It’s Dinovember, and his family’s plastic dinosaurs have been getting into mischief all month. Every year, Tuma and his wife devote the month of November to “convincing our children that, while they sleep, their plastic dinosaur figures come to life. 

“Why do we do this?,” says Tuma, “Because in the age of iPads and Netflix, we don’t want our kids to lose their sense of wonder and imagination. In a time when the answers to all the world’s questions are a web-search away, we want our kids to experience a little mystery.”

They had managed to breach the refrigerator and help themselves to a carton of eggs:

We live in a society where too much “creative expression” is varnished consumption. Express yourself wearing brand name clothes, and personalizing your hamburger. Real creativity is a whole different animal, or dinosaur. As educational organizations, we need to help inspire parents to dig into creativity while kids are young. From historical dress-up to science experiments to pure fantasy. Tuma’s project is a great example, and I hope it takes off.

The previous morning, the dinos had climbed onto the kitchen counter to raid the fruit bowl.

Even the dinosaurs are creative. Here they made him look like Barney:

“All it takes is some time and energy, creativity, and a few plastic dinosaurs,” says Tuma.

Check out his full article with lots more dino shenanigans.

Launched in autumn 2011 by a British nonprofit, HistoryPin pins historical items on a map. Their service demonstrates the potential for a global, crowdsourced database of historical media.

HistoryPin now boasts 277,348 items. Their aim is to encourage a broad audience to take part in local and global history, help people feel closer to the places they live, to conserve and open up global archives, and to become a large global archive of human history. So far, they’re off to a good start. Many cities have several dozen pins, and a few large cities have hundreds.

The challenge of global coverage

In the United Kingdom, HistoryPin’s home country, they have ~50k pins now. Some of those pins are cross-referenced with Google’s street view. For example, here are Elvis impersonators in Westminster, London, in 2006, superimposed on a current street view scene:

Despite the apparently high numbers, HistoryPin’s growth appears to be flatlining. They drew ~20k users in the few few months of 2011, helped by glowing press coverage at launch, but only at 30k more users in the last two years. They have 1,353 institutions registered, but few institutions are doing large-scale uploads. It’s unclear why growth is poor. The site is easy to use, and the usage terms are reasonable. They have a web site, as well as Android and iOS apps. One possible problem is that it’s unclear what the long-term future of HistoryPin is, so it’s not necessarily worth investing a lot of time. Also, they have a closed system, with no way to export content back out.

Growth needs to be exponential if HistoryPin has any hope of carpeting the globe. Relative to the U.K.’s 94k square miles of landmass, HistoryPin has barely 1 item for every two square miles. In London’s 607 square miles, HistoryPin has ~390 pins, again, barely 1 pin for every two square miles. HistoryPin would need at least 100x more pins to have serious global coverage. (For a sense of the scale needed for a global view, as of last year, Google Street View had photographed over 5 million miles of unique streets, covering 39 countries and about 3,000 cities, and they are rapidly expanding that.)

Nevertheless, the concept is compelling. Here’s an image from HistoryPin of a train station in Tuscon, Arizona, USA:

And here’s an image of the same building, 9 decades later, from Google Street View. It is now a restaurant:

Going global — from space

A global view is available from satellites. Here is a comparison of Tucson in summery 1984 (left) vs 2011 (right) from NASA’s State of Flux gallery, which posts weekly comparison images from satellites and land-based cameras.

Tucson, in the Sonoran Desert in southern Arizona, is one of the oldest continually inhabited areas of North America, with evidence of settlements 3,000 years ago. As with many western cities, Tucson was organized on a grid pattern, which can be seen from space. The side-by-side photos show that the city has grown quickly over the past 30 years. Indeed, population in the greater Tucson area has increased from about 600,000 in 1980 to more than one million in 2011. Expansion has been largely in the eastern region since mountains on the north, west and south restrict development.

The State of Flux site is run by Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and California Institute of Technology. It is a convenient launching pad for educators and the general public interested in change. The time periods range from  centuries to days. Some are related to climate change, urbanization, or the ravage of natural hazards such as fires and floods.

Online courses and MOOCs may be a poor substitute for in-person learning with a charismatic teacher, but they are light-years better than nothing, and are particularly relevant for higher education and specific skills, when students are self-motivated.

Universities, professional organizations, and educational nonprofits should keep these audiences in mind when developing new, free curricula.

It’s a huge audience. Billions of people lack the knowledge and skills gained by a college education. The following map shows the fraction of people enrolled in college or university, relative to the number of college-age teens and young adults:

Most countries fail to give their citizens a college education. Any country in the map which is not dark red is not college-educating a large proportion of it’s citizens. (The statistics exceed 100% when there are many adult-age students in school.)

But as more and more of the population is online, particularly via mobile devices, there are real possibilities for online learning.

In an extreme example, tiny Swaziland (landlocked within South Africa) has 1.2 million citizens, but only one university (serving <6000 undergrads, relative to ~120k young adults of college age). Like many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Swaziland’s school system allows few students to advance to secondary school or college. Of the 20 kids in the above photo, maybe one kid will go to college. However, in 2011, 18% of the Swaziland population was using the internet. Could they learn online?

Similarly in Asia, Bangladesh has ~150 million citizens. 43% of the population over age 15 is literate. There are 88 universities, educating 277k post secondary students — only 13% of the college-age citizens. Internet is used by 22% of the population (33 million people), mostly via their mobile phones. (Mobile internet is the only internet most places outside the capital Dhaka.) Can Bangladeshis learn meaningful skills online?

Some could. If we make more online courses available.

More statistics

The education statistics in Sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia are particularly grim. College educations in Malawi, Niger, and Chad hover around 1-2%. Madagascar is 4%. This is highly correlated to the wealth of a country.

This measure, the Gross enrollment ratio (GER) is the ratio of the undergrads to college-aged citizens. Here is a graph of GER vs. per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a measure of the economic strength of a country:

The overal diagonal trend is that richer countries send more of their students to college. Curiously, there are outliers, such as wealthy Qatar which has only 12% tertiary GER due to other social factors which suppress education in their society.

Another way to look at this is to see how many high school students continue to college. In no society does everyone go to college. The following graph compares the fraction of society that goes to high school vs. college, in countries worldwide:

In the orange triangle above, potentially college-educated adults have their dreams squashed. For example, in the Arab world, 69% of society goes to high school and 23% to college; in developing sub-Saharan Africa, 41% of the population goes to high school and 8% go to college; in east Asia and the Pacific, 80% go to high school but only 30% go to college.

Technology itself is not the answer

Brazilian class using One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) computers.

Of course, any dream that technology can conquer educational disparities needs a serious reality check. One of the more notable failures is the One Laptop per Child project, led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Nicholas Negroponte. Despite their claims that by distributing $100 laptops, “we have seen two million previously marginalized children learn, achieve and begin to transform their communities.” In 2012, two separate studies — one in Nepal and the other in Peru — concluded that kids using the computers gained little or no benefit in terms of improved language or math skills or school attendance.

But that does not mean we should not try. Cheap laptops, tablets, and internet-connected smart phones are proliferating at an amazing rate.  More online courses, with substantial, meaningful content — delivered to these students online — can make a difference for increasing numbers of learners who otherwise lack any real options.

The internet has demonstrated profound power to reshape societies, with social media fueling the protests of the Arab Spring. When classrooms are unavailable or limited, online courses are a huge deal. An online course has a clear curriculum, delivers content with text, audio, videos and/or interactivity, and provides some type of assessment. — And can potentially make a difference to millions.

Source: Graph of tertiary enrollment and other stats from UNESCO. In the GER map, countries in white don’t have current statistics from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics.

Fan fiction (or ‘FanFic’) is a retelling our favorite stories, just as humans have always retold myths and legends. It is mostly an amateur phenomenon, featuring characters from movies, TV shows, and popular culture in new situations or adventures. FanFic authors recombine established characters, “worlds” (i.e., the setting or universe of the original stories) and histories (the original events) from current works. Authors may also add new characters, new worlds and new histories, and extend minor characters and story elements of the originals.

FanFic can be easily dismissed because there’s a lot of garbage (and a lot of porn), but there are a lot of gems too.

The world of fan fiction and fan art is huge — exploding in recent years as the internet makes it easy to for fan writers and readers to publish, share and connect.

The largest fan-fiction site, Fanfiction.net, hosts millions of works, based on books, TV shows, movies, comics and more. The site hosts over 644k stories based on Harry Potter, and over 210k based on Twilight. There’s a thriving midlist too, with around 10k stories for topics like the Phantom of the Opera and Gossip Girl; plus a long tail, with 49 items based on Treasure Island and 9 for Curious George (e.g., Curious George and the Pizza). Many other sites cater to specific fandoms, including harrypotterfanfiction and twilighted, for “Twilight” fan fiction, and many other self publishing sites.

Wingfic: Sherlock with wings, illustration by Alice X. Zhang

FanFic serves niche audiences with a never-ending appetite for new twists and scenarios. Like any booming literary subculture, FanFic has its own rules, lingo, cliques and tropes. The subgenre “denialfic” is for stories with alternate endings or gross plot changes (e.g., a character does not die), “wingfic” where all the characters have wings, and “futurefic” transplants characters into the future. A large body of writing involves crossovers, such as taking characters from Star Trek into J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth.

The writers are not motivated by money. In fact, fan fiction is almost exclusively unpaid. It’s a hobby for most writers, and their reward is readership and feedback from readers. Moreover, FanFic stays legit by being noncommercial. By not selling stories, since FanFic is inherently a form of criticism, and is generally transformative (creating different persona and events for characters), authors stay squarely under the protection of Fair Use. “Especially for noncommercial stuff, fair use offers plenty of protection [for fan works] now,” says Professor Rebecca Tushnet, professor at the Georgetown University Law Center.

But income could be nice. “There’s probably not an author/fangirl alive who hasn’t fantasized about being able to write about her favorite show. The fact that you can earn royalties doing so makes it even better,” says FanFic author Trish Milburn, who writes on The Vampire Diaries.

Last week, Amazon threw a new twist into the equation with “Kindle Worlds,” a new self publishing site for FanFic authors. Amazon Publishing will pay royalties to both the rights holder of the original work and the authors of the new works. Authors will earn 35% of the net revenue for works of >10,000 words, and 20% for short stories of  5,000 – 10,000 words. The profit split between Amazon and the rights holder is not disclosed. Porn is not allowed. And crossovers from other Worlds are no permitted. Other KindleWorlds authors can build on prior work of any other Worlds author. Amazon Publishing will set the price for Kindle Worlds stories. Most will be priced from $0.99 through $3.99.

This is a fantastic entry point for FanFic authors who want a mechanism for selling their works, and it will be interesting to see if the market is successful. FanFic readers are accustomed to free stories. Not everyone agrees that 20-35% revenue share is fair: “This is not anywhere close to what I would call a good deal,” posted John Scalzi, the president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

Amazon has secured  licenses for three properties: “Gossip Girl,” “Pretty Little Liars” and “The Vampire Diaries,” are owned by Warner Brothers Television Group’s Alloy Entertainment. Amazon promises more are to follow.

It would be great to see more legal ways for commerce to grow in FanFic’s world of derivative and transformative art. A way for creative people to make stories, art, apps, music, with fair licensing terms. Rights owners should support broad remixing by their fans, and open up these avenues the same way they do with merchandizing. Educational organizations can help foster this by serving as the legal middleman, creating new ways for stories and culture to be transformed.

FanFic is about culture being owned by society.  Paid or not, Fanfic existed long before the internet, and be around when we live in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

See more: Time article “The Boy Who Lived Forever” is a very fair primer on FanFic. Also: WSJ on FanFic, io9 on legality of FanFic.

These Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) create “a strange paradox: these professors are simultaneously the most and least accessible teachers in history. And it’s not the only tension inherent in MOOCs,” writes A. J. Jacobs in the Sunday Review. Jacobs recently signed up for 11 courses (of which he completed 2), and graded his experience:

• B+ for the professors, who tended to be charming and theatrical, trying to make the best of the virtual environment. There’s no patience for crummy professors, as in a math course canceled in 2012 by Udacity.
• A for convenience, which is unmatched as students can learn from home, while commuting, worldwide. Start and stop anytime.
• D for student-teacher interaction, which is virtually nonexistent. It’s one-way delivery from pop-star teachers, a virtual lottery to get a professor to answer a specific question.
• B- for student-student interaction, which is vital for cementing the newly-learned knowledge, but even the best online discussions lack the immediacy of real life. There’s also a signal-to-noise problem, as well as trolling.
• B- for assignments, which are heavily multiple-choice quizzes (great for computers to grade, bad for measuring learning), rampant with cheating, and lackluster when peer-review is used for essays.
• B overall, which a generally positive experience, but minimal practical application when taking diverse subjects, and the courses don’t convey any credentials.

The hot air surrounding the rise of MOOCs is beginning to subside, and the ideas will percolate other fields.

On the academic end of the spectrum, traditional academia must and will respond to the pressures that are disrupting their industry. MOOCs are different in many ways from the “distance education” of the last few decades. How will universities compete with free? How will they justify being on-campus as the virtual experience improves? How much can the traditional, intimate classroom model of learning be bastardized before it looses all meaningful value, reduced to little more than watching TV?

This 18 minute TEDx talk by Michele Pistone discusses the future of higher education, and its historical origins:

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsiQ6-JTOWM

(Read more comments on Pistone’s talk.)

Of greater interest to this blog, is informal and professional learning. This is the opposite situation, as MOOCs have much to teach us. If you are involved you outreach, take inspiration from MOOCs about:

• Approaches to improving online learning (adding assessment, interactivity and community)
• Adding social aspects (online forums, exploring peer review, and seeing what formats prod students to engage)
• Implementation (user interfaces, software, marketing angles)

It’s all about packaging. The underlying elements (articles, videos, forums, etc.) have been on the internet for some time, and many organizations already have these ingredients at hand. What differentiates an “online course” is how it’s all combined, the outcomes (both learning objectives and certification), and the overall cohesiveness of the package.

How can you deliver learning with online courses? (And do you want to?)

For some more background, see also our articles on “What is an online course?” (Jan 2012), “Online courses for learning skills: MoMA, NYT & knitting” (Jan 2012; BTW: NYT recently canceled their online courses),  “Higher-ed courses with massive enrollments: A revolution starts” (Jan 2012), and “Online college courses, with and without the degree” (Feb 2011).

Trekker is a wearable backpack outfitted with a camera system on top. It’s portability enables Google to gather images while maneuvering through tight, narrow spaces or locations only accessible by foot. The Trekker is operated by an Android device and consists of 15 lenses angled in a different direction so the images can be stitched together into 360-degree panoramic views. As the operator walks, photos are taken roughly every 2.5 seconds. See a view of the Bright Angel Trail. Read more at Google’s blog announcement.

Trolley goes into museums. Google developed a push-cart system that could easily fit through museum doorways and navigate around sculptures. Here are views of several museums Google has covered.

Snowmobile was another hack, put together over the course of a few weekends (they say) using some 2x4s, duct tape, and extra hard drives wrapped in ski jackets to last through the freezing conditions. Motivated by the 2010 Winter Olympics, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada — the snowmobile mapped slopes and trails which fans would be seeing during the games.

Trike is a three-wheel bicycle developed in 2009 for recording from parks and trails, university campuses, theme parks, zoos, monuments, sports stadiums, and the like. For these locations, which are often private land, Google signs a deal with the location. They have a submission form for new locations, which is highly overbooked.

Cars were Google’s first step into street views, launching in 2007 with 5 U.S. cities, and now delivering 360° panoramic views from locations worldwide. Starting with an SUV, then a van, Google settled on a fleet of cars. The latest car has 15 lenses taking 360 degrees of photos. It also has motion sensors to track its position, a hard drive to store data, a small computer running the system, and lasers to capture 3D data to determine distances within the Street View imagery.

A related project takes underwater panoramas, such as a view of Lady Elliot Island, QLD, Australia.

Check out Google’s gallery of some of their best street view collections. Hopefully they will continue to connect more of our world.

Located east of Detroit, on the shore of Lake St. Clair, near the Milk River (photo below), the Ford house is involved with water quality monitoring as part of the worldwide GLOBE hands-on, school-based science and education program. The science part of the picture involves having students input water quality results into a global database. Shires notes, “Many groups who are engaged in ongoing testing come back for history tours of the house.”  Student visitors also learn about history of the family, including their love and respect for the water.

The Stan Hywet Hall and Gardens in Akron, Ohio has a successful program for 9th grade students from the local ‘Science’ High School. The students do two days of experiential learning activities on the 70 acre estate during a summer program before starting school. During the tours, the students learn about architecture, landscape design and technology, and they also assess primary source materials including archival blueprints, letters and historic photos. One of the science teachers remarked, “To be in their community and creating something that someone could really use–that is the motivation.”

Read more about both programs in Shires’ blog post at AASLH, “Bringing in Other Disciplines to Your Historic Site.”

Another cool example of multidisciplinary outreach school programs is at the Roberson Museum and Science Center (Binghamton, NY):

• Hands-on science, history and art. Students discover animal adaptations by studying taxidermy specimens, participate in magical science experiences, build steampunk scultptures, or explore antique objects and create a new use for them;
• School receives a mysterious artifact once a month (September-May) for your classroom. Artifacts range from tools to toys and relate to American History;
• Discover the Iroquois, their culture, their relationship with the land and how European culture has impacted native peoples. Students create pinch pots and learn Native American constellation legends in the Planetarium.

The print dictionary lasted for two and a half centuries, tracing back to 1755, when Samuel Johnson published A Dictionary of the English Language, the first comprehensive, reliable English-language dictionary. Johnson’s dictionary was used by the few wealthy, literate individuals and institutions who owned books, and was the standard for over 150 years. The consumer market for dictionaries expanded with the Industrial Revolution of the mid-19th century, when paper and books became generally affordable. Despite the importance of dictionaries to literacy and communication, there have only been a handful of major dictionaries.

Although a few dictionaries become commonly accepted as standards, there is no grand authority in charge of the English language.

Dictionaries are creative works which describe the ever-changing way a society uses language. Thus, if you start reading dictionaries, you find a cacophony of subtly-different definitions. For example, a “crosswalk” could be:

• a path marked off on a street to indicate where pedestrians should cross (American Heritage)
• a crossing lane marked off for pedestrians (Collins)
• a specially marked place for people to walk across a street (Longman)
• a specially paved or marked path for pedestrians crossinga street or road (Merriam-Webster)
• a marked part of a road where pedestrians have right of way to cross (Oxford)
• a place where pedestrians can cross a street (Wiktionary)

Why the variety of definitions? For one thing, copyright law necessitates that publishers find new ways to say the same thing. But also, language evolves over time, and publishers seek to serve consumers by hiring dictionary editors to invent new approaches to their craft of dictionary writing.

Unfortunately, even for the publishers like Bullon, who get digital, the economics of dictionary publishing is unsustainable. Dictionaries have a simple, obsolete, business model: A huge up-front investment, recouped over years (or decades) of book sales.

Depending on the publisher’s budget and marketing priorities, they hire lexicographers to create definitions from scratch, or paraphrase existing dictionaries. The Webster’s Third New International Dictionary took a decade to create. Finally published in September 1961, the team of lexicographers led by  Philip Babcock Gove spent 757 editor-years and $3.5 million ($26 million in today’s dollars) to build their unabridged dictionary with 450,000 entries. To create a new, medium-sized dictionary with 35,000 words would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars (for paraphrasing) to tens of millions of dollars (for new definitions based on examining real-world usages).

Sadly for dictionaries, in this digital age, it’s impossible to earn much money from subscriptions and advertising, and unrealistic to earn millions from dictionary-type apps. There’s a stagnation of the older dictionaries — and new approaches brewing which use crowdsourcing and artificial intelligence.

The following is an overview of most major dictionaries currently available, and their online/mobile offerings.

Free dictionaries:

• Wikimedia Foundation — Wiktionary — Wiktionary is a free web site, and a data source for many dictionary web sites and apps. — Started in 2002, Wiktionary has over 3.1 million entries in English. Similar to Wikipedia, it’s a collaborative project that anyone can edit, aiming to describe all words of all languages using definitions and descriptions in English. Many of the entries are either based on the other three free sources below, or paraphrased from existing dictionaries. Many of the entries were automatically generated, adapted from commercial dictionaries. It can be used freely, as long as it is credited.
• Princeton University — WordNet — WordNet is a data source for many thesaurus-type web sites and apps. — WordNet is a different kind of dictionary. Instead of a dictionary of words (where each word has one or more senses), it is a dictionary of “word senses.” It contains 117 thousand sets of synonyms, each for a specific meaning (e.g. “a sudden brief burst of bright light”). It can be used as a dictionary by listing all the meanings in which a word appears. WordNet also contains semantic relations. It can be used freely, as long as it is credited.
• Public domain — A Dictionary of the English Language — Scanned pages available from Internet Archive, with error-prone OCR. — Published in April 1755, and written by Samuel Johnson, ‘A Dictionary of the English Language,’ also known as ‘Johnson’s Dictionary,’ was influential. Prior to the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary, 173 years later, Johnson’s was the pre-eminent English dictionary. Funded in 1746 by a consortium of London’s most successful publishers, including Robert Dodsley and Thomas Longman.
• Public domain — Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia — Available in full-text form at Wordnik, or Global Language Resources. — The largest, out-of-copyright dictionary. One of the largest encyclopedic dictionaries of the English language. Published from by The Century Company of New York, in multivolume versions, with 7,046 pages. Last updated 1914.

Provides an API:

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) allow web sites and apps to access dictionary information in realtime. This is a great way to get information used in a variety of ways, inviting other developers to create innovative web sites and apps that use the dictionary data.

• The week started with a webcast co-sponsored by SPARC and the World Bank featuring a conversation with 5 Open Access Experts.
• Follow and contribute to Twitter buzz at #OAWeek, #OAWeek2012 and #openaccess
• SPIE, the society of optics and photonics, is taking the plunge into Open Access
• Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene is a  new Open Access journal venture by BioOne
• Author Peter Suber released a new book on Open Access

Read about more Open Access stuff going on this week in this post by Heather Joseph of SPARC, and check out the main Open Access Week web site.

There are currently 5,206,652 pages available, from more than 800 newspapers from 25 states, and the database is expanding. This is part of a long-term effort to develop an Internet-based, searchable database of U.S. newspapers with descriptive information and select digitization of historic pages. The project started in 2007, and was done by various grant recipients who digitized approximately 100,000 newspaper pages representing that state’s regional history, geographic coverage, and events of the particular time period being covered. Participants digitized primarily from microfilm holdings, and digitized at high resolution, greyscale.

So far, the National Endowment for the Humanities has given $22 million to 32 state libraries, historical societies and universities to digitize. That works out to $4.23 per scanned page. In 2011, the site averaged 2.5 million page views per month.

Read more in LOC press release.

Many universities are now offering free certificate programs online that are available to everyone. The concept is that while many people either can’t afford traditional schooling or cannot attend a traditional classroom schedule or setting, many of them still want and need to learn new skills. Dan Colman at openculture.com has compiled a list of 75 of the best free certificate courses, ranging from Stanford’s cryptography offering to Johns Hopkins’ Principles of Obesity Economics.

Rosie Redfield, Life Sciences Centre at the University of British Columbia

Still, the current generation of courses often disappoint, as it’s hard to find a balance between traditional classroom learning and independent online learning, and also keep the price free. As colleges and universities move deeper into on-line learning, they limit face to face classroom time with instructors teaching course content. Dr. Richfield, a researcher and professor at the University of British Columbia, is skeptical of the current generation of courses. She writes in “Preparing for the MOOC-ocalypse” that universities must “develop integrated programs with hands-on and face-to-face experiences that are seen as worth the cost.”

But what does integration mean, and how is the balance reached? Redfield suggests that “Ironically, the best way to prepare for this MOOC-opalypse may be to become part of the problem by teaching a MOOC.” One approach, borrowing from the “flipped classroom” widely discussed for younger students, students can learn the course work independently, using online tools and watching videos from their dorms, and use class room time for discussions and problem solving.

The need for a radical re-working of the costs of education is clear. Education is absurdly expensive. The following is a breakdown of estimated undergraduate budgets for 2011-2012. The dark blue is tuition and fees. For public 2-year commuter colleges, it’s just under $3 thousand; and for a private nonprofit 4-year campus, it’s $28.5k. (The per-course costs assume 8 courses per year.)

Source: Graph of tuitions undergraduate budgets from The College Board, Annual Survey of Colleges. PDF. 

Their new system, ReadCube Access, has an iTunes sales approach: a library can rent an article for less than $6 or can buy the same article for $11 (or less, depending on the source). Hrvatin and McGrath hope that ReadCube Access can not only lower expenses for universities, but also allow more journals to reach students around the country.

Other features allow for importing PDFs, finding new papers via Google Scholar or PubMed, downloads via institutions’ paywalled logins, recommendations, annotations, and citations.

They sold their idea to industry giant Nature Publishing Group and to the University of Utah’s library system. (See their blog post.)

The new “Open Textbooks” database hopes to get more facility to use affordable textbooks by helping them find good textbooks. The project has been public for three weeks, and currently has 87 book reviews.

These numbers should grow, as 11 Minnesota faculty members have offered to review books, and other Big Ten universities have talked about getting involved.

These kinds of independent catalogs are vital. Without the commercial incentives that drive commercial publishing, open textbooks are hampered by:

• Hard to find – With no profits to earn, open textbooks generally don’t invest in marketing. Nicolle Allen, textbook advocate for the Student Public Interest Research Group, said, “There are some sites that list reviews of open textbooks but I think this one is significant because it’s actually developed by a Big Ten, well-respected university.” Allen directs the research group’s Make Textbooks Affordable Project.
• No quality control – With no gatekeeper, there’s no barrier to entry and no commercial motivation to maintain the reputation of a publishing brand, employing editors and copyeditors.
• Unpredictable quality – With no sales royalties, authors must be internally motivated, and may not take the time to create superb publications.
• Minimal or no ancillary materials – The $4 billion commercial textbook industry often creates study plans, exams, and course-management software. Surveys show that instructors prize those materials above all else, said publishing industry analyst Al Greco of Fordham University.

Open textbooks are complete textbooks released under a Creative Commons, or similar, license. Instructors can customize open textbooks to fit their course needs by remixing, editing, and adding their own content. Students can access free digital versions or purchase low-cost print copies of open textbooks.

Despite being free, open access textbooks have been slow to catch on, said David Ernst, who directs the new U. Minn. project at the academic and information technology  department. Ernst said, “The open textbooks are out there… and they’re scattered.” Moreover, it’s hard for professors to assess the books because “they don’t know what is quality when they do find them.” By building up a peer-reviewed collection of textbooks, available to instructors anywhere, Minnesota officials hope to provide some of the same quality control that historically has come from publishers of traditional textbooks. University of Minnesota has the 11th highest enrollment of higher-ed institution in the U.S., with over 52k students.

“I became convinced this last year that we’re kind of at a tipping point right now,” Ernst said to InsideHigerEd. “It’s a thing that is going to be around and it’s only growing right now.

In an effort to motivate professors, University of Minnesota faculty will be paid $500 to write a review of an open textbook, and will also earn the same amount to adopt such a book in class. Faculty from other institutions are also welcomed to write requests, but are not compensated.

Currently, the majority of reviewed books are from Flat World Knowledge, a commercial publisher of free and open college textbooks.

It’s unclear whether solving the findability problem will improve adoption. “While we’re told price is very important, it’s always fourth,” said Greco to MPR. “As of today, open access textbooks have very little traction in the business.”

The catalog includes texts from Rice University, which launched a series of peer-reviewed open access books earlier this year.

Other open textbooks initiatives have struggled. For example, the California set up an academic standards review for open textbooks, in an effort to cut back their K-12 textbook expenses, which were $350M in 2008. More recently, a California state senator sought $25M in state funds to create new open access textbooks.

Ben Crowell is an open textbook author, says the K-12 market is even harder to convert to open access. “Textbook selection in K-12 education in the US tends to be extremely bureaucratic and top-down, and it’s virtually impossible to change that overnight, as Schwarzenegger tried to do [in California]. It’s completely different from higher education, where the assumption is that professors can choose whatever text they like as a matter of academic freedom. My experience is with writing free physics textbooks. They’re written for college students, but have also been adopted by a bunch of high schools. However, almost all of the high school adoptions have been from private schools, mainly Catholic schools.” Crowell teaches physics at Fullerton College, a community college in southern California, and runs Assayer, a catalog of free books.

The open U. M. Textbook Catalog accepts books that are:

• Openly Licensed. Acceptable licenses include Creative Commons Attribution, Attribution-Share Alike and Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike or similar. Some books may fall under a No-Derivatives license if the publisher offers an adequate customization program.
• Complete. Only complete books, similar to traditional textbooks currently on the market, are included. Materials such as lecture notes, online courses, or drafts, are provided only as supplements to textbooks listed in the catalog.
• Suitable for Adoption Outside the Author’s Institution.
• Available in Print. Because most students still prefer print textbooks to digital, all textbooks include a print option, generally for $40 or less. In some cases, textbooks without a print-on-demand option may be included if they are sufficiently easy and inexpensive to print locally.

See the Open Academics textbook catalog, from the College of Education and Human Development (CEHD) at University of Minnesota. Go to site >>

Meanwhile, there are other important threads affecting the industry, such as Apple’s iBooks Author software, which is raising the profile and production quality of online texts, and will create a marketplace for finding and reviewing e-texts.

See the site: Google Art Project

Google’s project also includes their “street view” to provide walkthroughs of 46 museums, with more on the way. Google’s team took 360 degree images of the interior of selected galleries which were then stitched together, enabling smooth navigation of over hundreds of rooms within the museums. The gallery interiors can also be explored directly from within Street View in Google Maps. Here’s walking around the Acropolis Museum:

Young Knight in a Landscape

Zoom. Zoom. 

All the images can be zoomed, some to a stunning degree. For 46 objects, visitors can see extraordinary detail using super high resolution or ‘gigapixel’ photo capturing technology, enabling the viewer to study details of the brushwork and patina beyond that possible with the naked eye.

At right is ‘Young Knight in a Landscape‘, (1510) by Vittore Carpaccio from the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. This is what you can see on the museum’s current web site:

But check out the level of detail which the museum gives you via Google’s Art Project:

More range. More access. 

Amit Sood leads Google's effort to bring the world's greatest museums online. This started as his "20%" project.

Their online collection spans a wide range of institutions, large and small, traditional art museums as well as less traditional settings for great art. “The Art Project is going global, thanks to our new partners from around the entire world. It’s no longer just about the Indian student wanting to visit Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It is now also about the American student wanting to visit the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi,” said Amit Sood, Head of Art Project, Google.

Google suggests you check out the White House in Washington D.C., the collection of the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar, or the Santiniketan Triptych in the halls of the National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi.

Videos, hangouts, online learning.

The expanded site has more powerful browsing (e.g., by period, artist or type of artwork), and integrates Google’s “hangouts.” Their videos (e.g., stories from curators) are collected in a central ‘Art Project’ YouTube channel.

In a smart move, Google also worked with Khan Academy’s smARThistory, who made 90 Khan Academy videos expressly for Google Art Project version 2. See them here.

Other uses of the technology

Google is using the same technology to host content on a few other institutions’ sites. Under the auspices of the Cultural Institute, Google is producing high resolution images of the Dead Sea Scrolls, digitizing the archives of famous figures such as Nelson Mandela, and creating 3D models of 18th century French cities.

What does this mean?

Access is growing. Museums are rethinking control vs. outreach. Is it better to limit access to real-life visitors who buy tickets and shop the museum store, or make culture freely available? It is better to lock down access to promote image licensing as a revenue stream, or release publicly hoping that free access will open doors for newer business models?