In our discussions, the question arose: what’s the one book you’d recommend we read to learn more about distance education? I don’t have an authoritative answer, since i haven’t kept up with the literature for several years now: probably there are better resources now that I’m not familiar with. But here’s my answer anyway, in case it’s helpful to others:

At the top of my list would be Distance Education: A Systems View by Michael Moore (not, not that Michael Moore). Chapter 5 is now made mostly irrelevant by the Internet, but otherwise it’s a good overview of the wide variety of issues that go beyond how you distribute content.

There are a few other titles, all with good content, though perhaps more academic and not as easy to read, or less broad.

• Learning and Teaching in Distance Education (Otto Peters) is by one of the pioneers in the field (and therefore not completely up to date). My recollection is it focused more on the learning and teaching sides of the process, with less about administration and larger issues
• Mega-Universities and Knowledge Media (John Daniel) focuses more on the role of technology in education, and has a good chapter on the economics involved.

Though it’s not about distance education per se, i’d also have to include Brain Rules by John Medina. This is a very approachable overview of some important findings in brain science and their practical application to every day life: why you should not talk on your cell phone while driving, how we remember and learn, the myth of multi-tasking, and so forth. It’s both engaging and good science, and i’d make it required reading for every professor/pastor/teacher.

Follow the link above for the details (they’re worth reading), but here’s an abbreviated outline:

1. “Find a single issue in the church today that concerns you personally.”
2. “Find a single historical crux—that is, a single document, single event, single person’s idea, etc.—from church history in which some version of that same issue emerges …”
3. “Study that historical crux (document, event, person’s idea, etc.) by reading a balanced bibliography of primary and secondary sources …”
4. Write a paper addressing the following three points:
   1. Describe your contemporary issue in detail, “… as if you were writing a brief editorial article for Christianity Today.”
   2. “… write a summary/analysis/interpretation of how that issue played out at your chosen historical crux.” (several important additional details here)
   3. Write a conclusion in “your Christianity Today editorial style”.

Does it seem crazy to suggest you write a paper if you’re not required to by some formal academic program?!? Maybe, but current research in learning theory strongly suggests you learn concepts much better when you write about them — writing for learning. So it’s not really about a grade for a course, it’s about your personal education (e.g. discipleship) in  what it means to follow Jesus today, based on knowing more about what’s happened in church history. This kind of writing is one of the reasons i blog: things simply stick better in my head when i take a little time to think them through and communicate them in writing. So you could always blog your response (if so, give it some distinctive tag like christianhistory so it’s more findable).

This morning’s readings included some discussion of how Richard Baxter put knowledge ahead of emotion in his teaching: “first light — then heat.” To the imagined objections of his working-class congregation that ‘We are not learned, and, therefore, God will not require much knowledge at our hands,’ Baxter answers with several arguments (whose language i’ve updated slightly: the selection is by Packer) as to why laypersons have as great a responsibility as scholars to increase their understanding of God and the Christian life.

1. Every individual should know that they are created by God, and the purpose of their life, as well as the way to individual happiness, as well as a scholar does. Do you not have souls to save or lose, as scholars do?
2. God has shown His will to you in the Bible; he has provided teachers and many other aids; so you have no excuse if you are ignorant. You must know how to be Christians even if you are not scholars. You may find the way to heaven in English, even if you have no skill in Hebrew or Greek: but in the darkness of ignorance you can never find it.
3. … if you think, therefore, you can be excused from knowledge, you might as well think you can be excused from love and from all obedience: for there can be none of this without knowledge… If you were as interested in the knowledge of God and heavenly things as you are to know your career or profession, you would have started learning it before today, and you would have spared no cost or pains until you had it. You think seven years little enough to learn your trade, and won’t spend one day in seven diligently learning the matters of your salvation.

and one closing comment:

If heaven is too high for you to think on, and to provide (prepare) for, it will be too high for you ever to possess.

Packer, J. I. (1994). A quest for godliness : The Puritan vision of the Christian life (70). Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books.

The first third of the book focuses on how business revolutions take place, a five-phase process according to Sanders:

1. a change in circumstances that dramatically affects our view of the business landscape
2. a consequential shift in values
3. the arrival of the innovators, who rush to address these new values with new approaches, leading to
4. disruption as the old guard either disappear or cave in and adopt the new values
5. the revolution finally culminates in the New Order, becoming better established and serving new markets

He gives a variety of compelling examples of these five phases as companies begin to adopt quality of life, broadly understood, both locally and globally, and for both current and future generations, as a central business value. Companies like GE, IKEA, SAS, Timberland, Aveda, Patagonia, and even Wal-Mart have made significant changes to how they do business, often helping the bottom line at the same time as they’re being more socially responsible.

The book is chock-full-o’ interesting factoids:

• In one survey, 50% of MBA students said they’d accept a smaller salary to work at a company that was very socially responsible.
• Two-thirds of recent college graduates claim they will not work for a company with a poor reputation for social responsibility.
• Paper (the vast majority of which can be recycled) accounts for one-fourth of the volume of landfill waste. As it breaks down in a landfill, it converts to methane, producing twenty times more greenhouse-gas emissions than carbon dioxide.
• If the US were to cut annual paper use by 20%, the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions would be equivalent to taking half a million cars off the road for a year.
• It takes 3 liters of fresh water to make one liter of bottled water (i cringe every time i see the wall of drinks in the kitchen at work and think about how much energy and resources it takes to support the “convenience” of individual servings)

On the negative side: some of Sanders attempts at catchy phrases are annoying, like “saver soldier”, a “highly motivated person who leverages work as a platform to help save the world”, or the “Them Generation”, those baby-boomers from the Me Generation who have turned around and are thinking about others now. And while he’s touting the “responsibility revolution” as an accomplished fact, i suspect it’s not quite here yet (if it were, he probably wouldn’t have had to write the book!). But he’s acting as a cheerleader here, and sometimes cheerleaders have to do some goofy moves to get our attention.

This book motivated me to see what i might do at work to make my company a better social citizen.

Some of the main points discussed include:

• How advances in technology have brought production within the reach of a much larger group of people than ever before
• “Ideagoras”, about corporate outsourcing of R&D to bring a much larger pool of ideas to bear on challenging problems
• “Prosumers”: how customers want to hack, not just passively consume, products
• How sharing scientific knowledge accelerates progress
• Open, participative platforms that enable those outside an enterprise to build on its products
• Wikis in the workplace

While the success of applications like Wikipedia may prove hard to reproduce, it’s clear that they represent some fundamental changes to how knowledge is developed and shared.

1. Given all my interests, how do i get more books without going broke?
2. What do i do later with the pile of things generated by #1?

If you read a lot, just managing your list of things you’d like to read becomes an information technology challenge all its own. Amazon wishlists work alright for this purpose (and help you remember just how interested you were, if you use the priority feature), and of course Amazon makes it very easy to buy them! (in case you’re feeling generous, our Amazon wishlist is here)

When it comes to a task like software development that i’ll invest personal time in, purchasing a new book is an incredible value: an hour or two saved nearly always justifies the cost of the book. Nevertheless, i try not go overboard, so my regular routine is

1. check my local library (unless it’s something i need to own or use for a long period of time)
2. check a bookswap site like PaperBackSwap or BookMooch
3. only if those fail me, cough up the money and buy it, typically from Amazon

But i don’t yet have quite the information technology i need to make this work as smoothly as i’d like. First of all, it means i have to check multiple places. Links and browser bookmarklets make this somewhat easier: looking at a book on Amazon, i can check my local library with one click with a library lookup bookmarklet (though it’s sometimes misses if there’s a different edition), and check PaperBackSwap with another (i posted here about the PBS bookmarklet i created).

More recently, i’ve been trying LibraryThing as my starting point for searches: once you’ve located the book of interest, they make it easy to get to Amazon, as well as your local library (through WorldCat), and they’ll even tell you if any of their associated bookswap sites have it available (kudos to BookMooch for participating in this: boo on PaperBackSwap for not playing). Furthermore, their Universal Import lets you import your Amazon wishlist directly into LibraryThing (at which point you can go down the list and check other sources). I’ve been thinking lately about writing a little Python application to query my Amazon wishlist but then do the work for me of identifying any items that are currently available from a non-purchase source.

What about problem #2, getting rid of book you don’t want anymore? We’ve had some success lately with a hybrid strategy:

• First, estimate whether there’s continued interest in purchasing this book by checking the used market at Amazon. Powell’s makes this even easier: you can type a lengthy list of ISBNs into their page, and they’ll tell you which ones they’ll buy (which is a pretty good estimate of whether there’s still a market for the book). If there’s a market for the book, you have nothing to lose other than a little effort by listing it on Amazon’s site. Once you’ve set up a seller account, you can list them for 60 days for free. They get a cut if you sell it, but any sale means more money in the kitty for future book purchases!
• If there’s no market for the book, then we list it on a book swap site. When people want them, we have to pay to mail them, but then we get credits so we can request future swaps. It averages out to a couple of bucks a book, which is a steal if you can find ones you want.
• If nobody wants it on the swap site and it’s not out of date, your local library might be interested in a donation
• If you absolutely positively have to throw away a book (sniff), at least make sure you recycle it!

(This post was motivated by Phil Gon’s latest post at the Logos blog on building your digital library by reselling your paper books. He describes a great way to finance your purchase of Logos software, and you’ll be much happier with a digital reference library next time you have to move it!)

Here’s how it works. You post books you’d be willing to give away (without remuneration). In return, after you’ve met the minimum sharing requirement of posting 10 books, you can two credits which you can use to ask others for books they’ve posted. If someone wants your book, you mail it to them and pay the postage: in return, you get an additional credit. When you ask someone else for their book, they pay the postage. While there’s no person-to-person exchange of value (money from me, book from you), it works out overall: people get books they want in some proportion to their willingness to share.

Of course, this is only appealing if you can find books there that you want. As you’d expect, PaperBackSwap isn’t heavy on the latest or most popular titles (but it does include hardbacks, despite the name: there are also companion sites for swapping CDs and DVDs).

The main attraction for me is a less expensive source of books that i can’t find in the local library, and would rather not pay full price for. I generally use Amazon’s Wishlist feature to track books i’m interested in obtaining (feel free to buy me something for Christmas!). So i wrote a bookmarklet (modeled on Jon Udell’s fabulous Library Lookup Project) that simply automates the search for an Amazon book inside PaperBackSwap.

Just drag this link to your link toolbar (see the Library Lookup Project if you need more help on how this works):

PaperBackSwap Lookup

In general, people tend to like:

• convenience (you can download new books wirelessly, no cables, long battery life)
• ease of use (good design, more readable than traditional monitors and PDAs)

Things they don’t like so much:

• #1 seems to be the cost: $400 is pretty expensive if your main objective is to read best-sellers. Many of the enthusiastic reviews on Amazon’s site are from beta-testers who were given devices to try: even among those who loved it, however, it’s telling that some said they wouldn’t buy one once they had to return theirs, and cost was the main reason. On the other hand, the incremental cost for books ($10 for best sellers, less for others) doesn’t seem high to me compared to the paper versions. Some people find it galling to have to pay again for books they already own in print, though i don’t see any easy way across that particular digital divide (i still have lots of music that i love only on cassettes because i was too cheap to buy it again on CD).
• Digital rights management: you’re really buying access to books. So you can’t copy them to other formats, or give them to anybody else.
• It’s not a completely open platform: some fussing about is required for PDF and other file formats, apparently you have to pay to have content emailed to your Kindle.
• The wireless coverage is still quite limited, which means the US heartland and other rural areas are mostly out of luck.

But what about Kindle as a Bible study device: would it work, and how might it compare to Logos Bible Software? These seem like the relevant features:

• There’s no way to beat the convenience of having a library in your pocket (also one of the main selling points for Logos), even more so when you can bookmark pages, write notes on passages, etc.
• Kindle provides word-based search of your whole Kindle library, another unbeatable feature of digital resources over print. I don’t have a Kindle to try out (but i’d be glad to review it, Amazon, hint hint): but what we’ve learned from a decade of web search is that word-based approaches only get you so far. I’d be interested to know what additional search capabilities it provides. For example, as your library grows, can you search only a subset? How flexible is the search syntax: wildcards? data-type specific searches?
• Kindle currently provides hypertext links to other resources like a dictionary and Wikipedia. So it’s not hard to imagine providing links to other resources as well.
• Will third-party vendors be able to provide books in Kindle’s format? In particular, will they be able to enrich them with their own hypertext markup? That’s where these digital formats really shine. As a personal user of Logos software, the ability to hover over a Scripture reference and get the text in a popup has become second nature: now i find myself putting my finger on footnotes and cross-references in print books, waiting for the popup (just kidding, but wouldn’t it be great?).
• While there are quite a few books by well-known Christian authors (Max Lucado, Rick Warren, etc.), the collection of Bibles is quite small: KJV, NIV, TNIV. Likewise, there are relatively few Bible study resources. Maybe this will change over time, and it may say something about how little reading most Christians do.

Bottom line: i don’t see Kindle today as any kind of competitor for Bible study software, when so many more specialized resources are available. But it will be interesting to see if it succeeds, and to see how this market changes over time. Certainly the future of reading has to include e-books: while paper will never go away, the advantages of digital resources are simply overwhelming.

The most compelling ideas have to do with the three forces of the Long Tail (p. 54 and following):

1. Wide availability of the tools of production means more stuff gets produced (a longer tail)
2. Democratized distribution means more access to “niches” (a fatter tail)
3. Connecting supply and demand (esp. through improved search, filtering and recommendation) means more business moves from the “hits” (the steep head of the tail) to the “niches”

Logos seems in many respects to be a good example of a Long Tail business: though we have initial production costs associated with producing titles in digital format, we aggregate demand across a much larger group than a typical bookstore, so we can support our “niche” (and sub-niches within it). And our community pricing model provides a very effective mechanism for determining which titles to produce when and for how much.

As some other reviewers on Amazon have noted, the book itself has a bit of a long tail: most of the interesting stuff comes early on in the book. And i could quibble that, while he’s appropriating as “his curve” something that Pareto and Zipf noted a long time ago, they don’t actually get mentioned until halfway through. That doesn’t seem quite fair to history, but he does have some interesting comparative comments about how the Pareto Principle or 80/20 changes with the Long Tail. Overall, though, i can’t be too critical since he was willing to comment on, and link to a post on our blog about the Zipfian distribution of names in the Bible (which Blogos readers saw first).

• The Long Tail
• Emergence
• The Python Cookbook (i’m finally getting knowledgeable enough to get real benefit from this one)

My brief review of the Python Cookbook read “Lots of practical recipes for using Python more effectively. ” Elesa was very puzzled until her husband, looking over her shoulder, pointed out that Python is a programming language…