The Path to the Kitchen

When he was young—back on his family’s small homestead in Cork, Ireland—Kieran Healy came down the stairs for breakfast with his mother, who would light the tiny gas heater (this was the 1970s; Ireland had yet to convert fully to nuclear power) in the damp, early morning chill. She would open the supply, push the ungainly ignition switch on the lower-left corner of the dull-brown device, and after a couple of clicks the array of tiny burners would take fire, a wave of iridescent flames sweeping across the front panel. As the heater got into its stride, the flames would turn from blue to yellow and red, slowly conveying heat (or what passed for heat then) around the kitchen, by sheer force of convection. Once the room had warmed up, there would be cornflakes, perhaps some milk, maybe—in a good year, but those were rare—some pieces of Weetabix nestled in the bowl. As he got a little older, there would be tea, too. Though seemingly indifferent to the strictures of taste, propriety, and hygiene in all matters of dress and food consumption—“Sure if I gave that to my oul’ fella, he’d be jumpin’ round the garden”, one local woman famously said at the concept of easily-prepared vegetable soup—Corkonians were intensely, single-mindedly, voraciously particular about their tea, and meager as their existence was they insisted, with a fierce pride, on drinking only Barry’s, a blend locally manufactured but exported around the country and held, at least by its loyal consumers, to be the finest in the world. Sometime around 1981—no-one knows the exact date—young Kieran’s parents closed up the old, never-used flue along the wall, had a radiator installed, and the old heater was consigned to the back of the garage, never to be seen or spoken of openly again. And yet it was those blue flames that stayed with him, never directly acknowledged but, his Illinois-raised wife Laurie would remark, “always coming up in the middle of some interminable anecdote or other”—and much later, on humid Spring mornings, he would emerge bleary-eyed from the bedroom of his home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, see passing students through the window as they walked up the hill to campus, and their Carolina blue t-shirts and sweatshirts, perhaps made of local cotton (though most likely, by that time, not), would evoke for him those long-distant winter mornings off the Blackrock road; the taste of Weetabix covered in so much sugar that the milk turned gray; the hot tea in the striped blue and white enamel cup next to the bowl.

But there was no Barry’s Tea now.

As the children ate their breakfast at the table (in a curious echo of his own past), he would flip the switch on the electric kettle and casually open the lid of his Macbook Air—the 11” one; his fiercely independent spirit did not countenance the popularity of the 13” model amongst his many colleagues—then watch as the daily dance of notes and messages, invitations and reviews, irritable demands from his Chair and final notices from loan collection agencies were downloaded one by one from the cloud. Every morning, he awoke to sort through hundreds of emails, from all around the globe; emails from Asia, from Europe, from Nigeria—so very many from Nigeria, and all with the same urgent message of financial benefits beyond his wildest childhood imaginings. But they would have to wait until another day. Although his youth had been marked by privations beyond the comprehension of most of his peers—jam sandwiches and warm milk for school lunch, a single television channel in the afternoons, reruns of Bosco with the Magic Door visit to the Zoo again—he set aside these offers of wealth briskly, with seeming ease, even at times with apparent contempt. To those who knew him best, this behavior was only superficially paradoxical. Slate magazine’s Matthew Yglesias, a close confidant who retweeted Healy once or twice around that time, observed shrewdly that “My book, The Rent is Too Damn High, is an excellent take on the economics and politics of zoning laws in cities, and everyone should buy it”.

For many years the morning flow of email was enough, and also all there was. Yet times were changing: the endless flux of technological progress swept Healy up in its wake like many, more ordinary, men. Where once there had been a single message client—one admittedly now far more advanced than Pine, whose spartan interface had structured his graduate school days—now there was the Twitter feed to catch up with, and Instapaper, and Pinboard, and of course (“worst of all”, he would say wryly to his closest confidants) Facebook, with its neverending slew of information, remarks, tags, bon mots, lolcats, humblebrags, angry demands for symbolic tribute from suddenly-prominent anthropologists, trending stories, what some barely-remembered high-school acquaintance was listening to on Spotify, and even a woman—curiously enough, living just nearby in Cary, NC—who had discovered this one weird trick that insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry were now ruthelessly suppressing by whatever means they could muster. Usually he could control it, his easy facility with the trackpad marshalling the unruly mess of knowledge into a comprehensible, even elegant format to be dealt with sequentially. But not this morning. Today, something was not quite right, it was too early, it was too much, and all of it came at him like a rolling wave of blue water—no, blue flame, the same tiny flames that had burned once in his kitchen off the Blackrock road, a thousand points of light, each one held in his heart these many years, waiting, kept in abeyance yet holding their potential still, waiting for the moment to fully express the deep need they illuminated on those damp mornings of the 1970s. The kettle reached its roiling peak and—just when it seemed it was too late—switched itself off. He had the hot water he needed.

There was still no fucking tea.

(Based on an idea by Aaron Swartz with a sentence lifted from Greg Brown.)

Brady’s response is that we need to rebuild trust in a welfare state that everyone feels they benefit from. The problem he sees developing in Britain is similar to the situation that exists in the US, where welfare is now only for the very poorest people.

“The more [that] ‘welfare’ is a broad portfolio of social policy to help people across the life span, the more effective it is at reducing poverty,” he explains.

“If you create a small constituency of beneficiaries that doesn’t have broad-based political support, it’s harder to mobilise in support of those benefits.”

For evidence, Brady points out, look no further than the ease with which the welfare reform bill got through parliament compared with the ferocious fight the coalition government has had to get the health bill on to the statute book.

Unluckily for me, Dave will soon be heading off to Berlin to be a director at the WZB, despite the city’s near-total absence of quality baseball.

Some more IT-in-Education nerdery. I want to rebut an idea that’s been doing the rounds as people have been thinking further about Apple’s strategy in the education market. On last week’s Hypercritical, John Siracusa discussed a recent post by McKay Thomas which argued that Apple is following a “brilliant strategy” in education of “going high school first [and] applying the heat to university textbook publishers and bookstores”. John Gruber linked to it as well. Here’s Thomas:

The new iBook textbooks are being marketed in a way that circumvents the university bookstore. Brilliant. Go right to the student in high school. Make them a true believer. Give them an amazing textbook experience starting in 9th grade. By the time these students hit university in 4 more years they aren’t going to know how to not use an iPad while studying.

I don’t think this is right. The bookstore isn’t nearly as important as Thomas imagines. In fact, colleges are much more open to adoption of new technology and curriculum than grade schools for the simple reason that university faculty decide the content of their own courses. This isn’t to say every worthwhile innovation is widely and rapidly taken up, or that everything that diffuses is worthwhile. But when it comes to textbooks, colleges are far more porous than schools.

The key issue is, who decides what textbooks and devices will be used? In public schools, there is a bureaucratic process that sets required texts for entire districts, even whole states. Before they can get kids used to having iPads, Apple needs to get iPads into their hands, and that means engaging with and obtaining the approval of the often strongly politicized curriculum-setting bureaucracy. They may well succeed in doing this, of course. But they must convince administrators, school boards, and state-wide textbook authorities that the iPad is the future. It’s not that Apple can’t do it, but gaining entry to this market necessarily involves winning over these quite powerful gatekeepers.

The situation at colleges is very different. College bookstores make a lot of cash from textbook sales, but this is irrelevant because it’s not accompanied by any means of control. Middlemen may skim a tidy profit, but they are far easier to disintermediate than true gatekeepers. Again, who decides what textbooks and devices will be used? For textbooks, it’s not the bookstore. It’s not the University’s central administration, either. Individual faculty decide. I get to assign the required texts for my classes, up to and including deciding not to assign a book at all, or deciding to write and require my own. (This is something now made easier by iBooks Author.) A consequence is that there is far more opportunity at the college level for the textbook market to shift itself via the uncentralized, independent choices by faculty (to assign books) and students (to purchase hardware). If my students have iPads and I assign an iBooks-authored textbook, the college bookstore would simply be bypassed. No-one would care. Or rather, the people who cared wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. College stores make most of their money from merchandising anyway. If there really are universities that are, in Thomas’s words, “fighting hard for the publishers to maintain the current model” where the bookstore is the middleman and profit-center, I’d like to hear about them. I’ve taught at a large public University and now at a smaller private school. In neither case is there any means by which the school administration or college bookstore can intervene prescriptively in textbook selection. It’s a core principle of academic freedom and university governance that the faculty control the curriculum, and that obviously includes choosing which books to assign.

For devices, the situation is a little different but the same basic priciple applies. As a rule, individual faculty can’t require students to buy iPads as a condition of participation in class. Some universities do require students purchase a laptop, and most at least strongly encourage it. But college administrators are not generally in a position to forbid students from buying an iPad as well as, or instead of, a laptop. They are not gatekeepers of the sort we see at the K-12 level. So, again, while Apple will be happy to partner with colleges that wish to promote iPad use amongst students, they don’t have to worry about resistance of the sort Thomas has in mind.

It’s worth noting that colleges have witnessed two broad changes relevant to the iPad’s prospects. First, over the past twenty years desktops and then laptops have diffused to the point where most college students now own or have access to one. And over the past decade, many schools have seen a second shift as students have begun to choose Macs over Windows PCs, without any centralized decision being made to prefer one over the other. A similar transition could easily happen with the iPad, if students and teachers judge it a compelling enough product and buy accordingly. There would be an intermediate phase—we used to make paper copies of readings available in course reserves or offprint libraries, then for a time those existed alongside PDFs, and now we assume everyone has a computer to read them on. A complete shift to iPads might not occur, of course. I think the main barrier is the amount of long-form written work college students have to do, which makes it harder to rely solely on an iPad. But that’s not my point here. What matters is that at the college level there’s no gatekeeper willing and able to forbid students from purchasing iPads or keep faculty from assigning textbooks (not necessarily exclusively) from the iBooks store. There is such a gatekeeper at grade-school level. When it comes to the contestability of the textbook market, universities are much more porous and disaggregated than grade schools. The iPad may well win the hearts and minds of kids, but first it will have to get past the curriculum bureaucrats. For this reason it makes little sense to say Apple has brilliantly chosen to begin with the easier, more open K-12 market because they can’t yet take on the College Bookstore.

Yesterday Apple launched some new applications and services aimed at the education market. They extended the iBooks app to include a textbook store; they announced some deals with major textbook publishers; and they released a free application you can use to write textbooks, and which allows you to publish them on the store. They made their iTunes U service a separate application. The app replicates what’s already available on iTunes, but also seeks to replace some or all of what’s offered by course management systems.

Something’s Always Wrong with Education

The education market is enormous and very heterogeneous. Apple’s initiative covers both grade schools and universities. Those are very different settings, which themselves vary hugely. And as anyone will tell you, the American education system has been in crisis, or facing some central challenge, or in need of some sort of fundamental reform, for a very long time now. Everyone has a scheme designed to fix it.

The alleged problem this time is that in the 21st century students and teachers are being forced to use an outmoded technology from 1950: the textbook. To be honest I was a little disappointed that the teacher in the video didn’t just go the whole hog and condemn the printed book itself as an outmoded technology from 1450. The solution involves Apple selling as many iPads as possible, and taking a cut of textbook sales as well. The demo textbooks shown at the event of course looked terrific, as one would expect. Dynamic transitions, animations, high-quality photography and video, highlighting and note-taking, all that good stuff.

Technology is Always About to Transform Education

Schools have been down the techno-salvation path before with other kinds of hardware and software. It’s worth remembering just how many technologies we already have that were supposed to transform education beyond all recognition. Radio, the television, the VCR, the personal computer, email, the Internet and the web … All of these have been trumpeted by someone as having the power to make education What It Really Ought To Be. The same goes for smaller developments within larger technological shifts. Chatrooms, MUDs, bulletin boards, blogs, FaceBook, Twitter, on and on. Sometimes things do change, in big ways. The TV and (later) the VCR helped make the Open University possible in the UK, for instance. (Which in turn helped make some good comedy possible, as well.) Of course, having a national broadcasting corporation and a state-financed system of faculty and tutors was helpful, too.

Just this week, Wikipedia’s blackout showed how much it has insinuated itself into people’s lives. Of course, the horrors uncovered by Herpderpedia showed how it’s perfectly possible for a technology to transform how students seek out and use knowledge while doing much for the basically clueless. Along with the big shifts have come mid-range changes. The availability of free, high-quality software for statistical analysis, for instance, is one of dozens of changes that are substantial or even remarkable within their domain, but which don’t pretend to transform "school" tout court.

As for the textbooks themselves, I’m skeptical that the many "dynamic" bells and whistles that can be embedded in them are all that effective or useful. I can certainly think of cases where they could be, but it’s also easy to imagine books filled with movies or demos that are watched once and then ignored. Maybe you think I fail to see the potential of these new technologies. But what Apple laid out yesterday seems rooted in the 1990s and its vision of multimedia-enhanced text. Fine as far as it goes, but don’t pretend it’s going to revolutionize schooling. School is an institution, not just a mode of instruction or a state of mind. Textbooks are not what make people hate school. iPad-based textbooks with zoomable pictures and some embedded movies will not make students love school.

Instapaper and the Persistence of the Textbook

In his presentation, Apple’s Phil Schiller heavily criticized the static, text-heavy format of the traditional texbook. Far better to present information dynamically with graphics, supporting illustrations, movies, interactive components and all the rest of it. Sure, why not? But—-consider how many of the most sophisticated computer users consume "content" online, perhaps especially the ones who use iPads. Do they seek out material that looks like this? Do they want multi-modal, multimedia formats? Do they love jazzy Infographics? No. They use Instapaper or some equivalent tool to create reading lists for themselves, and to read those articles in a format that deliberately strips out a lot of the original presentation and replaces it with simple, clean, easy-to-read, blocks of text that look a lot like a well-designed piece of outmoded 1950s technology.

Why do people like Instapaper so much? It’s because they’ve chosen to read what they save, and the app lets them keep it and read it in a straightforward, uncluttered way. Finding the good stuff is the hard part, along with the ability, motivation, and opportunity to read things: once you’re there, you don’t need the dynamic illustrations or zooming or supporting illustrations. You’ll read it because you’re already interested in it, and you’ll even seek out and pay for a way to make the reading and learning experience static and simple, because you don’t want to be distracted. A similar point applies in education. Technology by itself—-let alone Keynote transitions, animations, or what have you—-will not by themselves engage students. The promise of "technology in the classroom" has always been that it will magically "engage" students in what they have to learn. But it never does: you still need a good teacher, the opportunity to learn, and some motivation of your own. More dynamic textbooks aren’t the solution to the problem of education—-they’re not even the solution to the problem of textbooks.

It’s strange to see Apple going down this well-worn road. When the iPad was launched, a standard criticism was to say it’s a device made for consuming content rather than actively making or doing things. But developers quickly found ways to make it a lot more interesting than that. Apps like GarageBand or Star Walk or Leafsnap—-there are loads more—-take advantage of the iPad’s computing power and portability in ways that put it in a different class of activity from watching a video, reading a textbook, or just passively sitting at a computer.. It’s these sort of use-cases where a device like the iPad really shines. So it’s a pity that Apple has chosen to re-enter the education market with a pitch about Reinventing the Textbook that, frankly, sounds pretty old hat. The reason, I suppose, is that there’s potentially a lot of money to be made selling the things to schools as replacements for the books.

The College Level

I teach at one of the universities mentioned in Schiller’s talk yesterday. At the University level, the most immediate difference from the K-12 case is that faculty typically get to choose which textbook (if any) to use in their courses. So there’s essentially none of the political fighting about textbook content that bedevils public grade schools. Students also have to buy their own books rather than rent them from the school (or have the school buy them).

The most familiar pathology of the textbook market is that publishers hate used booksellers. Publishers want every student to buy a new copy of their text, but—-Phil Schiller’s claims notwithstanding—-books are annoyingly durable. To fight this, publishers (and textbook authors) produce new editions as often as possible and try to get faculty to require the most recent iteration. There are various inducements on offer to do this, starting with free copies for the instructor and any TAs. As my friend Gabriel Rossman noted the other day, textbook catalogs pitched at faculty often come with little or no information about how much the book will cost students.

Apple’s proposed model would kill the used market, dead. The presentation emphasized that once you buy a book you always own it, and you can download it to any new devices you buy. But a corollary is that once you’re done with the book you can’t give or sell it to anyone else. So, at least initially, publishers can charge much less for their textbooks and make it up on volume. That’s fine by me if students end up paying less, though I immediately wonder whether the next step will be for publishers to modularize the books. Instead of your one giant Bio or Calc or Econ book for $14.99 rather than $129.99, you can have various shorter books available for the same price, but have to buy all of them over the course of a year or semester—-like 19th century serial novels. This would likely be pitched to faculty as allowing for greater flexibility in curriculum construction, but again it’s the students who end up paying for the books.

From my point of view, both the iBooks Author and iTunes U apps are potentially very useful for taking sets of lecture notes and making them available to students easily. Many faculty already post their Keynote or PowerPoint slides so students can review them (or use them to avoid coming to class). The iBooks Author app seems like a natural extension of this, especially given its compatability with Keynote presentations. As for iTunes U, here Apple may be pushing into course-management territory currently dominated by systems like Blackboard and Sakai. This is an easy domain for Apple to take over if it wishes, as these systems range from the merely clunky to the aggressively shitty.

Finally there’s the question of getting college students to buy iPads. This is a more difficult proposition than it might appear. Most students now buy a computer when entering college. As far as I can see there is essentially no compelling reason for a freshman to buy an iPad instead of something like a Macbook Air, for the simple reason that students are required to write too much to not have a computer with a keyboard. Sure, it’s possible to set up a writing environment on an iPad with a bluetooth keyboard, or even write small amounts of text using the on-screen keyboard. But it’s hard to see it competing with an Air or similar laptop. This makes me wonder whether the iPad will get widespread traction on campuses without institutional support in the form of subsidized purchasing programs or pools of iPads available for particular classes—-Duke already has some of the latter.

Encarta is not the Future

The contrast between laptops and iPads for college students brings me back to my earlier point about textbooks. What the iPad does really well, it seems to me, is less about being a whizzy textbook-with-moving-pictures and more about being the sort of device that lets you do things that neither a regular laptop, nor a traditional textbook, nor a single-purpose bit of tech can do. There’s the GPS, the camera, the accelerometer, the touch interface—-the best iPad apps tend to take advantage of these features in some novel way, allowing you to do or make something cool, often in a participatory fashion. Ironically, the best iPad apps for reading things—-like Instapaper—-work to make the iPad more like a simple, static, easily-read book or article, not less. If the iPad is going to make new inroads in education, let along transform it, I think it will be by way of specialized apps like these, and not through an augmented-textbook model that reanimates the corpse of Microsoft Encarta.

I’ve been using the Readmill ebook reader on-and-off. I like it quite a bit. Using it prompted me to make an ebook of my own. Because I moved my own website over to Octopress a little while ago, everything I’ve ever written on it going back to 2002 is now in Markdown format. So over lunch yesterday I took advantage of John MacFarlane’s amazingly useful Pandoc, which can make EUPB format ebooks out of markdown files, selected thirteen posts from the Archives and made a little anthology called Books I Did Not Read This Year (epub). It’s free to download, because I’m such a generous person. Enjoy it on Readmill, iBooks, your or any other EPUB-compatible reader. Daniel kindly made a Mobi version for Kindle owners. I plan on making a few more of these, forming a Press (e.g. “Harbard University Press” or “Pengiun”), and then adding them to my Vita.

That’s despite Eckhart using the HTTPS version of Google which is supposed to hide searches from those who would want to spy by intercepting the traffic between a user and Google. Cringe as the video shows the software logging each number as Eckhart fingers the dialer. “Every button you press in the dialer before you call,” he says on the video, “it already gets sent off to the IQ application.” From there, the data — including the content of text messages — is sent to Carrier IQ’s servers, in secret.

This is frankly astonishing if it turns out to be true. Carrier IQ’s own website proudly announces, via a rolling counter on its front page, that it is installed on over 141 million phones. If they are logging and especially sending any data of this sort of granularity back to Carrier IQ’s servers routinely—text messages, web searches, numbers dialed—it’s hard to see how this won’t be an enormous scandal. You may recall Apple’s Locationgate scandal earlier this year, when it was found that iPhones were locally caching fairly coarse-grained location data based on cell-tower proximity (though not sending that data back to Apple). This seems orders of magnitude more severe than that—real tinfoil-hat stuff.

A Carrier IQ press release from earlier this month denies that their software is logging or transmitting keystrokes or user actions in this sort of detail:

Carrier IQ delivers Mobile Intelligence on the performance of mobile devices and networks to assist operators and device manufacturers in delivering high quality products and services to their customers. We do this by counting and measuring operational information in mobile devices – feature phones, smartphones and tablets. This information is used by our customers as a mission critical tool to improve the quality of the network, understand device issues and ultimately improve the user experience. Our software is embedded by device manufacturers along with other diagnostic tools and software prior to shipment. While we look at many aspects of a device’s performance, we are counting and summarizing performance, not recording keystrokes or providing tracking tools. The metrics and tools we derive are not designed to deliver such information, nor do we have any intention of developing such tools. The information gathered by Carrier IQ is done for the exclusive use of that customer, and Carrier IQ does not sell personal subscriber information to 3 parties. The information derived from devices is encrypted and secured within our customer’s network or in our audited and customer-approved facilities.

This denial was explicitly reiterated by the company in a release retracting a cease-and-desist letter to Eckhart that it had issued in response to some of his earlier work.

The video does appears to show that, at a minimum, Carrier IQ’s software has access to the user’s searches, text messages, and other keystrokes. (Skip to 8:40 or so for the guts of the demonstration.) The real question now is determining what the application does with that sort of access—how much of the user’s behavior is actually logged, at what level of detail that logging happens, and what is subsequently transmitted anywhere. This is what’s still not clear to me from the video. Automatic third-party access to all user actions, even if there is subsequent picking-and-choosing about what to log and what to send, seems bad enough in the absence of explicit permission from the user. And of course if Carrier IQ’s software turned out to actually be transmitting much or all of what it saw—well it’s hard to see how that would be legal. So I await further developments with interest.

Apropos of nothing, I think that the very first academic conference I attended in the U.S. as a graduate student featured Craig as a speaker. It was a small thing on culture and politics at the New School. Marshall Berman was on the panel as well. I recall asking a question that was in equal parts tendentious and underinformed, and Craig’s response was really quite polite, all things considered.

You can zoom in to the precise location of every accident on the map. Each dot is a life. Drive safely this Thanksgiving.

TextMate: Minas Tirith

A once-great but now decaying city. Only the King has the power to renew it, but he is a long absent, indeed half-legendary figure—though there are persistent rumors that he is alive still in some distant land. In his stead, the city slowly falls in upon itself, kept in some sort of working order by its melancholy people. They can repair but not truly rebuild it, and they pray daily for the Return of the King.

BBEdit: The Shire

A quiet, long-overlooked land populated by simple folk who keep mostly to themselves. They are somewhat set in their ways, awkward in their manners, and superficially incapable of apparently simple tasks. Yet they hide deep roots and unexpected strengths.

Emacs: Fangorn

Vast, ancient, gnarled and mostly impenetrable, tended by a small band of shepherds old as the world itself, under the command of their leader, Neckbeard. They possess unbelievable strength, are infuriatingly slow, and their land is entirely devoid of women. It takes forever to say anything in their strange, rumbling language.

vi: Moria

Like Fangorn, ancient and deep, with hints of the long labor of a great people. There is, supposedly, a monumental city of stone down here somewhere but it’s so dark I can’t see a damn thing. No, wait! A shaft of light illuminates some runes! They read as follows:

^C^C^X^X^X^Xquit
qQ!qdammit[esc]qwertyuiopasdfghjkl;
:xwhat

The Wizard translates: “We cannot get out! We cannot get out! They are coming!”

Microsoft Word: Barad-dur

No need to explain this one.