Taste of Tech

World Have Your Say is a call-in radio program. There’s nothing special about that. Nearly every station on the AM dial has one. The hosts talk about current events, and people can call in to give their opinions. WHYS, though, takes the idea of talk radio several steps further.

First of all, it’s a global show. Originating in London, it actively seeks participation from the global audience. They regularly have callers from the middle east, and Africa, and Asia, and places where you’d think they can’t even listen to the BBC. And the perspectives of these people can differ drastically from the media we’re fed by CNN and AP and even Reuters.

The other neat thing WHYS has done is to embrace some of the interactive web technologies. They blog about the topics discussed on the show, and encourage site visitors to comment. They also solicit discussion and debate topics through the web site. And, of course, you can listen live to the show online or catch the podcast version later.

Recently, they’ve begun using Twitter to let people know about the topics they’re going to be discussing on the show. In addition to giving people a heads-up about show topics, it provides a nice, concise list of world events and issues. Here’s the recent list:

• Do you want your leader to go to Olympics?
• What’s it like being white in Zimbabwe at the moment?
• Are you worried about rising food prices?
• Should your boss know your family plans?
• Are protesters ruining the Olympics?
• Should women dress modestly?
• Can Muslims take a joke about Islam?

Nearly every day, they have a compelling question or two, and they seek input from the global audience. If we really want our students to have a global perspective, and to be able to work with people from different cultures, this is the kind of thing they should be listening to.

World Have Your Say is broadcast on weekdays at 1700 GMT. If you’re in the North American Eastern time zone, that’s 1:00 PM. You can listen online or find a station near you.

I’ll admit it. I’m a sucker for free books. Whenever the school library is weeding out the collection, I’m invariably digging through the boxes of castaways, looking for something of interest. I always walk away with a small pile. And I even read some of them. Sometimes.

And so, in this 21st century post-information-age, when there’s no premium on information, and a quick Google search can answer most of the questions that a trip to the library can answer, I’m still oddly attracted to books. I’ve blogged about free books online five times. I’ve written about textbooks nearly as many times. And yet, here I go again.

This time, it’s Wowio. Go to the web site. Create an account. You have to provide a little more information than most of these sites. You have to prove that you’re in the United States, too. After that, you have a free account, and can download up to three e-books per day.

The books are in PDF format. I can read them on my computer. I can put them on my PDA. I’d like to put them on my mp3 player, but I don’t think that’s possible yet. I can’t print them. I can’t distribute them.

What kind of books? I started with Vonnegut. I’ve been wanting to re-read his earlier novels, but the local library doesn’t have them, and I’m too cheap to buy them. So I downloaded Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan. I also downloaded a book on religion, and one on, uhh, fermented beverages. That’s enough to last a while.

How is this possible? They’ve worked out a deal with the publishers that allows them to license the work, and they use advertising to pay for it. Each book as an advertisement at the beginning and at the end (though I haven’t seen any in the middle of the work. The web site also has ads.

The books don’t appear to use DRM. That is, there isn’t any copy protection. But they do customize the downloads, so my name is embedded on several pages of the book, along with a clear message saying that it’s specifically licensed to me. So if I start distributing these things, they’ll know pretty quickly where they’re coming from.

A high school English teacher once advised us to always be reading something. It doesn’t necessarily matter if it has any significant literary value. And it doesn’t matter if it takes months to get through it. But there shouldn’t be a time when you’re not in the process of reading something. I try to do that most of the time, and now I have a new source for reading material.

Back in the dark ages, I remember being very upset about the amount of money I spent in the college bookstore as an incoming freshman. Every course had at least one textbook that had to be purchased. English had several books, but at least they were small and relatively cheap. The kicker, I remember, was calculus. This was no $35 paperback like the structured programming and educational psychology texts. No, this was a $65 hardcover tome that I wasn’t looking forward to lugging around campus. The only consolation was that it contained three courses’ worth of calculus, so I was saving money in the long run.

That book is still sitting on my bookshelf, though I can’t say that I’ve opened it in the last decade. After three semesters, it was out of date and practically worthless. There wasn’t really much point in selling it back. Besides, I was going to be a math teacher. It might come in handy when teaching AP Calculus somewhere down the road. Like I said, its main purpose in life these days is to keep the bookshelf from blowing away if an unexpected tornado should rip through our home office.

Things have changed a lot since I went to college. This week, The Business Shrink reported that college textbook prices rose 186% between 1986 and 2004. They cite two studies by the U. S. government that report an annual increase in textbook costs of around 6%. That’s about double the inflation rate. The average American college student spends $893 a year on textbooks. If you’re interested, you can read the U. S. Department of Education Report or the Government Accountability Office Report.

There doesn’t seem to be any indication that things have improved since 2004. In an unscientific survey of college students working in my office, we determined that, while textbook prices vary widely, a student can expect to spend around $100 per book. Some of the texts include CDs, and these have to be purchased new because the digital rights management on them prevents them from being re-sold. Sometimes, students can get a break by purchasing electronic-only versions of the textbooks in a subscription model, but students still spend $100-150 per course for books.

That’s the college picture. What about K-12? Our science books are running around $65 for the student edition. Our geometry book is $68. The American history book is $99. All told, each of our high school students is carrying around at least $350-400 worth of textbooks. That’s well over half a million dollars worth of books for our 1600 student high school. In fact, district-wide, we spend more than twice as much money each year on textbooks as we do on technology.

Now… what if we wrote our own books? I know, I’m crazy. But hear me out. We have the best teachers around. Our American history teachers can make their subject come alive. Our math teachers can explain really complicated things in a way that makes them seem easy. Our biology teachers can draw a diagram on the board from scratch in 40 minutes that explains photosynthesis better than a whole chapter in the students’ bio books. All of these teachers could create their own teaching materials, and those materials would be better than the ones we’re spending a fortune on now.

Right now, our teachers get $37.50 per hour for course of study writing. Let’s say we want them to write a textbook. A year-long course might be divided into thirty chapters, with each being in the neighborhood of 10-20 pages long. I’m thinking in terms of a traditional textbook for the moment, though the final result may not necessarily take that form. If I could encorporate creative commons and public domain work along with my own writing, I could probably create a first draft of a chapter in about 20 hours. Revisions and peer editing might take another 5-10 hours. All told, we could probably write the book for around $30,000. That will last us five years, after which we would have to spend more money to revise it (though significantly less than the original investment).

If we do this for a course that all students take, that works out to about $75 per student. For that much, we could just buy the textbooks and be done with it. But what if we write an American history text, and we get the school down the street to write world history, and we trade? Then, we get two textbooks for $30,000. If ten schools did this, we could cover the whole social studies department without spending any more money. If a hundred schools participated, we could probably take care of all of our textbook needs at every grade level, in every subject. For 10% of our current textbook budget, we could build a sustainable program.

“But there are no books,” you’re saying. “You haven’t printed anything.” Right. There are lots of ways to handle this. Here are a few ideas:

• Use newsprint. We have our school newspaper printed on newsprint for around 25 cents a copy. Print each unit as needed, and give a disposable copy to the students. They’re carrying around a paper that weighs a few ounces instead of a big, heavy book. At the end of the unit, just recycle them. Total cost? Maybe $8 per kid for a year long class.
• Use portable media. Burn it to a CD or put it on a flash drive. The students would have to have computers to read it, which would be a big disadvantage. They could selectively print if necessary, but that would be expensive if they did it on laser printers at school. The focus would have to be on reading it on the screen. I saw an ad for customized 1 GB flash drives yesterday. They were $8 each, and we can get our school logo printed on them. CDs are about 20 cents each.
• Put it on the web. We could use a wiki for a collaborative document, or we could put it in a course management system if we wanted to control access to it. Students access the material online. There’s nothing to carry back and forth to school. Again, they have to have computers to access it, but we could provide hard copies to those without access if necessary.
• Use Portable devices. Use a document reader in a PDA, or an e-book reader, or even an mp3 player. Remember, we’re saving a few hundred thousand dollars a year, here. Over time, this might even be enough to pay for a 1:1 laptop initiative. That would have a transformational effect on how we do school.

I’m not saying there aren’t challenges. But information is not at a premium anymore. We shouldn’t be paying these prices just for information. We can put that stuff together ourselves and do a better job for less money.

“I have a puzzle for you.” It was the tenth day of winter break. Mom and Dad weren’t the only ones who could hardly wait for school to start again. The third grader and first grader both came right over. I handed them an envelope that had arrived in the mail. “I need to know who this is from and what it says.”

The disappointment was visible. The third grader can’t remember when she couldn’t read. The first grader is very proud of her literacy. This wasn’t a puzzle at all. Before they tore into the envelope, I asked them to take a closer look. The address, though obviously ours, wasn’t written in a format that was familiar to them. The street name was listed before the street number. The last line read “USA - STOW - OH - 44224.” That’s not how we write addresses. And why did it have three stamps? I smiled. There were more surprises inside.

“Dad!! This isn’t in English.”

“I know.” Now they were interested.

“Where did it come from? What does it say?”

“That’s the puzzle.” They pored over the letter.

“I think it’s from Luxembourg,” the third grader finally reported. “But it also says ‘Letzebuerg’ over here. Is that a place?”

“Who wrote the letter?”

“I think it’s Josée and Fernand.” It was a pretty good guess, because their names were at the top of the paper. I helped by explaining that their last name is on the next line. But they had no idea what the letter said.

“Do you want a hint?” They readily agreed. “The same letter is repeated three times in three different languages.” Josée and Fernand had gone out of their way to ensure they were understood. None of the three were English, though, so the girls were lost. “Are there any words that look like words you know?” Maybe they could get the gist of the letter from context.

The first grader chimed in. “an! in! die! hat! man!” Okay, that wasn’t what I meant. Sure, those are words she recognized, but they mean different things in German.

The third grader helped out. “There’s ‘courage.’ And ‘adresse’ is kind of like ‘address.’ ‘Animaux’ looks like ‘animal.’ There’s also ‘mentionnée,’ which includes the word ‘mention.’”

Now we were getting somewhere. “Can you figure out what it says?” Admittedly, it’s hard to construct a meaningful paragraph with so few clues. So we went online for help.

There are probably better translation tools out there, but I usually use Babelfish, mostly out of habit. I explained that computers can try to translate sentences from one language to another. They usually don’t do a very good job, but they help enough so you can figure out what the text is saying. We started with the quote at the beginning. I did the typing to save time.

«On ne peut atteindre de nouveaux rivages, que si l’on a le courage de quitter les anciens !»

“What language do you think that is?” They guessed French, especially after I read it aloud. So we translated from French to English:

One cannot reach new shores, only if there is courage to leave the old ones

Close enough. The kids figured out that it says something about leaving old shores in order to reach new ones. You can’t finish the journey unless you’re not afraid to start it. Are they on a boat? This has something to do with going somewhere.

We repeated the exercise with more of the letter, and eventually reached the realization that Josée and Fernand have moved to a new home in Rollingergrund. We checked Google maps, and found that this is northwest of the city of Luxembourg. It’s about 10 miles from where we used to live. We used the satellite imagery to look at their street. We then tried to get driving directions to their house, but Google Maps discourages driving across oceans.

How far away is that? We zoomed out until we could see North America. The first grader quickly found northern Ohio.
Wow! That’s really far away!”

It’s unlikely that the children will ever meet the Spielmanns. I do think they would like each other. Josée and Emily are both very kindhearted artists. But even if they never interact, our children have a connection to real people living on the other side of the planet. My kids don’t know anyone who doesn’t speak English as their primary language. Not only do Josée and Fernand not speak English every day, it’s not even in their top three choices of languages to use.

So how does this apply to 21st Century Skills? It’s certainly increasing their global awareness, and expanding their horizons beyond the English-speaking, America-centric world they live in. They were collaborating to solve a problem, and using technology both as a tool to answer questions and as a resource to find information. Not bad for a vacation day.

Josée and Fernand: Félicitations sur votre nouvelle maison, et meilleurs voeux à l’avenir.