The findingDulcinea Blog

Educators Will Create the Successor to Textbooks

This summer, The New York Times featured yet another article on how to replace textbooks. Scott McNealy, founder of Sun Microsystems, estimated that the U.S. education system spends $8-$15 billion per year on text books. One study claims that only 11% of this expenditure actually goes to creating content. Of course, printing, distributing and disposing of textbooks also comes at an enormous environmental cost.

The primary alternatives discussed in the NYT article are open-sourced, digital textbooks that can be customized by an educator.

But while the successors to textbooks surely will be digital, they won't be a textbook at all:

• They won't be created by an education company that bends to politically driven agendas, a phenomenon that has been around long before last year's Texas controversy;
• "chapters" won't reflect the perspective of just a few writers and editors, but rather the voices of thousands of educators; 
• in subjective areas, they won't require students to memorize particular "facts" and viewpoints, but rather will encourage them to think for themselves, and form their own perspectives; and
• they won't impose a "one size fits all" approach to learning on a diverse group of students, with different interests, abilities and needs.

The successor to textbooks will be created by a group of passionate educators who, in the words of John Carver, superintendent of Van Meter (Iowa) Schools, collectively decide that no one should have "ownership" over what is taught in schools.

There are a number of approaches that could render a product that meets the above objectives. However:

• A Wiki that is subject to the whims of a narrow band of editors with a lot of time to devote to winning ideological battles would preclude the involvement of the contributors with the most to offer;
• a "silo" approach to publishing, where educators post work only on their own school sites, will inhibit the collaboration necessary to develop depth, breadth and scale quickly; and
• there must be some central administration to continually enhance the solution in response to educator feedback.

At the recent Techonomy Conference, Bill Gates predicted that in five years, the best college education will come from the Web. But in many subjects, innovative educators are already using the Web to deliver the best educational experience to their fortunate students. Thousands of teachers and librarians around the world are finding, and sharing with their students, outstanding Web resources - including primary sources, expert analysis and countervailing viewpoints - that dwarf the information available in any textbook. These teachers are also creating lesson plans and assignments that test students' critical thinking and relevant communication skills, rather than prepare them to fill in bubbles on a standardized test. And they teach students how to effectively use the Web resources they'll use the rest of their life, and not a textbook that will soon join a landfill.

Many of these educators post their assignments on the Web; often on a school Web site, sometimes on a blog or other platform. This spring, when my daughter and her friends became concerned one of their  teachers wasn't adequately preparing them for an Advanced Placement Exam, they sought out materials on the Web, and eventually settled on a teacher in Northern Virginia as having the best exam prep materials. Everyone in my daughter's group passed the exam, while several of their classmates did not. I recently learned about a remarkable site for teachers and students of English created by Sandra Effinger; I foresee AP test takers from all over the country accessing her resources in coming years; here is a similar site for high school psychology.

The number of sites like the ones offered by these two educators will grow exponentially in coming years. What is needed is a central repository that collects many of them, so that teachers can access assignments created by other teachers, and learn from, and build on them. And if that repository was also one that made it easy for teachers to find great resources in the first place, and provided a free mechanism for sharing the resources and assignments with their students and colleagues, well, all the better. And if it promised a whole host of new features in the near future? It could very well become the successor to textbooks.

And that is what our free product, findingEducation, offers. It's in Alpha stage, and we can do a lot to make it better, but in its current form, the potential for it is clear. Its back-end is powered by SweetSearch and the content of findingDulcinea to help educators easily find the best online resources about any subject. Its My Library enables teachers to save the links they find to a bookmarking tool, and then share them with students on their assignment page. It combines assignment management and quality resource discovery into a “digital classroom.” Teachers are welcome to "frame" the page for the digital classroom so that it appears integrated into the school Website, with their own look and feel.

The ultimate value in findingEducation comes when it becomes heavily used by outstanding educators. For example, once hundreds, or thousands, of U.S. History teachers create assignments for, and provide links to materials about, the U.S Civil War, then a new teacher entering the fray can create a new assignment that synthesizes the best of the predecessor works. Teachers can identify other teachers who consistently create outstanding assignments, and use them as a model for their own.

What will it take for findingEducation to create a critical mass that will turn it into a "must use" tool? Sponsorship by a large education entity or organization that will encourage use by a substantial number of members. We can even create a separate file for these organizations to co-brand the offering and make it easy for members of the organization to find each other's work. Organizations such as AASA, NSSSA, NCSS, and ALA should have a keen interest in discussing this possibility with us, as should state and regional education departments.

We have a number of modules and additional features that can be introduced into findingEducation once it develops a meaningful user base.

For more information on findingEducation:

See a sample page: http://markskillman.findingeducation.com/

Take our site tour.

See our help section for our FAQ and other tips for using findingEducation.

For more information or to contact us with inquiries, comments or feedback, e-mail info@findingeducation.com or write me directly at Mark.Moran@DulcineaMedia.com

Sincerely,

Mark E. Moran

Founder & CEO

Dulcinea Media, Inc.

Read Your Way Through Winter

The holiday season is upon us and it’s time to settle in for the long duration of winter. But just because your general activity level is slowing down doesn’t mean your mind should be less active. It’s the perfect time to snuggle up with a cup of tea and expand your imagination within the covers of a good book. Here are some sites that can get you turning pages.

If you needed a little push to get yourself started on a book, try DearReader. Dear Reader lets you choose a book club to join, by genre or from a sponsored publisher. It sends you a few free e-mails with sections of a book from whatever club you've selected. If you like the book and want to keep reading it, the site gives you the location of your local library branch and locates the book for you.

Once you’ve gotten hooked on books and reading, you can start combing reviews for the best new material, obsessing over author interviews, and keeping up with the literary zeitgeist via blogs and features. Felicitously, you can delve into all these aspects of book culture with BookSlut. Become an expert or a dabbler in all affairs of the bookish life, or read columns targeted to your favorite genre.

Reading tends to be a solitary endeavor, but in the darkest days of winter, a few friends can help lighten the mood. Engage with other book-minded folk without putting down your cup of tea by joining Shelfari, a social networking site for book lovers. Build a virtual bookshelf, find other users who like the same books and get recommendations for new reading material based on your tastes.

Find enough books to fill 2010 with Flashlight Worthy, a blog of curated lists of books from around the Web on a variety of topics. Try "The Best Books of 2009," or "Tales from Inside the Schoolhouse" or "Books that Barack Obama Reads and Recommends."

Rachel Balik
Senior Writer

Explore book shopping online, more book clubs, news, reviews and even local book events with the findingDulcinea Books Web Guide.

If you’re short on time, browse through some of findingDulcinea’s recommended short story collections.

Summer Spotlight: Slow Down and Read

You read more things on the Internet every day than you can possibly count. Every day we’re being told to speed up, sign on, log in. If you’re on social networking sites, you get hit with a barrage of links every hour. Maybe you just read headlines, or the first paragraph. After all, you’ve got to finish quickly so you can race on to the next thing.

As we move into the summer months, however, it’s a good time to slow down a little. Even though we live in a world where it’s essential to be tech savvy, it’s equally important to do some things the old-fashioned way. In short: It’s time for you to read a book.

Of course, books and the Internet are not mutually exclusive. In fact, if Google’s new deal with book publishers gets approved by the courts, you might be able to read many books online through Google books. As a result, we’ll get access to out of print books, but we’ll also still be in front of our computers.

And that may be a problem, argues the talented and perceptive novelist and essayist Zadie Smith, who says that the Internet does so much damage to our attention spans that completing projects, especially writing projects, is practically impossible. She calls the Internet an “absolute disaster for writers.” But there are some studies that suggest the opposite: the Internet and other digital technology may actually be helping writing.

The Internet doesn’t have to be a "disaster" for readers, especially if you use it to research books or book events and then go explore in the real world. Start by choosing a great beach book; several are noted in our “5 Must-Reads for Summer” feature.

Then, consider sharing your renewed love of books with others by seeking out literary events in your area. Attending a reading or a book festival is a great way to share your love of literature, and get unwired for at least an hour. Happy reading!

Rachel Balik
Senior Writer

Sweet Sites | Magazines, Journal Articles, Books and More

Nothing beats a library, but know before you go using the online catalog WorldCat.

Thanks to my last Sweet Sites entry, "Global Resources for Searching Local News," you should now have just about all the newspaper access that you’ll ever need. Here are three more sites that can help temporarily quench your thirst for reading material.

Search for magazine articles that are available for free online via MagPortal. A page on the site lists the magazines available and what articles have been indexed.

If you’ve just got to keep up with the latest scientific discoveries, you’ll find every research paper published in a NIH-funded journal at PubMed Central.

Why wait to go the library to see if they have what you want on the shelf? Visit WorldCat and get information about books, CDs, videos, news articles and digital collections held by more than 10,000 libraries worldwide.

Amy Goldschlager
Editor

You can get this blog entry delivered to your e-mail inbox every Monday with our Sweet Sites newsletter. Sign up for it here!

Find your own "eureka" sites using SweetSearch.

Celebrating Edgar Allan Poe's Bicentennial

Photo: Associated Press

The American author Edgar Allan Poe was born 200 years ago this Monday, January 19th. You can get a sneak preview of our extensive biography of Poe with the article "Happy Birthday, Edgar Allan Poe." Calling Poe a "doyen of the macabre," the article sheds light on the events of his short life, which was plagued by "poverty, illness and addiction."

Last year, FindingDulcinea also published an "On This Day" article about a strange event in Poe's life. On October 3, 1849, Poe was found "drunk and delirious," either in a ditch or in a tavern in Baltimore (sources vary). He died several days later. According to the article, "Although the official cause of death given by the Baltimore Commissioner of Health, Dr. J.F.C. Handel, was “congestion of the brain,” there are several theories surrounding Poe’s death, the most popular of which include "the alcohol theory," disease and other medical problems, and the cooping theory." The article links to other Web sources that speculate further.

A findingDulcinea news article on Poe's death discusses a man known as the "Poe Toaster" who visits Poe's grave in Baltimore every year on the writer's birthday, leaving behind a half-filled bottle of cognac and three red roses.

For the bicentennial, The New York Times created a slideshow of images of Poe and scans of some of his material, including handwritten manuscripts and first editions. 

Project Gutenberg, the open source e-text database, has numerous Poe works available, including poems and ghost stories.

Liz Colville
Senior Writer
Audience Development

Year-End Review of Travel Books and Movies

If financial concerns keep you from planning a getaway in 2009, lose yourself in travel-themed films and books. Here are some exciting suggestions from leading travel writers:

World Hum writer Eva Holland collected nine travel-related films to watch in the coming year. Among the most intriguing picks are two book adaptations: “The Rum Diary,” an adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s novel, staring Johnny Depp as an expat journalist in Puerto Rico; and “A Walk in the Woods,” an adaptation of Bill Bryson’s novel, starring Robert Redford.

As for travel-themed books, The Guardian offers a list of its favorite travel books from 2008, as well as book recommendations from successful travel authors, including Rolf Potts of Vagablogging fame.

National Geographic Traveler has compiled a library of favorite travel books that best evoke a sense of place, according to surveyed travelers, writers, photographers, explorers and editors. The list includes novels, narrative nonfiction and books of photography, and is organized by continent and country in the left-hand sidebar.

Sarah Amandolare
Senior Writer

Five Must-See Lectures

TED.org, which is full of free lectures.

You no longer have to attend expensive conferences or tune in to a live broadcast to experience the intelligence and expertise of the world's brainiest economists, reporters, authors and entrepreneurs. Below are five recent talks that will enrich your mind from the comfort of wherever you and your computer are sitting.

1. Malcolm Gladwell: Outliers: The Story of Success

The author of "Blink" and "The Tipping Point" returns with "Outliers," an inspiring look at how upbringing, personality, fate and thousands of hours of hard work commingle to create the world's most successful people. This lecture is that book in a nutshell.

2. This American Life: The Giant Pool of Money

In audio rather than video format, this talk between This American Life producer Alex Blumberg and NPR's business and economics correspondent Adam Davidson is credited around the Web as one of the best explanations of the subprime mortgage crisis and how it connects to Wall Street's recent failures.

3. The New Yorker Festival: The Next Generation of Fashion

At the 2008 New Yorker Festival, three top graduates from three design schools talk about their own work, their inspiration, and the future of fashion.

4. TED Conference 2008: Samantha Power: Shaking Hands With the Devil

At the 2008 TED Conference, Power, who heads Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights, gives a lecture on genocide based on her book about Sergio Vieira de Mello, a UN diplomat who worked with dictators to protect human rights and was killed in a bombing in Iraq in 2003.

5. FreedomFest 2008: Charles Murray: "Real Education"

Murray, author of "Human Accomplishment" and "The Bell Curve," discusses his book about the American education system, including proposals about how to improve it.

Liz Colville
Senior Writer
Audience Development

Get Inside Your Favorite Author's Head

Lindsay Pierce/AP

At the New Yorker Festival a few weeks ago, I had an opportunity to stand before my favorite author, Canadian darling and master of the short-story, Alice Munro and ask her stylistically how she does it. For those who missed the festival, here are highlights from Deborah Treisman’s interview with Alice Munro.

If you like the idea of meeting face to face with authors, CSPAN2’s BookTV can help you find book festivals in your own area. For local readings and panels see Barnes & Noble’s event locator.

If your favorite authors have already passed on, or if you would prefer to learn about them without leaving home, the legendary Paris Review hosts interviews with some of the best-known and best-loved authors including Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Elliot, Grace Paley, Chinua Achebe and Eudora Welty for download or purchase. The site also includes marked-up pages from authors’ manuscripts.

For interviews with authors of contemporary fiction and nonfiction Publishers’ Weekly is a good place to start. PW is a staple of the publishing industry and an interview here is a strong indicator of what’s hot. In other words it’s good fodder for your next book club.

One-story.com is another of my favorite sites for author interviews, but you’ll find fewer big names here. The magazine consists of a single short story sent to subscribers every three weeks as a small booklet (perfect for subway reading). The company then posts interviews with their authors on its Web site. For New Yorkers and their neighbors, the organization hosts monthly readings where you can listen to the author, read from their story or a new work, then ask your questions in person.

For aspiring writers Poets & Writers magazine, along with first-rate author, editor and agent interviews, teaches readers how to write a query letter and which literary magazines accept submissions and when. They also publish yearly reviews of different MFA programs.

Shannon Firth
Writer

Check out findingDulcinea's recent article "Fall Reading Essentials: Short Stories" and visit our Books Web Guide for more resources on exploring authors and their work online.

Getting to Know David Foster Wallace

Steve Rhodes

Inevitably, when an artist dies, there is a renewed interest in his work. Old fans may groan at the stacks of “Infinite Jest” suddenly appearing at their local bookstore ("Where have you guys been?"), but this is all part of the collective wake that reading America is having in David Foster Wallace’s honor.

Of course, the tragic news was all over the Web this week. But a handful of links stood out, and they will be valuable to fans new and seasoned.

Very Short List, an invaluable daily newsletter, hosts a video of Wallace’s 1997 interview on “Charlie Rose,” where the author talks candidly about the often inglorious role of the author-professor, and about observing—but not interviewing—his idol David Lynch.

Play Magazine, the sports magazine of The New York Times, published Wallace’s lengthy homage to Roger Federer in 2006.

Rolling Stone published Wallace's famous analysis of Senator John McCain written during the 2000 campaign.

Marginalia hosts Wallace’s 2005 commencement address to Kenyon College: “Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think,” Wallace told the graduating class. “It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.”

The Paris Review Web site has the story “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men,” from the collection of short stories of the same title published in 1999.

The New York Times reviews “The Broom of the System,” Wallace’s first book, introducing his wild talent to the world in 1986.

University of California TV hosts a video of a recent David Foster Wallace reading.

The Believer published an interview between Wallace and Dave Eggers in 2003.

Liz Colville
Senior Writer

Is the Long Tail Endangered?

A few years ago, Wired editor Chris Anderson wrote an article (that later became a book) in which he claimed there was a growing market online for niche content and services. Consumers, Anderson said, had long been choosing popular mainstream items because alternatives were not readily available. The Internet and the development of digital media made specialized products and content easily accessible, and in turn made selling that niche content profitable. This is referred to as the “Long Tail” theory. (Check out his blog for an illustration and explanation of the Long Tail.)

Recently Harvard Business School’s Anita Elberse challenged Anderson's Long Tail idea using the example of online music and DVD sites. Though they offer a seemingly unlimited supply of niche merchandise, compared to the selections available at brick and mortar DVD and music stores, these sites are still seeing a concentration of sales among a few hit products. According to Elberse, the tail is getting longer and flatter and the number of top performing items is getting smaller, which would perhaps endanger the Long Tail theory.

Then today, the Los Angeles Times wrote about how Demand Media is taking a Long Tail approach by combining lots of Long Tail Web sites to create a blockbuster of a network (and perhaps putting the ball back in Anderson’s Long Tail court).

At findingDulcinea, all this talk about the Long Tail got us thinking about the content we provide, and where our success has been—the mainstream or the Long Tail?

One example of a “blockbuster” story is our coverage of the life and death of Tim Russert. This story generated a large amount of traffic for us; it seemed that nearly every visitor to our site for a few days was reading about, and commenting on, Russert. However, we also generated a great deal of traffic with a story we put together about the rising price of ammunition, and another about a report about how transracial adoption affects children—both stories would be considered Long Tail because they aren’t related to events covered widely by mainstream news outlets.

It is important for us to cover the stories that everyone is talking about, not only because we can add value to what is being reported, but because users expect us, as a news source, to cover what is most popular each day. However, often the stories that bring us the most new users and the most references from other sites are those of the Long Tail variety.

I think, in the end, success comes from finding the right balance for your audience. For us, that means providing Long Tail stories and offering new angles to blockbuster content.

Haley Lovett

Audience Development