Yesterday I rode an
information-highway metaphor of sorts--the Greyhound line between Northern
In my research for the Education paper, I also found that public libraries are pathetically underfunded--surprise of surprise. One West Coast county was spending just a quarter per year per resident in tax money to buy library materials. And even better equipped libraries of the old-fashioned kind have their limits. Just ask John Iliff, a former reference librarian who recently wrote about electronic books and their possibilities for users of the Pineallas Park Public Library in Florida. "Anyone needing a comprehensive overview of most topics," he says, noting the space limits of the typical local library, "has to go elsewhere" Does this mean that I'm going to depict today's Internet as a full solution to the woes I've just described? Hardly. In fact, I'm going to talk first about the limits of the Net. The real scandal of the Internet isn't porn; it's what is not online for children and other library users. You know what the worst tease on the Net is for the curious? The library catalogues--literally thousands of them. You see, they are full of references to books that you and your children cannot dial up because they haven't even been digitized.
Third, you'll learn about Ted Nellen, a New York teacher who's at the cutting edge in the use of online books and other resources. Ted can assure you that, yes, there's knowledge beyond textbooks--that even today the Internet can give low-income children more of a chance to catch up with others, as long as teachers know how to use the Net effectively.
Why the Net is a Library NOT Hardware isn't the only area where the e-book world could stand plenty of improvement. Despite the title of this presentation, the Net is a true library NOT. There are several reasons. It is not well indexed. Even Northern Light, the most thorough searcher on the Internet, indexes just one-sixth percent of the Web pages. Web sites come and go. And as for accuracy, the applicable motto might well be, "Reader beware." The Web abounds with good material, but it takes skill to locate and evaluate it.
Now, here's a regrettable irony in the public domain area. Guess whose White House joined the usual suspects on the Hill and pushed for longer copyright terms so that it would typically take two decades longer for modern books and other intellectual property to be available to libraries and the public without copyright restrictions. Yes, of course. Bill Clinton's White House--the same one that so commendably has been open to the possibilities of e-books for schools. The White House giventh. The White House taketh away.
As inspirational as the classics can be for students, however, they are not the full solution. Cliff Stoll, the author of Silicon Snake Oil, has made a career of being a techie Luddite; and I find his book just plain dishonest in many ways. But I couldn't agree more with some of his concerns. He has correctly noted that the Net lacks easy answers to such questions as, "What political compromises caused Bismarck to become the capital of North Dakota?" and "What's the history of the Ruhr Valley, and what are the implications of the new Eastern European competition?" Even Homer won't have the answers in those cases. Nor Thomas Carlyle. If nothing else, the classics, as valuable as they are, do not contain the grubby details that young people and the rest of us need to muddle our way through life. Let me give you an example close to home. My wife suffers from fibromyalgia, arthritis, heart problems, a medical dictionary's worth of ailments, and though she works and has medical insurance at the moment, she may well have to retire early in the next five or ten years. That means we must try to save and invest every stray nickel--the reason I'm not about to splurge on a gold-plated ticket to Augusta, no matter important the cause. I got nowhere with the standard mutual funds. I found a stock-market guide, however, that did wonders for my bank account--as did the investment-related editorial work that I obtained because I could educate myself That one book put Carly and me thousands of dollars ahead. Yes, a Web site existed for the investment guide and sister volumes. But it wasn't just information I was absorbing; it was knowledge, the interpretation, the structure and reasoning, the vision of the authors, not just the raw facts. I love hyperlinks, but sometimes we need just a plain, linear, book-style presentation--online or off. And textbooks alone are not enough online; we need other kinds of books, too, as I've just illustrated. Wouldn't it be great if young people for free could read the investment guide via the Net--in time to benefit much more than I will from the glories of capital appreciation and compounded dividends? Beyond that, I would argue that, utilitarian or not, investment guides or Great American Novels, books are valuable in themselves. We need to get the modern copyrighted works on the Net in a systematic way, and so far this is not being done--despite all of Al Gore's past rhetoric about a little girl in Tennessee being able to dial up the Library of Congress.
I suspect that Andrew Carnegie's ghost would be feel rather grouchy at the lack of free library books on the Net. He'd want tired, overworked parents to be able to be able to sit back on the couch at home and guide their kids through well-stocked cyberlibraries. Carnegie's ghost wouldn't want paper books and brick or concrete libraries to vanish; he'd simply be looking ahead to the many benefits of the electronic variety. So far, however, despite all the talk of child-friendly government, Washington hasn't given you what you need for your children on the Net. Nor has the private sector come through. Bill Gates owns at last several rare copies of The Great Gatsby but so far refuses to buy up the electronic right and share his favorite book on the Net. I believe that Gates, ever the pragmatist, may change his mind if you speak up. Why should the kids have to wait two more decades for Gatsby to be in cyberspace? No jihad against Mr. Gates or Microsoft here. I'm just suggesting that in this respect, he has yet to be Carnegie for real--despite all the glib comparisons in the press. Not Just Beer Ads, Either: Does this mean that we now have an information
highway with no sights to see but beer ads? The So what are my research techniques to find good material? Depends on the situation. And even then, my techniques won't necessarily be your techniques. Here are just a few examples of where I go on the Net:
--If I'm after a concept rather than a specific thing or person. Then I may use an index such as Yahoo, which, if it can't find anything, will send me automatically to a search engine. I don't know where I'd be without Yahoo, in which, incidentally, I am a stockholder because I believe so much in the service. Sometimes I will use Yahoo like a search engine and go for a particular term--but still with a concept in mind. Yahoo will quickly let me know the category into which the term falls, and then I'll see a list of other choices. Just one word, for example, "TeleRead," will bring up the category of Arts: Humanities: Literature: Electronic Literature.
--If the material came out in a commercial news publication. I may then turn to the poor man's Lexis-Nexis, the Electric Library, a commercial service which picks up articles from places ranging from USA Today to Fortune. I may also try the free Newsbot service for the most recent news articles, or the Wall Street Journal, which lets me go back a month for free; older articles from the Journal and other major populations cost $3 a pop. There's the NewsLibrary, which, off hours, charges between $1 and $3. Keep in mind, too, that many fine magazines, such as the Atlantic Monthly, actually let you search back issues for free. Even a long-time cyberholdout, the New Yorker, is on the Net at last with its own Web site even if, compared to the Atlantic, it's a bit stingy with its freebies. Also, don't forget AJR Newslink for pointers to thousands of newspapers, magazines and broadcast stations through the world. --If the topic is education or subject-specific content. For the former, I may try the U.S. Department of Education or perhaps the AskEric or Andy Carvin's EdWeb: Exploring Technology and School Reform or the Mid-continental Regional Educational Laboratory or the Online Internet Institute, which, among other things, includes some links to search engines for various curricula. Among the quickest, easiest, most direct route to material on history, science, math and the rest would be Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators--part of the Discovery Channel's online efforts. Between all those resources, you'll be able to identify the best of the specialty sites--for example, MendelWeb (for those interested in everything about the works of Gregor Mendel) or the Perseus Project, which offers a tour of the world of the Greeks and others from antiquity, including introductions to the art and literature. For students of Americans history, a "must" might be the multimedia American Memory Project at the Library of Congress, which, of course, offers the huge catalogue full of titles that the little girl in Tennessee just cannot call up right now. And finally, don't forget the Smithsonian, whose collections are so varied, from art to space to history--check out both a Smithsonian FAQ and a Yahoo overview. --If I want to track down an e-book. Obviously the Gutenberg site is a good start, and you should also try other literature collections listed in Yahoo. An outstanding possibility is the Internet Classic Archive, which offers 441 classics by 59 authors--Greco-Roman with a smattering of Chinese and Persian. Especially good about the Archive is that it links you not just to texts but to explanations of them. It so points you to other first-rate meta-sites, including the University of Pennsylvania site with more than 9,000 listings and the ability to let you search instantly by author and title. Of course, I may want to evaluate the facts and conclusions, not just dig them up. One way is to see how many other sites link to those with the most helpful information; Hotbot and Alta Vista both have this capability. With Hotbot you can pull down a menu and say you're searching for all sites that match such-and-such address--and then type it in. With Alta Vista you can use a format like link://http://www.teleread.org. Besides seeing how the number of links, I'll find out if the material and originator command respect offline. What kinds of real-world connections are there? To a publisher? A university or well-regarded company? Not that those are foolproof criteria, but when used together, they help. If I'm working in a narrow subject area, I may even run across sites that rate other sites--and, yes, there are K-12 sites along these lines. How Ted Nellen Helps His Kids So far I've helped you find good material. But how can teachers and students use it most effectively, especially with disadvantaged students? I can't tell you what to do in every situation, but I believe you could do worse than to catch up with the Cyber English page that Ted Nellen has put together. Ted and his kids are Argument A for Wiring Up the Schools, except that his triumphs are not just technological. Rather he also has blazed new ground as a teacher. Let me get your attention in a hurry by talking about the results--before I tell you how wired libraries helped Ted achieve them..
Well, as it turns out the average for New York City schools is 78 percent, but in Ted's classes, all the students passed. Yes. All. 100 percent. And at least four fifths of his own students came from low-income families, were the children of immigrants, suffered from disabilities or otherwise faced obstacles. Not quite your Exeter crowd, no? So what does this have to do with cyberlibraries? Plenty. Ted has adapted his teaching methods to the needs of wired children, rather than trying to the them into the standard box, and most of his methods would work in any school--rich or poor. Ted says: "Traditionally teachers walk and talk and say, 'Listen to me.'" To use his language, they're "a sage onstage." And despite all the nice words about computers, they see them as rivals for the kids' attention. Ted is different. He sees himself as a guide rather than as an I'm-okay-you're-not kind of boss to the children. Ted does not work in a standard classroom, even. Instead, in a big, long room, he has set up 30 computers that claim the children's main attention. The Webbed version of my talk includes a link to a case study by Liz Cushman Brandjes that will supply details of Ted's teaching methods, his environment and the interplay between it all. Ted painstakingly teaches the children to use the cyberlibraries and other resources on the Internet, and then he turns them loose on their own. He does not feel a need to strut around and show off his knowledge. Instead he wants the children to be able to tour the Web and read printouts from it at their own pace. That is how all the kids in his class passed the Regents' exam. Ted worked with his students individually to assess their needs, then nudges them in the direction of the appropriate Web sites. His knowledge of the Net multiplies his effectiveness as a teacher. Let's extrapolate a little from one the Web sites I've already recommended--the Perseus Project out of Tufts University. Well, Ted didn't mention it, but I could imagine his guiding one student to the part of the Project that emphasized the text, while another student might need to spend a little more time amid the visually oriented pages--not to avoid the text, but to whet his appetite for the words themselves. In fact, Ted might not have to do any guiding at all. That's one of the glories of hypertext. Students just click on the links and follow them wherever they need to go. The Net itself accommodates different learning styles. And not just in the sense of the visual vs. the verbal. Some students, for example, might want to start with an overview of a particular period in ancient Greece or Rome. Others might start with the life of Socrates or Julius Caesar. With the Net, the student can begin anywhere he or she wants and then cover other territory later on. But can kids really enjoy reading off computer screens? Well, Ted says that if anything, many children prefer that. They can search long texts for keywords. And they can blow up the size of the type or change the style, and while that sounds like a minor detail, it isn't. Dyslectic kids, for example, can especially benefit from the ability to display material as they would choose to see it in their own Netscape or Internet Explorer. Too, it's easy for them copy out little sections of the material they're reading and save them in files for their use later on. Meanwhile Ted himself can take Project Gutenberg books and others in the public domain and and put them on his own server and add links to his own notes, to discussion areas he sets up for the kids, and to outside Web areas of his choice. What more, even though the kids enjoy great control over the format, Ted can keep the focus on text in cases where he prefer this. He believes this is a powerful advantage that online text can offer over modern textbooks, many of which have busy layouts--full of charts and pictures, a mishmash that may be catchy by the standards of Wired Magazine but a disaster to children with attention-deficit problems. As Ted sees it, too many textbooks nowadays are really designed more to impress parents and other adults and not enough to serve the needs of the children themselves. Of course, there at the Murry Bergtraum High School High School for Business Careers, the budget for purchase of new books isn't that gigantic to begin with. He says it's all of around $10,000 or so a year. Imagine--$10,000 for 3,400 students, or less than $3 a student. New textbooks are just part of the problem. What about the old ones? Ted says: "We have textbooks going back to the 50s." Some are full of racial and ethnic stereotypes--hardly right for any school, much less one where Africans and other minorities are together the majority. Disgusted teachers have ripped out the pages. We're not talking here about censorship of great literature, but rather about efforts to avoid having the children's self-esteem lowered by the work of hack writers. What's really spooky is that Ted and his colleagues can't even throw the book away. The school bureaucracy requires that used books be sent either to junior high schools, poor places like Mississippi or Third World countries. And Ted and colleagues could rather not pass the problem on; and so, like toxic waste that cannot find a disposal site, the poisonous books won't go away. So what do the children read in place of the textbooks? Well,.Ted has constructed his own Syllaweb to guide them to the best material he can find on the Web and elsewhere. The Web counts more than the elsewhere, and on it he helps the students catch up with everything from short stories in the Atlantic Monthly to fiction. They get the material immediately when they need it, not when a teacher decides to introduce them to it; the Net offers the ultimate "just in time learning." Via Project Gutenberg and other sources, the students have access to the works of Mark Twain, Jane Austen and other greats, but in some ways it is even better that Ted exposure them to more recent material. Why? Because the reviews aren't out yet. In evaluating the material, there is squat for the students to imitate; they have no choice but think independently. After a student finishes a book review, it doesn't just sit inside a drawer in the teacher's desk, awaiting a grade. Instead Ted's students can post to the Web for inspection by him and classmates, and they can discuss the results in mailing lists and otherwise through the Net. The students amass online portfolios--Webfolios, to use a Nellism--and I'll include a link to those from the 11th graders he taught recently. The portfolios themselves include not only prose and opinions from the students themselves but also hyperlinks that lead you to the articles that played a part in the formation of those opinions. And, yes, Ted has the students doing the Web coding, the Hypertext Markup Language, for their pages. He doesn't want them to be prisoners of a specific vendor of software. Of course we know that HMTL is changing, but at least Ted encourages students to pick up the basics that can serve them well, no matter how the language evolves. Even with the book reports and other material posted, the process still isn't complete. Thanks to the Web, the parents can look over their children's work--from home. The parents themselves can gauge the quality of the students' efforts and use email to communicate with Ted about the children's success or lack of it. "But," I asked Ted, "is this really useful to kids from low-income families? How many of the parents have computers at home? And what about the network costs?" Well, it turns out that they may lack computers at home, but can use them at the city agencies and companies where they work. And others can come to the high school on weekends, or use machines at local libraries. The fact that hardware prices are dropping so quickly should only help. I would also remind people of the existence of groups such as the LINCT Coalition, which lets low-income people earn computers by teaching others how to use them. And Ted himself notes that some teachers may even team up with local colleagues to help the students themselves learn to assemble computers. But what about schools that feel they can't afford Web sites? Even that is no longer an excuse, given the number of free Web hosting services, including, if I'm not mistaken, some offered by Koz Technologies on whose SchoolLife server the PTA will publish this paper. You can even find free mailing lists. And of course, it isn't just the schools that can use them. So can PTAs. You can even get free dialup net connections through a service called Net Zero, which, though cluttered with advertising, is still infinitely better than no service at all. Simply put, the means exists for hardworking people--regardless of their circumstances--to team up and locate the resources to replicate much of what Ted Nellen has done. But resources are just part of the equation, and here is where the PTA comes in. You're going to have to lobby the schools and the teachers to do more than get the boxes and cables installed. You're going to have to lean on them to change their ways of teaching to make the best use of the sources. The Ted Nellen story isn't just one of "What is." It's one of "What Should Be." And even of "What Shouldn't Be." The last thing in the world that schools need, Ted says, is to expect to use the Net just to teach to tests. He doesn't even try. Ted tells me that he spent all of a day or so briefing his kids about the Regents' Test on which they triumphed. You might say there's a lesson here. Like ever-more-expensive stocks, like members of the opposite sex, tests can be more trouble than they're worth if you chase them too hard. If you want to use Net libraries to replicate Ted's work at Murry Bergtraum High School, you're going to have to upgrade the schools and if need be the teachers. In the era of wired libraries, the "sage onstage" approach just isn't going fly. TeleRead: Another "Should Be"
So what does TeleRead involve? Basically three parts. You already know about the library one. TeleRead could employ tracking mechanisms--the same ones used in pay-per-download schemes--to assure fair compensation for writers and publishers. You wouldn't be able to dial up more books without first reporting past usage. Ways would be devised to protect privacy; an approach could be used similar to that for anonymous digital cash. A national digital library fund could pay for the books. The money could come from a mix of public and private sources; this would be a chance for Bill Gates to be Carnegie for real. I would not want the government, especially the federal government, paying for everything; we need a diverse range of funding sources to assure freedom of expression. In the end, TeleRead would not single-handedly eliminate differences between the number of commercial e-books available to rich school districts and poor ones, but it would go a long way to help. What's more, it actually increase the sizes of the collections for all districts, such and poor. With the library model in use, at least partly, students could freely exchange included books over the Net without running afoul of the law. Another element of TeleRead would be the promotion of the proper hardware for reading books. Desktops and today's laptops are a start but no substitute for small, tablet-style computers that students and others could read while stretched out on the sofa or the floor. I propose that private industry, Washington and the states and localities team up encourage the spread of tablet-style machines that could be used not just for just for reading books but also for general Web browsing and light-duty writing and other purposes. The ergonomics of desktop machines are not optimal for reading. You don't want students to have to sit at a desk hour after hour; they should be able to do what children naturally do, and sprawl out and relax. Even laptops are not optimal, and not just because of size and weight. Screens may not be the right shape or clear enough or offer enough contrast between the type and the background, and, the way the keyboards are positioned, it may be awkward to hold them. TeleReaders could work with detachable keyboards for writing, and could be propped up with fold-out wired stands. No, I don't see TeleReaders as the main machines for writing, but at least the capability would be there. To answer one question for the insiders, TeleReaders could use the Open eBook standard and, yes, would of course work with the standard HTML and ASCII. It is important that we not isolate the Net for the books, or the books from the Net. I also see another use for TeleReaders--for electronic forms for citizens to use for commercial transactions on the Web, and for Web commerce in general. The more highly we can automate the whole population, the more money we'll save in both the public and private sectors and along the way help to cost-justify the national digital library. The same pen-interface machines that were so good for reading books might also be good for electronic forms and the like. What about the roles of local libraries? TeleRead
would hardly replace them. One of the biggest In concluding, let me stress that TeleRead is not
the full solution to those famous "savage inequalities." But it is a realistic
one. None other than William F. Buckley, Jr., hardly a fan of new government programs, has
written two sympathetic columns about it. This is a nonpartisan proposal Note: This is a work in progress done under severe time constraints--I finished just before I left for the bus station. It will eventually be de-glitched. I welcome fixes from readers! E-mail me at rothman@clark.net. Please note that after giving the presentation, I made some improvements in the Web version; this is not an exact transcript. |
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Net
is a true library NOT, but it is also a wasteland NOT. It is a boon to children and adults
alike, and often the lines blur when it comes to benefits. Recently, for example, while
working on a financial Web site, I wanted to make the point that Wall Street bigshots were
badmouthing the stocks of perfectly good companies that investors could pick up in
Blue-Light specials. What better analogy to use than the Salem Witchcraft trials, the same
events that 
