constructive, active, passive), proposing more and less powerful activities for influencing learning effectiveness. Both systems propose collaborative activities to be potentially most effective. Several of my posts have concerned how taking notes can improve achievement so I decided to conclude this series with a focus on collaborative notetaking.

Before I address the topic of collaboration, it may be helpful to provide a more general background on how educational psychologists and researchers such as me describe the process of taking notes. First, we differentiate the overall process into a storage and a retrieval phase. I assume this is obvious. A learner takes notes at one time to improve performance of some type at a later time. Second, we identify what might be accomplished during each stage. What is recorded during the storage phase determines what is available during the retrieval (study) phase. Learners may differ in how completely and how effectively they record key ideas so both completeness and quality of what is recorded could be important. The idea of a generative activity also proposes that the process of taking notes (whether available for review or not) might be helpful because of the cognitive activities that are involved. By extension, an instructor could prepare a quality set of notes and give them to students so they don’t have to take notes themselves. It matters if having personally taken notes is key to effectiveness. So attempts to determine if taking notes yourself has some unique value are useful.

Again, the importance of a retrieval and a study phase probably seems obvious. But again, there are important wrinkles that could be important. Does it matter if you review your own notes in comparison to expert notes? When in the time period between taking notes and the attempt to use knowledge should notes be reviewed? How many times and in what ways should this external record be used for review?

How might collaboration impact these processes? Some of the ways in which collaboration might modify notetaking are generative and some not. Collaboration could mean that others record notes you miss or record some things more accurately than you and access to their notes would allow you to achieve a more complete and a more accurate representation of the content. Maybe you just miss some things or misunderstand some things. When you have help, maybe you can record less and think more during the reception phase reducing the working memory demands of taking notes. These factors could be important if you don’t “slack off” knowing that you have some way to augment your own optimal efforts. These advantages are not generative. Collaboration could also involve actual interaction. Learners could discuss their understanding in reviewing their composite notes adding additional processing to what individuals might do on their own. This is what generative notetaking really proposes.

There are lots of other variations in notetaking that might be important and could be beneficial or harmful. There are postprocessing variations other than talking through notes with other students. Some systems (e.g., Cornell notes) propose a system of postprocessing?—?a secondary process of commenting on notes. Other ways of working with notes taken (Smart notes) also can be applied as part of the retrieval/study stage.

Another interesting proposal challenges the way we tend to think about taking in information during a live lecture. With asynchronous presentations that were increasingly common during the pandemic and also a way to think about the advantages of a flipped classroom, content is experienced in a recorded format. A learner or a small group of learners can control the pace of the presentation by simply stopping the playback of a video or even repeating segments of a recording reducing the working memory and note creation challenges of keeping up. With recorded content, a small group of students can even discuss as they record notes making the process more generative.

I have several motives in presenting notetaking in this way. First, I wanted those who think the processes are simple and fixed to think again. Second, I wanted to set you up for arguing that while determining if collaboration helps or not is pretty straightforward, understanding why what is observed in a dependent variable is not obvious. For example, if collaboration improves achievement, does this happen because the combination of notes is more complete and accurate or because the process of students working together led to some unique processing that would not have occurred without the interaction. Some have even observed that collaboration led to better quiz performance, but poorer implementation of the skills being taught (Fanguy, et al. 2021). These authors argued that the processing required of individual learners varied as a function of whether they had to depend entirely on their own notes. Deep understanding required for application might suffer when responsibility was shared.

I have concluded based on a review of most of the studies on collaborative notetaking that teasing apart the potential benefits does not presently allow clear conclusions. The core problem is that it is difficult to document how much actual interaction occurs and what are the characteristics of such interactions. Fanguy, et al. (2023) offer some interesting suggestions for how interaction might be operationalized, but few studies have included such data. So while studies do demonstrate the positive impact of collaborative notes (e.g. Baldwin, et al. 2019), the mechanisms responsible are unclear.

One additional factor is likely quite significant. Group comparisons between individual and collaborative notetaking ignore the individual nature of contributions within the collaborative groups (Fanguy, et al., 2023). No matter the nature of the inputs, we all learn as individuals and without a mechanism for identifying the type and extent of individual involvement, group comparisons will always be somewhat deficient. Even if group differences can be demonstrated, some within a group may benefit and some may not. The typical ending for many research articles?—?more research is needed?—?clearly applies to this topic.

One final point, I can and will suggest several digital collaborative tools for those of you who are interested, but I also caution that it is important to understand the purpose and hence perhaps the the strategies of notetaking that are to be recommended. As an academic, I studied student notetaking as would be applied to improve performance on future examinations. In my own work as an academic, I was and continue to be interested in the way I can take notes myself. There are several important differences in these circumstances. A student needs to understand the priorities of the course and instructor as would be relevant to an upcoming examination or writing project to take the most useful notes. Complete notes when requirements are unknown would seem a reasonable goal. My own goals are more self-imposed, but also are to record information that would potentially be useful over a much longer span of time. Capturing what seem to be important ideas in a form that will make sense to me several years in the future seems a different task.

Recommendations:

Google docs?—?collaborative notetaking may work with tools already familiar to educators. Multiple studies I have reviewed were conducted by assigning small groups of students (say 4–5) to a common Google doc file.

Hypothes.is?—?Hypothesis is a free tool that has been around for a while and is increasingly integrated into many LMSs used in higher ed. The tool is flexible allowing annotations and highlights to be publicly shared or shared with a designated group.

Glasp?—?Glasp is a recent entry to this category and is the tool I use for my own work. I like the tool because it is flexible in ways similar to Hypothesis and allows me to export the content I generate for long-term use in other Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) systems.

References:

Baldwin Matthew, P., Mik, F., & Costley Jamie, H. (2019). The effects of collaborative note-taking in flipped learning contexts. Journal of Language and Education, (4), 20.

Fanguy, M., Baldwin, M., Shmeleva, E., Lee, K., & Costley, J. (2021). How collaboration influences the effect of note-taking on writing performance and recall of contents. Interactive Learning Environments, 1–15.

Fanguy, M., Costley, J., Courtney, M., & Lee, K. (2023). Analyzing collaborative note-taking behaviors and their relationship with student learning through the collaborative encoding-storage paradigm. Interactive Learning Environments, 1–15.

I have a Threads account

I admit it. I have a Threads account.

Yes, I have a Threads account. I also have a Twitter account and Mastodon accounts on several different instances. When I am in an idealistic mood, I would describe this assortment of social services as an effort to diversify my attention and support multiple platforms. I think it is valuable to have alternatives both for myself and others. If I were forced to pick one, my choice would probably be Mastodon. Mastodon is a federated service without commercial priorities that allow me to interact without requiring me to view ads that require the collection of my data.

When I think about my priorities in a more utilitarian way, I recognize I must also make use of Twitter and now Threads. One use I have for these social platforms is to attract attention to my blog posts. Twitter has a large population base and Threads will likely soon have the same. Many internet users no longer follow blogs using RSS and identify posts that might want to view from the content they encounter on social sites. A federated service allows users to identify an ideal instance that tends to fit their personal interests and values and find content on other instances by identifying specific individuals they happen to encounter. The process is cumbersome requiring some skill and time. My approach ends up being a compromise allowing both my personal values and the utility of the more undifferentiated sites.

Is the online revenue model shifting?

I was listening to a recent podcast episode (This week in tech) that featured an interview with Reddit app Apollo developer Christian Selig (this is the first portion of the podcast should you want to listen) and he described his decision to abandon his popular app for using Reddit because of soon to be imposed cost increases to developers whose software makes use of the Reddit API. The rebellion of multiple Reddit subreddits has been in the news and this interview helped me understand what is going on. The interview also made me think about the issue of revenue generation and those who are users and also content generators in the social media environment. Selig offers a realistic and appreciative interpretation of the rate increase imposed by Reddit, but in describing his decision to shut down his own participation he offers insights into a system that is failing. The “free to use” mentality appears to be breaking potentially with a decline in ad revenue. It is a complicated situation – companies provide the tools which costs for personnel, hardware, and bandwidth. Some have responsibilities to stockholders to generate profits and offer a return to investors. Most depend on content creators who receive little or nothing for their contributions.

The value I found in the podcast interview was the specific descriptions of some of the financial variables associated with a service such as Reddit and importantly in this case the smaller supporting companies that depend on the infrastructure, members, and content creators provided by Reddit.

Content creators can make money on platforms such as Reddit, YouTube, and Medium. However, services such as these tend to have minimums that must be met before a content creator makes anything. For example, to receive a cut of ad revenue from YouTube a partner must accumulate 1000 subscribers and 4000 public watch hours in the last 12 months. So, if you can meet such levels YouTube will split the revenue generated with you.

Personal note – I was once eligible when YouTube had a lower hour total and no user requirement. I don’t generate many videos anymore and am nowhere close to what would be required.

I began cross-posting some of my blog posts to Medium which has a 100 user follower requirement. Again, have not qualified for the follower minimum. My posts receive attention at about the same level as the original blog posts, but these views do not translate into followers. I admit I use Medium in kind of the same way. I read a few things that are relevant to me and come to my attention, but I don’t follow many individuals. I subscribed to the service for a bit, but eventually decided to invest my subscription money in other services.

To be fair, if you are interested in your content being viewed and read, you can make free use of these platforms. You just have no hope of generating income if that is your main motivation.

The system I continue to support is that provided by Brave. Brave is a chromium browser (very similar to Chrome) that will show consenting users ads without relying on personal information and that allows those browsing to share some of the revenue generated through these ads with content creators who register with Brave. I have been a Brave user for 6 years now and as a content creator and micropayment supporter of other content creators, I pretty much break even on my costs and income. I originally invested $50 in the cryptocurrency used to anonymously connect producers and consumers and the value of this initial contribution was inflated by the whims of the crypto market. I am slowly depleting this investment as the inflated value of crypto has come down and my micropayments for viewing narrowly exceed what I take in as a content creator. This system seems fair to me. A piece of the pie for the service provider (Brave), content consumers, and content creators.

I am reluctant to abandon the blogs which I post through a paid provider (BlueHost). I have maintained a blog for more than 20 years and the accumulation of thousands of posts has value to me if for no other reason than it is such an integrated history of my thinking on so many issues. There are ads on my blog posts (you are reading such a post at this point) and I pay approximately $150-200 a year for the services I use. My income is probably $15-25. It is a hobby, but I do value the content I have created. Aside from the value of reading to write in order to generate posts, participation in the online world as a creator has always allowed me to gain insights into the workings of this environment.

My prediction is that the present model is going to change and I think the Reddit situation is a harbinger. As services move from ad-supported models to subscriptions, I anticipate content creators will respond by seeking situations in which their content has value as well.

Complexity of the textbook cost issue

Capitalism is not a perfect system. No method of encouraging productivity and fair compensation is. Rather than making the effort to sort through the complexities involved in the creation and manufacturing of a product or the delivery of a service, it is too easy to seize on a single issue and feel justified in some conclusion you have reached. I want to argue that this is the case in the public perception of the cost of textbooks.

Why am I writing about this topic? My motive comes from comments made in the reaction to the legal decision made against the Internet Archives and by advocates for Open Educational Resources. My intent to broaden the discussion a bit to address parts of the complexity that are often ignored.

I am the author of a couple of college textbooks and I was a college faculty member. This combination places me in a position of being able to observe both the actions of publishers, but also students, bookstores, and those who comment on various aspects of the book business and the use of commercial instructional materials. A little about me as a textbook author. While I wrote for a small, specific market, I would argue I was successful. The textbook my wife and I wrote had a run of five editions with major textbook publishers. Our book was imagined as a book that undergraduates in education programs would use in a course with a title something like “Technology for teachers”, but was also used in graduate courses and by individuals interested in the topic. We now have the rights to our book because we were unable to work out an arrangement that would offer a $29 Primer in combination with related web content. The idea was that we would update the web contentment continuously editions and organize this content to expand the Primer. In fairness and full disclosure, we wanted to be paid for the continual process of writing rather than a furious revision effort when a new edition was authorized. We now sell the Primer as a $9 Kindle trying to offer a version of our vision.

The issue of textbook cost and what the cost provides:

I have written about aspects of the textbook issue for years. One of my favorite posts was headlined “The beer money ploy”. While the title may seem unrelated, the post explored an aspect of the perceived cost of textbooks that is often ignored. I see parents and politicians talking about the cost of textbooks all of the time. Kids are paying $600+ a semester for textbooks in some fields of study. This seems possible. Our textbook was once sold for between $100 and $140 depending on the supplemental materials that were bundled and books of this type cost nothing compared to books in math and the sciences. Here is the thing about this cost as explained in the “Beer Money Ploy”. This is not the actual cost to the student. Nearly all book stores and many online outlets purchase used textbooks for 50% of the sales price. So a $600 bill at the beginning of the semester allows a resale of $300 to the campus bookstore or online outlet at the end of the semester. If you don’t explain this to your parents, you have $300 to spend as you wish. It is true that bookstores keep an eye on what books have been ordered for next semester and use this when purchasing used books, but the proliferating online services don’t worry about this for a given institution. Used book may be resold several times allowing bookstores and online services easy money for putting books back on the shelf or on the online market.

So, an author or the company paying the author a percentage of the wholesale price to the bookstores have to make their money on the original sale only. This means the company must jack up the price compared to what they would charge for a consumable item. Textbook companies have begin participating in the used market and now may lease textbooks. This solves their problem to some extent.

Textbook companies are not without blame. Textbook companies spend some of the money from sales on selling. Unlike a bookstore, textbook companies pay sales reps that visit campuses and individual instructors. Of course, this contributes to the cost of textbooks but seems necessary to get instructors to take a look at the books they consider. The effort instructors devote to the exploration of the multiple options they have for assignment is a related issue. Bookstores want instructors to continue with existing assigned books. Textbook reps promote their most recent offerings in a given space (large courses almost always encourage multiple books from a single publisher because of the amount of money involved) arguing for the value of current information. While this is true and there be other good reasons for considering a different book, new book adoptions are also how the company, author, and sales reps make their money. See above description of used book market. See previous comment on capitalism.

Publishers

What you pay for with a typical commercial in comparison to a roll your own approach:

A commercial publisher spends money on people who perform functions that may be diminished or absent in self publishing or the absent in the online material an educator might identify and patch together as an information source. When you develop a commercial textbook you work with an editor who comments on everything from writing style, the importance of content included or maybe not included, to embellishments such as when an example, feature box, or chart might be helpful. Sometimes they work with you to cut down the amount of material to meet some cost to page number target. They liked that I put content on the web to support my book because that became an option they could recommend for material I had spent hours to create and they wanted to drop.

Commercial publishers have specialists who check every reference to see that references you include are actually accurately cited at the end of the book and people who specialize in creating an index. They pay photographers to provide images appropriate to the content and people who transform charts and graphs from sketches authors might provide. Pages are carefully laid out translating the page after page of generic text into something that has a professional appearance. Is this worth it? I have different feelings about different things. I am constantly annoyed when I cannot find a reference that an author in a self-published book forgets to add. An appendix of key terms is helpful. The layout I like, but I read a lot of stuff in ebooks that lacks this feature. I read theses and dissertations that are hundreds of pages long and I clearly would rather read something in a more pleasing format. However, I can still read this material and I would not want students to spend time creating content that has a more diverse appearance.

I have already mentioned sales reps who bring free copies of textbooks (another expense) to the office of instructors maybe after they look up what you teach and quickly reading the promotional materials about books they have available on that topic. Necessary? Not in an ideal world, but I also know that few instructors spend time looking through even a few books to select the one they will assign. Some do, many just make a selection based on what they found acceptable in a previous edition, the scholarly reputation of the author(s), or a quick examination of a few topics of personal interest. I admit I tended to switch back and forth between a couple of books I liked so I kind of fall in the middle of this laziness continuum. Being forced to read the book I used at least every other year was my motivation.

One caveat to what I have said. My opinions probably best apply to lower division service courses and less to upper division courses for majors or graduate students. This has to do with the background of the instructor (see following comments), the uniqueness and depth of the content, and what type of literature best suits the purpose of a course. For example, advanced courses are more likely to require exposure to multiple authors who have specific expertise and primary rather than secondary source material.

Authors

Expertise

I would argue that writing a quality lower level, survey textbook in many ways requires more preparation than a specialized upper division textbook. I have found that the survey course requires that I address topics I know should be included that I am not prepared to address. I may be able to write on topics generically because I should know more about most topics than students because of previous teaching experiences, but quality instruction and more so writing instructional content requires a depth of knowledge beyond what ends up conveyed in what is actually written. When you write in an actual area of expertise, the range of topics is much more restricted and you are likely an active researcher/scholar in that area. When I try to explain this to people, I use the example of copyright specifically when it comes to fair use and what classroom teachers can do to present content themselves or that their students have created online. I started reading about this topic and encountered something called the TEACH act (Technology, Education, and Copyright Harmonization). I learned that the purpose of this legislation was to place online and in person instruction on an equal footing when it came to fair use for instruction. Sounds important for K12 teachers to me. To qualify for this equal footing, there were certain expectations – protected access for students in actual classes. By my understanding of what this means, unrestricted access as would be allowed when using popular tools such as web environments (Google Sites) should not be used to share content allowed for classroom instruction because access is not limited, whether intended or not, to students with access. I started asking lawyers with educational responsibility (my university attorney) and experts talking about educational fair use at conferences and they all were baffled by the question and even the existence of the TEACH Act. I have not found reference to this act in other technology textbooks in the discussion of fair use.

This is just an example, but I offer it to make the point that there is some unique work required when creating the background for writing about topics beyond what I would describe as the typical expertise of most authors writing in a broad academic area. There may be far more work required than you realize if you have not written a textbook yourself. Part of what authors are paid for is to do this work. Again, I have a specific kind of product in mind and I assume that support for the statements made and the actions recommended have a basis not in personal opinion but a careful review of expert opinions and research.

Summary

Understanding what is a fair price for work and the cost of a product depends on a realistic understanding of what it takes to generate that product. These comments were intended to communicate some of the factors consumers may not recognize.