Marc Perry in The Chronicle of Higher Education writes about a new online program at a technical college in Kentucky, in which students can begin and end the semester whenever they want.

One student, desperate to graduate, knocked off 113 quizzes and six writing assignments for a humanities course in 46 sleepless hours.But there is a downside to this convenience, and it’s deeper than bleary eyes. The open format of Jefferson’s program, called Learn Anytime, means students don’t move through classes in groups. None of Mr. Smith’s 400 online students will have a discussion or do a group project with classmates.

There’s a lot to digest in this article.  Some criticize the model; after all, true learning takes immersion and time.  Students do receive individualized attention, but it is largely automated.   On the other hand, the model is cost effective–for both administration and the instructors themselves, who are compensated per student, rather than receiving a flat fee per class.  For adjuncts, this can add up to more than even tenured faculty make (although instructors are essentially expected to work  around the clock).   Nevertheless, nearly 1300 students at Jefferson Community & Technical College have signed up.  Is this the future of higher education?

Faced with a growing collection of books and periodicals and a decreasing amount of space in which to store them, Stanford University’s Engineering Library has started to faze out print forms in favor of digitizing them, according to NPR.

For the moment, the Engineering Library is the only Stanford library that’s cutting back on books. But Keller says he can see what’s coming down the road by simply looking at the current crop of Stanford students.

“They write their papers online, and they read articles online, and many, many, many of them read chapters and books online,” he says. “I can see in this population of students behaviors that clearly indicate where this is all going.”

And while it’s still rare among American libraries to get rid of such a large amount of books, it’s clear that many are starting to lay the groundwork for a different future. According to a survey by the Association of Research Libraries, American libraries are spending more of their money on electronic resources and less on books.

Continue reading here.

This weekend’s episode of  On the Media talked about bookselling, eBooks, and the changing landscape for the publishing industry.  The full audio and transcript can be found here.

In The American Scholar, Sven Birkerts writes about the effect of the Internet on the novel and our ability to maintain focus on a complex narrative:

“The problem we face in a culture saturated with vivid competing stimuli is that the first part of the transaction will be foreclosed by an inability to focus—the first step requires at least that the language be able to reach the reader, that the word sounds and rhythms come alive in the auditory imagination. But where the attention span is keyed to a different level and other kinds of stimulus, it may be that the original connection can’t be made. Or if made, made weakly. Or will prove incapable of being sustained. Imagination must be quickened and then it must be sustained—it must survive interruption and deflection. Formerly, I think, the natural progression of the work, the ongoing development and complication of the situation, if achieved skillfully, would be enough. But more and more comes the complaint, even from practiced readers, that it is hard to maintain attentive focus. The works have presumably not changed. What has changed is either the conditions of reading or something in the cognitive reflexes of the reader. Or both.

All of us now occupy an information space blazing with signals. We have had to evolve coping strategies. Not merely the ability to heed simultaneous cues from different directions, cues of different kinds, but also—this is important—to engage those cues more obliquely. When there is too much information, we graze it lightly, applying focus only where it is most needed. We stare at a computer screen with its layered windows and orient ourselves with a necessarily fractured attention. It is not at all surprising that when we step away and try to apply ourselves to the unfragmented text of a book we have trouble. It is not so easy to suspend the adaptation.”

Kevin Hartnett of The Millions reflects on the rise of Kindle and the loss of bookshelves.

A chief virtue of digital books is said to be their economical size—they take up no space at all!—but even a megabyte seems bulky compared to what can be conveyed in the few cubic feet of a bookshelf.  What other vessel is able to hold with such precision, intricacy, and economy, all the facets of your life: that you bake bread, vacationed in China, fetishize Melville, aspire to read Shakespeare, have coped with loss, and still tote around a copy of The Missing Piece as a totem of your childhood.

A recent Chronicle of Higher Education article reviews research into the effect of multitasking on memory and attention span.  In “Divided Attention,” David Glenn considers the effect of media-multitasking in the classroom: those technology-wielding students who flip from screen to screen on their laptop, switching between Facebook, Freecell, and their lecture notes.  Are they able to focus as well as their peers?

“In a recent unpublished study, [Clifford I. Nass] and his colleagues found that chronic media multitaskers—people who spent several hours a day juggling multiple screen tasks—performed worse than otherwise similar peers on analytic questions drawn from the LSAT. He isn’t sure which way the causation runs here: It might be that media multitaskers are hyperdistractible people who always would have done poorly on LSAT questions, even in the pre-Internet era. But he worries that media multitasking might actually be destroying students’ capacity for reasoning.”

As an educator, I often find it difficult to keep my students on task, even without the distraction of technology.  Now that cell phones have become ubiquitous, it’s become nearly impossible: today I asked a student to put away his cell phone only to see him, moments later, reaching into his pocket, almost reflexively, to check another text message.  Was this a product of my lecture?  Or was he unable to focus because the buzzing cell phone in his pocket promised instant gratification, whereas my lecture on the importance of revision, alas, did not?   “Divided Gratification” doesn’t provide any definitive answers to these questions, but it does introduce several worthwhile theories on the matter.

On his blog The Millions, C. Max Magee has posted a conversation with a confessed book pirate — someone who uploads and downloads books illegally via the internet.  While some of the questions and answers seem to just skim the surface, the interview does offer some interesting insight into the mind of a person who obtains books illegally (as opposed to, say, borrowing them from the library for free).

In a recent Times Online article, Ben Macintyre writes about the death of the narrative at the hands of the internet.  According to Macintyre, the fast-paced nature of the internet has made us unable to focus our attention in a sustained manner.

The information we consume online comes ever faster, punchier and more fleetingly. Our attention rests only briefly on the internet page before moving incontinently on to the next electronic canapé.

Addicted to the BlackBerry, hectored and heckled by the next blog alert, web link or text message, we are in state of Continual Partial Attention, too bombarded by snippets and gobbets of information to focus on anything for very long. Microsoft researchers have found that someone distracted by an e-mail message alert takes an average of 24 minutes to return to the same level of concentration.

We crave plot, he continues, but the internet is not the forum for the long-form narrative–especially not when that next webpage is only a click away.  The cell phone stories that have become extremely popular in Japan may herald the next narrative form–compressed, yes, but still containing characters and a narrative arc, “proof,” he says, “that the ancient need for narrative, hardwired into human nature, can sit comfortably with the wiring of the newest technology.”

In a recent post to 3 Quarks Daily, Daniel Rourke discusses Socrates, the internet, and the instability of text.

Since the invention of writing, and its evolutionary successor the printing-press, text has commanded an authority that far exceeds any other medium. By reducing the flowing staccato rhythms of speech to typographically identical indelible marks we managed, over the course of little more than 2000 years, to standardise the reading consciousness. But in our rush to commodify the textual experience we lost touch with the very material that allowed illiteracy to become the exception, rather than the rule. We forgot that it is the very fallibility of text and book that make them such powerful thinking technologies.

This article from the Washington Post discusses the potential effects of new technology on the narrative form.

There’s endless talk in the news media about the next killer app. Maybe Twitter really will change the world. Maybe the next big thing will be just an algorithm, like Google’s citation-ranking equation. But Smith is betting that there will still be a market, somehow, for what he does. Narrative isn’t merely a technique for communicating; it’s how we make sense of the world. The storytellers know this.

They know that the story is the original killer app.