Smarthistory: The Blog

As some of our readers may have already noticed, we launched a Kickstarter campaign yesterday to raise $10,000 to help us create 100 more videos for Smarthistory.org. This will make Smarthistory a truly viable, free alternative to the traditional and very expensive art history textbook. If you haven’t watched the video, or looked at our page on Kickstarter, take a moment to do that—it explains everything.

The OER community is understandably focused on the issue of sustainability. Smarthistory is already a very sustainable project since we designed it to have minimal ongoing costs; our back-end is an open-source content management system, and all of the content on the site are voluntarily contributions. Yesterday Philipp Schmidt, of Peer to Peer University, wrote a blog post about the possibilities of using Kickstarter to help support the OER (open educational resources) and OCW (open courseware) communities. It will be interesting to see if Kickstarter is a viable means of support for open education initiatives like Smarthistory.

From inception, we have sought to be a synthetic resource that pushes beyond institutional boundaries—in terms of the collections we draw from, our academic contributors, and the students we serve. It’s interesting to us that, in addition to simply being a means to raise funds, Kickstarter is also a measure of our project’s value for others, or at least the translation of that value into monetary terms. For us there is an interesting paradox, since the bulk of the people we serve—college students—are perhaps the least likely to support us with donations, since they are less likely to have the financial means to do so. So far, donations have come instead from informal users, the education/technology community, and our supporters.

We need your help to make this work. Here are some things you can do:

1. Go to the Kickstarter site and watch our short video—it explains everything
2) Use Twitter, Facebook, and other social media to spread the word about our campaign
3) Write a blog post about us
4) Interview us for your blog
5) Visit Smarthistory.org

Needless to say, if you can help us reach a wider community, we’d be indebted. Thanks again.

The Next Generation Learning Challenges blog asked, “What makes an e-textbook work?” and last night, I responded with the following,

This important question may need a little rephrasing. The textbook is of course not a given, but rather, the result of a particular technology and a reflection of the needs and interests of a specific historical moment. The textbook promised the comprehensive treatment of its subject, accuracy, and a single, coherent, sequential structure.

The web has shown that these premises are limited and our students seem to know this. Perhaps this is because in their experience knowledge seems more expansive, intricate, dynamic, and cumulative and the very notion that a bound and static textbook that purports to be comprehensive is for them, inherently suspect. Diderot’s noble belief that his great Encyclopédie could contain the full extent of “each and every branch of human knowledge” was beautiful and wildly ambitious, but it was an expression of the mid-18th century Enlightenment.

Must we remain bound, even through metaphor, to the print textbook as a model? The economics of print technology required standardized editions that fail to reflect the fluidity of knowledge. We now have an incredible opportunity to invent an entirely new means with which to introduce and interact with a given discipline. Let’s leave the metaphor of the textbook behind us. Instead, open, networked learning should aggregate and respond to discovery and analysis in real time while drawing relevant materials from resources across a spectrum of disciplines. Further, we can include many more voices and create much more engaging models for learning.

Dr. Beth Harris and I created Smarthistory.org, a conversation-based multimedia art history web-book to begin to do exactly this.

Add your thoughts to the conversation over at the Next Generation blog.

Well, I was going to write a blog post about how there should be no such thing as an online textbook, because once we get rid of the textbook-iness of the textbook (good riddance!) and it’s on the web and is interactive, hyperlinked and contains rich media, why not just call it a website?  But it looks like I was beaten to the punch and a much better article than I would have written on this subject just appeared, “The Line between book and Internet will disappear” by Hugh McGuire.

Here’s his list of what ebooks (or think online textbooks) can NOT do:

• You cannot deep link into an ebook — say to a specific page or paragraph chapter or image or table
• Indeed you cannot really “link” to an ebook, only various access points to instances of that ebook, because there is no canonical “ebook” to link to … there is no permalink for a chapter, and no Uniform Resource Locator (url) for an ebook itself
• You (usually) cannot copy and paste text, the most obvious thing one might wish to do
• You cannot query across, say, all books about Montreal, written in 1942 — even if they are from the same publisher

Now, how long should this state of affairs last?

Here’s more:

You cannot do any of these things, because we still consider that books — the information, words, and data inside of them — live outside of the Internet, even if they are of the e-flavor. You might be able to buy them on the Internet, but the stuff contained within them is not hooked in. Ebooks are an attempt to make it easier for people to buy and read books, without changing this fundamental fact, without letting ebooks become part of the Internet.

Steven Zucker and I have written about and have been following the recent debates about the price of textbooks, and recent innovations in offering textbooks digitally, including renting them, licensing them, printing them, reading them only online, etc. I’ve been collecting the articles at my Posterous site. It’s been fascinating to read about Xplana, Inkling, Flat World Knowledge, and Coursesmart.

We wonder not just about how to reduce the price of textbooks (or make them free), but how long it will take textbooks as a genre to die. Or perhaps they never will…? Should we write an e-textbook that makes use of Smarthistory as a companion site?

In art history, Pearson/Prentice Hall has been busy rethinking the delivery of textbooks. For Janson’s History of Art, you can purchase the hardcover, the paperback, the western edition, brief editions, or you can purchase the ebook as a complete volume or by chapter (along with the proprietary software needed to read it). Via Coursesmart, you can also rent either the bound book or the electronic version – which you can highlight and annotate. These books can also come with passwords for an online interactive website, like the one offered by Pearson called “My Art Kit.” It’s worth noting that this growing multitude of options is creating confusion even on the publishers’ websites and it’s no wonder that faculty rely on the publishers’ representatives or their college bookstore to navigate these options!

Then there’s the simultaneous development of open educational resources (OERs), and that’s the area we’ve been active in, though we remain open to collaborations. OER is a broad term, and OERs are defined as “educational materials and resources offered freely and openly for anyone to use and under some licenses to re-mix, improve and redistribute.” Open educational resources include everything from open courses, learning objects, open courseware, video courses (think: Academic Earth), and the initiatives in this area have been heavily funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. See also Dave Cormier’s blog post on the complexity of the notions of  freedom and open-ness of OERs.

[By the way we couldn't agree more with Dave that "being open need not be complicated, it doesn’t need to be organized, nor does it even need to be funded. It has to respond to a need that exists" - Smarthistory has received grants from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, but runs entirely independent from an institution of higher education, and depends on voluntary contributions, and has a very small and sustainable overhead since it uses an open source CMS.]

Here’s a great list of OER resources and definitions. By the way, museums have been producing OERs for years (usually called exhibition subsites), but we don’t call them that for some reason. And what happened to the “learning object”? Sometimes it seems half the problem is that we come up with these terms that include some things and not other things for absolutely no good reason.

But back to the issue with digital textbooks. Why do we need textbooks at all – especially in the Humanities? If Post-Modernism has taught us anything, it’s taught us that there is not a single narrative, that there is no canon, that nothing can be “comprehensive.” Knowledge is messy. Acquiring it should be a little messy too.

We’ve been quite busy of late and wanted to be sure you know about a few short posts that relate to Smarthistory:

Next Gen: Learning Challenges is a partnership of leaders in education seeking to make students more successful. They asked us to contribute a post that engaged the organization’s four key challenges. Find it here.

The Society for Environmental Graphic Design held its annual exhibition design symposium at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills last week and inexplicably asked me to give the opening keynote address. The title was “Innovation in the Way We Learn, Interpret, and Share Information,” and you can get a nice sense of it on the SEGD blog.

Also, keep an eye out for Meg Florian, Smarthistory contributor extraordinaire and currently guest blogger over at Art:21.