Social networking at war

Having spent the best part of two days in airplanes or airports traveling to Mumbai, I've finished Daniel Suarez's Freedom, his sequel to Daemon (my review). Despite some rather stomach turning violence, it's probably the best science fiction book I've read for quite a while.

I'll not summarize the plot here, but I really loved the vision of what a genuinely developed social network might mean in terms of economics, politics, and warfare. Lots of near-future shots at agribusiness, cable news, military privitization, intellectual property, Internet privacy, and the debtor economy. Great plot, superb villains, and visionary social commentary. Computer gamers will eat this up with much or the action right out of WOW.

One concept that I loved in Freedom was that everyone in the "darknet" had a sort of personality score. Each interaction with another member is evaluated on a 1-5 scale on integrity. Your reputation ranking is visible to all other members of the net so you pretty much know who to trust and who not to trust. Wouldn't life be easier if we all had a little halo over our heads that grew or shrunk commensurate to our basic goodness?

Read it. Oh, and this seems to complete the saga. No waiting for a third installment.

Can e-books gather dust?

With Janet's kind permission, I am posting her e-mail to me about her experience using e-books and electronic support materials in her school. Seems like her experience should be educational for all of us. Doug

Hi Doug,

I'm sending you this "off line" as it seems too long for a posted comment, but I wanted to share my thoughts on your latest postings on e-books.

Here in CA a lot of us have to manage the textbook collections in our high schools, so this discussion is always relevant. I can confirm that with our latest adoptions in social science, science, math, and English Language Development, we received the textbook (and the teacher's edition) as an ebook, as well as in print. Depending on the publisher, they all have a variety of helpful tools to help the student study and understand what they are reading. We also have copies of our health textbook online and on CD in PDF format. The online health text version works well, but the CD version is a waste, as the page numbers don't match the print version.

More than 20 years ago, the district did away with lockers at the HS and MSs for various reasons, one of which was the stated fact by administrators that "everything will be on CD so who needs a locker?" Well, here we are in 2010 and students are now carrying 30 to 40 pounds of books worth about $400 on their backs. Did I mention that we are a high achieving high school with 3600 students, many classes, and 84,000 textbooks?

Now for the reason for this long introduction. Over the last 10 years, I have been asked several times to check into the availability of e-textbooks, but for reasons that you and your followers have stated, the books have often not been available or they are more expensive, etc. This has been partially solved with the inclusion of the e-text with the print text when a book is adopted (and paid for). This is usually in CD format, but sometimes in online access with a pass code. Some are better than others. However, one interesting factor has arisen that was not mentioned by other commenters. Students don't want to use the books in e-format of either kind. They pretty much don't want to read on a computer. Parents don't understand the e-books. Most of the copies of the books on CD that came with the adoptions are sitting in boxes in our increasingly crowded textbook storage area and we can't give them away. The ELL texts have especially helpful tools included with the CDs, but we can't convince students and parents to use them. You can probably say that this is a communication or PR problem, but it is a problem that is not being discussed here at my school or here by your followers.

We seem to make assumptions about students and technology that are often not true, and there seems to be a lot of them about e-texts especially. I don't think we can necessarily combine the discussion about e-library books, including fiction and reference, with the discussion about e-textbooks at the high school or college level. The considerations seem to be different when one is talking about textbooks and there are still so many factors to consider that you have mentioned in this post and in the follow up. I'm glad you started the discussion. Now we just need to encourage people to join it. Of course, given the nature of technology, things will have changed by the time we finally get around to coming up with some solutions. It will be interesting to hear what happens at the school in Texas mentioned in one comment.

Janet HasBrouck, Teacher Librarian

Arcadia High School, Arcadia CA

I wonder if California's Governator visited with any real live librarians or teachers before suggesting all textbooks become e-textbooks?

And they want to ATTRACT members?

Thanks to sharp-eyed Iowan, Gordon Dahlby for sending this to me. I guess I was ISTE's poster child.

Thanks, ISTE, I appreciate you too.