There are a whole host of problems facing the school education system in the US. Teacher training is just one of them.

The sheer number of teachers required and the low pay almost ensures that the average school teacher will not be anywhere near the best that American colleges turn out. If you think about it, isn’t a school teacher’s job, in whose hands we leave our children’s education, much more valuable to society than a lawyer’s or a banker’s. Unfortunately, society puts a really low price on it.

So we have the teachers we have. Can we do a better job of teaching with the lot we have? Clearly, teacher training can be effective, as the NYT article points to. But to improve any system, you need to be able to measure performance. That’s how you know, as you make changes to the system, if they are being effective or not.

Unfortunately, school teachers’ unions in most states vehemently oppose the validity of measurement systems and common sense changes like tying teacher pay to performance. So you have a public school system, which is what most Americans use, which is not delivering the goods and resisting all efforts to change.

HBS Professor Clayton Christensen and colleagues have written an interesting book Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. The lecture/classroom model of teaching was a response to society’s need to provide an increasing level of education to every American citizen. It wasn’t always this way. As the number of students in the school system started shooting up (both number of years and number of students being educated was going up) the school system responded by adopting a mass production system, on the lines of the changes going on in manufacturing at that time.

The biggest theme of that mass production of education was standardization. Put more students in the class, teach them the same way, at the same pace. Standardized text books, standardized tests – everything was based on the assumption that in order to scale up the throughput of the school system, we had to standardize.

And they were absolutely right. By any metric of success, the school system in the US, rose to the challenge of educating Americans in much larger numbers. The system delivered. Until the 70s.

Once the challenge of scale was met, American educators started worrying about the quality of education. But try as they might they haven’t been able to improve that over the last two decades. The monolithic school system was designed very well for mass production of education, but was resistant to change.

The biggest problem in today’s schools is standardization – a teaching paradigm of one size fits all. Students have different learning styles and capabilities. A classroom, even if the teacher is great, pushes the onus of adjusting learning styles on to the children.

The authors then go on to say that technology will change all that. Computers can enable what they call “Student centric learning” – where the path and pace of the lessons adjust to the student’s learning style. In addition, the online content can reflect the best teaching out there. To use a music analogy, today’s classrooms are the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of live performances done by artistes, some good, some bad, some average. Online education can be like digital music – the rendition isn’t as life like as a live performance, but everyone is listening to the original composition.

The authors believe that student centric online education will disrupt the classroom education paradigm. At first this will happen slowly, but soon it will become this irresistible flood that will forever change our education system. By 2014 online courses, they predict, will be 10% of all high school courses in the US. By 2019 that number will be 50%. Today it is just 1%.

Christensen has written a management classic – The Innovator’s Dilemma. I was deeply influenced by this book and its successor Innovator’s Solution because they related so well to how Offshore Services were disrupting the IT Services industry. He applies the same principles to predict how online education will disrupt classroom education.

I find online education a fascinating study. I just registered my daughter for some online supplementary courses from Johns Hopkins CTY Online. As I learn more about it from her experience, I am sure I’ll be returning to this subject here.

Related posts:

1. Make Work Homework
2. English Medium Education Can Lead to Poorer English
3. Paper Problems

I’ve come to the clear conclusion that it simply isn’t suited for reading the vast majority of non-fiction. You might not even notice it when you’re doing it, but when you read a non-fiction work like this one, you tend to flick backwards and forwards a lot, skim past the bits you already know about, re-read earlier passages in light of later ones, that sort of thing. And that’s prohibitively difficult with the kindle, which is designed primarily for reading narratives where you start at the beginning and make your way steadily to the end. Truly narrative non-fiction a la Krakauer is fine, but “learn about the crisis” nonfiction just doesn’t lend itself to being read on the kindle at any price. If you’re the kind of person who reads footnotes, you will get very annoyed very quickly with the kindle whenever they start appearing.

I have come to the same conclusion and have started ordering dead tree books when they are non-fiction. Any book where illustrations are important gives you a suboptimal experience on the Kindle. And as Salmon says, skipping chapters or going back and forth is just very difficult in a Kindle.

But this is not inherently a problem with an e-book. It’s just that Kindle hasn’t addressed the issues involved. One is about laying out a book specifically for the Kindle. Today it is laid out for the actual book and that is essentially sucked in for the Kindle. No doubt the variable font settings on the Kindle make this challenging, but the problem can be solved. And with color e-ink displays coming, there shouldn’t be the wide gap between the layout of non-fiction books and their e-book counterparts.

The other issue is with usability. The big question that I don’t have an answer to (but somebody does) is – can an e-ink display have touch capabilities? If it can, the Kindle reader can easily flip back and forth within a book. The experience might be different from a real book, but much better than today’s Kindle.

Related posts:

1. Leaving the Kindle On During Takeoff
2. Digital Book Economics
3. Make Work Homework

I got an HTC Hero on Sprint. It looked good and had great reviews. But it is in general underwhelming. And as a phone its close to a disaster.

When someone calls me, they call me on my Google Voice number. Google then routes the call to my cellphone. For some reason, there is a big delay between when someone calling me starts hearing the phone ring at their end, and when it actually starts ringing on my cellphone. This delay is negligible when GV is forwarded to my land line. If I forward it to my wife’s Verizon phone, the delay is a bit longer but still OK. On Sprint the delay is so long that my phone rings for only 10 seconds before it goes into voice mail. Sprint technical support can’t solve the problem. So basically I miss calls when the phone is anywhere but in my pocket and even then, I have to be quick.

Anyway, sorry I subjected you to my tale of woe. I am hoping someone from Sprint or Google will pick up on this and do something about it. I may be locked into a two year contract but I still have my free speech!

That’s not the only problem with the phone. It is seriously underpowered. Performance is like molasses. The calendar sucks and I’m not willing to get one from the Android marketplace unless it is great and doesn’t require me giving my Google credentials to a third party. And there are dozens of UI problems.

Plus there are a set of problems which are problems with the whole smart phone category. I regularly hit the wrong keys on the phone dialer. I still haven’t gotten used to typing out emails or messages on the keyboard. And while I like the fact that my Google Reader goes with me wherever I go, the font is just too small to read for any length of time.

So, as I was thinking hateful thoughts about my phone today a thought occurred to me. What I really need is a regular, unsmart phone and an iPad. Move all the intelligence to the iPad and have a sturdy, single purpose, idiot proof phone that is small, cheap and works great.

Something to think about. Just for a moment, before I go back to hating my HTC Hero on Sprint.

Related posts:

1. My iPad Will Have to Wait
2. Open Toolbox
3. Google Voice – Different and Useful

Doctors and other service providers who bill on time, never use email. Understandably, since that breaks the $/hr model which personal visits and phone calls support. All forms, bills, health insurance claims – it is all paper, if the doctor doesn’t bill the insurance company directly.

Bill presentment is moving online, but most companies, including companies like Comcast, PG&E and local utilities do it poorly. Which leads to frustration online or you revert back to paper bills.

Anyway, there’s a lot of paper. I’m not very good with filing and such like. And the fax machine at home is temperamental. So I decided to up my Evernote subscription to paid and started scanning paper docs into it. That way I can tag it multiple ways, instead of filing it (single tag). Evernote also makes the pdf searchable so finding it when I need it will be easier.

Pretty soon I was doing a lot of scanning. I have a flat bed scanner. And with a flat bed scanner, scanning multi page docs is a huge pain. First, you have to go back and forth between the scanner and the computer for each page. After all that, I was getting as many pdf docs and there were pages.

To get a combined pdf, the easy solution was to install the HP software that came with the printer-scanner. But then that is a mammoth 300 MB installed and just on principle I wasn’t going to do that. I have not understood why HP thinks that just because they have sold me a printer they have the right to install all kinds of junk on my computer that I don’t need or want. And they make it so difficult to install just the piece that you want, including threats like “We would strongly advise you to install the entire software”. After installing, the software will force itself into the Mac quick launch tray and the menu up top, without so much as a by your leave.

So as you can see, I don’t like HP very much and I wasn’t going to install their monstrosity just for combining pdfs. Happily, there is this Mac automator script which achieves that very readily.

That leaves the problem of the scanner itself. Why are sheet feed scanners so expensive? I can’t believe that the cost of production is higher. It has to be that manufacturers believe that a sheet feed scanner is generally required by a business not by consumers and so it can take a higher price. Or because a specialized scanner has no annuity printer ink revenue. I can’t see any other reason.

Related posts:

1. Open Toolbox

Not really. I had my MacBook with me, so what I really needed is a 3G connection not a third device. And 3G connections costs money which I can’t justify based upon the amount I would use it with my laptop (only occasionally). I already have a $100 bill for my cellphone out of which probably $40 can be attributed to the data connection.

For me, and I suspect for a lot of people, the iPad is going to come down to how they answer these questions:

- Of the three devices – smart phone, laptop and tablet – do I need all three or will two do? I can see some people saying I need to stay with my company’s Windows laptop but I’d really love to have something from Apple for browsing, entertainment and light work, which is most of what I do at home. iPad could be it for those people.

- But for most people just three devices will be too many. If two will do, what are those two devices? My guess is the iPad is not going to find a place in the top two, too often.

- How many 3G connections can I afford and which devices should have them?

On the second point, Apple can’t do much. It also doesn’t need to since it practically owns the smart phone category and has a growing MacBook franchise.

But the cost of 3G plans is a big hurdle for the iPad. And with its clout with mobile operators, it can do something about it.

I think that it’s safe to say that without a 3G connection, the iPad is much less useful. It then becomes more of a bulky iPod – a gaming and entertainment device that you can’t put in your pocket – than a constant companion that saves you from squinting at your smartphone screen while waiting in doctors’ offices.

But if every 3G connection is going to cost me $30 to $60 extra, I don’t think it works, at least for my MCIM (middle-class Indian mentality).

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Why can’t I get a 3G plan that is just variable – it bills me by the MB across all devices I use?

Now that’s a plan that would make it easier for me to go for the iPad. I’d probably still wait for the price to come down and the specs to go up, which will happen in a year for sure.

Update: But maybe the iPad is actually a Kindle replacement, except that it can turn many tricks that the Kindle can’t. Really? A backlit screen for reading books? Not for me, though. And someone who agrees with me.

Photo Matt Buchanan

Related posts:

1. An Unsmart Phone and an iPad
2. Leaving the Kindle On During Takeoff

This is pretty important in many ways. Google is willing to give up China as a market in support of free speech. Some commentators have said that they were getting thrashed by Baidu anyway and so there’s not much that they’re giving up. But that is wrong. China is going to be the biggest internet search market in the world in a few years. It is unquestionably important. To even be second in that market could be worth a lot. That Google, a public company, is willing to give that up to hold up a principle, is huge. I can’t immediately recall any sacrifice of this magnitude by a public company for a principle.

The Chinese government did not respond directly to Google’s press release. Instead it just reiterated that internet companies must abide by the law of the land. The Chinese authorities are unabashed in their quest for “managing” opinion on the internet.

From the New York Times:

“China’s Internet is entering an important stage of development, confronting both rare opportunities and severe challenges,” Mr. Wang said. “Internet media must always make nurturing positive, progressive mainstream opinion an important duty.”

Is this China just cocking a snook at the rest of the world? Are they saying “We are China. We make the rules. You obey them or leave.” Or is it that in their scheme of things, free speech isn’t a high priority? Or rather “managed opinion” is a high priority.

It could be a little of both. Hacking into corporate networks and Gmail accounts is bad stuff. I don’t think there is any school of thought (unless you call “Art of War” one) that will condone that. But they probably know that with enough deniability and their economic muscle they can just keep doing it with impunity.

But on censoring the internet, it may just be that free speech doesn’t hold the same exalted status as it does in the Western world.

India has regularly banned books that the government feels may incite unrest particularly amongst religious groups. In the Indian context I think that is a very pragmatic approach. It does mean that some works of literature are denied to the Indian public. It also means that this exception to free speech can be misused by a government. But on balance it is a modest price to pay.

Free speech is enshrined in the US constitution – the First Amendment in fact. Nowhere is it held in greater sanctity than in the US. But even in the Western world, the ideal of free speech can get tarnished as it collides with other laws. In the UK for instance, the libel laws are such that a science writer of repute like Simon Singh can be brought to his knees by the British Chiropractic Association because they don’t like the way he described chiropractors.

In China, for the society and form of government they have, uncontrolled political discourse on the internet, could be viewed as dangerous and harmful to society. A little criticism of the Communist Party one day become an Iranian style Green Revolution the next. Imagine a country of the size of China in the midst of what Iran is going through. It can’t be good for anyone, least of all for China’s political classes. I may not agree with their views on censorship, but I understand them. And it seems like most Chinese would rather be able to buy a car than have access to the writings of Chinese dissidents.

A great piece on China’s subtle censorship on the internet by James Fallows at The Atlantic.

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1. Google Voice – Different and Useful

Besides the fact that it makes it so much easier to access my notes when I am on the move, there is another unexpected benefit. When you take a photo using your phone, the process of getting it off the phone and on to your computer is an extra step that slows things down. Taking pictures using Evernote makes that pain go away. When you take a photo using Evernote, it is automatically synced to the Evernote cloud and from there to your computer.

Here’s the first photo I took using Evernote, “Wake Up Sid” style!

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1. Open Toolbox
2. Paper Problems
3. An Unsmart Phone and an iPad

Email, Calendar, Contacts

My personal email is on Gmail. I moved from Yahoo Mail after many years and have never regretted it. Gmail totally rocks. For work related email, I first tried Mac Mail. The integration with Exchange was supposed to be better with Snow Leopard which is why I thought I’d give it a spin. But it is surprisingly clunky. I was constantly battling authentication errors which were clearly a problem with the email client not Exchange. Google Calendar sync with Mail didn’t work for me. Also Mac Mail has other irritants like saving drafts even after one has sent out the email. Eventually I gave up and moved to Thunderbird. The email client is trouble free although the performance is a little sluggish compared to Mac Mail. The Lightning add-on for calendar functionality within Thunderbird now works quite well for me, though it took a couple of tries to get it going. Another add-on called Provider for Google Calendar, takes care of the calendar sync. And a third one gContactSynch handles the sync with Google Contacts.

Lightning and the other two add-ons are still in beta. And my move to Thunderbird on Mac is still less than a month old, but it’s working well so far.

Phone and Mobile phone

I use Google Voice. I have come to like it a lot and sometimes worry about getting in too deep with a beta product. While Google usually stretches the meaning of ‘beta’ quite a bit, this service is definitely beta. If they get into a scrap with the FCC and scrap the service, I’ll have to ask all my contacts to change my phone number in their address books – a prospect that makes me shudder. So, if you are listening Google, I hope it won’t come to that.

For my mobile phone, I just moved from a Blackberry Pearl to HTC Hero (on Sprint PCS). The iPhone does not allow the Google Voice app so it wasn’t an option for me. The HTC Hero is an Android phone and so it plays very nicely with all Google services. But surprisingly Google Voice isn’t smoothly integrated. It often fails to make an outbound call with GV, which is not that big a problem since you can complete the call with the mobile phone number. But the one problem that has me worried is that calls to Google Voice have to be picked up in about 12 secs or they go into voice mail. Unless GV extends their ring time, or makes it configurable, I’ll have to be quick on the draw, or miss the call. Which is not good. But not bad enough to have second thoughts about GV.

The HTC Hero apps that work well for me are the HTC Exchange mail client, Gmail, Contacts and Google Maps. The inbuilt calendar is not up to snuff. I often resort to Google Calendar using the browser, which I shouldn’t have to. There are a gazillion apps in the Android Market for Calendar but my problem is that I don’t want to give my Google password to a third party. The information on which apps in Android Market store my password and which don’t is not readily available. Google Reader through the browser works really well, but I’d sure like to have an RSS reader on the phone (that doesn’t store my Google password). Another thing – I think the Google Voice app could be much better.

I am pretty excited about Android and even though HTC Hero feels like a version 1, with many irritants big and small, I’m going to stick it out in the hope that things can only get better.

Archival

For bookmarking I have used Delicious for a long time and continue to do so. I don’t find myself using the ’social’ aspects of Delicious. In fact I rarely go back and look at my book marks at all. But it feels good that if I do forget something I can go find it. For quick access to often used sites I use the browser bookmark functionality in Firefox.

I take a lot of notes. I use Evernote to store my notes. I use a notebook and a pen, the old fashioned way, if I am in a meeting. But even those notes eventually will go into Evernote. If I find something important while browsing, I will use the Evernote Clipper in the browser to quickly add it to Evernote. I also scan almost any important paper that needs to archived, into Evernote. In a way, Evernote has replaced the need to use Word files at all. Or store pdf files in a directory. It is all in Evernote, constantly backed up to the Evernote site. Ironically, my usage is still low enough for it to be free for me.

For backup I use a Time Capsule from Apple on my home network.

Other Productivity Tools

Open Office has been OK for me, not great. I don’t use Writer (equivalent of Word) at all. The spreadsheet software works well for me. The presentation software doesn’t. Just for this, I am thinking of getting iWork from Apple. Keynote is superb.

I also use Google Docs extensively. For collaborative work, it is hard to beat. But again, the presentation software is weak.

Skitch is a fantastic tool for annotating screenshots, images and photos. I love it. Its free.

I recently came across this browser add-on called Readability. It is fantastic. I tend to prefer uncluttered pages and larger font size. Readability delivers it on any page with one click.

I use Twitter very sparingly. I guess I don’t have much to say and when I do, it is a post like this which is more like 1400 words, not 140 characters! But this Bit.ly Sidebar has made it really simple. Even if you use it just to send a link to a friend, it is quite useful and interesting.

I use a whole bunch of other tools and services for blogging, entertainment etc. But that will have to keep for another day.

Related posts:

1. An Unsmart Phone and an iPad
2. Evernote for Android
3. Google Voice – Different and Useful

Now the airline rules are very clear and are rigorously implemented by the airline crew:

1. All Portable Electronic Devices (PED) must be switched off during takeoff and landing.
2. No wireless devices can be operated during the flight.

The second rule is pretty unambiguous in how it should apply. All cellphones, laptops and devices with WiFi – anything with an RF signal – must not be turned on during the flight. The Kindle does have a cellular signal which can be easily turned off. Not a problem – the wireless anyway drains the battery real fast and its probably a good thing that you have to turn it off in case you had it on at the time.

But the first rule is a little gray when it comes to the Kindle. I guess you could call the Kindle a PED. But then so are electronic watches and hearing aids. You don’t have to (rather can’t) turn those off. Which is why the attendants making the announcements will often describe PEDs as “anything with an on/off switch”. That takes care of excluding hearing aids and pacemakers from the regulation. But does that take care of the Kindle?

Not really. The Kindle does have an on/off slider. But the problem is that you can’t really turn off a Kindle in a way that an airline stewardess will understand. When you slide the on/off button on the Kindle the current page of the book you were reading is replaced by a sketch, typically of a well known writer like Mark Twain. Most people will see it and liken it to a screen saver which to them means that the device is on.

But the way e-paper works, it isn’t a screen saver. There is no power drawn to hold the image. From the Wikipedia entry on e-paper

…is capable of holding text and images indefinitely without drawing electricity, while allowing the image to be changed later.

What this means is that the Kindle draws no power when holding the image of a page. Only when you turn the page, do you use (a tiny bit of) power. Which partly explains why the Kindle doesn’t have a mode that will kill the image completely.

So the Kindle does have an on/off slider but it doesn’t really switch it off the way we understand electronic devices to work. I can foresee trouble if you get into an argument with an airline stewardess. I would advise shutting the jacket of the Kindle, if you have one. Or just keep it away.

It seems like a shame to have to stow it away for the 15 minutes it takes to get to cruising altitude when you can resume reading. If you are not carrying a real book that is 30 minutes of downtime every flight when you have absolutely nothing to do.

So why do you have to switch off your PEDs during takeoff and landing? This is actually an FAA regulation. An article in Slate explains

The rationale for switching off other portable electronic devices is slightly different. Even if a device doesn’t transmit a signal—think iPods, Game Boys, “anything with an on-off switch”—it still emits energy at a frequency that could, possibly, interfere with the plane’s electronics.

It seems to me that the Kindle’s intermittent power sipping can’t really pose a problem. But I seriously doubt that the FAA will make an exception for the Kindle any time soon. Oh well…

The wireless device rule (#2 above) is pretty clear, but as airlines progressively introduce WiFi on board it starts stretching the limits of credulity. The same Slate article has some explanations. But it seems like post hoc rationalization of the rules. For every time one has heard cell phones go off in someone’s bag while the airplane is taxiing, there are a thousand other times someone has left it on and it hasn’t gone off. If this was a serious safety issue, shouldn’t there be stricter policing? Or maybe it is a serious safety issue and strict policing will start as soon as the first plane crash due to RF interference occurs. I don’t know which is worse.

Photo by caribb

Related posts:

1. Kindle Doesn’t Quite Work for Non-Fiction
2. My iPad Will Have to Wait

There are a few disadvantages of course. The biggest one is the price. At $360 or so you don’t want to leave it on the airplane! You can’t loan a book to someone else. Books with illustrations won’t offer the same experience for a while (no DC comics on the Kindle so far). You are forever tied to amazon.com as your supplier of books. Much like the lock-in that music downloads from iTunes created for the iPod until Apple also moved to mp3 downloads. Funnily, the DRM that the publishers insist on creates a lock-in that benefits the device manufacturer the most.

Kindle, and hopefully other e-books, will change the economics of the book publishing industry. I can’t say if it will be for better or for worse for the publishers (probably worse) or authors (probably better). But the readers will certainly have more choice. And this can be very, very good for Amazon’s shareholders.

The marginal cost of a book is quite a bit more than a for a music album or a DVD. I would put at about 20 to 30 %. It would be somewhat less for hard covers and technical books with specialized readership as compared to paperback and popular fiction.

With e-books that marginal cost goes down to zero. This allows the price of the book to be lower, even while (I suppose) Amazon makes a higher % margin though perhaps a similar dollar amount per book. A lower price can seriously expand the market.

Then there is the convenience. To be able to instantly gratify the need for a new book can only mean more sales of new books.

The marginal cost being zero means a few other things as well. Classics whose copyright has expired are available for next to nothing. The entire collection of Dickens is available for $1, for instance. A Raja Sharma has a whole collection of summaries of classics for around a buck each. I’m sure there are thousands of high school and college English lit students who will plump for the summary.

The reason why the summaries are interesting is much more than the genre of summaries itself, which existed before the e-book. It is interesting because it totally bypasses the publisher. The author gets a 33% cut of revenues from Amazon, regardless of the price. Amazon keeps the rest. Might this become more of a trend in the future? It just might. New authors can avoid the publisher entirely with a combination of Kindle and Print on Demand. You’d have to do your own marketing, but then if you are a new author, it’s not as if the publisher is spending millions on marketing your book anyway.

Question – are summaries of books that are still copyright protected, an infringement of the copyright? Business book summaries are regularly advertised in the Economist and given that the summary almost always will eliminate the need to read the book it seems reasonable to assume that there is some contractual arrangement between the summarizer and the publisher of the actual book. On the other hand can ‘remixing’ a book be deemed an infringement?

In an earlier post Paperbacks in India I wrote about how publishers were releasing cheaper paperback versions of books in India simultaneously with hard cover releases in the US. With an e-book release that won’t be possible, which means that publishers will lose the ability to geographically price segment the market. Which hopefully means that the book will cost less everywhere. Although it’ll be a long time before e-books become a factor in India. The readers just cost too much today. But get some real competition going and the prices should come down quickly. Maybe from Sony, or maybe these guys.

Related posts:

1. Kindle Doesn’t Quite Work for Non-Fiction
2. Leaving the Kindle On During Takeoff
3. Online Education is Coming, And Fast