eBooks could be cheating done right!
A TOWN WITHOUT BOOKS, WHERE NASA PRACTISED MOON LANDINGS
My father grew up in a mining town with no trees and, as he claims, no books. He left as soon as he was able and found work cleaning telephones. By the time he retired, he was advising executives and working with professors from Harvard.
EXECUTIVES WANTED NOTES, NOT BOOKS
An autodidact with no credentials, my father channeled his insecurity into reading. He spent a fortune on books about software development, teamwork, and productivity and he read and annotated them all. He stood on the shoulders of giants, knowing what the experts knew and how they disagreed.
He recommended books, but no one bought them. He bought copies of his favourites and handed them out but no one read them. They didn’t “have time” for extra reading. Someone said, “I don’t want a copy of the book– I want your copy… with the highlighting and notes.”
NOTES ARE CHEATING! OR ARE THEY SMART?
A high school teacher threatened to punish us for possessing “cheat books” like Coles Notes. In law school, first years whispered about “case summaries” from upper-year students. I avoided this “easy way out” until I slammed into an instructor who crammed an entire Ph.d of readings into a one-semester class. A team of us divided up the thousand or more pages and shared our summaries.
Last night one of my fellow Masters students, overwhelmed by the volume of readings, said, “I’m supposed to be an educator. What does it say about me if I just skim articles instead of reading them word for word? I might miss something important.” The result? She spends hours reading one article and feels frustrated and bored. She runs out of time to read anything else. How is she supposed to explain, debate and apply the concepts in class?
THE INFORMATION TRICKLE-DOWN – “NOTES” IN DISGUISE
How many professionals who believe that “notes are cheating” wait for academic research to trickle down into textbooks, popular books, trade magazines, blogs and webinars? How many get their professional development through chats with colleagues over coffee? Aren’t all of these tiers of knowledge filters through other people? Aren’t they all forms of notes?
Consider the amount of time it takes for information to trickle down through filters. Why are people hosting webinars about learning styles and right/left-brained thinking when those concepts were overturned by studies done three years ago?
Where is the virtue in believing that the only way to benefit from a book is to grind through every single word even if it means not having the time to grasp the broader concepts or compare them with the opinions of a dozen other experts in the field?
I suspect that cliche phrase “critical thinking skills” is hovering out there. Or perhaps “critical reading skills.” How likely is someone to be critical about reading or thinking if they can barely finish one person’s article let alone a dozen or more? How many people are like my father and channel their insecurity into an autodidactic drive that develops more efficient reading and thinking? How many choose tribalism instead, associating with the latest trend or a group of influence, arguing based on their tribal affiliations and the sunk costs of hours or years of focused reading in one area, instead of embracing the broader marketplace of ideas?
e-BOOKS AS A CHANGE IN GENRE
I recently read a couple of case studies about how content-management systems can change publishing. Instead of producing long manuscripts attributed to a single author and designed for a specific audience, groups of writers and experts collaborate on creating much smaller modules of writing that could be re-used in multiple contexts. The smaller size made the modules more focused and improved their quality because reviewers would spend more time on a particular subject module than they would if it were part of a 500-page manuscript.
Why are books so long? Their length drains authors, fatigues reviewers, and dissuades readers. If I like a non-fiction book, I summarize it in a couple of pages of text, tables and diagrams and make a digital PDF for distribution. I can summarize a 235pp book in 6 pages. I know that people won’t read books I recommend much less buy them. I send them my summaries to share the concepts. Would someone pay $20 for a 6-page summary? Think a bit about your answer. Some consulting firms charge tens of thousands of dollars to produce executive summaries of reports that are never read in their entirety.
The ugly truth is likely a combination of factors: people want value for their money; they tend to associate bulk with value. Worse, producing something concise is far more difficult than writing volumes. I’ve had profs react to criticisms of their lengthy, unfocused writing by saying students need to develop critical thinking skills—a depressing cop-out.
USING NOTES TO TEACH BY EXAMPLE
I read a fascinating article about using problem cases to teach students. Researchers found that students learned better from “worked examples” than from simply trying to figure out a case on their own. The worked examples were annotated cases that illustrated the thought processes of an expert: what did they highlight as important facts? How did they analyze the problem? How did they come to their conclusions?
In many ways law school is an example of worked examples. All of the court decisions we read represented transcripts of a judge’s thinking process. We were reading the “notes” of hundreds of legal experts who filtered and analyzed the actual testimony and arguments they’d experienced in a case.
eBOOKS AS WINDOWS INTO THE MINDS OF OTHERS
Why should eBooks simply be an electronic repackaging of regular books? My Kindle copy of “The Design of Everyday Things” seems a very cheap and poorly-done digital version. Images are many screen-turns past their mention in the text. Captions are in the same font and size as the rest of the text and are plopped in the middle of the regular prose. It’s confusing and annoying.
What about all the potential for graphics and music? I doubt that an expensive multimedia “song and dance” helps people identify, internalize and apply concepts. If you’ve ever suffered through an “engaging” PowerPoint presentation with swooshing animations you may sympathize with my point of view. You’re one source I need to consult and compare out of a dozen or maybe hundreds.
What is the real potential of eBooks? By now, you can point out the direction yourself: shorter, more modular, and if nothing else, highlighted and annotated by other people. eBooks can represent a genre change much like the content management system. They can make the eBook itself a modular job aid instead of forcing people to read hundreds of pages of prose… or more likely wait for a webinar to come out with PowerPoint slides. Most importantly, eBooks can share the highlights and the notes of the readers who’ve already read them. We can see where people disagree and why. We can follow up on suggestions for alternative points of view. We can read deeply to compare our own interpretations or we can skim and consume a much larger number of points of view. eBooks represent an opportunity to combine social media, communities of practice, and mentorship into the reading and thinking experience.
ANNOTATED eBOOKS ARE ALREADY HERE
As I mentioned, I am currently reading “The Design of Everyday Things” by Don Norman on my iPad using the Kindle app. The software underlines certain paragraphs, ones many other readers have highlighted when reading their Kindle versions. The eBook technology provides me with the immediate benefit of seeing what others thought was important.
If educators value peer-learning and critical thinking, perhaps they’ll embrace these exciting new possibilities. Not all of us want to escape the world by taking a vacation in the pages of a book. Not all of us see the virtue in plodding through every lazy word of text. Many of us want to focus on absorbing and contrasting multiple points of view and developing practical solutions to our problems.
FOOT-NOTE
Now that you’ve finished this lengthy essay, don’t you wish you’d just had someone’s notes to read instead?
Posted in: Week 06: eBooks
Allie 1:33 pm on October 12, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Hi David,
There’s obviously much in this essay to consider and respond to, but I’ll keep it to my top 4…
1) I read your take as being very strongly pragmatic (read what we need in order to solve the particular task at hand). I can’t help but think of the contrasting issue to the execs you discuss who want to synopsis rather than reading the book – that is, the huge value some people place on displaying how well read they are – or how well read they want people to think they are. I think this is significant for our discussion of e-books this week because the materiality of hard copy books is not only personally but socially significant for many. In the museum studies course I teach, we talk a lot about how, as students, our bookshelves at home can be considered curated collections – and how we are using them to make visible, to ourselves and others, our identities and ambitions.
2) Your comments on shearing down content reminded me of something significant a mentor once shared with me – it’s not what you know, it’s knowing where to find out what you need to know.
3) The idea of social annotations sounds really interesting – but as with knowing where to look, I’d want to be picky about whose metadata (annotations and highlighted passages) I’d be using. I say this because most of my experience with metadata in the form of marginalia and highlights comes from academic library books – and at least in the UBC social science books, ‘outrage marginalia’ seems to be a hot genre! As for finding the socially sanctioned good stuff – at least in academic texts – I love the Web of Science search engine, as it tells you which pages of a given text are most often cited in peer-reviewed publications. Interestingly, and a bit hilariously, it’s often the first page!
4) re: modular content. I’ve recently worked on a very large book composed of 30 distinct, and independently authored, chapters. From what I’ve learned from that experience, curation (careful selection, editing, and ordering) is paramount to ensure that the volume as a whole is cohesive. Something about applying the content management approach to publishing that concerns me is that the emphasis may land too heavily on the individual piece of content rather than on its relationships to other pieces in the broader work.
David William Price 1:46 pm on October 12, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Wow, thank-you for sharing some great points.
1. Good point about people “wearing” their books as a symbol of their erudition. I was just talking to someone about the over-valuing of symbols (judgments based on the wearing of a hijab, or a skirt that is too short) rather than the character of the person as demonstrated through their actions. My father amassed a huge library in his basement which obviously had a huge symbolic value. I actually felt a tremendous sensation of freedom when I downsized my home prior to moving to a new city. I gave away 100s of books. I’m happy with a growing set of summaries I can share and use. To me, books are intellectual consumables.
2. “Knowing where to find vs. knowing”. Hm… I’m on both sides of this concept. On the one hand knowing where to look is important. On the other, having some judgment about the value of different sources means knowing some content. That’s why I prefer the notion of focusing on core concepts and defining mental models of those concepts in the form of job aids. The summaries, which could be analogized to hockey cards or baseball cards, I suppose, provide an easy way of trading in ideas and not getting too blinded by a particular expression of an idea in a particular book.
3. You’re right that annotations will have different value based on who provides them. In one sense, Wikipedia shows the power of curated crowd-sourcing. That’s a definite possibility. Simply going with trend in highlights and comments is another path. A third way would be to tap into particular minds: how would Steve Jobs annotate a business book? How would that compare to Bill Gates?
4. I take your point about the value of curating. I suppose I would say that your value as a curator is to consider the modules and work on the connective tissue that sequences them and teases out the patterns in them. The fact that you can work with modules actually gives you a lot more power in editing. Instead of facing a monolithic work, you can re-arrange modules for purposes of comparison, contrast, etc. One of my goals for my writing students is to make better use of outlines… breaking ideas down into chunks and playing with those chunks like a curator, using the outline as a simulation of the final work.
I strongly believe that anxiety over reading and thinking comes from feeling overwhelmed by a perceived complexity. Cognitive load theory suggests we use chunking to assemble patterns and hierarchies for easier processing.
kstooshnov 9:05 pm on October 12, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Very interesting point, David, about the circumstances in which your father lived and became an educated reader, just as executives and professors went the other way with their reading: less is more. I agree with Allie first point, in fact heard very similar ideas in the CBC podcast Doug posted, people like to show what they know (therefore more is more, one would assume).
Thanks to Google and their scanning of a billion or so books, nobody has to read anything ever again, as we now have n-grams to tell us what can be found in decades’ worth of reading material: here’s the link: Google Ngrams Viewer. Gives us more time to get that perfect score on Angry Birds ;-P