I'm working on my PhD in History, and to help pay the bills I teach both classroom and online history courses. The institution I teach online courses for recently moved from requiring students to purchase the course text to providing them an online version with the class, while offering students the option to purchase custom hard copies. Students can purchase the full, hardback, color version, can select monochrome versions, or get paperback or plastic comb bindings. Sounds great, right?
Not so much.
The vendor provides students with a login ID and password for each student to use, which gets them access to the book for six months after the end of the course. The textbook website has integrated learning tools, skills assessments, maps, images, audio and video, etc... along with the text, which is properly paginated to go with my desk copy. Again, this stuff all sounds great. In practice, there are problems.
Students complain that it takes them double or triple the time to do their reading. Sending them login ID and password was a catastrophe, because they were provided by email, and not all students gave us the correct email address or knew that they had a school-supplied email address. This led the school to just embed a link to the text in our courses, which killed much of the interactivity built into the online text.
This ignores other problems. Student computer type and age, patch level, apps, skill level, whether they have their own machine, comfort with updating their computer, etc... have a huge effect on whether a student can successfully use an online text. I teach students that range from high school age into their sixties. Most of them are not comfortable troubleshooting problems, communicating problems, or even understanding that they have a problem. There are students whose parents won't let them install Flash or other media players on the family PC.
Unless Schwarzenegger is talking about providing all students with a Kindle DX (in color) or some similar device with free wireless broadband to access their texts, we're talking about huge administrative burdens, tech support burdens, and even financial burdens for families. The support ecosystem is just just not available for most folks to successfully use an online text for all of their courses.
Actually, one of the main complaints Historians have is incomplete information about the past. Not having every little tidbit makes it impossible to figure out how people actually lived. History _should_ be more than just names, dates, and events. If we can properly preserve and index items that seem really mundane to us, future generations have a _much_ better chance of having some real understanding of how we developed as a society.
So what you're saying is that we shouldn't expose the deserving to ridicule? Did you even read the site in question, or the link the the person threatening to sue? Please.
Two issues for you:
1. Atrios didn't suggest that this dude was an actual stalker, or imply that the people who read his blog (one of the most popular, btw) to harass or threaten anyone.
2. Have you listened to conservative cheap-labor types go after people who question them? They never get sued for the libelous and slanderous things they spew...including the filth put out by Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulture. Try to objectively recall the tings they said about President Clinton for jus a bit.
This is nothing more than a SLAPP lawsuit. Something designed to irritate the person sued to make them go away when they expose something you don't like.
Should Atrios have used a different post title? Maybe. But is it something he (or she) should get sued over? Not hardly. This is the type of crap that keeps real issues in our courts bottled up.
It's interesting that our educational systems have fallen far enough that people actually think we created a government in 1776, when what we really did was announce our intention to break free of England.
The Articles of Confederation that were the original blue-print for government in the colonies, were an unworkable farce, and were replaced by the Constitution ( which has its problems) in the 1780's, but at least allowed us to be an actual nation, not just a bunch of squabbling children.
I'm all for protecting my rights and privacy, but if you want to stop what the government is trying to do, exercise your franchise and vote! Maybe you could run for office and try to make an actual change...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm working on my PhD in History, and to help pay the bills I teach both classroom and online history courses. The institution I teach online courses for recently moved from requiring students to purchase the course text to providing them an online version with the class, while offering students the option to purchase custom hard copies. Students can purchase the full, hardback, color version, can select monochrome versions, or get paperback or plastic comb bindings. Sounds great, right?
Not so much.
The vendor provides students with a login ID and password for each student to use, which gets them access to the book for six months after the end of the course. The textbook website has integrated learning tools, skills assessments, maps, images, audio and video, etc... along with the text, which is properly paginated to go with my desk copy. Again, this stuff all sounds great. In practice, there are problems.
Students complain that it takes them double or triple the time to do their reading. Sending them login ID and password was a catastrophe, because they were provided by email, and not all students gave us the correct email address or knew that they had a school-supplied email address. This led the school to just embed a link to the text in our courses, which killed much of the interactivity built into the online text.
This ignores other problems. Student computer type and age, patch level, apps, skill level, whether they have their own machine, comfort with updating their computer, etc... have a huge effect on whether a student can successfully use an online text. I teach students that range from high school age into their sixties. Most of them are not comfortable troubleshooting problems, communicating problems, or even understanding that they have a problem. There are students whose parents won't let them install Flash or other media players on the family PC.
Unless Schwarzenegger is talking about providing all students with a Kindle DX (in color) or some similar device with free wireless broadband to access their texts, we're talking about huge administrative burdens, tech support burdens, and even financial burdens for families. The support ecosystem is just just not available for most folks to successfully use an online text for all of their courses.
Actually, one of the main complaints Historians have is incomplete information about the past. Not having every little tidbit makes it impossible to figure out how people actually lived. History _should_ be more than just names, dates, and events. If we can properly preserve and index items that seem really mundane to us, future generations have a _much_ better chance of having some real understanding of how we developed as a society.
So what you're saying is that we shouldn't expose the deserving to ridicule? Did you even read the site in question, or the link the the person threatening to sue? Please.
Two issues for you:
1. Atrios didn't suggest that this dude was an actual stalker, or imply that the people who read his blog (one of the most popular, btw) to harass or threaten anyone.
2. Have you listened to conservative cheap-labor types go after people who question them? They never get sued for the libelous and slanderous things they spew...including the filth put out by Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulture. Try to objectively recall the tings they said about President Clinton for jus a bit.
This is nothing more than a SLAPP lawsuit. Something designed to irritate the person sued to make them go away when they expose something you don't like.
Should Atrios have used a different post title? Maybe. But is it something he (or she) should get sued over? Not hardly. This is the type of crap that keeps real issues in our courts bottled up.
It's interesting that our educational systems have fallen far enough that people actually think we created a government in 1776, when what we really did was announce our intention to break free of England.
The Articles of Confederation that were the original blue-print for government in the colonies, were an unworkable farce, and were replaced by the Constitution ( which has its problems) in the 1780's, but at least allowed us to be an actual nation, not just a bunch of squabbling children.
I'm all for protecting my rights and privacy, but if you want to stop what the government is trying to do, exercise your franchise and vote! Maybe you could run for office and try to make an actual change...