The question is, does it make sense to share content openly, or is this trend toward open content thwarting innovation, disrespecting intellectual property and robbing us of our ability to earn a living in the long run?

In this excerpt from his upcoming book, Jason Lanier takes on intellectual sharing and digital collectivism. Strongly stated stuff, but it makes you think (or in my case, rethink) about things you have accepted (if you are like me, a priori, perhaps) as truth.

Long term trends and effect aside, how does this relate to the work of LEARN NC? I think that those of us working to meet the needs of the public school teachers and students have to share. We are working for the state, supported by public resources, and serving a constituency that is under-resourced and hardly equipped to pay. Like others in the public education arena, we are expected to play nice with others and share our toys and we actually walk the walk. Besides, once we begin to try to restrict access to those who have paid, we create a market where there isn’t one, and fair use cedes to for-profit. (takes me back to one of my very first posts in this blog almost two years ago, Fair Use: use it or lose it!)

So what do you think?

• Start with an idea that closely aligns with what the funder wants to fund.
• Think about what you hope to accomplish. What is the scope and depth of the project?
• Is the project innovative? Make sure that the idea you have hasn’t been funded before. The grantor will be looking for something new and different.
• Does the project use best practices? You will need the most up-to-date information that you can get.
• It is easier to find funders with a concept in mind.
• Read the Request for Proposal very carefully, using a highlighter so that you don’t miss any important facts. What to look for:
  • Purpose of the grant funding
  • Eligibility requirements
  • Deadline
  • Proposal section instructions (critical piece)
  • Page limit, fonts, and margins
• Funders will toss out a proposal without looking at it if it doesn’t follow the instructions and use the correct font and margins and goes over the page limit.
• Your organization may serve as a partner with another organization. A memorandum of understanding is needed.
• Buzzwords and acronyms
  • Spell out the words for the acronyms
  • Define words if needed; don’t make assumptions (for instance, “at risk” might mean something else than what you want it to mean.)

Proposal Selection Instructions

Use the proposal section instructions with the scoring criteria if it is included in the Request for Proposal.
Common proposal sections:

1. Needs statement/problem statement
   1. Support with data, surveys, teacher input, etc.
   2. Do more than identify research: explain what you want to do.
2. Goals and Objectives
   1. You need to be realistic. The project should be doable within the grant period.
   2. Goals and objectives should be measurable.
3. Methodology
   1. Describe the what, where, when, and who for the project.
   2. If you are including professional development, be sure to describe it. Make sure it is current.
   3. Identify who will be doing the project and what the follow-up will be.
4. Personnel and staff
   1. Who is responsible for carrying out the project and their responsibilities and why they are the right staff to do this.
5. Evaluation
   1. Will you use an internal or external evaluator? Check the budget to see if there is money included to hire an evaluator.
   2. What evaluation tools will you use? Go back and look at your goals and objectives.
   3. Ask an evaluator to write this section of the proposal. They can better articulate the evaluation tools they will be using.
   4. Colleges and universities have internal evaluators. Also, contact prior grantees and ask them who they used.
   5. The American Evaluation Association website, http://www.eval.org, has a “Find an evaluator” section.
6. Budget
   1. What are the allowable costs?
   2. Make sure the numbers are real.
   3. Create a budget narrative and show calculations. Look for a budget narrative sample through an internet search to see how this is done.
   4. Spell out how much money is needed and why. Include every single line item and discuss this in the narrative.
   5. Don’t make numbers up.
   6. Recheck the addition!
   7. The funding is for the project only, not operational costs.
   8. If including technology in the budget, make sure to justify it in the narrative rather than creating a wish list. Explain why you are selecting specific technology to use in the project.
7. Appendix
   1. Can you include an appendix in the proposal?
   2. Do not put material in the appendix that should be in the narrative.
   3. Don’t overload this area. Most reviewers will only spend a few minutes looking at it.

More things to think about

• Sustainability — Think how you will sustain parts of the project after the funding period. Consider revenue generating options. Expand professional development.
• Partial vs. full funding — Negotiate if necessary. Be clear about what is going to be funded. A revised budget may be needed. A revision to the proposal may also be needed. Ask the funder for a good length of time to work out what it means to your project to have partial funding.
• Scoring before submission — Give the proposal draft to others, including the scoring criteria to identify possible weaknesses in the proposal.
• Look a funded proposals — Get at least one copy of a funded proposal to look at for content, scope and formatting. Look at prior grantees and ask to see how their projects were funded.

Writing a better proposal

• Use clear and precise language
• Make sure that the deadlines and budget information match throughout the proposal.
• Give a draft to a grant writing professional or have them write it. Be clear about their role in the process.
• Use the Request for Proposal guidance and scoring criteria and use the points as a guide also.

Natural push to integrate? Not so much. But why? Seems logical that teachers and faculty developers would integrate the cool applets on Shodor’s Interactivate in their online, hybrid or face-to-face classes, but somehow we’re not making the connections between learners and high-quality digital content.

Sounds like a job for…. the Media Specialist! I know, you are already charged with class novel sets, checking out textbooks, replacing projector lamps, and troubleshooting everything that plugs in, but as the central curriculum resource in the school, who better to integrate quality digital content-area resources? And, where better for teachers and students to encounter these resources than the online public access catalog?

Thanks to Gerry Solomon, Media Mage of North Carolina, for alerting me to a study at Florida State University to explore ways of bringing digital content to school libraries. Digital Libraries to School Libraries (DL2SL): A Strategy for Lasting K-12 Open Content Implementation will explore how school libraries can successfully integrate digital library “open content” in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM materials) into their collections and services.

Clearly, the availability of free, open digital content is not enough. We need to make connections for teachers, align and describe the resources, and provide a central location, one they already turn to for quality, vetted content, for accessing these items. I still wonder at the disconnect between classroom instruction and quality online content, so I will be following this study closely.

Lesley shared an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education that really makes you think. We know that putting computers in classrooms doesn’t always make for a better learning experience, but what about taking them out? What are the advantages of “teaching naked”?

Jeff Young’s July 20th article entitled When Computers Leave Classrooms, So Does Boredom tells of a dean who is so unimpressed with the poor use of technology in instruction that he removed all computers from classrooms to encourage faculty to think about how they spend that classroom time between the bells. If your next lesson is to be presented as a lecture with [dare I say it] a PowerPoint presentation, is why take up precious face-to-face class time to deliver it? Technology allows for the publication and pre-class consumption of that lecture using podcasts, video, and screencasting. Class time can them be used for more engaging learning experiences including group discussions, hands-on activities and other more collaborative learning opportunities.

I would never think to encourage the removal of technology from a classroom and that is not, really, the point. It is not about shunning the use of technology in teaching, it is about effective technology use in teaching. To quote an excellent related blog entry from academhack,

This is not a story about a luddite professor, but rather about a professor who has developed an effective way to use technology in education. In fact what Jose has done, is allowed technology to thoroughly change the way education happens, rather than just treat it as a supplemental, incremental change.

Of course this is not news to us, but you wouldn’t know it, really, from looking at how professional development is created. Too often we plan or procure professional opportunities for teachers without consideration for adult learning theories, let alone brain research. The article makes a few important recommendations and explains why, neurologically, each should be considered if a professional development activity is to make a positive impact. You must read the article to understand why, but here are a few brain-friendly findings:

• Motivation is key, and teachers, like other adults, are usually motivated to learn things to build their skills. Activities that connect directly to job-related goals are more meaningful.
• Effective feedback — timely, specific and positive feedback — contributes to motivation.
• A positive learning situation, one in which the teacher is engaged and has ownership, is more likely to stimulate the part of the brain that allows for attention and retention of the skills or knowledge presented.
• Topics must be presented over enough time and in enough depth to allow for thorough understanding. Social and collaborative opportunities around the topic can help with implementation.

From what we’ve observed, it seems that the impact of professional development, the learning and application of learning, is often not even evaluated. If an evaluation is done, it is usually a post-workshop survey that focuses on the event rather than its impact, and the result may be that the workshop serving the best box lunch is most highly rated! While effective evaluation is more resource intensive, it needs to happen. Otherwise, how will we know we are making the best use of our professional development dollars?

• Organizing and Managing
• Content Collaboration
• Curriculum Sharing
• Media Sharing
• Virtual Environments
• Social Networking and Communication

The Top 25 Web sites for Teaching and Learning were named so because they foster the qualities of innovation, creativity, active participation and collaboration. The Web sites honored include: Animoto; Classroom 2.0; Curriki; Diigo; Edublogs; Facebook; Good Reads; Google Reader; Mindmeister; Ning; Our Story; Partnership for 21st Century Skills; Polleverywhere; Primary Access; RezED; Second Life; Simply Box; Skype; SOS for Information Literacy; Teacher Tube; Twitter; VoiceThread; Wikispaces; Wordle; and Zoho.

The Table of Contents from this issue provides easy access to the articles. Of particular interest is an article by Merrilea J. Mayo about the use of video games in STEM education, something she’s been in discussion with various researchers in North Carolina to get developed. There is also an article that discusses the potential and reality of teachers’ use of digital assets from the National Science Digital Library.

If you are interested in media other than print, start with the video introduction to this special issue, or the podcast of an interview with Chris Dede on immersive interfaces for engagement and learning.

**note** You may need to access this while on campus or use NC LIVE to gain access to this subscription-based resource.

In working on North Carolina Digital History I’ve put a lot of thought and work into making the content as readable as possible — ensuring not only that people will be able to find the material they’re looking for, but also that they’ll be able to read it comfortably and effectively once they’ve found it. I won’t say I’ve entirely succeeded; the current page design is one step in a process of iterative improvement, but I think we’re making considerable progress. It is, in any case, a thoughtful design, and it’s that thought process I want to talk about here.

I’m working from two key premises:

1. People can and will read online, if the content is interesting, well written, and decently designed; and
2. The design of a page of content — its layout and typography, whatever its medium — has a tremendous impact on the ease with which a reader can comprehend it.

Scanning and reading

The difficulty with reading online is that websites are typically designed as if they were reference materials. In fact, the entire theory and practice of web usability is based on the notion that websites exist to help people efficiently find and use discrete bits of information. Usability testing looks at whether “users” (not readers) can navigate a website and find what they’re looking for — essentially, a scavenger hunt. Why? Not because most websites actually exist for that purpose, or even because most websites existed for that purpose back in the ’90s when usability got its start as a field. The web was barely out of diapers when Suck proved that you could publish long-form content on the web, have devoted readers, and support yourself with advertising. No, usability research focuses on information-finding because usability research costs money, and information-finding — or, more specifically, product-finding — is where the money is.

Jakob Nielson’s usability research, the sine qua non of the field, is well-designed, cleary reported, and valuable to designers, but Nielson and his colleagues have to make a living, which they do by selling reports of their research. Who has money to buy research reports at $100 a pop? Big businesses with big business models — business models predicated on either (a) selling products or (b) pointing people to other websites that sell products. Neither of those business models serve readers, so we shouldn’t be surprised when Nielson still insists that people scan, rather than read on the web. This isn’t to disparage Nielson. I believe he’s an honest researcher; I certainly don’t believe he’s twisting his conclusions to suit the needs of the people paying the bills. I do believe, though, that — like all researchers — he designs his questions selectively, with a particular audience and purpose in mind, and before we accept his conclusions we ought to consider how he asks his questions.

The conclusion that people scan rather than read on the web, which Nielson first published in 1997, has become conventional wisdom, but it’s based on a few assumptions that aren’t universally valid. There’s a certain disparagement of “users” that I don’t appreciate — the comparison of users to cattle, for example, foraging for information. (”Users” is bad enough. As Edward Tufte says, “Only two industries refer to their customers as ‘users’: computer design and drug dealing.”) Foremost, though, is the assumption that people are less likely to read a web page than they are, say, a magazine. In fact, people read magazines and newspapers in a variety of ways that are less than thorough and far from linear. Some people read a magazine from back to front; others jump around looking for content that interests them. Newspaper readers will follow a “jump” to a new page only if they are particularly interested in the article. But when readers find an article that interests them, they’ll sit and read it… at least until they lose interest.

All this sounds like pretty much the way “users” are supposed to behave on the web. In fact, some recent research from the Knight Digital Media Center on eye-tracking suggests that people read newspapers online much the way they read them in print. In fact, “Once people chose what they wanted to read they read more thoroughly online than in print.” (Emphasis mine.) As the researchers conclude, we can get over longing for the “good old days.” People will read online content if it interests them, if it’s well-written, and if it’s designed decently, just as they do in print — maybe even more so.

All this is irrelevant to some degree in designing a textbook, because the audience for a textbook is captive. They can’t simply choose not to read it. Still, we ought to care how easily they can read it, and whether we’re doing everything we can to aid comprehension.

What readers need

Mandy Brown writes that readers — not skimmers or “information seekers” but readers who are reading carefully and deeply and thoughtfully — need solitude above all else. To read, we need to isolate ourselves with a text. Books give us the space we need to read; websites do not. But they could; designers simply choose not to design them that way:

There are, of course, readers who shun the screen—those who print out long articles, or—gasp!—purchase printed books and magazines instead. We often attribute their resistance to those elements over which we have no control: the physical discomfort of sitting at a desk (versus curling up with a book); the as-yet-impossible task of producing a screen that is more comfortable than paper; the attention-deficit nature of so much browsing online that makes the transition to reading seem unattainable. But there are in fact other issues at play here, and we are capable of exerting a great deal of control over them: whether or not the design of the page embraces the reading experience, or merely grudgingly squeezes it in among the looking and searching and skimming.

I should say that most books give us the space we need to read. Novels, for example, and monographs, and most nonfiction books present plain, well-spaced text, black on white, with sufficiently wide margins that we don’t feel we’re falling off the page with the words. Textbooks, though — in fact most books for kids — have grown increasingly busy over the last few decades, usually with the excuse that kids like eye candy and will be bored with plain text.

Well, everybody likes eye candy. But eye candy doesn’t aid comprehension. It attracts the attention and distracts the reader, and distractions prevent us from absorbing information, exploring concepts, making connections between ideas. Busy design is fine for reference books, whose purpose is to help you find and recall discrete bits of information — Dorling-Kindersley’s topical encyclopedias and “Eyewitness” books are great fun to browse, and the photos and illustrations are visual anchors to help those discrete facts take root in the reader’s mind. If you’re reading an explanation of the banking crisis, or Anna Karenina, you need room to concentrate.

Designing for readers

What does it mean, on the web, to give readers their space? It means simplifying the user experience to help readers follow the text and stay focused. It means, sometimes, not taking advantage of the medium of the web by littering the page with media and hyperlinks. It means a minimalist design — not a boring one, because attractive sites are actually more usable, but one that, in the words of the too-liberally quoted Albert Einstein, is as simple as possible but not more so.

In North Carolina Digital History, for example:

• The main text column expands with the width of the web browser, but only to a point — it has a maximum width of 56 ems, or (roughly) the width of the letter m in a given type face. The number of characters in a horizontal line of text is called measure. We want to take advantage of the horizontal space a big monitor provides, but too great a measure — too wide a column — and the eye has trouble tracking across the page.
• There is a great deal of white space around that main column. The right-hand sidebar, which includes navigation links, commentary, and links to supplemental material, is separated from the main column by a sizable gutter, and I’ve tried to keep it as short as possible (which I admit isn’t always as short as I’d like).
• To avoid luring students away from the text, I don’t link from the body of the page to ancillary material, but only to material (potentially) necessary for comprehension of the page itself, such as definitions of terms, comments on primary sources, and footnotes. Links to related material, further reading, and so on are relegated to the sidebar.
• Media such as images go in the main text column only if the student is asked to stop and consider them carefully.
• Images that don’t meet the above criteria are “pullout out” into the left-hand column so that they appear next to the text to which they relate. There, they don’t interfere with reading, but they’re close by relevant passages if they’re wanted.
• A big difference between reading a printed page and a screen is that if you look away from a printed page, you can remember your place. Once you scroll away from a paragraph of text on a computer screen, it can be hard to find again. To help readers keep their place, I try to keep paragraphs relatively short, and I use more headings than I would in print. Left-column images help to mark vertical space, as well. In long documents, especially dull ones like charters and constitutions, I pull out headers into the left-column. (In the last case, I’m tacitly — or sometimes openly — admitting that I don’t really expect anybody to do more than skim the document.)

I’ll write more about several of these points, and others having to do with web typography, in greater detail in further posts. For now, I’ve violated enough of my own readability rules for one day.

• Cost. A student who buys a $100 textbook new can sell it back to Student Stores for $50, where it’s sold used for $75. An e-textbook costs $50, so the cheapest option for the student is to buy a used print copy and sell it back. (Interestingly, the biggest reason textbooks are so expensive is the huge market in used books — a positive feedback loop that keeps driving up costs.)
• You can’t keep an e-book — electronic textbooks expire after 180 or 360 days.
• Difficulty of use. E-textbooks are nearly always just print textbooks put onto a screen, with the same layout, which makes them difficult to read (that was my point, not theirs).
• Electronic versions do not always have all the same content as print textbooks, and publishers don’t make this clear. A professor considering allowing the e-book has to read through both versions carefully to make sure they’re the same.

Despite all this, everybody in the room — half of them were from UNC Press, it seemed — thought that the major impediment to wider adoption of e-textbooks was cultural. The assumption remains that electronic text is the inevitable future of reading. This kind of prediction often produces its own feedback loop — the more people hear it, the more they repeat it, believe it, and eventually give into it. But it can also be self-preventing — if people assume it’s inevitable, they don’t bother actually taking steps toward it, and then it never happens. The latter is what I see happening with these e-textbooks. Publishers figure it’s the wave of the future, and they want to look like they’re moving in the “right direction,” so they publish electronic versions of their textbooks, but they can’t come up with a business model for publishing them, and they don’t bother designing them so they can actually be used. History is littered with inevitable things that never happened; this could turn out to be one more.