While I admit that I am excited about e-books and their possibilities both as an educator and individual reader, I find myself a print addict.  Anything more than a couple pages long that I need to read with care goes to the printer. I shudder at the thought of trying to read anything of substance on a PDA or, worse, a cell phone screen. I've not purchased a Kindle. My dresser is stacked with - gasp - a dozen or more hardbacks and paperbacks. Amazon, Barnes & Noble and printer cartridge manufacturers all love me.

Am I a latent Luddite?

Probably, but Hamlet’s Blackberry: Why Paper Is Eternal (2007) 74 pages by William Powers, Media Critic for the National Journal, helped me understand a little better why many of us still cling to hardcopy books, magazines, newspapers, and printouts of digital content. It's a fascinating, uh, "paper."

One of the more interesting sections describes the early  impact the printing press had on hand-written manuscripts. Handwriting, according to historians became even more widespread and important after Gutenberg. He uses this as an lesson, writing: "We have seen that new technologies do not necessarily eliminate old ones, at least not as quickly or predictably as is often assumed. However, when new modes of communication arrive, they do often change the role played by existing media." (p.26) and argues that "paper's work has been shifting away from storage and toward communication." Communication being the end user experience of actually reading.

Power's describes a Sellen and Harper study that ascribes to paper four "affordances" - inherent characteristics that make it particularly useful, especially for concentrated study:

• Tangibility (Our hands can do some of the work our brain does in navigation.)
• Spatial flexibility (We can spread out paper limitlessly, not confined by the size of a monitor)
• Tailorability (We can easily mark up printed documents.)
• Manipulability (We can put one page beside another for easy comparison.)

He concludes, "within a multi-tasking context, printed documents make it easier to focus on each specific task."

There are two other characteristics of paper that Power describes that resonated with me.

The first is that is is immutable. "Unlike a Web page that can be changed in the blink of an eye, a paper document implies a certain commitment to the content it carries." (p. 49) This summarizes my concerns over Wikipedia - not that the information it contains may be inaccurate. But that it may be accurate today and inaccurate 10 seconds later. (And frightens me to think how easy it would be today for Orwell's Big Brother to finish his task of revising all of history.) This may also explain why I take a good deal more time and care writing an 800 word magazine column than a longer blog entry - no going back to "re-write" the column.

The second characteristic is that paper is a selective medium. "A hard-copy document can only hold only as much information as will fit on its pages, and it cannot link to other sources except by verbal reference. ... the immensity of the digital trove also makes it inscrutable, unwieldy, and, at times, overwhelming." Power quotes Brown and Dugid in The Social Life of Information: ...it has become increasingly clear that libraries are less 'collections.' than useful selections that gain usefulness from what they exclude as much as what they hold." If that is not the best argument for excellent collection development strategies in school libraries, I don't know what is.

Anyway, Hamlet's Blackberry is well worth taking the time to read. I suggest you print it out and do so.

I've been tagged for two memes. The first comes from Amy Bowllen at School Library Journal. Her meme is 5 Things I Wish I Learned In School. (I am running late on answering this one!)

1. I would have benefited from a year-long course in Philosophy. I've still never taken one and seem to only have picked up bits and pieces of schools of thought. Seems like it would have made a nice framework on which to hang one's observations through life. I have a copy of Sophie's World and have been meaning to get to it.
   
2. I wish I'd had a class in simple home repairs - how to fix a toilet, how to hang a picture, how to paint a wall. I've managed to learn these things (or most of them), but the experience was never pretty.
   
3. In college (especially grad school), we were so encouraged to develop our "leadership potential" that management skills were neglected. This one needs its own blog entry.
   
4. I'd have like to have learned how to argue dispassionately, how to supervise others humanely and effectively, and how to give bad news without feeling guilty. All human relation skills, I suppose.
   
5. It would have been nice to have someone sit me down and tell me that most of life is comedy, not tragedy. That the vast majority of things we worry about never happen - or if they do, they are seldom world-ending.
   

The second meme comes from Miguel Guhlin at Around the Corner. His is the Professional Development Meme. What's on one's "Learning To-Do" list for this summer. (Miguel even lists assessments to show how he will prove he has accomplished his. Good grief. I bet he was the kid who always read all the assignments and raised the curve.) This is summer and I'm keeping my list short...

1. Figure out how to naturalize as much of the yard as possible without offending the aesthetic sensibilities of the LWW. Less mowing, greater drought tolerance, kinder wildlife habitat, better lake water quality - and a lawn that looks like weeds. This will be a challenge...

2. Scale Mt. Bookpile (as LazyGal calls it). Here's what's stacked on my dresser:

• Influencer (Patterson, et al.) Signed up for McLeod's online book club.
  
• Brain Rules (Medina) Watched the video preview. Does that count?
  
• Daemon (Zeraus) Sci-fi recommended by Wired.
  
• feed (Anderson) Sci-fi recommended by Jeff Utecht.
  
• Canoeing with the Cree (Sevareid) Classic trip of two boys' river trip through MN to Hudson Bay.
  
• Distant Fires (Anderson) A more recent re-creation of Sevareid's adventure.
  
• how (Siedman) Behavior is more important than ever in a wired world. Dang it.
  
• Don't Make Me Think (Krug) Web-page design.
  
• A Gravestone Made of Wheat (Weaver) Been reading one of this MN author's short stories each evening and really enjoying them. Title story basis of movie Sweet Land.
  
• Dirty White Boys (Hunter) Hunter is THE best adventure/suspense writer going. This is one of the very few of his books I've not read.
  
• Hunter's Moon (White) Reminisent of Travis McGee.

3. Explore new ways to learn at NECC. I am deliberately going to try some new offerings at the San Antonio conference, especially those things being organized by the EdubloggerCon folks. While I am sure I will get to plenty of "sessions," I'll be seeking some less structured learning opportunities as well.

Of course work goes on as well all summer - 60+ more "smart" classroom installations, implementation of a new student information system, distribution of new computers and training for 120+ teachers, writing policies and procedures for some testing/datamining activities, etc.

I'm looking forward to fall - when I can get a little rest. 

I am tagging these folks for either or both memes. I'm picking on a few people I enjoy reading and I wish would write more often...

Nancy Willard (http://csriu.wordpress.com/)

Steven Maher (http://mrmaher.wordpress.com/)

Artichoke (http://artichoke.typepad.com/artichoke/)

Tim Wilson (http://technosavvy.org/)

Jane Hyde (http://newdunstantoo.blogspot.com/) 

Rob Rubis (http://edgingahead.edublogs.org/)

Inspired by an e-mail received this morning... I love Motivator! 

The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one's mind a pleasant place in which to spend one's leisure. ~ Sydney J. Harris

What is education's relationship to cultural change?

1. To bring about cultural change?
2. To transmit culture?
3. To prevent cultural change?
4. All of the above

While much attention has been given to the first two roles of education, the last role - preventing or delaying social change -  is usually ignored.

When my daughter returned from her first semester at the University of Minnesota, she complained that her classes lacked relevance to her intended vocational goals. Well, in so many words anyway. While the U would probably say those "core" courses are there to make sure a student is well-rounded and culturally literate, I suggested to Carrie that this is simply society using education as a means of slowing cultural change by only allowing students who are willing to conform and delay gratification to gain positions of responsibility in society. "You play by our rules or you don't play at all." And it works very nicely, thank you.

Ask yourself if graduating from high school depends more on a student's IQ or EQ? And how much of EQ is knowing when to simply shut up and go with the flow?

Education is also a means of keeping the rich, rich and the poor, poor. As Jonathan Kozol wrote in Savage Inequalities, in the US there are schools for the governors and schools for the governed. And my guess is that vouchers would exacerbate the rich school/poor school division, setting more firmly in place the current haves and have nots in society. There are always the remarkable few that escape poverty through education, but they are remarkable ... and few.

I have argued before that schools will not change through internal motivation. In fact, I would argue that teachers and administrators are among the most reactionary factors in any educational change model.(Blue Skunk blog readers excepted, of course.)  I would add that local communities want little change as well, based on initiatives involving year round school, the importance of high school athletics in the budget, and local reaction major curricular changes (like Everyday Math). Businesses claim they need better educated graduates, but do not support longer school years or higher funding for education. Do they really want employees who think outside the cubicle?

Major cultural shifts are about transfers in power, and nobody gives up power without a fight.

Were it not for institutions applying the breaks to change, I'd guess many of us would experience cultural whiplash. For many of us the societal changes brought about by technology are already creating stress in our lives. So this is not necessarily all bad.

____________________________ 

As I think about change in education and about education as a cultural change agent, I can make the argument that only the federal government that has been able to change schools enough that they in turn create true cultural change. Over the past 50 years, I would suggest that these laws not only impacted K-12 schools, but changed society as well:

• Desegregation laws
  
• ADA and special education laws (This may be the single area our selfish boomer generation may be looked on favorably about from a historical perspective!)
  
• Title IX
  
• NCLB
• E-rate funding

I know of no state or local initiatives that have had the broad and lasting impact of these federal requirements. Could it be because federal lawmakers are NOT educators so don't know why a thing CAN'T be done?

I take away two things from the list above. First it is federal policy rather than federal funding that has the greatest impact on education. Compare the changes wrought by NCLB compared to E-rate. So as our national associations lobby, I want them to concentrate on policy, not funding.

Second, federal legislation is a two-edged sword. While I am politically aligned with desegregation, ADA, Title IX, and E-rate, the implementation (not the goal) of NCLB works against what I feel best serves students and society. In other words, everyone must pay attention to what is happening in Washington DC and be involved in national politics. Or am I stating the obvious?

Can education effectively be used to change society? What and who actually has the power to change education? Am I missing big changes that started at a local level?

Inquiring minds want to know...