For the past 18 months or so, I have been a big fan of a certain web 2.0 tool that allowed students to create online books that could be viewed interactively and shared by URL. In a big email push this past week, they revised their user agreement. I read it carefuly, but even my skeptical eye did not catch the fact that they had removed the capability to see the book interactively unless you are actually logged into that “personal” account. No longer can teachers have students create books and share them electronically with family and friends at no cost. No longer can teachers create interactive ways for students to understand new content. No longer can all the teachers to whom we have “plugged” this tool use it with their class
es in any functional way.
Some of the other changes related to content ownership are even more disturbing, but this one is the deal breaker right up front. If it is not free, TeachersFirst cannot review and recommend it. The sad thing is that I thought their business model MIGHT actually work: provide the tool for free, but ask parents and teachers to pay if they wanted a printed copy of the book. In an ordinary economy, it should have worked. Seeing your child’s (or grandchild’s) clever writing would be enough for parents to shell out the bucks. The school library or a teacher might select the very best books created by a class for actual printing and permanent display on school shelves. Even in an era where reading has become more and more electronic and less tactile, people can be overcome by the urge to make a moment in a child’s life “permanent.” It should have worked.
But the economy strikes again. So we will be removing mention of this once-amazing tool for scaffolded or open writing experiences from over 80 reviews on TeachersFirst. Instead of recommending that students create online books, we will recommend another content-authoring tool…until that one dies, too. Let’s hope the economy improves before it sucks all creativity out of learning. There are enough forces at work trying to do just that. Economics should not be one of them.
Twenty or thirty years from now, electronic libraries will be full of cyber-volumes about the opening decade of the 21st century and the confluence of events that turned the world sideways like an iPhone display: the flood of web 2.0, September 11, wars, and unprecedented economic distress. We certainly have no satellite view today. We cannot even feel the tilt well enough to know which end is up. We have all this information, and we can find out nothing.
I just finished editing another set of small tidbits to throw into the Web of information and ideas about the economy: some pages for parents on how to help children and teens cope during tough economic times and some for teachers on how to help all of us learn more about these complex systems. But even collecting and synthesizing good information from reliable sources is a slippery reality. When it comes down to it, nothing we write is any better than the reliable sources we trust — trust just because someone else we trust already trusted them. Even a savvy web user can only use the tests of reputation, references, credentials, and (gulp) Google ranking to decide who to believe. If my network says it’s reliable, I guess I can trust it.
As educators we know that we must help our students learn to compare information, assess it, compile it, and convey it, but there are days like today when I wonder if we are simply helping them build a false sense of reality. I watch the news and I wonder which “authority” or “expert” will fall tomorrow, which economic scheme will prove false, which report on the stateus of Afghanistan will be mistaken. I especially wonder what the state of the economy really is. No one knows. And this time Google does not help. There does not seem to be an algorithm for ranking such a total abstraction.
I am afraid I am left simply wondering what they will say in twenty or thirty years about all of us who are driven by the shepherds of the news media and the Internet. Reality is slippery, and we are supposed to help our students navigate it when we do not understand it ourselves. But someone trusts us because someone else they trust trusted us.
Scary.
