The impact of online sales tax

It seems that Amazon will be collecting tax on California sales in a year, and I expect that to become the national norm. What might the impact of the tax be?

The US Department of Commerce estimated that online shoppers spent $165.4 billion in 2010 and Vertex Inc. estimated the average state tax rate as 5.5224% during the first nine months of 2010. That says states are losing around $9.13 billion annualy in Internet sales tax.

That may be a small portion of our 14.7 trillion dollar GNP, but it would pay the salaries of a lot of state workers (especially professors :-), which would help the economy and make a lot of people happy.

But, aren't sales taxes regressive, taking a bigger percent of a poor person's income than a rich person's? For sure.

If it were up to me, I would raise revenue with a progressive tax that came out of the pockets of those better able to pay (like me) and corporations that take advantage of unreasonable loopholes..

But we are talking about sales tax, and my guess is that a sales tax on Internet purchases is relatively fair -- less regressive than general sales tax. Online shoppers tend to be relatively well off. They have computers, broadband connections to the Internet, credit cards, can accept daytime deliveries, etc.

We need emperical data on this question -- it would make a good thesis or dissertation if economists have not already studied it.

On balance, I favor taxing online sales, but if it turned out to be as regressive as our general sales tax, I would probably change my mind.

Regressive taxes are a bad idea for a couple of reasons. Most directly, they make the lives of poor people -- little kids and adults -- less happy. But they also reinforce the growing economic inequality in the United States.

What do

Namibia, South Africa, Lesotho, Botswana, Sierra Leone, Central African Republic, Haiti, Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil, Guatemala, Honduras, Hong Kong, Paraguay, El Salvador, Chile, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Zambia, Niger, Swaziland, Gambia, Zimbabwe, Dominican Republic, Peru, Sri Lanka, Mexico, Costa Rica, Singapore, Madagascar, Mozambique, Nepal, Uruguay, Ecuador, Rwanda, Philippines, Uganda, and Jamaica

have in common?

According to the CIA World Factbook, they are the only nations with higher GINI coefficients than the United States, suggesting that their income inequality is even greater than ours. That is not very good company, and it does not make for a comfortable, sustainable place to live.

California's Internet sales tax will reshape retail

Amazon VP Paul Misener

Two months ago, the California legislature passed a law requiring Amazon to collect sales tax, and Amazon retaliated by starting a state referendum drive to repeal the law and dumping thousands of California-based affiliates. Now, it seems a settlement has been reached in this battle. It's been reported that Amazon will drop its referendum drive in return for a one year moratorium on collecting sales tax.

If you live in California, your Amazon purchases will remain tax-free for the next year, but will be taxed after that.

That will help the state budget. Amazon VP for global public policy Paul Misener said that Amazon would also "welcome back tens of thousands of California-based advertising affiliates," which means yet more tax revenue for the state.

I favored and predicted this outcome, but did not expect it to be settled so quickly. My guess is that other states will follow suit -- California is large and influential and thirteen other states are already in conflict with them over tax collection. The New York Times has also reported on Amazon's tax problems in other states.

In a comment on a previous post, Shava Nerad, suggested that the mechanics of tax collection from 50 states with different rates, forms and procedures would create a record keeping nightmare. She worried that confusion over forms and procedure would drive thousands of small mail order and catalog companies out of business.

The one year moratorium gives online retailers and states time to work out uniform, simple forms and procedures for tax computation and reporting. It seems that Amazon wants to work out such a solution. Misener says they will "work with Congress and the states to obtain a federal resolution to the sales tax issue as soon as possible."

Amazon should take the lead in designing the system. They have a large stake in having it be simple and smooth, and they have been running a complex online service since the mid-1990s. It sounds like a good Amazon Web Services application to me.

The implications of this compromise go beyond California. It tips the on-line/storefront balance, and will impact retail business throughout the nation. We might even see some Amazon stores.

US Ignite -- can the US develop innovative applications for the coming gigabit network?

In 1986, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) linked a few universities, creating a national network. The initial 56k bps links shown here were soon upgraded to T1s, and people began using applications like email, file transfer and threaded discussion..

As networks spread and increased in speed, new applications were invented. The majority of those applications were developed in the US, because we had more people using state of the art networks than other nations. Most international traffic came to the NSF backbone, where it was terminated or passed through to another nation.

But our infrastructure and connectivity lead has eroded, leaving us a typical developed nation, no longer outstanding. Nations with wide spread high-speed networks are likely to develop applications for the future.

Is there a way for us to regain momentum as we enter the gigabit era? Some US universities and cities and companies like Google have already moved in that direction. Universities are experimenting with high-speed networks and Google is connecting a few cities, but, can those efforts be connected and scaled up?

NSF hopes so. They want to connect the experimental gigabit networks at various universities and cities together to create a large enough user base to justify and spur application innovation.

The USIgnite effort is just getting off the ground -- they are now soliciting white papers and will soon hold a workshop.

For a discussion of US Ignite, check this post on Google Plus.

Amazon offers California a sales tax compromise

Two months ago, the California Legislature passed a law requiring Amazon to collect sales tax. Amazon refused, dumped all its California affiliate stores (costing the state tax revenue), claimed they were not operating in California and started a petition campaign for a ballot measure to overturn the law. In the meantime, they are not collecting tax, and when the measure qualifies for the ballot, the law will be temporarily suspended.

Now Amazon has offered to build two warehouses in California and hire 7,000 workers if the legislature will put the issue off for a few years. (Does the 7,000 include the affiliates they cut off or would it be the reinstated affiliates plus 7,000)?

I live in California and love it that Amazon is tax free -- often choosing them over another store for just that reason. Regardless, I think they should drop the referendum and start collecting sales tax and I predict they eventually will have to.

Here are a few reasons why (in no particular order):

• Amazon asserts that an online sales tax would cost California jobs. I find their faith in low taxes as an economic silver bullet reminiscent of the Tea Party. It will cost some jobs and pay to create or maintain some others. No one knows the net change.
  
• The California Retailers Association (Walmart, Barnes and Noble, etc.) says Amazon's refusal to collect sales tax cost California over 18,000 jobs and a $4.1-billion loss in sales resulting in over $7 billion in lost economic activity in 2010. I trust their figures about as much as I trust that Amazon gives a hoot about California jobs.
  
• California loses jobs when consumers pay higher taxes and when Amazon affiliates are zapped, but we also lose jobs with the bankruptcy of Amazon competitors like Circuit City and Borders Books. The same goes for laying off teachers, state employees, and others.
  
• I believe California needs added revenue and am willing to pay my share.
  
• I worry that a sales tax might be a burden for the poor, but I bet Amazon shoppers are relatively affluent. This is an empirical question that Amazon could answer.
  
• The early rationale for an online sales tax exemption was that it would allow Internet e-commerce to take off. Amazon has taken off.
  
• Amazon thinks it might be cheaper to do a ballot referendum than to fight the law in court, but what about the cost of a referendum to the taxpayers?
  
• The media and advertising business will surely like the referendum – both online and brick-and-mortar retailers will spend tons of money on misleading, simple-minded ads.
  
• Amazon cut off their California marketing affiliates in order to claim that they had no operations the state, but seven California addresses are on the list of United States Subsidiaries at Amazon’s Web site.

Let me know what I have left off this list – on both sides.

California is a large, precedent setting state, and this battle has national implications. Wikipedia lists 13 states where Amazon is in a controversy over sales and use taxes. My fearless prediction is that the list will grow, and, in the long run, we will be paying tax on online purchases. That will change the retail landscape (and maybe Amazon will open stores when it happens).

Get a free copy of Twitter for Good -- a how-to for organizations with social goals

When Twitter started up, its prompt question was "What are you doing?" A lot of early traffic was simple answers to that question -- interesting to your friends perhaps, but not particularly significant.

The prompt today is "what's happening?," which solicits a broader class of comment.

There are many stories of inventions that came to be used in ways their creators did not envision, and Twitter is one of those. In the preface of Twitter for Good, co-founder Biz Stone tells the story of James Buck, a photo journalist covering Egyptian demonstrations. When Buck was arrested during a demonstration he tweeted one word -- "arrested." The word spread via Twitter to his colleagues and diplomats, and within hours he tweeted again -- "free."

It is now clear that Twitter can be used for more than telling friends what you are doing. It has been used for disaster relief, political organizing, live reporting of events, as a broadcast medium for popular figures like athletes, actors, politicians and journalists, even, sadly, for coordination of terrorist activity.

Twitter for Good is a how-to book with tips and case studies for organizations and individuals that want to use Twitter for good. It's oriented toward social action, but many of the recommendations are also relevant to any organization that wants to use Twitter for public relations, marketing, and customer or community relationship management.

I have only skimmed the book, so cannot write a full, critical review, but, if it sounds interesting, you can get a free copy. Starting at 12:00 AM (midnight) on Tuesday, September 6, 2011 an electronic version of the book will be available for download at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Click on the Kindle (Amazon) or Nook (B&N) edition, then purchase them for free. The B&N version is in ebook format.

The offer is good for 24 hours. If you miss the free copy, all is not lost -- you can enter to win a copy here.

AT&T (and Verizon) hypocrisy

AT&T argues that their acquisition of T-Mobile would benefit the public because they would be able to increase their fourth-generation LTE coverage from 80% to 97% of the US population, but couldn't they do that on their own without T-Mobile?

It turns out they had an internal proposal to do just that. In a recent FCC filing AT&T estimates that they could deploy the approximately 44,000 nodes needed to achieve 97% coverage by the end of 2013 at a cost of $3.8 billion.

However, in the next paragraph they say that senior management had rejected the proposed build out since there "was no viable business case for such an expansion." The extra coverage was not worth even $3.8 billion to AT&T.

Yet they have offered $39 billion for T-Mobile. Part of that is to acquire T-Mobile customers, but those folks might not stick around since they had already decided against AT&T. Still, what alternative would they have?

That pesky competitor T-Mobile would be gone and there would be only two competitors remaining. Sprint was small and not doing so well. How long until there would be only one competitor? Sweet.

Lest you think that I am an exclusive AT&T basher, let me point out that I was a Verizon customer until last year when they treated me so badly that I left them for cable.

Furthermore, Verizon can match AT&T's hypocrisy. If you want to come unglued, check this post on Verizon<.a>.

We are toast.

The 2011 Campus Technology Conference

I recently attended the 2011 Campus Technology Conference in Boston. Since I teach using Web 2.0 tools, am an e-text developer and my school is interested in using iPads, I focused on those areas and had a great time and learned a lot. I'll tell you what I saw, and you can follow the links at the end of this report to see videos and slides from presentations I missed.

Keynote session

The conference was preceded by a day of workshops featuring in-depth presentations and hands-on exercises. Two that caught my eye were Mark Frydenberg on Web 2.0 tools for the college classroom and Jenna Linskens on the applications and uses of the iPad in education.

Linskens stated that there are over 12,500 educational applications for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch -- that can be a bit overwhelming. Experienced teachers like Linskens and Frydenberg organize applications and focus on those that they find useful. Linskens mentioned 102 applications in 13 categories, including four "must haves." (What would be your "must have" iPad applications)?  Similarly, Frydenberg showed dozens of applications in 14 categories.

Michael Wesch

The next day, the conference got underway with an inspirational, entertaining talk by award winning teacher Michael Wesch of Kansas State University. Those familiar with Wesch and the videos he and his students have made documenting classroom atmosphere and engagement will find the first half of the presentation familiar. 

For example, over half of his students say they do not like school, but none dislikes learning and he expressed his disappointment in the kinds of questions students ask – for example "how long does the paper have to be" or "will that be on the exam?"

Wesch: required skills change over time

This presentation went beyond Wesch’s earlier work. He brought in his experience as an anthropologist in Papua New Guinea and got a bit Mcluhaneque in talking about the idea that media are more than communication tools -- they mediate and change relationships. A family gathered around a TV set at dinner time is not the same as a post-TV family. Educational needs are also different. Students who grew up during the TV era need to learn critical thinking, while those in the post TV world need media literacy for creating, filtering, organizing, distributing and rating information.

There were two and a half days of concurrent session presentations. The session format stressed quality over quantity -- each presentation was a full hour, so there was time for formal talks, demos and discussion.

Jeff Borden

Being interested in e-text, the first session I attended was "eText is Here" by Rand Spiwak and John Ittelson. They are e-text enthusiasts, but stress that the format wars were far from settled. The turbulent nature of the format and device wars was further emphasized by Jeff Borden of Pearson Learning in his presentation "Emerging Technologies in Content Delivery: eBooks and eReader Devices." Borden listed 23 e-reading devices and 18 e-text formats.

Borden is an informative, entertaining speaker. He gave two presentations, and both were recorded. I recommend watching the videos. You might also be interested in his directory of 500 e-learning tools.

Borden: tools change over time

In addition to keynotes and technical sessions, there were extended conversations with executives from Google, Apple and Microsoft. These ran concurrently with the technical sessions, and provided an opportunity to hear a strategic presentation and have plenty of time for questions and discussion. I only had time to attend one of these conversations, but will watch the videos of the other two now that I am back from traveling.

The exhibit floor

Campus Technology is not a purely academic conference -- there was a mix of academic and professional presentations, a show floor with vendor booths and an area where vendors made scheduled presentations. The exhibit area was large enough to include many interesting vendors and small enough that I had time to visit all the booths with products I wanted to learn more about -- like the three bears, it was just right.

Videos: I've just scratched the surface. Videos of the keynote sessions, conversation sessions, and featured parallel presentations are online.

Slides: The workshop and presentation slides are also online. Even if there is no video of a session you are interested in, you can download the slides, get a feel for the presentation and contact the author.

Steve Jobs is an artist

Homebrew Computer Club meeting

I only met Steve Jobs once -- at a Homebrew Computer Club meeting in 1976. Homebrew meetings were held in a stadium style auditorium at the Stanford University linear accelerator lab, and they featured a "random access" time, in which people in the audience stood up and made announcements or asked for help with a problem they were working on.

Steve Wozniak stood up and offered free copies of the schematic for the computer he and his friend had built.

After the random access session, attendees talked with each other and with vendors standing at tables in the back of the auditorium. Jobs was behind a table with a wire wrapped version of the Apple I motherboard, and we talked about the trade-offs in implementing functions in software or hardware.

Wozniak, Jobs and an Apple I

At the time, I was editor of Interface Age, a short-lived magazine with a national circulation, so I asked Jobs if he would write us an article about his ideas on design and his computer. He told me he would not be willing to write an article unless I would devote the entire issue to Apple.

I was pissed by the kid's arrogance, and walked away.

Inside the Apple I

But he was right to be arrogant. He is an artist who works on very large canvases.

Jobs does not create paintings or songs, he creates products and industries. Painters work with paint and brushes, musicians with instruments. Jobs works with organizations and capital. His artistic works include Apple Computer, Apple, Next, Pixar, Apple stores and iTunes and he's sculpted the personal computer, mobile music and phone, movie, TV and music industries. Now he is dabbling in architecture with Apple's proposed office complex.

Check this column by David Pogue for more on the industries and products Jobs imagined and then created.

Apple I

Steve Jobs' Stanford commencement speech

Steve Jobs gave this 14.5 minute address to Stanford graduates in 2005. It is an inspiring speech, which calls upon the graduating students to have the courage to follow their passion. It would have been an even more appropriate speech to give to the entering freshman class because while in school students have the freedom to seek their passion and to make mistakes.

Text transcript of the speech.

Here are a few quotes from the speech:

"The minute I dropped out (of Reed College), I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting...None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac."

"I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me."

"Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do."

"Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition."

"Stay hungry, stay foolish."

Facebook Evil -- they invented my "interests"

As you see here, Facebook lists my interests as: PetVille, The Global Text Project, Wondershare, Quantum Wealth Management, and Celebrity Cruises

I have never told Facebook that I was interested in these things, in fact:

• I have no interest in PetVille -- my wife plays that game with our grandchildren.
• I am interested in the Global Text Project, but have never told that to Facebook or given them permission to tell others.
• I have never heard of Wondershare and have no idea what it is.
• My son-in-law owns Quantum Wealth Management, but I've never told Facebook about that.
• I have taken some cruises, but never with Celebrity Cruises.

When people compare Google Plus and Facebook, they usually focus on features and user interface. I hope Google stays away from Facebook's Evil practices.

Recommended podcast: Maajid Nawaz on radical's use of the Internet

Maajid Nawaz

At first we naively expected the Internet and other communication technology to favor democracy over dictatorship. In a 1998 report on the Internet in Cuba, I wrote of

the 'dictator's dilemma' -- the desire to have the benefits of the Internet without the threat of political instability. How do you give people access to information for health care, education, and commerce while keeping them from political information?

Today, we have a more nuanced view of the Internet as a force for democracy -- we see that it is not only used by democrats, but by dictators and even terrorists, as illustrated by the use of Google Earth to plan missile attacks.

al-Aqsa commander in Gaza

Maajid Nawaz, presents a vivid picture of the use of the Internet by radical Islamists in his Ted Talk A global culture to fight extremism. Nawaz feels that extremists -- whether Islamists or white power advocates -- make better use of the Internet than democracy advocates. He speaks with authority, having used the Internet as a propagandist and recruiter for the global Islamist party Hizb ut-Tahrir for 13 years, including five years in an Egyptian prison for attempting to overthrow the government. He describes the use of the Net by extremists, asks why they have succeeded across borders and goes on to argue for a countervailing grass roots, youth-led movement to advocate for a democratic culture.

Directory of e-Learning tools

Jeff Borden and his colleagues at Pearson eCollege have created a directory of 500 e-learning tools. The tools are divided into several categories: Continuing Education, Data, Discipline Specific Material, Graphics & Audio, Learning Assets, Measurement, Planning, Presentation Tools, Reference, Repository/Community, Search Engine, Student Tools, Technical, Online Teaching Theory, Web 2.0, and YouTube Videos.

Nearly all of the tools are free, and there is something there for every teacher and student interested in Internet-based education.

Look the material over and, if you find a tool you like, let us know about it.

Free, online Intro to AI from Stanford University

Stanford University CS 221 Introduction to to AI will be offered free online this fall.

The lectures will be online and all students will use the same materials, do the same assignments and take the same exams. Non-Stanford students will receive a completion letter showing where they fall on the grading curve. Over 10.000 students had requested information in the first three days after the course was announced. The instructors hope they can handle 10s or 100s of thousand students using tools like Google Moderator to select questions for discussion. I am curious to see how this and other very large online courses work out.

The Net is back up in Syria -- why did they take it down? Why reconnect?

As shown in this graph from Renesys. Syria, like Egypt in January, was disconnected from the Internet for 28 hours, but is now back online.

Why did they take it down? Why did they reconnect it?

I am sure the takedown was under consideration and debated internally for some time. The deciding factor may have been the world wide revulsion at the YouTube video showing the tortured and mutilated body of 13-year old Hamza Ali al-Khateeb. (A good place to read about that is David Brooks' commentary on it in the New York Times. If you want to see the video itself, you can find it on YouTube. I've not watched it -- Brooks' description was sufficient for me.)

Why did they reconnect to the Internet? Perhaps they realized the futility of stopping the flow of information into and out of the country, as illustrated by this tweet:

@MadeInSyria Dial up access for #Syria: +46850009990 +492317299993 +4953160941030 user:telecomix password:telecomix, 11 hours ago

Perhaps it was the dictator's dilemma -- Syrian economic institutions had grown too dependent upon the Net to cut it off. Regardless, it is back up and the Twitter stream for #syria is again reporting on the situation, for example:

@MalathAumran: Hama reports tens of tanks gathering about 60 at the southern entrance of the city #Syria, 1 hour ago

@jenanmoussa: Ten dead as helicopter opens fire in #syria(n) city of #Edleb: al arabiya, 2 hours ago

@weddady: 63 peaceful protesters killed yesterday by the regime of Bashar Al-Assad in #Syria.. in other news, the world is watching.., 2 hours ago

@MalathAumran: Idleb: Military helicopters are shooting randomly on Jisr Alshghour city for half an hour now. more details @ http://j.mp/j2wR3s #Syria, 2 hours ago

@guardian: Syrian forces kill 70 protesters http://gu.com/p/2ph93/tw #Syria
2 hours ago

@FlashNewsPlus, #Syria: extremely disturbing report from witnesses that wounded are being taken from Al Badr hospital in #Hama and killed. via @MalathAumran, 8 hours ago

Messages like these are being read by government leaders and citizens around the world, and they cannot easily be ignored. They are also important for the people in Syria who can know what is going on in cities other than their own.

The Syrian government would like to suppress this news, but they cannot. Do they now wish they had reined in the Internet from the beginning, as, for example, Cuba did and continues doing? Cuba has paid a price for that decision, but it may have helped prolong Castro's regime.

The Web of Data -- WolframAlpha is two years old

We talk about different ways to retrieve stored data. Text search ala Google is most common, but we also have relational databases like Zoho Creator, hierarchical taxonomies like the Yahoo Directory or the Dewey Decimal system used in libraries, and keyword tags like the label terms in the right hand column of this blog.

Wolframalpha, which just celbrated its second birthday, stores and retrieves structured data, but it goes beyond retrieval, using the data for computation. For example, when I entered "New York to Los Angeles at 100 miles/hour," it computed the straight line distance using geo-coordinates and then computed the time to travel that distance at 100 miles/hour. (Click the image to enlarge it).

It also showed the assumptions it made -- that I meant the city New York, not the State or Financial Note and I meant Los Angeles, California, not Chile -- and it inferred that I wanted it to compute travel time from the fact that I had included a velocity (100 miles/hour) in my query. It also "knows" that a velocity is an example of a broader class, rate.

It easily handed unit conversions. When I modified the query, asking it to calculate "Los Angeles to New York at 1 inch per hour," it reversed the direction of the arrow in the diagram and told me the trip would take 17,804 years 3 months 24 days 22 hours 35 minutes.

My next query was "calories in 2 slices of bread and 2 tablespoons of peanut butter and 2 tablespoons of jelly." It calculated the weight of the ingredients, looked up the number of calories of each and displayed the result: 440 calories. It also displayed other nutrition facts like the amount of fat, cholesterol, and saturated fat.

WolframAlpha has information on many types of object, but it is limited. When I asked for the "calories in a peanut butter and jelly sandwich," it overlooked the bread, and assumed two tablespoons of peanut butter and one of jelly. It does not have data on "sandwiches."

But, the next version may. Wolfram is constantly adding new data. During their second year they added data in these categories: US Economy,International Data, US Social Statistics, Culture and Media, Geography, Astronomy, Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Health and, medicine, Life Sciences, Materials, Physics, Money and, Finance, Units and Measures, Math, and Technology and Computer Systems.

It is noteworthy that Wolfram has decided their staff would add new data. This is in contrast to Freebase, a structured data storage and retrieval system, in which any user is able to add data, wiki style. (Freebase lacks the computation ability of Wolframalpha).

Freebase and Wolfram are building a "web of data" as opposed to a web of HTML and javascirpt pages. They include semantic information -- they know about the data they are storing.

Is this the future of the Web? Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web protocols, is now focusing his attention on the semantic web and Google has acquired Freebase. Google knows you are an instance of the class person -- what can they infer about you?

More on Nature's forthcoming digital texts

A few days ago, I posted a positive note about a series of electronic texts announced by Nature Publishing. It sounded like a significant improvement over the electronic textbooks being offered by other major publishers, so, I followed up with an email interview of Vikram Savkar, Publishing Director for Nature Education. The questions and answers follow, and the added emphasis is mine, not his -- all good stuff.

When will it be possible to play around with the etext or at least a sample interactive lesson or other material?

We expect to be able to demo sample modules for press in early to mid August, ahead of publication of the full product for the broader market on September 1 2011. Review access will be available to instructors from September 1, 2011.

Is the etext a collection of interactive lessons or are the interactive lessons a supplement to an integrated textbook?

The interactive lessons in fact are the textbook. Each lesson is a thorough exploration of the topic at hand, beginning with background information, followed by a discussion of core concepts, mid-point self-tests, interactive activities to allow the student to apply core concepts, and end of lesson test questions. There are approximately 200 such lessons arranged in the sequence in which introductory biology courses are usually taught. Instructors will be able to rearrange the lessons if they teach topics in a somewhat different order. The lessons are interactive in two senses. First, because they are online - and integrated with the gradebook, annotation tools, self-tests, end of lessons test questions, and so on - students will actively drive their own progress through the material, with continual feedback to let them know where they stand. Second, most lessons contain rich interactive demonstrations (available in both Flash and HTML5 versions) that immerse students even more deeply in particularly key concepts. Taken as a whole, the interactive textbook combines what is best from print textbooks (thorough text, peer reviewed figures) with the best of what is only possible online. Note that the textbook will come with a rich set of supplements, including lecture notes, instructor guides, and more.

How often will it be revised?

One of our core goals in designing Principles of Biology was to enable it to evolve frequently, in response to both emerging scientific discoveries and suggestions that instructors have on how to expand particular modules. We plan to make these revisions on an ongoing basis. Instructors will be able to choose on a case by case basis whether or not they import these revisions during the semester, so no instructors will ever be surprised by an automatic update to the text. We think of this approach as creating a "living edition".

Will it be for sale to the general public as well as students?

Yes (and I agree with you, I think there are many lifelong learners who could benefit from this book) Principles of Biology will be available for individual purchase from the Nature Education website from September 1, 2011. The general public can pay $49 by credit card and will receive the same lifetime access that students do, with the same continual revision to maintain scientific currency.

To what extent, if any, will uses be able to cache material for offline study?

Students will have access to an offline digital version, which has most of the instructional content but won't be tied into the gradebook and a few other connection-dependent features. It's not a substitute for the full interactive textbook, but it should allow students to do some good studying on a plane or wherever else they happen to have time but no internet access.

What about DRM?

There is some DRM, but the heart of the anti-piracy strategy we've chosen for this program is ensuring that the official product is so effective that there is a significant disincentive to use a pirated version. For example, the assessments that we've integrated into every page of the textbook will feed into the online gradebook that instructors use to evaluate students' progress. Students who don't purchase the digital product won't be in the gradebook . . . that will be inconvenient for them. I'm sure some people will try to bend the rules. Overall, by pricing this product affordably, adding in plenty of value online, and mixing in a little bit of DRM, I believe we've created a strong case for people to use this product as intended.

Have you any art or sample videos that we can look at or link to?

Not just yet . . . the website is still in development and testing. We'll have samples available to you in August. We do have a few mock-ups of an iPad view of Principles of Biology if you would like to use them in the BYTE.com piece. These are early design concepts at this stage. You can see an example here.

Will there be a computer science "book" in the series? Will there be versions for non-majors, for example, "IT literacy" as opposed to computer science?

Since the natural sciences are our core strength as a publisher, our primary focus is to expand the program across most of the life and physical sciences in next few years. I would say that expansion into fields like computer science would likely only be through partnerships with publishers who specialize in those spaces.

If they deliver what they seem to be promising, and live up to the policies I've highlighted above, these will be terrific books. Since they are limiting themselves to life and physical science, I hope other publishers are watching.

(Here is another interview of Savkar -- check it out).

Textbooks -- moving beyond the "Gutenberg Bible"

Nature Education, in partnership with the California State University System (my employer), has announced a series of digital textbooks in college-level science. The first book in the series, Principles of Biology, is intended for biology majors and will be available September 1, 2011. It will be used at three CSU campuses in the fall.

Gutenberg's first books were reprints of the large handwritten bibles of the time. Today, traditional textbook publishers are offering machine readable versions of previously printed books and chapters. Nature's books promise to depart from tradition in the way they are created and distributed.

Nature's books will be "born digital" -- created from scratch by a group of scientists, instructors, artists, and interaction designers working together under the guidance of their editorial team. The first book will not be out until September, but it is undergoing extensive peer review by CSU faculty and is slated to include 175 interactive lessons and the usual supplementary material like test banks and PowerPoint presentations.

Nature's business model is also is also different. The biology book will retail for $49, which is cheap by the standards of the mainstream textbook industry. But that is not the big change. Students purchasing electronic versions of textbooks today typically gain access for a limited time, perhaps a year. Nature is proposing lifetime access to a continuously-updated book -- a textbook with an open-ended subscription.

They plan to sell direct to students through college book stores or sell site licenses to schools. But, if the subscription/books are as good as they sound in the press release, won't there be a general retail demand for them? Hey, I want one.

The textbook industry is ripe for change. There are a few dominant companies (including Nature’s parent company, MacMillan) with large sales forces, high printing and distribution costs, and bookstore markups. (Click the image above for a cost breakdown). These books from Nature may be game changers. Nature is a prestigious publisher, the CSU is a large textbook customer, and the access model and price are very attractive.

Nature is departing from the traditional textbook model by having a team of collaborators create a digital book from scratch and selling it as an ongoing subscription at a low price. If they can deliver, they may be the Aldine Press of our day. (Aldine's 15-16th century innovations included publishing small, portable books, punctuation like the period at the end of a sentence, and typography like italic text). Stay tuned for more when we get some hands-on experience with the biology book and interactive lessons.

Multimedia Learning by Richard E. Mayer

A few years ago, I was skeptical of PowerPoint, going along with the assumption that PowerPoint presentations had to be dull. I unthinkingly bought presentation guru Edward Tufte's claim that PowerPoint is evil, that "Power corrupts and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely."

Well, I'm a convert -- PowerPoint presentations are at the heart of my electronic text. I believe presentations combining slides and narration can be effective teaching tools, and I just read a book of research supporting that claim.

Richard E. Mayer, a UCSB psychologist, reports on 93 controlled studies in his book Multimedia Learning. Mayer's experiments test a dozen presentation principles, which he hypothesizes to be true, and 92 of those studies confirm the hypothesis.

For example, consider his redundancy principle, which holds that people learn better from graphics and narration than from graphics, narration and text -- the text is a redundant distraction.

To test this principle, Mayer and his colleagues ran five experiments in which one group learned from a multimedia presentation with narrated graphics and a second group saw the same presentation with text captions below the graphics. The non-caption group learned more in all five experiments.

He also gives theoretical explanations for his principles. The redundancy principle follows from visual overload in seeing captions and images simultaneously and mental effort expended in comparing spoken narration and written text. Mayer also explores the boundary conditions of his principles. Redundancy is less of a distraction if the captions are short or the text is shown after the narration finishes, not while it is playing.

Here are Mayer's twelve principles. Don't be bound by them, but use them as a checklist when going back over an old presentation or planning a new one.

• Coherence Principle: People learn better when extraneous words, pictures, and sounds are excluded rather than included.
  
• Signaling Principle: People learn better when cues that highlight the organization of the essential material are added.
  
• Redundancy Principle: People learn better from graphics and narration than from graphics, narration, and on-screen text.
  
• Spatial Contiguity Principle: People learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented near rather than far from each other on the page or screen.
  
• Temporal Contiguity Principle: People learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented simultaneously rather than successively.
  
• Segmenting Principle: People learn better when a multimedia lesson is presented in user-paced segments rather than as a continuous unit.
  
• Pre-training Principle: People learn better from a multimedia lesson when they know the names and characteristics of the main concepts.
  
• Modality Principle: People learn better from graphics and narration than from animation and on-screen text.
  
• Multimedia Principle: People learn better from words and pictures than from words alone.
  
• Personalization Principle: People learn better from multimedia lessons when words are in conversational style rather than formal style.
  
• Voice Principle: People learn better when the narration in multimedia lessons is spoken in a friendly human voice rather than a machine voice.
  
• Image Principle: People do not necessarily learn better from a multimedia lesson when the speaker’s image is added to the screen.

Let me close by suggesting two Mayer-like experiments that I would like to see run. One is a test of the effectiveness of showing images followed by the images with captions, the other a study of the effect of changing the tempo of a presentation. I'd love to hear the results if you run the experiments.

Some experience with a modular electronic text

I have been building and using a modular electronic text (etext) for an IT literacy course this term.

I recently gave a presentation on modular electronic texts and my course. You can see a link to the presentation and comments on it here.

The following is a digest of those comments and some of my reactions to them.

Cost: Several people noted that lower cost was an advantage of etexts. The etext for my course is free, but traditional publishers charge for etexts. While those charges are high today, they will eventually decline to reflect savings in printing and distribution cost.

Environmental concerns: An etext can be read from a screen, which requires power, but no printing. Many students print the module transcripts, but that is not as costly to the environment as printing and distributing a book.

Portability: My course would easily fit in a flash drive; however, there is (at present) no facility for one-click download of a module, subset of modules or the entire course. This is less important to people with Internet-connected portable devices like tablets and smart phones.

Internet connectivity: Several people pointed out that Internet connectivity is needed to access the etext. Without a simple module-download function, that is the case. On the other hand, being connected is valuable even if you have a local copy of the entire etext. If one is online while studying a module, they can search for complementary information, send messages to other students, the professor and the module content creator, follow the module resource links, etc.

Flexibility: Several people pointed out that an etext was more flexible -- new content or a new way of explaining or illustrating a point can easily be added. However, others pointed out that this caused a versioning problem -- the transcript a student printed or the presentation they studied from might not be current. Furthermore, the videos might lag behind the presentations and not reflect all changes. An explicit version history can solve that problem -- I will start recording significant changes to presentations in the topic module comment section.

Campus infrastructure: This etext can be used for self-study, but I use the presentations in a face-to-face classroom. All of today's classrooms do not have Internet-connected computers and projectors, though they are becoming common. In general, infrastructure must become ubiquitous to generate cultural change. (See this post for more on ubiquity in education).

User interface: Several people mentioned the simplicity of the user interface. The fact that each topic module and each assignment has a unique URL makes it easy for the topic modules and assignments to link to each other and for a teacher to include one or many modules in a class. The presentations also follow a uniform format.

Still, the user interface is not as simple and standardized as turning a page in a book or looking up a term in the index. Some people mentioned that an etext user interface might be confusing to a student who was not comfortable with computers. For example, one person pointed out that a newcomer might have trouble differentiating between the links comprising a topic module (on the left side of the screen) and the cloud tag and links to other documents and sites on the right side. I will add that distinction to the "About our electronic text" page.

Focused content: Several people liked the relatively narrow focus of the annotated slide presentation format. The skills and concepts covered were explicitly stated, and the students knew what to study. For enrichment, they could follow the "resource" links at the end of each presentation. Each module is the rough equivalent of a section in a textbook chapter.

Multiple learning modes: Some students prefer the video presentations, others the PowerPoint presentations or the presentation transcripts. Some prefer reading from paper to reading from a screen. The modules are flexible in that a student can go through a presentation online, watch a video or print the transcript with its slide images for offline study.

I could easily provide audio recordings of the video sound tracks for podcast listening. I plan to add audio recordings of classroom presentations next term, which will provide another option -- a more spontaneous presentation plus classroom interaction.

Marginal notes: Marginal notes can be done by printing the transcript and writing on it or by keeping a notepad window open while watching a presentation online. There is definite room for improvement here -- one can imagine writing/drawing/dictating marginal notes while using a computer or tablet. (Dictated notes should be coupled with well integrated speech recognition to convert them to text).

Instructor convenience: One person commented that a modular etext makes it easier for a professor to develop a customized course. That is true, but most faculty do not worry about customization -- they simply select a textbook and build a course around the accompanying PowerPoint slides, test banks, etc.

Professors are used to adopting a textbook and letting it structure their course. The modular etext requires that they become editors and curators, not mere textbook adopters, and that takes time and thought.

Standards: The material for this course is browser based -- no special reading program is required. The material is in widely used formats -- HTML, pptx, docx, and Flash video. But, the electronic text is in its infancy, and I suspect that other standards for file formats, collaboration, and user interfaces will emerge.

Collaboration and community: An etext allows for collaboration among students, professors, and authors of the teaching material. This collaboration is particularly easy and scalable in the case of a modular etext, in which a community can form around a single module in the same way as Wikipedia users can focus on the articles they are interested in.

I had expected that the topic module and assignment comments would be used for this sort of collaboration and interaction, but they were not. Instead, students used an email list server and face-to-face contact in the classroom to give me feedback and to help each other. (We met twice a week). The comments or other collaboration mechanisms would be more important in a distant education or self-study setting.

The future of the (text)book

New media start by emulating old media, then evolve. Gutenberg's movable type was first used to print large bibles that, like their hand-copied predecessors, were kept in monasteries. It took about 50 years to evolve the form factor of the smaller "portable" book and still longer to settle on conventions for typography, punctuation, tables of contents, figures, indices, footnotes, and so forth. It took 80 years for early movies, shot with a relatively static camera, perhaps filming a stage play, to evolve into the fast-cutting style introduced by MTV.(Change is not always for the better :-).

The textbook is no different. A couple weeks ago, our class saw a digital book presentation by McGraw Hill. They are developing digital versions of their print books, starting with the best sellers and moving down the list. They supplement those with PowerPoint presentations, test banks, links to video, etc. geared to that textbook.

But, like the Gutenberg Bible, this is only the first step. I do not know where the textbook is headed, but I know we are not yet there. A few rough guesses as to future directions are that ...

• There will be a place for collections of modular teaching material rather than integrated textbooks for an entire course -- the professor will become a curator or editor, assembling material as opposed to a textbook adopter, selecting a textbook.
• Communities will form -- students, professors, and authors of learning material will be able to interact with each other, and their roles will blur.
• We will have different user interfaces. We are beginning to see new options with touch interfaces on tablets, but will see more. For example, we should be able to use voice input with speech recognition for control and annotation.
• Standards will evolve for formats, user interfaces, social platform interaction, etc., just as we evolved standards for book pagination, format, and punctuation. We are at version .1 today.

I could keep going on like this, but it is general and speculative. Many people are working diligently on the task of reinventing the book -- thinking about it and developing research prototypes and early standards and products. Here are some you might want to check out:

• The International Digital Publishing Forum is a trade and standards organization. Their activities include holding an industry conference and developing the open Epub format.
• Epub is an open standard for book publishing -- you can see reviews of Epub readers here.
• Archive.org has pioneered online access to audio, video, books, Web site archives and more. They have books in many formats including Epub, Kindle and PDF.
• Internet Archive also has a prototype reader. To try it out, pick a book, navigate to its detail page and click "read online," or jump straight to this example: Darwin's Voyage of the HMS Beagle.
• Pushpop Press has a noteworthy publishing platform and tablet user interface. Check out this 6 minute video demonstration featuring Al Gore's latest book.
• The Institute for the Future of the Book is a research institute focused on, no surprise, the future of the book. They value scholarship and research as well as aesthetics.
• If you'd like to read an old-fashioned book on the history of the book, check out Ivan Illich's In the Vineyard of the Text: a Commentary to Hugh's Didascalicon, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1993.

Technology innovation and the beginning of Microsoft

We've talked about the evolution of a technology from vision to research prototype to product. We used the invention of the Web as an example, starting with the vision of Vannevar Bush, the research prototypes of Doug Engelbart, and the product developed by Tim Berners-Lee.

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has written a memoir, which was excerpted in a Vanity Fair magazine article describing the founding of Microsoft. Allen writes that he and high-school classmate Bill Gates discovered and fell in love with programming in 1968, and goes on to give a snapshot of IT innovation at that time.

That year, 1968, would be a watershed in matters digital. In March, Hewlett-Packard introduced the first programmable desktop calculator. In June, Robert Dennard won a patent for a one-transistor cell of dynamic random-access memory, or DRAM, a new and cheaper method of temporary data storage. In July, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore co-founded Intel Corporation. In December, at the legendary “mother of all demos” in San Francisco, the Stanford Research Institute’s Douglas Engelbart showed off his original versions of a mouse, a word processor, e-mail, and hypertext. Of all the epochal changes in store over the next two decades, a remarkable number were seeded over those 10 months: cheap and reliable memory, a graphical user interface, a “killer” application, and more.

Engelbart gave his famous demo at the same time as products that would eventually make his prototypes practical were being invented (DRAM) and going into mass production (Intel).

What innovations are in the vision stage today? What innovations are in the research prototype stage today? Have any revolutionary new products been introduced recently? Information technology was a key field for innovation in 1968, what are the key fields today?

Should social networking/marketing be decentralized (a positive experience)?

There is a lot of talk about social marketing these days.

Some feel it is the next big thing -- pushing the valuation of Facebook to billions of dollars.

Others worry that it might be a bubble that will leave us with no real infrastructure or innovation gains when it bursts, and that the best and brightest among us are wasting their time and skill trying to get people to click on ads.

I don't know how social marketing will evolve, but I do know that it did not begin with Facebook. Amazon was one of the first to capitalize on social media -- their user-written reviews surely contributed to their outstripping Barnes and Noble back in the earliest days of online book selling.

I was reminded of the early days of Amazon because I just had a positive social shopping experience there. I went to the Amazon Web site to find a book, but found a book reviewer instead. The reviewer's name is J. Marsano. He did not like the book I was looking for, but I liked something about his review, so I started browsing through his other reviews.

When I read his review of a picture book on Greek Mythology, I ordered it for my grandchildren. I bought the book without hesitation because I had gotten to know Marsano through his reviews. I learned that he lived in Brooklyn, was a fourth grade teacher, had an ipod, worked on boats, was married, was going to get a pet rabbit, bought his wife an ipod docking station for her birthday, etc. It felt nice -- I liked and trusted the guy. So, I took his advice and bought the book.

The process was almost perfect -- it served my purpose and Amazon's.

Only one glitch -- I had a question, and would have liked to send Marsano a message -- to ask for a recommendation for a kids book on Norse mythology. I could not do that through Amazon, so I had to ask it in a comment on his review and hope he sees it. Kind of like putting a note in a bottle and thrown into the sea.

Do we really need to centralize our social marketing and media in Facebook or anywhere else? Would it be better to decentralize -- to add social networking as a feature wherever it is relevant?

An informal survey of student views of PowerPoint

The table below shows responses of 160 University of Pittsburgh students to a ten-minute survey of their attitudes toward and use of PowerPoint. The survey questions were 5-level Likert scales -- a student could either disagree strongly, disagree somewhat, be neutral, agree somewhat or agree strongly with the statement.

The survey was not random. It was taken by about half of the class -- the students who were motivated enough to attend an optional study session.

Answer the questions for yourself, and see how you compare with the Pittsburgh students. For example, the strongest positive response was on printed handouts. Do you print PowerPoint handouts and study from them? These motivated students do.

The study is described in Barbara A. Frey and David J. Birnbaum, Learner's Perceptions on the Value of PowerPoint in lectures, January 31 2002.

Faculty retention, tenure and promotion (RTP) in the Internet era

Teaching, service and research are considered when evaluating university professors for retention, tenure and promotion (RTP).

RTP committees generally look at things like teaching evaluations by students at the end of a class, published journal articles and conference papers, and service on school committees.

Today's active, effective faculty do a lot of time-consuming work on the Internet -- things like:

Teaching: podcast lectures, develop online teaching material, help students via email, chat or VoIP, create a blog or Twitter stream relevant to a class.

Service: build a Web site or other application for a department or conference, build a Web site or other application for an organization in the community, offer mentoring or advising to students in feeder schools, offer tech training to colleagues, develop campus infrastructure.

Research: create a scholarly blog, publish in online journals, participate in online research communities, maintain an online database, make scholarly contributions to Wikipedia.

What would you add to these lists? Which of these activities would count toward RTP on your campus? Which should?

Auburn University recently considered significant contributions to Wikipedia in granting tenure to professor. Would your university have done so?

Does your city offer Internet service? Why not?

         

The community broadband map on the left shows the 133 US cities that offer residents Internet service. Is your city one of them?

It is common for local government to offer services like gas, electricity, water and sewage disposal to residents. Why do only 133 cities offer Internet service?

The reasons are different in each case, but one factor that is common to every case is that the telephone and cable companies do not want competition from cities. They fight to block municipal Internet services in many ways. In some states they have even gotten laws passed to prohibit cities from offering Internet service. The broadband preemption map on the right shows states with legislation prohibiting or making it difficult for cities to offer Internet service to residents.

(Both maps are interactive -- you can get further detail on the services offered and the restrictions placed on them by visiting the map pages and clicking on them).

The maps are taken from a report called Publicly Owned Broadband Networks: Averting the Looming Broadband Monopoly that was written by Christopher Mitchell and published by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance on March 23, 2011. You should also read Bob Frankston's comment on the report.

You may also be interested in Breaking the Broadband Monopoly, a report Mitchell wrote last May. It covers similar ground and includes many examples of municipal networks.

(We have also covered related topics on this blog in the past).

AT&T, the nations second largest wireless Internet service provider is trying to acquire T-Mobile, the fourth largest provider. If the acquisition is approved, how will that affect wireless Internet competition, service, and prices?

What are the arguments for and against municipal Internet service?