<\/p>\n
A TOWN WITHOUT BOOKS, WHERE NASA PRACTISED MOON LANDINGS<\/span><\/p>\n 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. <\/span><\/p>\n EXECUTIVES WANTED NOTES, NOT BOOKS<\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019t \u201chave time\u201d for extra reading. Someone said, \u201cI don\u2019t want a copy of the book– I want your copy\u2026 with the highlighting and notes.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n NOTES ARE CHEATING! OR ARE THEY SMART?<\/span><\/p>\n A high school teacher threatened to punish us for possessing \u201ccheat books\u201d like Coles Notes. In law school, first years whispered about \u201ccase summaries\u201d from upper-year students. I avoided this \u201ceasy way out\u201d 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.<\/span><\/p>\n Last night one of my fellow Masters students, overwhelmed by the volume of readings, said, \u201cI\u2019m 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.\u201d 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?<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n THE INFORMATION TRICKLE-DOWN \u2013 \u201cNOTES\u201d IN DISGUISE<\/span><\/p>\n How many professionals who believe that \u201cnotes are cheating\u201d 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\u2019t all of these tiers of knowledge filters through other people? Aren\u2019t they all forms of notes?<\/span><\/p>\n 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?<\/span><\/p>\n 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?<\/span><\/p>\n I suspect that cliche phrase \u201ccritical thinking skills\u201d is hovering out there. Or perhaps \u201ccritical reading skills.\u201d How likely is someone to be critical about reading or thinking if they can barely finish one person\u2019s 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?<\/span><\/p>\n e-BOOKS AS A CHANGE IN GENRE<\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019ve had profs react to criticisms of their lengthy, unfocused writing by saying students need to develop critical thinking skills\u2014a depressing cop-out.<\/span><\/p>\n USING NOTES TO TEACH BY EXAMPLE<\/span><\/p>\n I read a fascinating article about using problem cases to teach students. Researchers found that students learned better from \u201cworked examples\u201d 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?<\/span><\/p>\n In many ways law school is an example of worked examples. All of the court decisions we read represented transcripts of a judge\u2019s thinking process. We were reading the \u201cnotes\u201d of hundreds of legal experts who filtered and analyzed the actual testimony and arguments they\u2019d experienced in a case.<\/span><\/p>\n eBOOKS AS WINDOWS INTO THE MINDS OF OTHERS<\/span><\/p>\n Why should eBooks simply be an electronic repackaging of regular books? My Kindle copy of \u201cThe Design of Everyday Things\u201d 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\u2019s confusing and annoying.<\/span><\/p>\n What about all the potential for graphics and music? I doubt that an expensive multimedia \u201csong and dance\u201d helps people identify, internalize and apply concepts. If you\u2019ve ever suffered through an \u201cengaging\u201d PowerPoint presentation with swooshing animations you may sympathize with my point of view. You\u2019re one source I need to consult and compare out of a dozen or maybe hundreds.<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2026 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\u2019ve 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.<\/span><\/p>\n ANNOTATED eBOOKS ARE ALREADY HERE<\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\n If educators value peer-learning and critical thinking, perhaps they\u2019ll 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.<\/span><\/p>\n FOOT-NOTE<\/span><\/p>\n Now that you\u2019ve finished this lengthy essay, don\u2019t you wish you\u2019d just had someone\u2019s notes to read instead?<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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. 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