Sherman Dorn

What the iPad will and will not be

Last time I wrote about electronic readers, it was before the announcement of the Messiah Tablet iPad. Well, it's Pi Day, and whether or not the circle has been squared, for the first time in my life I've given money to a Steve Jobs company for hardware. As I noted in January, I hate reading PDFs on my laptop, I can't read them comfortably on my Sony Reader, and I really need to read PDFs for my job or kill a lot of trees in the process. The iPad costs about the same as other devices that would do the job, and it'll be far more likely to just do its job. And that's the end of the story, at least as far as my purchase is concerned.

But since there is an enormous amount of myth and hype about tablets/larger readers from both technophiles and technophobes, maybe a little realism is in order. After watching the January 27 unveiling video (and tremendously enjoying the Doritos Canada parody--it shows you how far Lorne Michaels has fallen that something like this didn't appear on Saturday Night Live January 30), I've been thinking about what tablet-sized readers could do and what they cannot do.

First, some genres will do well with little additional effort or reworking of production systems. Comics are likely to be successful on at least one tablet/large reader, as is anything that is already produced for a large-ish page size. Some magazines will survive in this way, and I can easily imagine museums producing electronic catalogues. In general, image-intensive texts will benefit. All of this is easily encompassed within any ebook distribution system, but the more visually luscious books and magazines that will benefit from the iPad and other tablets are also resource-intensive to produce, either by artists or the publisher.

With some tinkering (and yelling and screaming), students will get what they repeatedly complain is lacking in ebooks: easy ways to highlight and annotate texts. The lack of annotation capacity in the EPUB ebook standard is a fixable problem, since EPUB uses xml. The ability to share annotations would be even better. I've written about my use of Diigo in teaching, but that's a workaround, and it's awkward every year that passes, with new versions of Diigo and new problems in sharing annotations.

Apart from annotations, it is not clear what interactive systems will work well on a large tablet that doesn't exist already on websites. There are some good tools for interactive exhibits, such as the Omeka package for museums (see its use in the Inventing Europe exhibit) or the WordPress Digress.It plug-in, which allows reader annotation of any paragraph. Omeka is interactive in a navigational sense. Digress.It is interactive with the content, but the paucity of comments on the Digress.It port of Ivan Illich's Deschooling suggests that it is largely theoretical. 

Craig Mod's essay this month on the infinite canvas (a la Scott McCloud) is interesting, but I'm not sure how that might translate into reality. There's an interesting alpha-level website called the infinite canvas that is infinite in the horizontal dimension. Its showcase includes a cute short comic by Neil Gaiman and Jouni Koponen, The Day the Saucers Came, but the interaction consists of clicking on forward/back buttons with simple PowerPoint-style slide transitions.

And then there will be plenty of resource-intensive development efforts that create one-off apps, many of which will be interesting pedagogically and culturally but will be one-time-only projects. If I were interested in managing the creation of an interactive project, I'd probably create it on a website using tools that I know the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad could read -- that is, no Flash and no Java. I know there's an App Gold Rush on, but the non-Flash, non-Java, smartly-designed website is going to be useful no matter what's in people's hands or on their laps or desks.

In other words, the iPad has one very obvious tool that's more than an ebook reader (anything that is visually intense), and there will be an obvious extension for tablets and readers in general (annotations), but the rest is not yet clear.

Petrilli nails ESEA reauthorization proposal

After finishing the last entry, I realized I should write something about Friday's USDOE proposal on ESEA reauthorization. But procrastination is sometimes a serendipitous thing, thanks to the Fordham blog: Mike Petrilli's analysis is correct, at least on first approximation. A narrative framework is not statutory language, Duncan's proposal isn't George Miller's, and other Beelzebubs squatting in the filigree, but I had the same general reaction Petrilli did.

I'll write more about ESEA reauthorization later in the week.

Health care reform: how to save lives and money and maybe defuse debates about teaching

Another reason for the House to pass the Senate's health-care bill and both houses to pass a tweak through reconciliation: it would expand existing comparative-effectiveness studies. Currently, massive advertising by pharmaceutics is feeding Americans' existing tendency to ask for huge amounts of wasteful spending on imaging/testing, drugs, and surgery. While NPR has highlighted the cooptation of a research term (osteopenia) in the service of Merck drug sales, it's important to see drug advertising as taking advantage of a broader tendency to overtest and overtreat, not the sole cause. Some other examples: older men take protein-specific antigen (PSA) tests to detect prostate cancer though you'd have to test 1400 men and possibly treat and thus give more than 40 men a substantial risk of impotence and incontinence to save a single life (National Cancer Institute PSA fact sheet). And apparently every year 75,000 people have cement shot into their vertebrae though sham surgery gives close to the same results. 

The "safe" and thus ineffective way of changing treatment is to give the advice, "ask your doctor." Yeah, right: practicing physicians who see patients 40-60 hours a week are always up on the latest studies published in obscure journals every week or two, and everyone knows that a doctor's advice is always followed. Consider three effective changes in health behavior prompted by research: smoking reductions, switching how parents put their babies to sleep (in terms of positioning), and a reduction in the proportion of older women taking hormone-replacement therapy. 

Continue reading "Health care reform: how to save lives and money and maybe defuse debates about teaching"

Health care and financial-aid reform as a package

Wednesday's rumor has turned into Friday's semi-confirmation: Democratic leaders in Congress are looking very seriously at packaging together the changes to the Senate health-care bill with the Student Aid and Financial Responsibility Act (SAFRA) through budget reconciliation. SAFRA would end federal subsidies for bankers that initiate loans for college students and return an estimated $67 billion over many years to be used for better purposes, such as giving poor students Pell grants. Since taxpayers foot the bill for the banker subsidies that currently exist, students end up paying twice for their own loans, once in interest to servicers and a second time in taxes that go to banker subsidies. It's time to end the double taxation of students.

Politically, the packaging is a good move for multiple reasons. Matthew Yglesias argues that putting SAFRA in with the health-care bill changes will reassure House progressives that one of their priorities will get a vote in the Senate, and it might get SAFRA over the hump of the small number of Senate Democratic naysayers who are siding with lenders over students. Last night, Sara Goldrick-Rab explained the shame of the anti-student bank subsidies, and it sort of burns me that one of the Democrats signing the protect-the-poor-bankers letter to Harry Reid is Florida's Bill Nelson. 

To be honest, I expect the package is more likely to attract support from the Nebraska Senator Nelson than Florida's Senator Nelson, because Ben Nelson (NE) now wants his embarrassing Cornhusker Deal for health-care off the table. But both Senator Nelsons are on the wrong side of the issue with SAFRA. I e-mailed Bill Nelson to that effect early this morning, but each time I've called his Washington office today, it's been busy and the voicemail is full. Time to call his local office on Monday...

A health-care mandate for education

Over the next week I'll be writing a few entries about health care. Today, it's the benefit of an individual mandate for college completion. The individual mandate is the package deal that goes with universal coverage, to get healthy people into the insured pool, and it's also important to help college students finish. Every year, USF and every public college and university loses students because they get sick or have a financial crisis because they or a family member get sick. Even if imperfectly enforced, an individual mandate would give colleges and universities the political ability to require proof of insurance upon enrollment, and that would safeguard both the individual investment of the student and her/his family and the public investment as she or he starts college.

Yes, there are alternatives, but they're all bad: Many colleges offer a very high-premium plan for students because the pool they can compose out of their students (or a fraction of their students) is tiny. Together with the option to stay on their parents' plans until 26, an individual mandate would give college students more choice by letting them enter the exchange markets instead of having one horrid option for health insurance in college. An individual mandate would make sure that our public investment in higher education is not wasted by a spurious event that no one can control.

(Obviously, someone in the White House reads my blog because they're emulating thought of the same idea as they echo my uninsured-death-every-24 21-minutes entry in their final push, highlighting key numbers on the issue:  625 Americans who lose health insurance every hour, 8 health special-interest lobbyists for every member of Congress, 8 Americans denied coverage every minute either by loss of insurance or other means, and $1115 paid every month on average for a family premium.)

Kristof and the public purpose of feel-good years

Charlie Barone is right: Nicholas Kristof's column yesterday comparing TFA and the Peace Corps shows the practical limits of TFA (as well as Kristof's ignorance about VISTA, but that's a different story). There's something important about consistently reminding reporters and other naive folks that TFA is not scalable. Regardless of what you think of it, there is a vast difference between the needs for a professional long-term teaching corps and matching up a few thousand new college graduates with positions that would be filled at best with long-term substitutes. There's nothing wrong with short-term backfilling (heck, that's what ARRA and other stimulus bills are for), but that's not a main solution for much.

Barone's point is not really about Kristof's central argument, which is more about how young Americans need to experience more of the world. Kristof is right about that, though maybe they should also see more of their own country? Nor is it about the side benefit of TFA participation in terms of giving a broader group of young adults experience in the public sector.

I think the last is the lasting impact of TFA. I look more favorably on TFA than a lot of other education researchers, not because I think there's significant evidence of great results but because a backfilling role in urban systems is acceptable and because social movements need well-off and well-positioned allies, people who had formative experiences that led them to empathize with others. In Inventing the Feeble Mind, for example, James Trent documents how WW2 conscientious objectors' experiences in state institutions helped lay the groundwork for a postwar change in attitudes towards cognitive disabilities. That's not a pre-law internship, as some accuse TFA of becoming; regardless of naivete, two or three years represents a serious commitment for someone who's 22. I don't know where TFA alums are going to be, but few of them are like Michelle Rhee either in temperament or future careers. Somewhere in 10 years, a TFA alum far outside public education is going to make a difference in a different sphere of life because of those two or three years.

Florida v. Georgia -- in budget crises, not football

Today's revenue-estimating conference in Tallahassee is probably going to confirm prior state revenue estimates, which are slightly better for 2010-11 than 2009-10, but that's like saying two broken legs are better than two broken legs and a broken floating rib. The state revenues are still far below 2006, and there are three sources of pressure on the state budget: increased demand for Medicaid, the federal maintenance-of-effort requirement for education (even with the waiver for absolute maintenance), and declining property-tax collections that support K-12 school districts.

Last year we kept reminding ourselves that we weren't in California. And this year, Georgia's picture is worse. Plus a few other states I could mention. But that's cold comfort: Schadenfreude doesn't pay the bills.

Updated (5:45 pm): Yes, today's Florida state revenue estimates are almost identical to the last round.