Recently in the Books Category

The Kindle e-book reader frees academics from having to carry around a huge collection of chunks of matter, but flipping from main text to footnotes is awkward, and the highlighting tool doesn't replace the bracketing, underlining, and commenting that we do between the lines.

In a few days, I expect to be the owner of a new Kindle DX (the full-page reader, designed for magazines and full-page PDF readings). I found the Kindle most useful when I was reading for pleasure.

I have to admit I am scared silly by the idea of a generation of students so alienated from material they are supposed to be immersed in that they rent digital textbooks that they do not intend to keep, cannot dog ear and underline, and otherwise feel totally alienated from. Even the current trend of students not underlining in books so as to preserve their resale value strikes me as appalling. Taking ownership of your education -- and indeed, just learning how to read closely -- means making your books part of your physical environment. In an era when you thought criminally overpriced textbooks full of uselessly pretty pictures and pre-chewed content was the absolute nadir of education, the Campus Full Of Kindles demonstrates we still have lower to sink. If, that is, the Kindles alienate students from their libraries rather than empowering them to immerse themselves in them. --Alex Golub, Inside Higher Ed

I hear students tell me that in some disciplines, individual textbooks cost $200. I don't think it's the Kindle that's done the alienating.

Update: MIke Arnzen invokes the Kindle in a good post on teaching creative writing in the digital age. His reflections parallel many of my own, as I contemplate my role as a teacher of journalism.

http://www.60secondrecap.com/resource/

How to Write a Paper

• 1: Get Psyched
• 2: The Thesis Statement
• 3: Organization
• 4: Proving you know what you're talking about
• 5: Your teacher is not a mind-reader
• 6: In Conclusion
• 7: Rah-rah-rah, etc.

My sixth-grader has scored very well on standardized tests for math, but he finds a blank page of math problems intimidating and boring. He spends hours -- literally hours -- wasting time at the kitchen table, not doing his long division or word problems. Yet for pleasure, he reads Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries and the last two bedtime stories we've finished have been kid-friendly biographies of Archimedes and Galen.

My son wants to be a scientist, but finds math boring. Clearly we have to do something about this!

Age-appropriate development and understanding of mathematical concepts does not advance at a rate fast enough to please test-obsessed lawmakers. But adults using test scores to reward or punish other adults are doing a disservice to the children they claim to be helping.

It does not matter the exact age that you learned to walk. What matters is that you learned to walk at a developmentally appropriate time. To do my job as a physicist I need to know matrix inversion. It didn't hurt my career that I learned that technique in college rather than in eighth grade. What mattered was that I understood enough about math when I got to college that I could take calculus. --Joseph Ganem, American Physical Society

One day, my wife put the book 10 Things All Future Mathematicians And Scientists Must Know: But Are Rarely Taught into the stack of books at my son's bedside. I glanced through the table of contents and got very excited.  The book mentions the Challenger disaster (managers ignored the engineers who warned that a low-temperature launch was risky), Dr. Snow's study of a cholera outbreak (he plotted deaths on a map and realized one water pump in the neighborhood was infected), and the principle of Occam's razor (which, in the absence of compelling evidence either way, favors the simple explanation over the complex).

Each chapter features a series of anecdotes that explain a big-picture concept (causation and correlation; bias; mistakes as an integral part of scientific inquiry; ethical experimentation), a cartoon mouse and cartoon Einstein comment on the stories, and the chapter ends with discussion questions that first require you to solve a word problem before you can weigh in with an opinion. This chapter is training young minds not to jump to conclusions, especially when all the information they need is right in front of them.

While I won't pretend this one book has solved all our math woes, I will say that at bedtime the other night, Peter was happily pondering this question:

A hot-air balloon can safely hold 1055 pounds. It currently has 6 people in it whose average weight is 128 pounds. In addition, it has a 4-foot by 6-foot metal floor that weights 8 pounds per square foot. How many 25-pound bags of sand can be safely placed in the balloon?

This question came at the end of a chapter that described the 2001 death of the up-and-coming singer Aaliyah. (A pilot initially said it was unsafe for her entourage and all their baggage to fly in a small plane; but the group refused to leave any people or any baggage behind. The pilot relented, the plane crashed soon after takeoff, and all nine people aboard were killed.) My son has a well-developed sense of morality, so he was pretty much furious at that pilot.  The emotion motivated him to answer the word problem number story.

I guided him through the process, of course, asking questions to make sure he remembered the various subtotals.

When my wife came past the door and saw that we were still up reading (and calculating), she ordered us to stop for the night.

What can be learned from Fitzgerald's tax returns? To start with, his popular reputation as a careless spendthrift is untrue. Fitzgerald was always trying to follow conservative financial principles. Until 1937 he kept a ledger--as if he were a grocer--a meticulous record of his earnings from each short story, play, and novel he sold. The 1929 ledger recorded items as small as royalties of $5.10 from the American edition of The Great Gatsby and $0.34 from the English edition. No one could call Fitzgerald frugal, but he was always trying to save money--at least until his wife Zelda's illness, starting in 1929, put any idea of saving out of the question. The ordinary person saves to protect against some distant rainy day. Fitzgerald had no interest in that. To him saving meant freedom to work on his novels without interruptions caused by the economic necessity of writing short stories. The short stories were his main source of revenue. --William J. Quirk, The American Scholar

From Awful Library Books.

For more schadenfreud, see Cake Wrecks, Photoshop Disasters, and Fail Blog.

I assigned book one of Maus: A Survivor's Tale to a "Writing About Literature" class, the designated writing-intensive course for our English majors.

The students discussed the abrupt ending, the use of ethnic stereotypes, and of course the comic book medium itself. One student's "Hearing through Yiddish... Seeing in Ink..." is particularly thoughtful.

About a third of the class went on to read book two, even though it wasn't on the syllabus; one student read the book aloud to her nine-year-old sister.

This weekend, Seton Hill is home to a conference sponsored by the National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education.  I'm canceling all my classes during one day of the conference.

I don't use APA style, but this article about nine pages of corrections to the APA style manual caught my eye.

"It's egregious," said John Foubert, an associate professor of education at Oklahoma State University, who bought two copies of the book - one for his office and one for home - when it was released in July. "These are the standards for how we write our manuscripts and how our students write their papers .... The irony is so thick."

The corrections include four pages of "nonsignificant typographical errors" and five pages correcting errors in content and problems with sample papers in the book. The APA also released four corrected sample papers in their entireties. One correction is "Page 88 - Change last line under 'Exception' to read 'Spacing twice after punctuation marks at the end of a sentence aids readers of draft manuscripts.' " Another is "Page 64 - First paragraph, line 2, insert a comma after 'e.g.' " --Inside HIgher Ed

I've asked students in my "Writing about Literature" class to write a book review, in order to establish a connection to the literary world outside the classroom.

The Purdue Online Writing Lab has a brief handout, Writing a Book Review, which begins by explaining the difference between a "book report" (written for the teacher who assigned it, by a student who is trying to prove he or she read an assigned text) and a "book review" (written for an interested reader who has not yet read the book, and who is in fact trying to decide whether to invest the time and money).

I remember reading about a professor who recently stopped offering a course in how to write book reviews, on the grounds that there was no longer a real market for people to become professional reviewers. The name of the professor escapes me...

Anyway, after a half hour of sifting through sites that are trying to sell custom book reports to lazy students, I found a few how-tos that looked valuable.  So here you go, internet hive mind, take these links and add them to your algorithm.

Note on Jargon and Genre

If you are familiar with the fan following of any work, you might be used to talking with other people who share your background knowledge of the genre. Rather than 1) using obscure genre-specific terms without any explanation, or 2) interrupting your essay frequent interruptions, so that your reader knows the difference between a k'tharn (a sword used by the Plains nomads in the realm of the Unknown Times, with a core of cursed blood taken from a clan enemy's heart) and a ba'tti'kak (kind of like a small k'tharn, only way awesomer), reduce your reliance on jargon. (If the jargon is especially well-handled, or especially confusing, it's worthwhile to note that in a section on its own.)

How to Write a Book Review (Bill Asenjo)

• Hook the reader with your opening sentence. Set the tone of the review. Be familiar with the guidelines -- some editors want plot summaries; others don't. Some want you to say outright if you recommend a book, but not others.
  
• Review the book you read -- not the book you wish the author had written.
  
• If this is the best book you have ever read, say so -- and why. If it's merely another nice book, say so.
  
• Include information about the author-- reputation, qualifications, etc. -- anything relevant to the book and the author's authority.

Book Reviews (Colorado State University)
A review is a critical essay, a report and an analysis. Whether favorable or unfavorable in its assessment, it should seem authoritative. The reviewer's competence must be convincing and satisfying. As with any form of writing, the writer of a book review is convincing through thorough study and understanding of the material, and opinions supported by sound reasoning. (See this document on reviewing nonfiction, poetry, and other types of books, including travel and children's)

Slashdot Book Review Guidelines
(These are written for the benefit of highly technical readers who know a lot about the subject but may not have much experience writing for a general readership.)

The style tips apply pretty well to any informative writing.) 

• Avoid cliches (this book, which is better than sliced bread, cuts through the clutter to break down to the nuts and bolts of the real brass tacks at the heart of the matter). Write plainly.
• Go easy on the exclamation marks and glib hyperbole ("This book belongs on every developer's desk!" sounds too much like "You're not going to pay a lot for this muffler!")
• Be cautious in general about suprelatives [sic] and strong adjectives. Don't say a book is "unsurpassed" or "the best available" on a given topic without doing some actual comparisons to likely contenders. Some other words of praise or derision are often used with too little backing evidence: rather than just calling a book "excellent," "sloppy," "boring," etc., provide concrete examples from the text that demonstrate these qualities.
• Watch your background. Even if each one is sensible by itself, too many adjectives in a sentence (or a review) makes it look like adjective soup. In particular, intensifiers like "very" and "extremely" in most cases can be excised to everyone's benefit.
• Rhetorical questions are fine in small doses, but not large ones. More than a few rhetorical questions in a review can make it sound breathless and silly.

A good collection, on a well-designed page.

www.readprint.com

Thanks for the suggestion, Josh.

When the University announced its Kindle e-reader pilot program last May, administrators seemed cautiously optimistic that the e-readers would both be sustainable and serve as a valuable academic tool. But less than two weeks after 50 students received the free Kindle DX e-readers, many of them said they were dissatisfied and uncomfortable with the devices. --Fox News

Ms Watts, from Islington, north London, said: "I asked why I couldn't borrow a pair of scissors and she said, 'they are sharp, you might stab me'.

"I then asked to borrow a guillotine to cut up my leaflets but she refused again - because she said I could hit her over the head with it!"

She added: "It's absurd - there are plenty of heavy books I could have hit her with if I wanted to.

"I hardly look very threatening - it's really sad she could not make a commonsense judgement." --BBC

Thanks for telling me about this bizarre, sad story, Robert.

Dear MR BAGGINS, Fellow Conspirator,

I am Thorin Oakenshield, descendant of Thrain the Old and grandson of Thror who was King under the Mountain. I am writing you to discuss our plans, our ways, means, policy and devices for rescuing our treasure from the dragon Smaug. -- Stephen Granade riffs on the Nigerian e-mail scam (see 419 Eater).

The Seton Hill registrar describes how her devotion to mathematics and logic has helped her serve her community.

"Nearly everything I need to know, and that I currently believe, I think I've learned at school board meetings.... I've survived seven elections, I've been beaten up by the press, made deep friendships and bitter enemies. I've been threatened, accused, betrayed, but most of all rewarded." Barbara Hinkle (8.4Mb MP3)

I'm keeping my media skills limber, posting pictures and audio that I took during Seton Hill University's discussion of This I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women.

[L]ast fall, for the first time in 15 years, Ms. McNeill, 42, did not assign "Mockingbird" -- or any novel. Instead she turned over all the decisions about which books to read to the students in her seventh- and eighth-grade English classes at Jonesboro Middle School in this south Atlanta suburb.

Among their choices: James Patterson's adrenaline-fueled "Maximum Ride" books, plenty of young-adult chick-lit novels and even the "Captain Underpants" series of comic-book-style novels.

But then there were students like Jennae Arnold, a soft-spoken eighth grader who picked challenging titles like "A Lesson Before Dying" by Ernest J. Gaines and "The Bluest Eye" by Toni Morrison, of which she wrote, partly in text-message speak: "I would have N3V3R thought of or about something like that on my own."

The approach Ms. McNeill uses, in which students choose their own books, discuss them individually with their teacher and one another, and keep detailed journals about their reading, is part of a movement to revolutionize the way literature is taught in America's schools. While there is no clear consensus among English teachers, variations on the approach, known as reading workshop, are catching on. --Motoko Rich

This sounds like a much better approach than having students at this age watch the movie so they have something to contribute to the discussion of a book they haven't read. 

In the "Literature and I" assignment that I ask my English majors to write in "Writing about Literature," several students reported that they loved reading when they were younger, but that school turned them off.  Of course the canon is an important part of our shared literature culture, and if students are all reading their own separate lists, there would be little to discuss.

Of course the classics are important, but I'd be satisfied with giving students in middle school a little more choice, and certainly letting high school students pick from among current best-sellers in an advanced English class.

My son (age 11) loves reading, and usually dashes off joyfully when I tell him to go to his room and read whatever he wants. He chooses nonfiction for his own reading pleasure, often a Popular Science, PC Gamer, or a military history book.  My daughter (7) prefers to work with her hands and body rather than to sit still, but the last few days I've been reading her The Hobbit, and she always asks for more (even though the chapters aren't a kid-friendly length).

I was on the road (and away from a computer) for the past few days, on a little family outing.  My wife brought along a copy of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure #4 that she picked up cheap at a library sale.

The cover of this book, originally published in 1979, features a big-jawed space hero in a suit that sports a familiar color scheme.

Colbert's tag line brought tears to my eyes. (Thanks for the suggestion, Kerry!)

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Nailed 'Em - Library Crime
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Tasers

This is a little late, but it's still the right way to handle the criticism. From Amazon:

This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our "solution" to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we've received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.

With deep apology to our customers,

Jeff Bezos
Founder & CEO
Amazon.com

David Stanley pointed me to this thoughtful essay.

Modern librarians who prioritize information over knowledge perpetuate a distraction from the real purpose of a library. A library facilitates the patient gathering of knowledge - whose acquisition is superior to almost every other endeavor. Religions have adapted to technology for the most part without being destroyed by it, so why can't libraries? It might not be too late.

Information on the Internet may come across as authoritative, but much of it is one giant Ponzi scheme, especially in the hands of the young, where it can become a counterfeit for the reading and memorization that true learning requires. Scholars are made through the quiet study of one chapter at a time. For that we need silence. We need to restore an appreciation for the close study of words.--William H. Wisner, Christian Science Monitor

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for--thought they owned.--David Pogue, NYT

The citizens whose Kindles needed rectification had purchased unauthorized George Orwell books.  So 1984 disappeared down the memory hole, and Animal Farm got shipped to the glue factory.

A bit predictable, but still enjoyable.

Older words also making their debut as a result of renewed interest online: sock puppet (a false identity used to manipulate opinions in online forums) and fan fiction. (Via Guardian)

From a thoughtful review of the Kindle:

The Kindle DX's five-way joystick is quick, convenient, and expertly designed. (Plastic Logic's touch screen really isn't markedly better than using Amazon's joy stick, but that's because the touch options are fairly rudimentary.) The problem is the dearth of good places to direct the cursor.

That's a real shame because one thing we've learned over the last two decades in journalism is that information architecture is everything. Charticles, sections, deep captions, multiple points of entry, these are the hallmarks of journalistic innovation--and successful careers--for this generation of editors and readers. But all of that has been thrown out with the E Ink interface. We're back in the days of William Shawn's New Yorker with no table of contents and bylines at the end of the article. -- Marion Maneker, Slate

Chris Anderson is best-known for championing the long tail (marketing to the niche customers who fill out the trailing end of a demographics chart, rather than trying to create products to please the mass market) and has been promoting a book on the topic.  One of the early reviewers for his book identified great swaths that were taken, without citation, from Wikipedia.   

All those are my screwups after we decided not to run notes as planned, due to my inability to find a good citation format for web sources...

This all came about once we collapsed the notes into the copy. I had the original sources footnoted, but once we lost the footnotes at the 11th hour, I went through the document and redid all the attributions... Obviously in my rush at the end I missed a few of that last category, which is bad. -- Chris Anderson, in an e-mail to Waldo Jaquith (VQR)

A highly visible internet economy expert, and the editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, working with an editor on a print project (not blogging in the heat of the moment) chooses to drop citations altogether, rather than dig a little deeper to find out information that any freshman comp student is expected to know?

Anderson is certainly doing the right thing by taking responsibility right away, rather than hoping it will blow over (it won't).

Jaquith (who broke the story on the Virginia Quarterly Review's blog) is careful to note that "All ideas that form of the core the book are credited, and his own thesis that he builds upon that showed no signs of being anybody's but his own."

Since, as I understand it, copies of Anderson's book have been floating around in draft form for some time, it's theoretically possible that some of Anderson's own writing might have been inappropriately pasted into Wikipedia articles.  (Just now, I put a segment of Anderson's text into Turnitin.com, and the service marked it all as having appeared on Anderson's blog, where in fact an excerpt from the book was recently published.  Turnitin.com didn't drill down any deeper than that.)

If Anderson had maintained a habit of properly citing every use of Wikipedia text, it would be easier to give him the benefit of the doubt, and assume that uncited passages were appropriated by Wikipedia users.  But Anderson's reply takes responsibility for failing to cite, even though the "I didn't know how to do it" excuse holds little weight.

The "long tail" meme has its critics, so I expect there will be a lot of chatter about this.  I certainly have no desire to purchase this book now.  I'll buy one from a different author -- someone out there in the long tail.

I have not yet bought a Kindle, though I'd like one.  However, this bit of news gives me pause. It's exactly the worry that has kept me from sinking money into a proprietary format.  Here's Dan Cohen, explaining what he learned from an Amazon customer service rep, after some of the books he purchased failed to transfer from his online account to his iPhone:

You can buy a book and it can only be downloaded numerous times or you can buy a book and only then discover that it can be downloaded only once. (The rep even put it this way!) There is no way to know.

In the meantime, Amazon wants us to upgrade our Kindles every year or two. Apple wants us to upgrade our iPhone or iPod touch every year or two. This means that although the books remain in your Kindle library online you may not be able to download them once you upgrade your hardware. And there is no way to know -- at least according to what the customer service rep told me. -- Gear Diary

Roundtable
Chair. Charlie Lowe, Grand Valley State University

Scott Banville, University of Nevada, Reno
David Blakesley, Purdue University

How can open source software, open access publishing, and commons-based peer production (CBPP) principles help us to create a sustainable university?

How can they positively impact the social and economic development of the university and expand the resources available that sustain university culture?

What is the role of the university in the larger community in fostering such sustainable practices?

Chair. Bonnie Kyburz, Utah Valley State University

Planning for Sustainability in Multimodal First-Year Composition Programs
Michele Ninacs, Buffalo State College

Fast, Free, and On the 'Net: The Story of a Self-Published Textbook
Steve Krause, Eastern Michigan University

How College Textbook Publishers Will Thrive in Ubiquity. Or Die Trying.
Nick Carbone, Bedford/St. Martin's

I enjoy steampunk, a cultural aesthetic which celebrates what both ordinary and extraordinary things might look like, had technology progressed along the lines that Jules Verne and his contemporaries imagined. As a literary subgenre, it imagines that the immeasurable power of steam has opened the skies, leading legions of top-hatted gentlemen-explorers and parasol-wielding adventuresses to the heavens beyond.

With steampunk on my mind, after submitting the final semester grades, I took a moment to celebrate by poking through the stacks. I found this absolutely beautiful book, A History of the Growth of the Steam Engine, by Robert H. Thurston, published in 1878. (Full text via Google Books.)

This isn't just a retro aesthetic, reacting against the streamlined and textureless Apple assembly line, or a self-conscious choice to make every bolt and gear visible in order to force us to come into direct contact with the technology. This is the real thing.
This engraving of the Worthington Pumping-Engine made my heart stop.

I also love the detail in this Compound Marine Engine. It's proportioned so that it looks to my eye almost like a desk toy, but I assume that's a person-sized hatchway visible on the left image. No riveted portholes? C'mon! I left the pages and my hand in the frame, so you can get a better idea of the materiality, the hefty bookiness of this book.

Charles Crowell writes a valentine to Amazon's e-reader as a cost-saving tool for cash-strapped college students:

If we extrapolate these savings from these two courses over a two-semester, ten-course academic year, we could expect an average savings of $245.05. That number, of course, would vary according to the cost of the respective textbooks, their number, the number of textbooks in a Kindle format, and the Kindle version price of those textbooks. Lots of variables, but my point here is that there are some budgetary savings available from a traditional pedagogical approach to using the Kindle. As textbook publishers put more and more textbooks into formats that can be read by eBook readers of any type, the savings should be larger. I've modeled prospective savings in a traditional, textbook-based pedagogy, and the savings would appear to be on the order of 50 percent per year. Over four years of undergraduate school, that's a savings of several thousand dollars. -- Inside Higher Ed

I've become a fan of audiobooks, mostly because I can listen to them while folding laundry or weeding the yard or while auto-piloting my way through the grocery store. I've thought about writing an article like the one that just appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education. One book, sampled four ways -- paperback, audiobook, Kindle, and iPhone.  Ann Kirschner beat me to it -- and did a fine job.  She seems surprised at how much she enjoyed the audiobook:

Soon I was looking for any excuse to stay plugged in just a little bit longer. In fact, if I made a graph of total reading time on Little Dorrit, I bet that the audiobook would win (though not for the most pages).

You can listen while you are walking around.

You can listen while driving.

You can listen while applying makeup.

You can listen while you are cooking.

You can listen while you are in the dentist's chair.

Audiobooks also impose a certain discipline. I think of this as real-time reading: The author and narrator control your pace, and it is impractical to skim ahead or thumb back to another section. For Dickens, so naturally cinematic and plot-driven, that can have a breathtaking effect. It was my good fortune to be listening when Little Dorrit and Maggie spent their long night wandering the London streets. I shivered with them, I shared their exhaustion, and I sighed with the dull relief of returning to the Marshalsea prison.

Kirschner notes that young people who grew up playing hand-held games will have no problem reading from small screens.  She's right, though of course when those young people start losing their eyesight, they might appreciate larger displays. 

Right now, I'm struggling through a text-to-speech version of the Illiad, and I'm not enjoying it as much as I have enjoyed some more modern stuff.  I don't think it has much to do with the content, but rather the fact that the past few weeks have been a bit hectic, with my wife having an operation and me needing to take care of her and supervise the home-schooling, while at the same time trying to wrap up the loose ends of the semester.  So I've been hitting the sack pretty late and pretty tired, without the benefit of any commute time or solitary-walk-around-the-quad-with-headphones time.  When I fall asleep during a chapter, I'm more inclined to jump ahead then back up and re-listen, since I know it will take me forever to find out what happens if I try to study each chapter.

Okay, I'm officially lame. I teared up a few days ago during Star Trek, and tonight I teared up during this song from The Magic Treehouse: The Musical, based on a series of easy-reader books by Mary Pope Osbourne. The touring show was in my town tonight; we had front-row seats. The song is a perky, sappy tribute to brotherly and sisterly love, and the lyrics perfectly describe my own kids.

Jack: You're so brave!
Annie: You're so smart!
Jack: You make me laugh!
Annie: I love your heart!
[...]
Annie: I'm the arrow, you're the bow.
Jack: I'm the tic-tac, you're the toe!
Annie: You're the engine.
Jack: You're the steam.
Annie: I'm the peaches!
Jack: I'm the cream!
Both: What would I do without you?

A tear actually slid down my cheek after the "steam" line, and I reached for my wife's hand so she could feel it.

I am so lame...

Now I'm going to listen to this song again.