Q. Why do people think young people are so Web-wise?
A. I think the assumption is that if it was available from a young age for them, then they can use it better. Also, the people who tend to comment about technology use tend to be either academics or journalists or techies, and these three groups tend to understand some of these new developments better than the average person. Ask your average 18-year-old: Does he know what RSS means? And he won’t.
The importance of having empirical findings about digital literacy among young people — as opposed to anecdotes and assumptions that tend to affirm what we want to believe — is that the more we assume, the less we teach. As Prof. Hargittai puts it:
Q. Are there implications for workplace readiness?
A. There are positive outcomes for those who know how to work and employ tech information, and those who lack information will confront a different situation. In terms of a link with demographic differences, those people who seem to be more savvy are the ones who tend to be in more-privileged positions. There will be an increase in social inequality if this divergence continues this way.
I’m not a fan of the concept of “privilege”, but it’s plain to see that some demographics have better access to technology than others. And it’s all fun to suppose that students these days are technologically literate and then craft way-cool tech-centered curricula around that assumption. But the problem is that the students who are not technologically savvy — whom Prof. Hargittai identifies as “Women, students of Hispanic origin, African-American students, and students whose parents have lower levels of education”, which is to say, an awfully big percentage of the people we teach — end up getting left behind while we have our fun.
I stumbled upon an amazing find a few minutes ago: an OS X application called Graph Sketcher. It is developed and maintained by MIT, and very simply, Graph Sketcher lets you hand-draw graphs on a set of coordinate axes and then manipulate them by changing color and thickness, shading in areas underneath, and so on. You can add text annotations to the graphs and (apparently, haven’t tried this yet) graph spreadsheet data and add best-fit lines.
Why this software blows my mind should be clear to anybody who’s ever had to make up a handout, test, or lab for calculus or precalculus. In doing those course preps, you are constantly needing to make up graphs that have a certain look — inflection points in a specified place, strange asymptotic behavior, jump discontinuities, even just basic piecewise functions. You know how the graph ought to look, but to get the graph, you had to come up with a formula for it, plot it in a computer algebra system, and then export the plot as PDF or a graphics file and then import it into your document. This process is alternately impossible or maddeningly time-consuming. Or you could try to freehand it in a paint program, but those programs aren’t meant for precision, and while you might be able to get the behavior right, the result looks like crap.
But this software lets you just draw the lines where you want them, and then bend them using simple Bezier curve handles. Or you can tell it to plot certain points and connect the dots. Here’s a plot I just drew for a quiz:
I just drew four connected line segments for the curve and then bent them around until I got what I wanted. Voila — instant logistic function with a y-intercept at 2 and carrying capacity at 10. I didn’t have to diddle around with until I was blue in the face. (Even had I been inclined to do so, Maple still doesn’t work under Leopard so it’s moot.) Then one-click export to PDF, and I’m done. How many weeks might have been added back into my life that were otherwise wasted trying to get graphs to turn out right using formulas?
Best of all — it’s shareware. Who says there’s no good software out there for Macs?
More and more colleges and universities these days are offering some kind of program where students who enroll get a computer to use while they are in college. Most of these programs involve giving out laptops, although an increasing number are giving out tablet PC’s. The idea is that students will be enticed to enroll because of the “free” computer offer, then use the computer along with the pre-loaded software throughout their college years, and then typically students get to keep the computer when they graduate. (That last being a nifty way for a college to get around the problem of what to do with outdated equipment.)
It seems like a good idea, but I wonder if giving away a computer upon matriculation is the best way to meet the technology needs of students. These programs focus on the device. Fine, but what if you want to use, or already do use, a computer other than the one the university is giving out? And what if your tastes in technology change, so that the shiny new Dell laptop you got as a freshman no longer cuts it after you discover Ubuntu Linux or OS X when you’re a sophomore? You’re locked in, and you’re less free, not more free.
Since devices come and go at an exponential pace, it seems more sensible for colleges to provide not a device to its students but a high-quality, even world-class infrastructure for computer usage and let the students handle the procurement of a computer on their own.
For example, here’s a package of perks that a college could provide to its students instead of a computer that would make their computer use potentially more productive:
Internet and intranet access that is fast (cutting-edge, Internet2 fast), has tons of bandwidth, is rarely if ever down for unscheduled reasons, and is accessible at all points on campus via a secure wireless network.
An extension of that wireless network to businesses and hangouts that are near but not on the campus itself, so that students could be on the network while working at that coffee shop just across the street from the math building. Use a whole bunch of Meraki Mini routers to make this cheap and simple.
A huge amount of network hard drive space, something like 500 GB per user. Something big enough to archive 4-5 years’ worth of college work in a variety of media formats.
Secure FTP/SSH access to that network hard drive that is usable from anywhere.
Personal web space on par with what you might spend $100 per month for if you bought it from a server farm in terms of the amount of storage and bandwidth provided. And like the commercial server spaces, that personal web space would be populated with the ability to host web sites and blogs, create subdomains, and create multiple POP and IMAP email accounts (in lieu of MS Exchange email, not in addition to).
And most importantly, offer the freedom to use this first-class campus network in whatever way the student wishes as long as it’s not illegal, doesn’t hog the campus’ resources unnecessarily, and fits within a small set of university guidelines for usage. This is not only doable but currently being done. One large university near here has the policy that they don’t monitor so much what you are doing with the campus network but rigorously monitor how much of the network you are using. Want to play WoW with a bunch of other people over the network? Fine, but you’d better plan on doing it at 2 AM when there’s not many people on the network trying to get actual work done, or else you’ll be locked out.
Then, having set up this network, the college would encourage faculty (through financial or other incentives) to use the campus network to provide the basic “texts” for their courses using free and existing online materials or by writing their own course notes, and getting away from expensive textbooks. If you could eliminate print textbooks for one student taking four classes each semester for a year, that would save the student in the neighborhood of $800, which the student could use to buy a decent laptop computer.
After writing my two recent posts about the Amazon Kindle, I began to notice that I was not only unimpressed but bothered, even angered, at certain elements of the Amazon Kindle. I don’t usually get ticked off at an electronic gadget I don’t own, so I had to think about what my problem was. After a while, I pinpointed the cause: It’s the way Kindle handle blog subscriptions. You can get blog content sent straight to the Kindle, but only the blogs that Amazon chooses to offer you, and only after paying a fee. Most blog “subscriptions” on the kindle are $0.99/month. Cheap, negligible even, but still not free. And this strikes me as being simply wrong.
The power of technology consists in its capacity to be a liberating force in our lives. This goes all the way back to foundational technologies such as electricity, indoor plumbing, the automobile, and so on. The reason we include technology in our lives — the reason we keep buying new technologies — is not so that we can own a device. We own the device because in some kind of sum-total way the technology makes us more free.
Take the iPod for instance. It does cost you something to own an iPod, apart from the cost of the device, namely that if you get your music from iTunes you had better be ready to own only iPods for the rest of your music-loving days, thanks to Apple’s DRM. But that opportunity cost is offset in numerous ways. The iPod and iTunes make me free to buy only the songs I want rather than the whole album, to try new music at low cost, to arrange music and play back music the way I want, to carry literally 20 years’ worth of collected music with me in a small, sleek, and incredibly well-designed package.
Or closer to home, consider computer algebra systems like Maple or Matlab. Of course it’s cool that these programs can do symbolic integration or calculate π to the 100,000th decimal place. But what makes them powerful and not just cool is the way that they free mathematics students and researchers to concentrate on learning concepts and big ideas, or making observations and reasoned conjectures, rather than having to worry about whether our calculations are right all the time.
And so here comes the Kindle, and from the get-go it starts locking me down in all these different ways without giving me any truly freeing technological advantage in return. You can buy books straight from the device; but all the books you already own have to be re-bought and sent to the device. You can send your own text or Word documents for viewing on the Kindle, but only through email and only after paying a fee to do so. That’s your own content being put on your own device, and you’re being charged for it. And don’t get me started again on the lack of PDF support.
In this situation, the overwhelming message being sent is that Amazon is not interested in making a product that will revolutionize the way I conceive and consume books, but rather a product that will make them lots of money, to be made in turn on expenses both big and small and not all of them necessary or even warranted. This just isn’t the kind of technology that the world needs today.
I panned the Amazon Kindle yesterday, so it’s only fair that I give some constructive ideas in return. Amazon, Jeff Bezos, whoever is reading this, if you want your Kindle to sell like iPods among college students and faculty, do the following:
Include native support for reading, annotating, and syncing PDF documents with our computers. Imagine the ability to download a PDF of a homework assignment, PowerPoint slides, research article, or whatever, from the internet or a course management system; move it to the Kindle; then read and annotate the PDF; then sync your annotations back onto the computer for archiving, later viewing, or presenting. The ability to do this in a lightweight, high-storage capacity device would make it very compelling — possibly irresistible — to faculty and students, those of us who traffic in electronic documents.
Make the screen touch sensitive and include some kind of handwriting recognition. This isn’t hard or expensive. Palm has been doing a pretty good job of this for years on relatively inexpensive devices and you can, too.
Listen to Scobleizer’s comments about the user interface, particularly button locations and sizes.
Did I mention native PDF support?
RSS. First of all, learn what RSS really does; unlike what you say on the Kindle main page, RSS provides a lot more than “just headlines”. Kindle can deliver full blog content — but it’s only for select blogs, and for a price. Baloney. Include an RSS reader with the device, and then let users subscribe to whatever RSS feed they want, and as many feeds as they want. What’s it costing you to allow that option?
Give the option to have WiFi. The world doesn’t need “Whispernet” or any other new-fangled proprietary system. If you want to charge an extra $100 for WiFi capabilities, fine. But give the option.
Make the buttons a little less cheap.
Before I forget: Native PDF support.
Drop the price — big time. $400 is way too much, particularly when you consider that that’s only the beginning of the expense of owning the thing. You have to pay for subscriptions to blogs, for the ebooks you can read on the thing, even for the privilege of moving a file you created from your computer to the device! With all the above improvements made, I’d consider paying as much as $199 for it — the same price as an 8 GB iPod nano, because I would be equally attracted to both devices. (And let me tell you, that iPod nano is really calling out to me these days.)
You’re welcome, in advance. Email me for where to sent the royalties.
The Kindle — Amazon.com’s e-book reader and fledgling entry into the consumer electronics market — seems like a good concept. It certainly looks good, and there appears to be some interesting technology under the hood. But there are some puzzling choices being made by Amazon here as well. I’m not buying one, and I think I’m not alone.
What I could see myself — and by extension, other academics and college students — using a device like this for would be to read and annotate documents on the go without the physical burden (and relatively poor battery life) of my Macbook. And when I say “documents”, I mean PDF’s. The PDF is the hydrogen atom of the electronic document world — the most commonly occurring element and appearing in all different platforms. I have mountains of e-documents I have to read and take notes on in all areas of my profession, and they are almost all PDF’s. If I had an electronic device that was light, small, didn’t get hot when I used it (like the Macbook still does), has a nice display, allows me to read and annotate PDF’s easily, and was priced around $150, I’d snap it up in a minute.
The Kindle gets all of these right except the last two, and these are deal-breakers for the academic market. A $400 price tag for a “document reader” that won’t let me read the format which 90% of my documents are in? It makes me wonder if Amazon truly understands the concept of the “electronic document” if they think the Kindle is marketable to all but the have-everything early adopters in its current state. (And yes, I’m aware that there are third-party workarounds for the PDF issue, but really, this is like saying that it’s OK if a car only runs on kerosene and not gasoline because there are third-party solutions to convert one to the other.)
Update: Scobleizer unloads on the Kindle. There’s video. I think he makes too much of the lack of social networking capabilities, but his UI criticisms are hard to deny.
Editorial: We’re getting near the end of this week’s look back at articles from the past here at CO9s. I’ll have two more tomorrow and one more Saturday. Why twelve? Why, because 12 is an integer of the form , of course. Didn’t you know those are the best kinds of numbers?
One of the things I want to accomplish on this blog is question assumptions, especially where those assumptions have an impact on students and how we teach them. For me, there’s no bigger source of unquestioned assumptions than the current movement built around the digital native hypothesis — the notion that children today are native to the digital world and come pre-loaded with technological skills that we “digital immigrants” have to acquire. These assumptions simply don’t square in any way with what I’ve experienced as a teacher, and the extent to which these assumptions are driving pedagogical programs in this country is alarming and dangerous.
In this article, I lay out a sort of research program to delineate and open up for questioning just exactly what it is these people are assuming. Now all that’s needed is for somebody to come along and start collecting data — and see where the truth is.
The video below, via Wes Fryer, gives a pretty good synopsis of the entire notion of “digital natives” and how they should be taught — if you drink the kool-aid believe the arguments of people who believe in digital natives. It’s 7:40 long, so take a deep breath and make some popcorn:
I’ve carped long enough on Angel’s sorry excuse for web functionality, so let’s talk about web sites for companies. I’m looking for a good differential equations book for next semester and was recommended to Arnold Publications, a UK-based textbook publishing house, by a colleague who loves their statistics book. So I sauntered on over to arnoldpublications.com, as listed on the back of that stats book. Here’s what I got in my browser:
That’s it… just a big silhouette of some guy named Arnold looking bravely into, I guess, the sky or the future or something. This is with my browser at full size. Is this a joke site? Or a T-shirt? Or what?
Then finally I noticed the scroll bar on the side, telling me there’s more stuff below the fold — you know, where my browser doesn’t display when I first access the site. Rule for web design, and selling stuff in general: If you want to sell stuff, put your stuff where it can be seen — no, put it where it is impossiblenot to be seen. Here’s what’s below the fold:
OK, here’s where the links to their products should be and their online store. Right? Well, not so much. Here’s the entire text on the web site. Check out the last paragraph.
Wha?
Sure enough, clicking on the link (”hotel reservation”) takes you to an Expedia.com-type site where you can get hotel reservations. What this has to do with being in the textbook publishing business is anybody’s guess. And the first person to locate the links to their textbook descriptions wins a prize.
I guess they do business, and web design, a little differently across the pond than we do here.
The comments at my last post are suggesting that email has been surpassed by IM, Facebook, and text messaging among the younger generation as the preferred means of electronic communication. (Maybe of any kind of communication.) That really gives me, as a professor, some pause as to my assumption that if I need to get information out to students in a timely way (say, about a change in an assignment or a last-minute announcement for class) or create a space for out-of-classroom discussion of ideas or assignments, email isn’t nearly as reliable as I think it is.
I’m OK with that if it’s true, but then there are two questions that come to mind as being pretty important from my perspective:
If I have information that I need to get out to my students quickly and be reasonably assured that they’ll get it in time for it to be useful, what is the best way to do this? Is there no one best way, meaning that I need a plan to send the info out in multiple formats? (That would be time consuming = bad.)
Whatever medium/media is the answer to the first question, where is the functionality for it in the major course management software packages like Angel? If it’s there, does it make sense to use the CMS proprietary version of the softwar or some third party app? (E.g. Angel’s chat feature versus plain old AIM?)
Also, would students appreciate professors using IM, texting, Facebook, etc. for class purposes, or do they really want to keep “their” means of communication for social purposes only? I tried using Facebook last year in relatively close contact with my precalculus class, and far from the students appreciating my efforts, they really felt resentful and creeped-out by the fact that their professors were on Facebook, which is “theirs”.
Casting Out Nines is my blog about education in general, higher education and math education in particular, technology, and various math and technical subjects that float my boat.
I stumbled upon an amazing find a few minutes ago: an OS X application called 
until I was blue in the face. (Even had I been inclined to do so, 
The 
, of course. Didn’t you know those are the best kinds of numbers? 
