This year ends as it began – I am still working on a book. This is not even a completely new book, but a new edition. What complicates the process is our effort to move away from the traditional textbook format to a hybrid that is an attempt to combine what is best about books with what is best provided online. The process moves slowly for me. I fit writing around my primary responsibilities and I must learn as I go. I don’t exactly write what I know, I write what I learn and what I observe. The holiday break gives me the opportunity to make some progress.
Writing books is not always that well received. This may surprise the general public who tend to believe this is what academics do. Some place original research at a much higher level. I guess I do to a point, but there is often a diminishing return with many studies contributing little of value. I value the researchers who identify problems and work to solve them. For practitioners, there can also be an anti-book bias. In this case, the book is seen as a commercial venture. The open source movement types align themselves with this perspective. It is evidently fine to earn a living by interacting, but not by providing the resources on which these interactions are often based. I assume what I do takes a degree of talent and commitment much in the way helping individuals learn through interaction takes talent and commitment. I am willing to compete to do what I do. Most who earn their living interacting are not willing to accept the same challenge.
I grapple with why books or at least comprehensive products in some format are still needed. Why not just follow a few bloggers who offer content appropriate to the domain you are expected to understand – what some describe as a personal learning network. I think authors provided two valuable contributions far more efficiently than a series of online interactions. First, I think good authors provide a structure that ties things together in a way that makes sense. The books from Tom Friedman offer good examples of what I mean by structure. What does the focus of U.S. education have to do with world wide access to the Internet, politics, the energy resources we rely on, and the dangers in a sense of entitlement? Offering a perspective that provides an answer to the complexities of our world Is not something you pick up from casual conversation. Writing about tech represents a similar challenge. It is relatively easy to explain how to use this online service or that software. It is far more difficult to explain to people who teach different things and who work with learners of different ages and capabilities how to make decisions about what learning experiences make sense.
Understanding is about constructing mental structures not fact collecting. Cognitive psychologists explain long term memory as a combination of nodes and links. We tend to be long on the contribution of fodder for nodes and short on the modeling of links. A structure I can identify, even if I disagree, gets me closer to crafting a structure of my own than lots of isolated tweets, blog posts, or web pages. We need models of the big picture.
The second major contribution is the commitment to providing a complete view. We live in an era of specialization. As a researcher I know a lot about the metacognitive limitations of struggling learners in self regulating learning environments. In other words, why do some learners study in such an inefficient fashion. This is good for one class period in my undergraduate ed psych class. My depth of knowledge on the other topics I cover varies. I think this is typical. I tend to know what I write about in far greater depth. This is what takes so much time.
So, this is what I think you pay an author to provide – first, a clear and creative structure appropriate to the field of study, and second, a perspective that makes certain that all the of essentials are covered in depth and with authentic examples. There are not a large number of people willing to meet these standards – the first requires some talent and the second a great deal of work. So, I am a fan of the long form and believe that it will always be important. I do understand that many are frustrated with expectation that someone must pay for the products used in education. I have difficulty relating to this position, but I try to understand it as a function of their limited experience. My wife once asked my son who has won an Emmy for his video editing skills whether he was threatened by the inexpensive tools so many now use to edit video content. “Not really,” was his reply. “I think most people will find out it is a lot harder than you might expect. I think it is a good thing when people give it a try.”