Higher ed is tough on our vendors. We are a vocal bunch, we like to share our opinions, and with the proliferation of blogs, tweets, and listservs we have the ability to publicly express our strong opinions. The free exchange of ideas and opinions in our web communication platforms is a good thing, but the ability to quickly disseminate our opinions must be balanced against the requirements to be collegial, professional, and balanced.

For some reason, we feel that it is okay to talk about a company (or the people who run a company) with language that we would never use when writing about our academic colleagues and peer institutions. The online rhetoric around edtech companies seems to be more strident than anything one hears at conferences. Strongly worded online complaints get the most attention, where balanced (if critical) assessments are derided or ignored.

I propose the following cautions for the next time any of us write a blog post or comment, listserv post, or tweet about an edtech company that we work with.

Maintain Professional Communication: When critiquing a company, my rule is to not write anything for an online audience that I also would not say directly (face-to-face) to a person who worked for the company. This does not mean that our critiques should be any less passionate, it is just that the form of communication should be collegial.

Don't Criticize Anonymously: People who want to criticize a company in an online platform should be willing to put their names to the critiques.

We Are Not Perfect Either: Every company that I have ever worked with has made bad, short-term, and ill-informed decisions. But then again, so has every institution of higher learning. We should hold our edtech partners to high standards and be willing to critique, push and negotiate - but we should try to be a little bit more humble in our actions.

Critique and Criticize, But Be Constructive: If you are unhappy with a company, by all means make use of blogs, comments, tweets and listservs to share your complaint. But keep the criticism to the specific instance or specific failure, avoid non-productive generalizations.

Authentic Dialogue Is the Goal: Be clear about your goals in using online mediums for critiquing an edtech vendor. If venting is the goal, perhaps it is better to take a step back. If your goal is to start or motivate a dialogue, in order to attain an achievable outcome, then a passionate online critique is justified.

Can you critique or improve upon this argument?

Apple drives me crazy.

What I Believe - And Why Apple Makes Me Wrong:

Talent is Overrated: Yes, leadership matters. But I've come to believe that leadership matters in very specific ways, and that the real strength of a company or a university comes from the full range of people employed by the firm or institution. Leaders need to provide an overall goal that everyone else, including employees and customers, can believe in and get behind. This goal needs to be big enough and audacious enough to be worth taking risks to achieve, worth sacrificing for, worth investing in. But Steve Jobs not only set big goals (simple and gorgeous devices, software and services etc.), he seems to have personally participated in design decisions and partner negotiations. From what I read, it is Steve Jobs who was able to negotiate with the record and film industries to create iTunes, and it was Steve Jobs who relentlessly pushed for (and edited) products from the iPhone to he iPad to the MacBook Air.

Micromanagement and Management by Fear are Bad: The truth is, we really don't know what life at Cupertino was like under Jobs as CEO. Maybe the stories of Jobs' temper, or his controlling every detail of major product design and product launches, are overstated. Perhaps Jobs encouraged argument and debate, and the people who worked at Apple with Jobs felt free to debate and disagree with the boss. What do you think?

Markets Are Conversations: The idea is that we don't just buy products, we invest in relationships. We will not purchase products or services from a company that we don't trust. We are no longer blind consumers, easily influenced by mass marketing. Rather, we are empowered users, and we like to do business with companies that listen to our needs and authentically engage us on many levels. Perhaps you have had a meaningful (strategic) conversation with someone from Apple outside of the Genius Bar, (again - I'm excluding campus reps who are awesome but not involved in developing products or services), with Apple I'm left still talking to myself.

Open Over Proprietary: The web is all about open standards. All things being equal, we'd rather invest in open source applications and open source platforms, investing our resources in people rather than licensing. But I'm writing this on a MacBook Pro running 10.6.8 (not Linux), and with an iPhone in my pocket (closed OS). Mobile web apps might be great, but can they really compete with the apps designed for iOS on the App store?

Transparency is Essential: I'm constantly arguing for greater transparency in the projects that I'm involved with. Put up the project documents on the web. Blog or tweet about the process. Talk about what did not work as well as what did. Yet Apple remains the opposite of transparent, a black hole of information.

Fail Fast and Often: Sure, Apple has some failures. The Apple TV, the Lisa from 1983 ($10,000), the hockey puck mouse, the Power Mac G4 Cube (2000), Ping. All of these seem like small change however, products that Jobs and company never really got behind. Maybe Apple learned from Motorola ROKR "iTunes" phone (2005), and definitely from the failure of MobileMe, but success after success seems to best characterize the history of Apple's product launches.

I would never want to run a company (or a university) the way Apple has been run. Apple's management culture, at least from the outside, goes totally against my (academic) values. Yet, it is hard to argue with the results.

Thoughts?

I've been mulling over the Google $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola Mobile.

The consensus on the rationale for the purchase seems to be:

Patents: The deal is really about Motorola's 17,000 patents, and the need for Google to have patents to fight off mobile operating system lawsuits by Apple, Microsoft, Nokia and who knows who else.

Cash: Google has about $39 billion of cash on hand, and without making big acquisitions they'd be pressured into paying dividends.

Android: Owning Motorola gives Google a fighting chance that an iPhone killer Android powered phone would emerge, as GoogOla phone could enjoy the tight software/hardware coupling that Apple achieves (while keeping Android open source to encourage more mobile devices in the ecosystem).

These all seem like reasonable reasons to buy Motorola Mobile, but none of these explanations comes close to justifying a $12.5 billion price tag. I can't help thinking that Google could have taken some of those billions and invested those dollars in our nationwide bandwidth market failure.

Google has invested in 1 gigabit-per-second broadband service around the Stanford campus - and is doing some stuff in Kansas City, Kansas - but it seems like the opportunity (and the need) is much bigger. I'd happily pay more money for much faster connection, and I bet I'm not alone. With the billions that Google has on hand they could invest heavily in buying local ISPs, and upgrading them for fiber-to-the-home. What about investing in WiMax? I'd even rather see Google buy a cell carrier (Sprint/Nextel - market cap $10.5 Billion), and invest some serious money in mobile bandwidth.

The terrible bandwidth problem in the U.S. will prove to be the most important rate limiting step in the evolution of education. Slow speeds, erratic service, high prices, and the unavailability of robust data plans for mobile devices will limit how quickly and thoroughly we can move learning to digital and mobile platforms.

South Korea will blow us away.

Placing little bets on bandwidth, but huge bets on hardware/patents, is the exact opposite of the strategy that Google should be taking. Maybe Microsoft will be smarter?

Thoughts?

"Amazon has told publishers it is considering creating a digital-book library featuring older titles, people familiar with the talks said. The content would be available to customers of Amazon Prime, who currently pay the retailer $79 a year for unlimited two-day shipping and for access to a digital library of movies and TV shows." From the WSJ - 9/11/11

Amazon. The whole reason I buy so many Kindle books is that the price of new releases is about the same as that of paperback versions. A hardcover timed purchase for a softcover price. Eliminate that discount and I'm not buying.

We keep getting told that e-books are not really cheaper than paper books. According to the NYTimes, printing, storage and shipping a hardcover books costs $3.25. The rest of the price difference for a $13 e-book, vs. a $26 hardcover, comes from paying the publisher $4 less ($9 vs. $13), and paying the author (in royalties per book sold) $2.27 to $3.25 for e-books vs. $3.90 for the hardcover.

The economics of e-books don't seem to me about lowering the costs per unit, but rather about increasing the number of units sold.

E-books, being so easy to buy, should sell more copies than paper books. (This seems to be occurring at Amazon). If the price is less than $15, I will not hesitate to instantly buy and download an e-book after reading an online review.

The key is that I make the purchase from the same device, and at the same time, that I read the review. This device might be a computer (through the browser), but increasingly it will be through a tablet or a smart phone. If the price is above $15, and if the book is not available as an e-book, then I'll probably put the title in my Wish list - but I will not purchase. E-books drive more book buying.

Which brings us back to the Amazon library service on which the WSJ reported. If new books are not included in the library subscription fee then one of the biggest advantages of e-books disappears. We want to read books that are in the culture, that people are talking about, and that means new books. The Kindle has changed my reading habits from a library / softcover reader - to a new book / e-book reader.

A subscription rental service without new books may have the paradoxical impact of driving down demand for purchasing new e-books. A bad subscription model still makes individual purchases seem expensive in comparison, even if nothing has really changed. The anchoring effect. This has occurred with Netflix. The Netflix streaming service is terrible (bad selection), but I'm down to 1 DVD rental at-a-time because the the low cost of streaming makes renting DVDs seem overly expensive. Amazon needs to be careful here.

So the question is, what would I pay for a yearly subscription that included all Kindle books? Good question. What would you pay? We are talking about renting here. No ability to own the digital book. I would pay, I think, one dollar a day. One dollar a day for instant access to every Kindle book that Amazon sells.

How about you?

Thank you Tony Sanfilippo , Assistant Press Director at Penn State Press, for laying out the challenges faced by university presses so clearly in his post "Price and printruns" on 9/8/11.

Can we brainstorm some solutions to the high price of University Press books together?

The big challenges to university press book pricing, as Tony lays them out, come down to demand and supply. The demand for serious academic books has dwindled to a point that only a price point high enough that will convert the few non-price sensitive buyers can hope to cover the costs. Further, digital is not the soluation, as printing costs might account for $5, everything else is editing, marketing etc.

Tony's whole post is worth reading, as he takes the time to make a serious argument to explain the decline in book buying practices. In regard to the problem of the ever growing price and smaller printruns for university monographs, Tony asks that "….if anyone has a suggestion on addressing that issue, please let [him] know."

10 Ideas:

1. Concise Books: Does book length matter in the cost of editing/production etc? True, the concise book format does not work for every book. And maybe it is more work for an editor to work with an author to stick to 100 pages rather than 270. But could it be that books like "Under New Management: Universities, Administrative Labor, and the Professional Turn" could make their arguments in fewer pages? I'm certainly more likely to read a short book than a longer one.

2. Go All Digital: Tony writes, "And before you tell publishers that digital books should be lowering our costs, the unit cost of the paper and boards and ink is the smallest expense, probably about $5 a copy for the title above." OK….but I'm having trouble buying that a fully digital, e-book publishing system wouldn't bring about bigger cost savings. It is very expensive to do print and digital, but what if the university press went totally digital. Unifying on a single digital platform would have to save some money, as working on the logistics of printruns must take lots of time.

3. Go Virtual: Can university presses save money by getting rid of their offices? Hire editors who work out of their homes. Get rid of administrative overhead.

4. Go Flat: I have no actual knowledge (a handicap I seldom let stand in my way) of how a university press is organized, but I'm betting that the organization at least resembles other publishers and other parts of academic administration. And this means hierarchy. Get rid of the management layer. Empower editors to choose books and authors, and shepherd them through the process. Let the results of the books speak for themselves.

5. Outsource Copyediting: Use the vibrant web freelance market and opportunities for outsourcing to lower copyediting costs.

6. Embrace Business Development: University press people are going to have to make deals with Amazon, B&N, Google, and big publishers to lower the costs of their books. This is perhaps a different skill set then what has been traditionally demanded for employment within a university press, but the world has changed.

7. Sponsorship: Can university presses find donors for individual titles? Creative fundraising and named sponsorships? (Instead of a building, give a book!)

8. Go Naked: Put up all the costs associated with launching a university press book right up on the website. Line item by line item. Shine some light on the costs. Amazing what a full accounting can accomplish.

9. Embrace Failure: The best way to find the great university press book might not be through the traditional editorial funnel. View books as experiments, and be willing to engage in lots of attempts. Publishing more books should bring some economies of scale. Placing lots of little bets might yield the 1 or 2 big sellers that can fund the rest of the long tail.

10. Brainstorm the Business Model: Admit that a $69.50 book, one that few people will buy, signals a failure of the status quo. Time to try something new. We all want the same thing. We all want the university presses to keep publishing noncommercial books. We all want some other mechanism besides the market to determine which authors and books get published. We all want to pay editors a strong professional wage. We all think that it is part of the university mission to create knowledge, and a university press is key to this mission. So let's work together to find a new business model.

Your ideas?

Pick these ideas apart, add some new ones, whatever. But let's start talking.

Is the promise of a shift from physical to digital content stalled? By academic year 2011-2012 I expected to discover, receive, and consume most content digitally. And while I always thought that our academic curricular content would lag somewhat behind the move to digital in our consumer/entertainment content, I did not expect things to be so static.

Evidence For A Stall:

Video Streaming: Let's call it like it is. Netflix streaming sucks. The loss of the Starz deal is not going to make things any better. My Netflix DVD queue contains 419 movies. My queue, 168. And I don't want to particularly watch any of those 168, while I can't wait for my next DVD (Breaking Bad, Season 3, Disc 3) to arrive. At one point I thought that academic libraries would be able to stop buying DVD's, and just give every student, professor and staff member a Netflix streaming subscription. This was a dumb argument when I made it (streaming movies can't be mashed-up and edited, Netflix had no university deal etc.), but is even dumber in light of the poor streaming collection.

E-Books: I love my Kindle, and I think the Amazon e-book buying experience is terrific. But Amazon, B&N, and the publishers are trading short-term profits for the long term advantages of building loyal (and paying) readers. I came to e-books already a fully formed book lover. The books I fell in love with are ones that I borrowed, either from family, friends or a library. Amazon, B&N, and the publishers have done very very little to allow (much less encourage) book lending. Lending books encourages buying books, as norms of reciprocity ensure that sooner or later the lendee will want to become the lender. DRM will prove bad for authors and bad for readers.

Course Curriculum: Try an experiment. Decide that all of the curriculum for your course must be available digitally, viewable on a mobile device. I bet you will have problems. Course video and course monographs may not be available digitally, may be prohibitively expensive, may not work on the range of mobile devices your students carry, or all of the above. The work involved in figuring out how to make all of your course content digital and mobile ready, and then figuring out how to get it to your students, will be way more effort than if you just did it the old fashioned way with paper and course reserves.

Should we be pushing, as both academics and consumers, to get this digital revolution in high gear?

Are we wrong that today's high school students will expect to consume their curricular and fun content on whatever mobile device they arrive with on campus (and will ignore it if is not available)?

Has the digital/mobile revolution really stalled?

Randy Martin's new book, Under New Management: Universities, Administrative Labor, and the Professional Turn looks like an important contribution to the debate about the changing nature of higher ed.

Reading Serena Golden's interview with the author on IHE (9/2/11) made it clear that Martin has some challenging and smart things to say about trends in the purpose, organization, governance and place in society of post-secondary education. This seems like a book that I want to read, and perhaps recommend others in my community to read and discuss.

Then I went to Amazon and saw that the book is priced at $69.50. No e-book version is yet available, but the Temple University Press also lists the book at $69.50.

Which makes me wonder, who is going to buy this book? Yes, I think university libraries should all have a copy. But what individuals interested in this conversation are going to shell out 70 bucks?

My guess is that the author is not planning on paying his kids' college tuition with the proceeds of Under New Management. He probably wants the book to be as widely read as possible, so the ideas and arguments circulate. Getting some traction in the ideaosphere (did I just coin a word? - aahh..Google say no) is the best most of us can hope for. Maybe some speaking invitations (usually unpaid, but who knows?), an interview for a podcast or two. Time with Oprah (just kidding). We expect to pay the mortgage with our day jobs.

This is not an original question, but I'd like to know the answer. Why doesn't Temple University Press release Under New Management solely as an e-book? Are editorial expenses really that high?

Maybe even get Amazon or B&N to do some good-in-the-world, and underwrite the editorial and copyediting process of university presses.

Get more books like Under New Management in circulation, and drop the price low enough so that lots of people buy the books.

Please explain.

Last week I participated in a type of web meeting that I hope becomes the norm for academic / vendor coloration.

The discussion was a "client-led Blackboard Mobile Learn Enhancement Requests," with participation from both the folks who run the Blackboard mobile division and clients (and prospective clients) worldwide.

A discussion between academic clients (existing or potential) and a vendor is nothing unusual. Nor is it noteworthy to hold this discussion using web meeting tools. What I think was innovative, and worth repeating, was that this discussion was:

a. Open to anyone who wanted to participate (it was communicated on a Blackboard listserve).

b. Designed around client requests and requirements, and not a standard company presentation.

Web meeting platforms make virtual meetings amazingly easy and productive. Our academic culture values openness, sharing and collaboration - we want to share what we know (or don't know) and learn from our colleagues. Why is it then that the we restrict most of our vendor demos and vendor discussions to within our own institutions? Why don't we open up these discussions to anyone who wants to participate?

The fact that this "client-led Blackboard Mobile Learn Enhancement Requests web meeting" was organized by Ed Garay, Assistant Director for Academic Computing and Director of the UIC Instructional Technology Lab at University of Illinois at Chicago, should come as no surprise. Ed is emblematic of people who find their ways into learning and technology, in that his path has been both non-linear and varied. Originally from Ecuador, Ed found himself at UIC (first as a student and then in administrative and teaching work), collaborating with faculty on language, math, Mosaic, HTML and hypermedia, teaching and learning technology, mobile computing, collaboration technology, social networking, and anything new of potential benefit to Higher Ed.

This work led into his current leadership role in ed tech at UIC, and his co-teaching of an online Health Informatics course. I'm thinking that Ed's somewhat non-traditional path at least partly explains his organizing our "client-led Blackboard Mobile Learn Enhancement Requests web meeting,",opening up this opportunity for the rest of us and setting an example to follow.

In an e-mail exchange about his push for an open model for vendor collaboration (Ed is organizing next a client-led discussion on lecture capture), Ed wrote that:

" Web 2.0 and social networking tools (like blogs, wikis, Podcasts, Google Apps for Education, Twitter and Google+) facilitate open fluid communication and collaboration among a myriad of folks in Higher Education. Vendors need to get over NDAs and controlled access to knowledge for their clients are talking and comparing notes more than ever. We can and will crowd-source what is best for our own colleges and universities."

Are Ed Garay and the folks at UIC on to something here?

What would be the practical constraint of inviting colleagues from other schools to our vendor web demos and discussions?

How can we move academic / company discussions into the realm of virtual meetings, complementing the traditional professional society (EDUCAUSE) or vendor sponsored (Blackboard World etc.) meetings that bring in a range of colleagues?

3 reasons to read Cathy Davidson's Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn:

1 - The Academic Connection: Davidson is the Duke professor/administrator behind the original iPod program. Back in 2004, Davidson and her colleagues cooked up a plan to give each freshman an iPod, and then an iPod to every member of any class that came up with an academic experiment around the technology. We might not remember just how controversial this experiment was, or the degree to which Duke was criticized for wasting money and getting away from the core educational mission of a university. Turns out, the iPod experiment succeeded on numerous fronts, including launching student driven podcasting, class recording and sharing, learning object creation, and innovative science and language applications. Davidson recounts the iPod experiment in the book, as well as other experiments that she has been involved in as an administrator and in her own courses. She is a risk taker, an attribute often in short supply amongst our academic leaders.

2 - Brain Science and The Big Picture: One of Davidson's big points in Now You See It is that we continue to run our institutions, our schools and workplaces, as if we still lived in the industrial economy in which they were originally built to serve. We continue to act as if information was scarce, and that work had to regulated, monitored, and packaged around the needs of production. Digital tools, mobile devices, and ubiquitous web based communication give us new tools to accomplish our (increasingly collaborative and brain based) work. Research consistently demonstrates that we perform better when we are creatively engaged in tasks in which we are intrinsically motivated. Yet we continue to insist on end-of-term grades (postsecondary), end-of-year high stakes tests (secondary/primary - No Child Left Behind), cubicles and 9-to-5 face time.

3 - An Antidote to the Anti-Digital: Davidson has zero time for the "dumbest generation" or the "Internet is making us stupid" arguments. She references cognitive and brain science research to demonstrate the plasticity of our brains to cope with and thrive in our digitally stimulated environments. She talks about educational institutions that have harnessed game-based principles to create immersive (and highly successful) learning environments. Davidson profiles workplaces that have thrown out the industrial age rule of command and control, of management as supervision rather than leadership and support, detailing how these employers achieve both high profits and high staff retention.

I'm so pleased that Now You See It came out of our academic world, written by someone who works within our system. Her critique of higher education is that of an insider who wants to reform and improve the system, not blow it up. I hope her next book looks more critically and with greater depth at a wider range of academic institutions - that she spends some time away from (the admittedly gorgeous) Duke campus. It would be fascinating to hear how Davidson thinks higher ed can utilize the digital tools, research on brain science, and the willingness to take risks and experiment that advocates to fundamentally redesign our industry.

Until that book comes out, I'd put Davidson as number one on the list of authors to bring to your campus - you can ask her yourself what we might be missing.

What are you reading?

My Kindle is cannibalizing my media consumption. Not so much the Kindle device, which I look forward to Amazon making big improvements upon. It is more the Kindle ecosystem, specifically the ability to instantly purchase any newly published book for the cost of a softcover. This week I purchased Tom Perrotta's The Leftovers the day it came out ($12.99). No waiting the interminable 2 days for Amazon to ship the book. Instant reading gratification.

This week I also decided not to subscribe to Hulu+. I had thought about doing so, given how crappy Netflix's streaming library is turning out to be. The cost of Hulu+ is only $7.99 a month, and if you have a *.edu e-mail address you can get a 1-month free trial.

My reason to forgo a Hulu+ subscriptions has nothing to do with the price of the service, or the quality of the streaming library. Rather, I've decided that I don't want easy access to video. Video is simply too tempting, too engaging, and too pleasurable. My mind loves nothing better than to camp out in front of video. Add streaming to the iPhone and iPad and I'm afraid Hulu+ would simply be too enticing. By taking away the choice of video, and always having at hand a fiction book that I want to read (an instant download away), I'm hoping to improve my information consumption diet to include more books.

This is a new experience for me. Actively denying myself choice in order to encourage a certain kind of media consumption. Video might be fun, but books end up being so much more nourishing.

It's not that I'm fully abstaining from video. Just this week I watched a few episodes of "Breaking Bad" (season 3) from Netflix (disc delivery) - an amazing show you should all rent. I'm down to the one-at-a-time Netlfix disc plan, combined with streaming (which the kids mostly use). This seems to be enough.

The Amazon / Kindle ecosystem makes book selection, delivery and reading wonderfully efficient, pleasant and affordable. An example of the potential of a platform to change behavior.

How have your information consumption patterns changed over the past couple of years?

Do you work with someone who works remotely? Do you have someone on your team who telecommutes full-time, or a significant part of each month? Are you working at a distance?

I bet that if you work outside of a nonprofit higher education institution that your answer is much more likely to be "yes" then people within traditional academia. Virtual teams are becoming, or have become, the norm in ed tech, publishing, and consulting companies. Even nonprofits outside of academia tend to have a large share of virtual team members. But if my informal surveys and chats with colleagues is correct, it seems like the higher ed workforce is lagging somewhat the trend of distributed work. (This is an empirical question, does anyone have good data?).

7 Gifts of Working with Virtual Academic Colleagues:

1. Living Virtually: Having a colleague work at a distance has forced us to use the same online collaboration tools in our team work together that we utilize for teaching and learning. In the blended learning program of which I'm a part, we use Adobe Connect for synchronous class sessions and student group work. With our virtual colleague, we now use Adobe Connect to run most of our meetings - either having the system run while the rest of the team gathers in one place or with all of us at our computers. This practice with Connect has made us all much more skilled and confident in this synchronous learning / communications tool - and this expertise carries over to our courses.

2. Mirroring Students: A virtual team member is probably a "must have" if you run any blended or at-a-distance learning. But even if all your courses are local and face-to-face, our digital tools means that we are increasingly time-shifting and place-shifting the teaching and learning engagements. A virtual colleague needs to live in this digital tools at all times, and does not have an easy fall back of walking down the hall to chat. If the digital tools are not working, a virtual colleague will be the first to notice and the most invested in getting things fixed.

3. Attention to Communication: The social aspect of work is enormously important. Information sharing and collaboration happens more outside of meetings than within them. E-mail is a poor substitute for true communication. Working with a virtual colleague means thinking hard about communication and collaboration. A distributed team requires mindful practices around communication, some thought about "how" we work together.

4. Experimentation: Working with a distributed team is not always easy, and we sometimes get sub-optimal results. This challenge, however, forces us to experiment with new and better ways to collaborate. These new methods and tools help everyone, not just the remote team members.

5. Time: I'm convinced that a team member who works off campus can be more productive because she or he goes to fewer meetings. Working from home can facilitate longer stretches of uninterrupted time for projects, writing, and thinking.

6. Perspective: Sometimes being a little apart from the day-to-day craziness of our work allows for a more long range perspective, an ability to keep an eye on strategic goals.

7. The World: The world is moving towards globalized and virtual work teams. We should not be left behind.

Do you see the world of higher ed becoming more accepting of working at a distance? What will it take to make this change? Are you virtual?

One of the (many) gifts of writing a daily blog is that I can no longer make the excuse, "sorry, I don't have any time for that". Really, if there is time for daily social media participation then there is time to participate in things FOR THE PEOPLE WHO PAY THE SALARY.

So, yes, I have time to sit on that committee. And yes, I have time to be a part of that search. And yes - I'd be happy to do that testing, track down that bug, do that research, and give that presentation. I can work with that student, and train this professor. I'll give you my feedback, and write that report, do that guest lecture, and help you move your boxes. Plan the meeting - no problem. I have time for you.

It's not that I can't say "no" - its just that I will not say no to you. As saying yes to your request is most likely an invitation to learn something new, something I don't know, and I need to learn new things each day if I'm going to keep sharing.

Contributing to our ongoing discussion about the future of higher ed, from wherever your expertise and passions reside, is the best sort of professional development. We now have many ways to join the dialogue, and each is valuable. Tweet, comment, or post - each is equally worthwhile and equally productive.

Attending our professional meetings, giving presentations, and submitting papers remain enormously valuable to our career progression and professional learning. I would add that finding a way to participate in the conversation around higher ed is equally important, and it fuels and motivates our participation in other professional development opportunities.

I've also learned that finding a way to participate in the discussion beyond our campuses and our companies on higher ed assists in our ability to participate in internal conversations. The world of micro-blogging, commenting and blogging allows us to try out new ideas, learn what is most important to us, and learn from others. Participating in ongoing conversations motivates us to keep up with what other people are saying and what the latest evidence demonstrates.

On a practical level, committing to participate in external conversations around higher ed on a regular basis means giving some things up. The time it takes to tweet, comment, or post takes some time away from the ability to consume. I read less news and read less blogs and read less tweets, but I'm more selective in what I do read. The consumption / production equation gets skewed a little bit away from consumption.

How do we encourage more people to join the conversation?

How do we create incentives for more folks in higher ed (and here I include educators who work at technology and publishing companies, as well for-profit and non-profit universities) to tweet, comment and post?

How do we get our leaders to understand that the more we contribute to the larger conversation, the more motivated we will be to turn these conversations into actions and behaviors?

What fun books did you read this summer? Books that do not relate to education, learning, or technology? Books that do not help us re-invent, re-engineer, or re-mix higher ed? What fun book should we add to our late summer reading list?

My list, in order of most recently read:

Innocent by Scott Turow
Format: Kindle
I'm only 55% through Innocent, so don't spoil the ending. Actually, I'd rather be reading Innocent now than writing this blog - as I'm dying to know who killed Barbara Sabich.

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The Magician King: A Novel by Lev Grossman
Format: Audiobook
Even better than the Magicians. (Although you should read them both, one after the other, if you have not found your way to Quentin Coldwater's world yet). The fact that Grossman writes for Time magazine is almost enough to make we want to subscribe.

If you are going to start anywhere with Audible, start with The Magician King. Mark Bramhill will convince you that computer generated narration will never come close to the performance of a skilled audiobook performer.

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A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Format: Audiobook
Egan's book seems to be on everyone's "must read" list - and for good reason. She can flat out write. The intertwined stories of music industry insiders, outsiders and their families is engaging, and the shifting time perspectives and points of view is always invigorating. Goon Squad is probably the best place to start if you want to maximize your chances of book clubbing with a colleague.

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The Informationist: A Thriller by Taylor Stevens
Format: Kindle
Pure escapist trash - and I say this is a good way. I'm a sucker for strong women (you should meet the real Dr. Kim), so the plot holes, over the top violence, and marginal writing really didn't bother me. I nominate "The Informationist" for the best book title of 2011 (which of us wouldn't want that title on our business cards) - the book might go down hill from the title page - but that is no reason to avoid this good trashy fun.

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Wicked Bugs: The Louse That Conquered Napoleon's Army & Other Diabolical Insects by Amy Stewart
Format: Audiobook
The only book on my summer fun list that is not fiction. Included because Wicked Bugs is sort of a hybrid - more of a cookbook or a list than anything resembling narrative nonfiction. Stewart basically summarizes every disgusting, poisonous, disease spreading, and gross things that bugs do to people. The list is long and delightful. Mystery writers should keep Wicked Bugs available for reference, as bugs turn out to be great murder weapons. Fun book, I don't recommend listening to the audio version before falling asleep (as this book will give you creepy crawly dreams).

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The Lock Artist: A Novel by Steve Hamilton
Format: Kindle
Great premise. A mute, young, brilliant, and emotionally damaged thief whose sole power is the ability to open any safe. Who amongst us hasn't thought how cool it would be to leave academia for the world of safe cracking? The technical descriptions of the inner workings of safe locks is probably the highlight of the book, but the story is pretty good and time spent with the lock artist is mostly diverting.

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Sizzling Sixteen (Stephanie Plum) by Janet Evanovich
Format: Paperback

At this point, reading Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series probably counts as a psychiatric addiction. As soon as number 17 (Smokin' Seventeen) is in paperback I'll probably find myself purchasing and reading. I actually have a fondness for these books for a couple of reasons. The first is that my Dad grew up not so far from where Stephanie Plum lives, and the second is that Evanovich used to live in the same small town that I currently reside. Really the ultimate in beach books - enjoy with very little of your brain turned on.

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The Privileges: A Novel by Jonathan Dee
Format: Kindle
A story of upper-middle class urban dweller young adult angst that never quite manages to launch. Great first chapter (which I downloaded as a Kindle sample), and then very uneven from there. I can't recommend this book, but I like the general genre and would be interested in your recommendations.

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Your turn.

What was your fun reading this summer? What do you recommend?

What do you plan to read next? (I'm planning to read The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta).

1. Your university will need more dorm space once you sell your leadership on the benefits of blended learning, as more students can be accommodated in classrooms, but they will all need a place to live.

2. Your office as a dorm room is suddenly a revenue generator.

3. Doing your daily work among the students, with your laptop at library tables and eating places etc, is a great way to make your work and presence visible to the campus community.

4. Your institution will invest in the tools you need to be a mobile education professional, including that new MacBook Air, an iPad, and an iPhone.

5. Taking everyone out of their offices puts everyone on a level status playing field, with everyone from the CIO to the just hired system admin all working from their laptop wherever they can find a space.

6. Students, like you, have need for collaborative group work spaces - and making this need apparent for the whole community will drive investments to construct these spaces.

7. Students, like you, have need for private and quiet spaces to reflect, think and write - and making this need apparent for the whole community will drive investments to construct these spaces.

8. Offices are industrial age artifacts - and we live in the digital age - giving up your office for a dorm room is a clear sign that we are re-thinking how we design our work environments.

9. Giving up your office for a dorm will force you to finally throw away all those old paper documents that you have been saving.

10. You don't accomplish most of your work in your office anyway, between all the time you work at home and all the meetings you go to, so giving up your office actually will not be that painful.

As the post Steve Jobs chapter begins at Apple, perhaps this a good moment to re-engage Apple's long and productive relationship with higher ed.

Apple's mindshare in higher ed has probably never been greater. How many of you reading this column are doing so on an Apple product? In my world, the majority of students I see come through our doors carrying Apple laptops, and more often than not they also have an iPhone or an iPad. iTunes is a part of daily life, and iTunesU is probably the pre-eminent open education destination.

The growing ubiquity of Apple in academia, however, has been accompanied by a disengagement with the higher ed community. I'm not talking about our relationship with our campus reps, which in my experience has always been amazing. Rather, I'm thinking about the seeming lack of opportunities to work with Apple on a strategic level, to engage and co-discover new ways that existing Apple products and services can integrate with higher education. I'm thinking of the lack of opportunities to interact with Apple leadership at conferences or other events.

Perhaps my experience with Apple is not representative. Perhaps folks from higher ed have had opportunities to get to know the leadership in Apple's education business. Have you? Over the past couple of years I've been able to interact with the leadership of the big players in ed tech and publishing, often with these relationships being initiated and nurtured at the annual EDUCAUSE conference.

There are a number of good counterarguments to my complaints about a lack of a relationship with Apple leadership and higher ed. They include:

Counterargument 1: Apple leadership is in fact engaging with higher ed, creating productive partnerships and shared innovations. (And I just don't know about these conversations).

Counterargument 2: Apple leadership is not engaged in conversations and collaborations with higher ed, but then again Apple leadership doesn't collaborate with anyone outside of the company. They are focused on bringing out great hardware and software, and while a culture of transparency and dialogue might work for higher ed, it is not the Apple way. (And Apple's success speaks for itself).

Counterargument 3: Apple is as engaged with higher ed as any other company, and in fact offers products and services (such as iTunesU, PodCast Producer, and Apple student hardware deals), that go far beyond Microsoft, Google, etc. etc.

Counterargument 4: Stop whining, get a life, and realize that Apple is just not that into you.

These are all possibilities, and each may contain some truth, but I'd argue that Apple's lack of engagement with higher ed (if this is indeed true) is a lost opportunity for us both.

Apple has disrupted the music industry, a business that didn't want to be disrupted. But us higher ed folks want to be disrupted, we are looking for new models and new technologies and perspectives that can improve learning and lower costs. We'd be overjoyed If Apple created teaching apps, or even a full online university, that were as elegant as the other Mac products. How great would it be if we learned to give lectures (or conference presentations) with the same panache and smoothness as an Apple product demo!

Some ideas:

• Perhaps we could work with Apple to bundle Podcast Producer and iTunesU, a project that integrates lecture capture and open learning one initiative.

• Maybe we have some ideas about iOS, iPhones and iPads and mobile learning can go next, ideas that can inform the hardware or operating system.

• Or maybe we'd both learn from debating the pros and cons of content moving to the cloud, and whether or not the Google Chromebook model of a cloud based machine (lightweight, always connected), will become a student learning platform of choice.

What would you want to discuss with Apple?

I actually have no idea who the the head Apple education people are. Who at Apple is thinking about higher ed? We'd like to get to know you.

1. What does it mean that I love watching these Apple keynotes online, but I have zero desire to ever attend one live? (hint: Suspicion of group adulation.)

2. Why do we need all these reporters (and bloggers) covering the Apple Keynote presentations when everyone can just watch the event for themselves?

3. Does the fact that I'm sort of underwhelmed with OS X Lion indicate that I'm jaded or just spoiled? (I'll still upgrade though.)

4. Are there any interesting higher ed apps on the Mac App store? (And how come Apple doesn't talk about them much if they exist?)

5. How many of the 130 million books downloaded in the iBookStore came from higher ed? (None from me….iPad is too heavy to read on.)

6. When is someone going to build an LMS from scratch around the smart phone (iPhone, Android), tablet (iPad, Android etc) and the Web? (The iOS 5 demo is a hint on how quickly the software on this platform is advancing.)

7. Is there some school, camp or cult I can join to learn how to present as well as the Apple guys? (And why is it always guys?)

8. Do the Apple iCloud, the Amazon Cloud, the Microsoft Cloud and the Google Cloud mean that I now have to deal with 4 separate clouds? (depressing.)

9. Will our 2012 freshmen be surprised and dismayed that their coursework and library digital content doesn't automatically end up on all their devices? (Like they are used to with their music and photos and documents with iCloud.)

10. If you were Steve Jobs, and you suddenly decided that your legacy would be to disrupt higher ed in the way that you've disrupted music and mobile phones, what are the top 3 things that you would do? (And would iCloud be part of your answer?)

Spousonomics: Using Economics to Master Love, Marriage, and Dirty Dishes by Paula Szuchman and Jenny Anderson

Surprise 1 - Great Read:Spousonomics was a marginal book choice for me. It sat on my Audible Wish List for a while, and I was only lukewarm about buying it. To my surprise, Spousonomics is smart, funny, and informative. I'm always a little weary of journalists popularizing academic disciplines (too much fawning, too little critiques), but Szuchman and Anderson are fluent writers and accomplished students of the dismal science.

Surprise 2 - Economics Learning: The behavioral and micro economic principals discussed in Spousonomics will familiar to most of you, but thinking about economic concepts in the context of marriage is a great way to engage in some active learning. We think about our relationships all the time, and thinking about our relationships from the perspective of sunk costs, loss aversion, marginal costs, and supply and demand makes both the economic principles, and the relationships, seems more interesting.

Surprise 3 - Under-Buzzed: Nobody told me to read Spousonomics. (I'm telling everyone I meet, including strangers, my parents, my spouse, and even unmarried teenagers - go figure). Have you hear any buzz about this book? Maybe we have a collective Freakonomics fatigue? Maybe I'm just not spending enough time with the right people.

Surprise 4 - Universal Marriages: All of us in long-term relationships seem to be exactly the same. We seem to all have the same issues (sex, money, work, real estate, in-laws, etc. etc.) Very validating.

Critique 1: Spousonomics is the economic marriage book for the "The Bobos in Paradise" crowd. Knowledge worker marriages. Don't expect much diversity beyond the world of journalists, lawyers, professors, web designers, advertising people etc. in the profiles. Would have been fine if the authors owned up to the shortcomings of the qualitative methodology utilized in the research that went into the book.

What are you reading?

Dear Paul Graham:

I read about Y Combinator, your tech startup boot camp, in this month's Wired Magazine.

With all due respect, I found most of the startups you chose to mentor to be kinda boring. Do we really need another music streaming, meal finding, social networky, Facebook gaming site or mobile app?

Ask yourself this: What does the world really need that can be: a) delivered via a browser? b) delivered via a mobile device?

The answer: Education!

More specifically: Higher Education.

The next billion dollar technology company will be a globally focused education technology company.

Why?

• Because tens of million of people in the emerging middle class in the emerging economies will need a postsecondary education to compete in a globalized digital economy.

• Because the emerging middle classes of the emerging economies share an insatiable demand for higher education and postsecondary credentialing.

• Because the existing postsecondary infrastructure in these countries is completely inadequate to the demands for entrance (size), quality, and delivery mechanisms.

• Because these countries will leapfrog past traditional, place-based bundled postsecondary institutions, doing what they did with cell phones as they leapfrogged the old 19th and 20th century land line systems.

Some company is going to figure out how to partner with existing educational institutions to secure accreditation and brand recognition, bundle and add value to the growing universe of high quality open source educational content, and package this content into courses that will be delivered via smart phones and browsers from cheap laptops.

Some startup will crack this code, and be purchased down the road by a technology, media or publishing company that wants to build this new business, but is too big and slow and risk adverse to create the new higher ed.

I bet the founders of your start-up will not come from the U.S. Rather, they will be embedded in the local culture and educational systems. They will be from India, China, Indonesia, or Brazil.
The real action in higher ed in the next 30 years will not be in the U.S. or other wealthy countries. It will be in the emerging economies.

Will Y Combinator find, nurture, mentor and fund this startup?

Thought experiment. You are teaching a course that has a significant online (distance) component. Your mobile platform will be used to access both the LMS (learning management system) and e-mail for responding to students. You are not looking for a main laptop replacement, and will not be doing course authoring or virtual meetings with this mobile platform.

You want to be able to accomplish the following tasks:

1. Have the form factor be small enough that you can carry your mobile platform everywhere you go.
2. Have the ability to enter text into discussion boards or blog posts in the LMS from your mobile platform, as well as to respond to e-mails.
3. Ensure ubiquitous access to the Web.

What mobile platform would you buy?

Options:

iPad Wi-Fi + 3G
Pros: Big enough so that LMS displays well through the browser. Virtual keyboard okay for typing. Thin and light.
Cons: Too big to put in pocket. Keyboard only okay. No flash support (your courses have flash video).

Google Chromebook 3G
Pros: Full keyboard and screen. True browser experience with flash. Smaller, lighter and better battery life than most laptops.
Cons: Too big to put in pocket. Why not just get a good small laptop with cellular modem?

SmartPhone: Android or iPhone or iPod Touch
Pros: Small form factor - can be placed in pocket.
Cons: Browser is small. Mobile LMS apps not yet fully developed, and may not be deployed. Typing is a challenge.

What mobile teaching (or learning) platform do you buy?

Are any good options left off this list?

The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories by Frank Rose

Frank Rose, contributing editor to Wired magazine, does exactly what Wired magazine (and other media like IHE should be doing) - creating Wired in the "long form". I love Wired magazine. (Don't you?) The sensibility, the subject matter, the people, the unapologetic techno-utopianism…etc. etc. Therefore, I love a book length version of the a Wired magazine type article even more. The Art of Immersion is just that type of book.

Rose's basic argument is familiar to you. Media are now participatory. Good narrative is the essential tool in a world drowning in data points and content. Media creators exist in a conversational space, one that they cannot control. Successful media properties must engage across different media, as well as platforms. Films jump to comic books, comic books to film, film to fiction, fiction to fan fiction, and fan fiction to the Web. These ideas may not be new, but Rose puts them in both an historical and pop-culture context. His writing is smart, energetic, and engaging - moving his own narrative about the new narrative along briskly and thoughtfully.

Some complaints. Some of the examples to illustrate how media are moving from the superficial to the immersive have been overdone. I don't need to hear more about Avatar, I'm not a gamer, and I have never watched Lost. And naturally I think that Rose misses a big part of the story by not looking at immersive educational platforms like simulations.

But these complaints are small compared to the pleasure that this Wired reader got in reading a great book length version of a Wired story.

Now how am I going to get IHE to start putting out books?

What are you reading?