The Tower of eBabel and Draconian DRM aren’t toxic just for the e-book industry. Along the way they are also bad news for distance education.
Let me explain. Students learn best when they can communicate easily with peers as well as instructors. As John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid note in The Social Life of Information, employers often discriminate against job candidates with degrees from online universities–because the hiring organizations value community, not just the actual texts in use. Nothing like bull sessions to increase employability!
And the e-book angle? Well, today’s shackled formats interfere with the creation of communities–making it difficult or impossible to engage in group annotations of books. OpenReader will help address such issues and even offer such capabilities as the ability to point to specific sentences from afar. Yes, students can communicate via email and forums, but that’s not the same as what full-fledged annotation could offer. Also, how about the ability to share books remotely within the spirit of fair use? Is that the same as a bull session? Of course not. But if dorm friends can lend each other p-books, shouldn’t distance-learners be able to exchange e-books in at least a limited way?
More on The Social Life of Information: Brown and Duguid are not always as clueful as they could be about e-books–seeing things more in the present than in the future. When they complain about the paucity of e-books online compared to the total number of books, they probably are not giving ample consideration to the potential of search-based indexing of the kind that Roger Sperberg has been advocating. What’s more, keep in mind that not all books get the same usage–that digitization can focus on the most popular ones, while providing easy ways to locate related books that are on paper only. So many possibilities exist. It’s a shame that Brown and Duguid do not fully appreciate them.
But, to return to Social Life itself and to the topic of distance education, here is a little snippet that I did like:
Stanley Fish once called an essay about communities of interpretation ‘Is There a Text in this Class?” With distance education, where texts are shipped to individuals, it will become increasingly important to ask, “Is there a class (or community) with this text?”
