Integrating Smartphones into the Classroom

Smartphones can be valuable tools in the classroom, if teachers find the right way to use them. Unfortunately, the devices can’t be controlled the way textbook content can be.

Solutions range from the total bans on cellphones in the classroom to allowing students to use their smartphones as they please. Some instructors use social media to engage their students, but blogger Dexter McMillan suggests the technology has turned teachers into advertisers competing for consumers’ attention.

“Teachers are selling a product, knowledge, to their students—much of which has no interest or practical use to the majority of students,” he wrote. “Teachers are advertisers selling the most undesirable product on Earth: History. Math. Grammar.”

Teachers used to be able to stand in front of a class and lecture, but technology has created a more collaborative style of instruction that isn’t solely measured by grades. McMillan wrote that teachers need to reclaim that content control with more and better tools.

“Without control of these devices, technology will not be able to move the classroom experience forward in a significant or profound way,” he said. “Grumpy cat, sports highlights, and pictures from the party on the weekend will continue to dominate classroom attention.”

Is It Time to Omit Textbooks?

There have been plenty of studies showing college students are not always running out to buy their assigned textbooks. At the same time, every collegiate retailer knows that collecting textbook adoption information in the first place can be like pulling teeth, so why not just drop them altogether?

“Banning textbooks is not capitulation to their misguided frugality. It’s recognition that students don’t view their textbooks the way we expect them to—and they may have a point,” The Good Enough Professor wrote in a recent blog post.

The problem with textbooks, according to the blogger, is students know they probably can find the same information online for free, making the assigned book redundant and expensive. Besides, students come to understand during their K-12 days that learning is more about locating the right information to pass a test than it is working through concepts and ideas.

“Students want to adroitly navigate the world of information—hence their zeal for finding workarounds,” she wrote. “By abandoning textbooks, we can better work with that grain rather than against it.”

The CITE goes Mobile

You can now view The CITE even when you are not at your office.  Use the QR Code below with your mobile device to connect to The CITE's mobile page.  In the year ahead we will be talking more about mobile as a significant emerging trend for retail and course materials.  Thus, it seemed appropriate to make our site more mobile as well. 

The CITE returns!

Hi everyone. Sorry for The CITE being on a longer hiatus than originally expected or indicated. Thanks to everyone who sent messages to see if everything was okay and to everyone who came to the site to see if we were posting again. More than 10k of you came back at least once this month to see if posting was active again, and many days had over 1000 unique visitors -- more than a few of you checked back very often! My apologies for making you wait, but thank you for your persistence!

Regular posts have already been scheduled to start showing beginning on Monday (Aug 29)and we should be back to regular daily posts quickly. A great deal has occured in the past two months while we were on hiatus, so we will try to mix some updates of news from the summer in with current events. A few quick items on the blog to point out:

A new look. You will notice a slightly updated look and feel to the page. Hopefully this revised layout will make it easier to use and find information of value.

Ask Your Questions. In addition we will be experimenting with a "community answers" tool over on the right-hand toolbar. Currently, it only seems work for select browsers or if you log in. The latter should not be necessary. If you can see content under the "community answers" label, then your browser works with this widget. Here you can post questions to me or the community. I will work to see if I can resolve the problems with the widget, if not, it will likely get removed. You can always send messages to me directly with your questions.

New Voices. The blog will have some new voices. We have hired a new Emerging Technologies Strategist (Jeong Oh) who will be a regular contributor to the blog. Our Digital Media Specialist (Veronica Gancov) will contribute occasional posts. Our fantastic publication team will hopefully also continue to send stories to me for posting.

Thank you again for your continued interest and support. On to the blogging!!!

The CITE on a short hiatus.

To our loyal readers,

The CITE now reaches tens of thousands of readers from more than 170 countries. Your continued interest in our part of the conversation is appreciated. However, due to travel and meetings, preparation to launch some larger pilots and programs, and some resource constraints, the CITE will be on hiatus for the month of July.

We plan to make several announcements in August -- and of course, much is happening quickly in this space these days so there will be a number of news stories to report. We will look to get back to frequent if not daily postings next month.

We are also looking at moving the blog to a new platform, and may make that shift in the next month, time permitting.

I hope that many of you return when posting resumes in August. In the interim, please feel free to post questions here which you would like to see answered in future blog posts.

Best regards,
M

Move toward digital series

The Textbook Guru blog has begun a new series on the "Move Toward Digital." The series includes guest posts, interviews and the author's view point on the every changing world of education and the move from physical books to digital.

Here are some of the initial postings in the series:

- Consumer Trends and Drivers toward e-Textbook Adoption
- Four Obstacles to Overcome Before Digital is Universally Adopted
- How the Internet is Changing Education (Infographic)
- The Status of Math in the United States, and the Classroom of Tomorrow

The CITE added to Best Textbook Blogs

Thanks to DistanceEducation.net for adding The CITE at the #5 spot on their list of 50 Noteworthy Textbook Blogs. The listing has a number of other great blogs on there -- some which we have featured here, and some which are new to me. It is a useful resource to check out (and I would say that even if we had not made the list).

www.thetextbookguru.com

Here is a new blog that recently came across my radar: www.thetextbookguru.com. Jeff Cohen has created an interesting blog that contains links to a range of articles relevant to the course materials industry. His weekly round-up of articles of relevance to the industry provides a great sorting and scan of industry developments -- definitely a must read. The textbookguru will join my blogroll here as a blog to follow.

The CITE's 1000th blog posting!

Welcome to the 1000th blog posting on The CITE and Thank You for coming!

This posting marks the 1000th blog entry on The CITE. The first posting, back on September 5, 2007, noted that this would be an experiment – posting occasional news stories, analysis, commentary, responses to questions, etc. The blog started out with a posting every 1-2 weeks. Somewhere around April 17, 2008 we decided that the blog had merit, and folks out there had interest and so the decision was made to commit. At that point we began to track traffic volume to the blog and thus I tend to look at April 17th as the blog’s birthday.

When we began tracking the volume of traffic to the blog, we had a few visitors a week. Today we have thousands -- more than 58,000 readers have visited the blog from 170 countries around the world. Thank you for coming, and coming back.

One of the very first postings on the blog announced the new Sony Reader. Not long after that, the Amazon Kindle was announced and that story too was covered here. EReaders have been a common theme on the blog ever since – and quite a few have come and gone over the past few years. In the last few years we have seen the devices come to some early maturity, at least on the trade book side, if not quite as much in textbooks. We have moved away from wide-scale experimentation to some dominant designs, and standards. The device wars have somewhat ended, with the platform wars just heating up. The iPad’s introduction last year represents the next generation of devices. Not quite an ereader, not quite a laptop. Some early projections suggested that the device would flop – being neither quite one nor the other, did it have a place? Apparently history will prove that it did.

Birthed with the first commercially viable ereaders, this blog too has grown over the past few years. With some occasional breaks, we try to get a posting up daily. Occasionally we have a couple spurts with two postings a day. I have a backlog of items to blog about that is well over 50 items deep. For a while Liz Hains helped convert many of these to blog hosting, for which I am appreciative. Since the start of the year, the NACS Publications team – including Cindy Ruckman, Michael von Glahn, Dan Angelo, and Dan Pender – have been very helpful and supportive by providing me with a couple postings each week. While comments on the blog have been few, I have received numerous emails over time, including a variety of suggestions and articles of interest.

I hope this blog has provided some insight (and occasionally useful advice) to those out there involved with course materials or print -- whether retailers, publishers, authors, educators, administrators, or students. The world is changing. Sometimes it seems that change is faster or slower than others. Change is coming, though, and hopefully this blog is serving to both signal and record some of that change, and generating some thought about what future roles and opportunities exist in the digital space. The revolution in ereaders, ebooks, digital content, and digital course materials has just begun. We will try to make the next 1000 posts informative, broad-based, and occasionally fun. Let’s see what the next three years brings!

Thanks for your time and interest.

M

A new view on the CITE

Google now offers dynamic views -- allowing you, the readers, to view The CITE content in different ways. So if you are tired at looking at the blog in its current format, try taking a look at it using: thecite.blogspot.com/view You can select different types of views to see the content in different ways. One note -- the "snapshot" view will not work for this blog as we do not have a daily picture associated with posts. Also, to use the new dynamic views feature you must be using a newer browser, such as IE8. There is also a Google post where you can learn more about the different dynamic views.

Thanks to Liz

Thank you to Liz Hains for her contributions to The CITE over the past 2 years. Liz has increasingly handled most of the blog postings and was a great member of our team. Her contributions helped the blog grow past the 50k reader point this year.

Liz was offered and accepted a position with another organization that will be an excellent career move for her. While we search for a replacement, and with the pending holidays, there will be fewer posts for a few weeks. I want to take this opportunity to thank our loyal readers and welcome readers new to the blog.

There are many things happening in this space and with this change in staffing we are looking at a number of opportunities and ways to increase the value of this blog in the year ahead. While postings may be sparse for the next two weeks, we plan to get back up to regular posting speed after the new year. Best wishes to all for the holidays.

-M

The CITE turns 2

Hi everyone,

This past weekend, April 17th, the CITE turned two years old. We would like to thank the many readers and visitors who have taken an interest in our blog. As of this past weekend, we have had 39,564 unique visitors. While nearly 80 percent of our traffic comes from the US and Canada, we have seen visitors from 160 different countries, with a large percentage of our visitors returning regularly. The future of course materials in a digital context is clearly topic with global interest if our readership is any indicator.

Many thanks to all of you for visiting the CITE. We hope to continue providing value and interest to you the years ahead.

College Textbook News blog

We have added a new blog to our blogroll called College Textbook News. The blog focuses on the latest happenings in the college textbook industry and is written by Clyde Smith, writer of the Cultural Research blog about library innovation. This blog will be another good resource for additional news.

NACS Media Solutions launches website and Facebook fan page

We keep commercial announcements on this blog to a minimum, reporting instead on other news happening in the world of digital course materials and ebooks. However, we have some exciting announcements to share with you today.

First, you probably noticed our new logo and look for the blog. The content and approach will remain the same, but with several initiatives starting to come to fruition, over the next few months we will provide updates on what we are doing within NACS and NACS Media Solutions (NMS) related to this area.

Second, we have just launched our new NMS website http://www.nacsmediasolutions.com/ and our Facebook fan page. On our website, you will find more information about how we are working to build and support a foundation of technology, content solutions, and a network of partners that enable collegiate retailers to be an effective and value-adding channel for digital course materials and other pertinent digital content, products, and services. Many of our service offerings are still in development so check back frequently for updates. We are working on some really exciting initiatives and look forward to announcing these in the coming months.

Don’t forget to show your support for NMS and become our fan on Facebook! You can access the fan page via this link or by searching for NACS Media Solutions.

Future predictions

MediaBistro’s Galleycat blog is featuring an interesting series of articles with predictions for the publishing industry in ten years. They posted predictions from Seth Godin, Richard Curtis, Mark Coker, Jane Dystel, Richard Nash and Scott Steinberg. A few interesting items are Richard Curtis’ prediction that college students will begin using tablet PCs this fall and by 2011 or 2012, tablets will replace laptops on campuses across the nation. Mark Coker believes that in ten years, 95% of all reading will be on screen and Seth Godin says,

“This is the decade when book publishing will (finally) be transformed from a business that chops down trees and puts returnable books into bookstores... into one that finds ideas, funds the writers that need it, and uses their (authors' and publishers') leverage and skills to promote those ideas to people willing to pay for them, in whatever format is the most efficient way to get that transaction to occur. If that doesn't happen, and the industry (led by reactionary old-school CEOs) persists in defining itself as being in the book business, it will be 15% the size it is today by the end of the decade. It's our choice."

Gallycat also has a number of interesting posts about different e-readers and developments at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) out in Las Vegas. Such as their Video Tours of e-readers.

Happy holidays!

Due to some illness and some scheduled time off, Liz and I will have few postings to the blog over the next week. As the end of the first decade of the millenium approaches, we would like to thank our readers -- both new and returning. We are nearing our 600th post, with over 30 thousand unique visitors from 149 countries, many of whom return regularly.

Blog postings will resume with regularity January 4th. If there are stories or topics you would like to see covered more in 2010, let us know. If you would like more commentary or information on a topic, we will provide that if we can. Based on a continously growing readership, we hope that we are doing something right. However, feedback from you will help us to continue improving.

Best wishes to all for a happy holiday season, and we look forward to exhanging more information with you in 2010.

Best regards,
Mark

500th blog posting

Today's post hits a milestone for this blog -- our 500th entry. We now have over 21,000 readers from 142 different countries. Thank you to our followers. We hope the blog is meeting your expectations. Please let us know what else we can do to improve the blog, other stories you would like to see reported, or topics where you would like to see more information.



The CITE is now nearly 18 months old. Over the last 18 months we have seen great growth in announcements regarding e-readers and e-reader technology, although it is also equally clear that there is not yet an optimal reader solution available on the market. There has also been growth in interest for alternative approaches to the traditional textbook, most of which involve technology in some way or other.



Later today NACS will be releasing a press announcement regarding a new partnership among some of the leading college store retailing groups -- along with a new e-textbook initiative for stores that will be owned by the industry. A copy of that announcement will appear here in a few hours. We anticipate additional announcements later this year for other new initiatives in the print-on-demand (POD) space, as well as additional partnerships that will enable collegiate retailers to provide content in ways that generate a wider range of affordable options for textbooks and other types of content. In my opinion, the current announcement will send an important message to the collegiate retailing industry that if we choose to remain viable through the coming transition, we must collectively demonstrate the capability and credibility of the industry to provide new and real solutions to the textbook affordability problem. Where digital solutions and new technologies are involved, few stores can do this on their own or will be able to survive if they remain with a store-specific solution absent of industry standards. Today's announcement will encourage standardization of efforts among leading industry groups in an effort to reduce the costs of improving student choice and store offerings.

New posts coming soon

We received a few notes that the blog has not been as up-to-date as usual over the past couple weeks. Our apologies. Liz has been out for her wedding and honeymoon, and my wife and I just returned from a month in Russia to bring home our new son. Both Liz and I will be back in the office again starting next week and blog postings will continue regularly at that point. We will also do some catch-up on some of the big stories that have come out over the past few weeks for those of you who might have missed them.

Best regards-
M

Seth Godin's Textbook Rant

Well known and widely respected marketing guru Seth Godin published an entry on his blog this week entitled “Textbook Rant." He notes that he received more comments on this post than any other he has ever made. Since he got such a reaction, we can probably expect him to start publishing more on the topic, or being more vocal on it elsewhere. Here are a few of the “quotable quotes” from the piece:

• This industry deserves to die. It has extracted too much time and too much money and wasted too much potential. We can do better. A lot better.
• As far as I can tell, assigning a textbook to your college class is academic malpractice.
• Any professor of intro marketing who is assigning a basic old-school textbook is guilty of theft or laziness.
• The solution seems simple to me. Professors should be spending their time devising pages or chapterettes or even entire chapters on topics that matter to them, then publishing them for free online. (it's part of their job, remember?) When you have a class to teach, assemble 100 of the best pieces, put them in a pdf or on a kindle or a website (or even in a looseleaf notebook) and there, you're done. You just saved your intro marketing class about $15,000. Every semester.

Among the responses, I thought this comment related to stores was interesting: The textbook industry does need to die. Especially the privatization of textbook and textbook resale stores...

Rants like these are not uncommon. It would be pretty difficult for anyone involved with the textbook industry to deny that as an industry we have problems. Like health care, autos, or banking. As a colleague of mine observed in response to Seth's "simple solution":

While in theory this all sounds great, but do all professors (or adjunct professors) really have the expertise, time, desire, etc... to "devise" pages or chaperettes and for that matter, who ensures the validity and accuracy of the content? While technology will certainly allow for "anything goes" it would seem like there still needs to be some "control and validation" of content to be taught and that a college or university would not want to create an environment of the "wild wild west".

My opinion is similar to this articulation. I believe Seth's comment is a fairly over-simplified interpretation of what faculty are “paid to do” as part of their jobs. Many faculty do not have the expertise to write a textbook in the style he is asking for – or even if they do, there is little or no reward for most faculty to spend their time in the way he asks. The example of the faculty member who made over $20M – I am pretty sure that is the very rare exception. If they want tenure or promotion, or recognition within their field, that time is better spent on research related publication, or grant work, or even working directly with students in the class.

I always viewed the textbook more as a reference supplement. I typically made it optional. I then usually picked a set of more up-to-date articles or a professional book (depending on the course) which were the required readings. Some students really like having the reference textbook – and it can often cover topics I do not have time to cover in class, or provide additional examples or an alternative perspective. If I did have time to work on improving a course, I much preferred to spend that time finding better ways to use in-class time to maximum benefit, such as creating new active-learning approaches and exercises that would reinforce core concepts.

Writing chapterettes or entire chapters well takes time and research and is a very different skill set that many of us do not have. And frankly, that is not part of the faculty member’s job per se (and certainly not before one is tenured). The accrediting process also typically looks at what books or readings faculty assign in different courses as one means of ensuring that the curriculum is delivering on what is expected. If 20 of us are teaching different sections of the same course, it also helps to ensure some standardization among courses. Or, if I am teaching a course that builds on a prior course, or have to approve a course a student took at another institution, knowing what textbook was used in the prior course gives me some understanding of the approach and content the faculty member in the course was likely to have followed.

I also share the concern about the control and validation process. Faculty already get in trouble for inserting their biases into classes. Without the editorial checks and balances, or review process, how are standards of quality monitored? “Free” does not necessarily mean “equal” or “better.” I think there are some good approaches emerging out there, but worry that we might “throw the baby out with the bathwater” in an over-fixation on price.

As a former student (with 11 years of college education), a former faculty member, a former administrator, and now as someone in the textbook industry more directly, I think we would all agree that the textbook industry has some significant problems when it comes to price, and perhaps some additional issues related to value. It is a tough challenge. Yes, many textbooks are out of date because fields are developing far more rapidly today and the old processes do not work so well. Yes, there are faculty who do not do their job, or their students, justice when it comes to selecting course materials. Yes, the industry needs to change – die? I don’t think so. But change? Yes. There are a number of creative ways in which educational publishing could reinvent itself to continue to produce relevant and current texts, and perhaps at lower cost – but such change will not come quickly or easily. It may be outside organizations and influencers who drive a new generation of course material content. That will likely start with open educational resources (OER), and eventually evolve into new revenue-based models as products mature and the value of having enterprises to assist with the process resurfaces – since there are limitations to true OER as well. Organizations like Flat World Knowledge, Connexions, MERLOT, and others are examples of how such organizations are needed if OER is to be successful. As such organizations emerge there is an eventual need to support the organization, which means revenue. That could come directly or indirectly, but eventually it must come or the organizations are unlikely to be sustainable for the long term.

Okay – I will stop my textbook rebuttal rant there.
-M

Campus Store Central blog

We have added a new blog to our blogroll called Campus Store Central. The blog is managed by Campus Stores Canada and provides news, views, trends, and practices that are of interest to college stores. The blog also features some digital postings.