Posts from — February 2010

One of the most firmly entrenched academic practices centers upon the use of textbooks as the fundamental drivers of curricula. Ultra-expensive, these items represent one of the largest costs for public school systems as well as those attending college.

As the digital age continues to work its way into the stuffy world of academics, there are clear indications that textbooks are gradually being phased out in many areas of the country. The sheer volume of resources available on the net is leading many school districts to create and share their own materials.

Macmillan, considered one of the largest players in that old, conservative world, apparently has now also seen the “handwriting on the wall.” The company recently announced it will offer academics an entirely new format: DynamicBooks.

The Wikipedia of Textbooks

The new, digital textbook format introduced by Macmillan has been dubbed by the New York Times as a kind of “Wikipedia of textbooks.” New software will allow college-level instructors to edit digital versions of e-textbooks, enabling these professors to customize the texts for their individual courses.

In addition to having the ability to reorganize and/or delete entire chapters or sections of the text, professors will be able to upload their course syllabus as well as any other supporting materials that have been created for the class: notes, videos, pictures and graphs. Offering significant potential cost savings (half the price of physical textbooks according to the Times), this format will allow all course materials be placed in a single digital location, a feature that should prove to be a godsend for students.

But it is yet another step that Macmillan is taking that is drawing the greatest attention. The phrase “Wikipedia of textbooks” speaks directly to that concept, the ability of professors to rewrite paragraphs and add their own equations, drawings, and illustrations.

While this step will allow most professors to do what they already do in a more efficient manner, the idea is not sitting well with the traditionalists who see the intellectual property within such books as proprietary. The further blurring of copyright laws as professors create their own content and intermingle that work with the published textbook authors is an enormous issue for those who have made a living in the textbook field.

The Opposition

Most of the concerns center on a format that is ripe for plagiarism. But the editorial staff at Tufts Daily is calling the concept risky for other reasons.

TD expressed extreme concern that professors would have direct editorial control over the content of the textbook yet would not be required to cite sources for the changes made nor need approval from either the publisher or the authors of the textbook. In addition, TD is concerned with another of the focal points of textbook traditionalists.

Apparently a significant number of the textbooks that will be available are those currently utilized in “large survey courses in the sciences.” While all professors no doubt altered the material to some extent in their individual courses, the traditional textbook had served as a standard reference for students.

According to TD, not only were students able to reference the textbook to discern greater clarity of the specific material that has been presented, the books provided students the essential content deemed relevant to the topic. But now, TD fears those books could well be devoid of relevant topics or critical background material.

In addition, TD notes “that professors may change the text with biased or even false information,” could “accidentally miswrite a definition or make an error in a formula or equation.” Any such errors would no doubt be detrimental to the students taking the course.

TD further insists students should not be the ones to face consequences for these errors or biases, that professors “should not be allowed to edit textbook content without review by the publisher or the textbook author.” And while TD offers support for the field of digital textbooks due to their ease of use and accessibility even as they reduce textbook costs, the editors insisted that allowing such edits did “not outweigh the potential problems that it could cause.”

Instead, professors should not be provided unchecked editorial control over the textbook as it ultimately “jeopardizes the reliability of course material for students.”

Macmillan Moving Forward

Despite these concerns, Macmillan plans to start selling about 100 titles through DynamicBooks. Some of the reported texts that will be available come August include: Chemical Principles: The Quest for Insight, by Peter Atkins and Loretta Jones; Discovering the Universe, by Neil F. Comins and William J. Kaufmann; and Psychology, by Daniel L. Schacter, Daniel T. Gilbert and Daniel M. Wegner.

The books will be available at college bookstores, the DynamicBooks web site and through CourseSmart. Accessing the DynamicBooks editions will be possible either directly online or by downloading the text to a laptop or iPhone.

And of the cost savings, the Times noted one concrete example. The aforementioned Psychology has a list price of $134.29 when sold in its traditional format. The version that may be altered by a professor will sell for $48.76 when accessed through the DynamicBooks concept.

The altered versions will also be available in print on-demand version from Macmillan. However, when students opt for that format, the cost will revert nearly to the original list price.

100% Support for New Concept

Given the costs associated with textbooks, any step taken to reduce the outlay by students or schools is a welcome one in this corner. The fact of the matter is the current knowledge explosion renders most books out-of-date within a matter of months after publication.

In addition, no text is ever a perfect match for a course and the students taking that course. Every teacher makes modifications on at least a weekly or monthly basis, supplementing and deleting whenever such a step makes sense for the students they are entrusted with.

Kudos go out to Macmillan for taking a step other publishers have held back on: the level of customization that comes with being able to edit and supplement at the sentence and paragraph level. The option also allows for those delivering course content to collaborate and share material that is known to work best with students and include that in the basic course materials.

That inherent question, should professors have the right to edit and alter materials, is essentially a non-starter anyway. The bottom line is every good instructor does just that, altering and supplementing as he or she deems appropriate.

But now colleges, and hopefully one day K-12 school districts will be able to save hundreds of dollars even as they continue that long-standing practice of offering students an anchor text.

Professor Robert Milardo arrived at the University of Maine in Orono in the summer of 1982 after teaching for a couple of years at the University of Southern California. Calling northern Maine a great place to live and his role the perfect job, one with a fair balance of teaching and research responsibilities, Professor Milardo has remained at the flagship campus ever since.

A professor of Family Relations, Milardo is currently editor of the Journal of Family Theory and Review owned by the National Council on Family Relations. He has published extensively in the field of family studies in leading journals and is the author of The Forgotten Kin: Aunts and Uncles (2009), The Decade in Review: Understanding Families into the Next Millennium (2001), and Family as Relationships (2000).

Professor Milardo’s interviews and commentaries on family issues have appeared in Psychology Today, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the USA Today.

Professor Milardo earned his Ph.D. in Human Development & Family Studies from Pennsylvania State University and his M.A. in Social Psychology from Connecticut College. Given his depth of study in the developing science of personal relationships and the ongoing importance of family to raising successful children, we were extremely interested in Professor Milardo’s work, particularly as it relates to aunts, uncles and kinship, and his theory of families as multiple households.

We recently spent some time with the Professor discussing his most recent work, The Forgotten Kin.

What ultimately was the impetus for you looking into the extended family and specifically to then examine the roles of aunts and uncles in families?

I started with an interest in interviewing men in caregiving roles other than parents. Were there men who were acting responsibly and having a positive influence on children? In my own life, uncling has been very important to me. I really enjoyed being around my nieces and nephew as children and now as adults.

And in my own childhood, uncles were important to me and fun to be around. On the other hand, the field of family studies is largely silent about uncles (and aunts) so a research project seemed like it would be interesting and maybe important.

Can you explain a little bit about the people that formed the basis of your research – how did you go about selecting and gathering interview and research candidates to examine the family roles associated with aunts and uncles?

Getting men to participate in research on family issues is not always such an easy task. I began the study in Wellington, New Zealand at Victoria University and spent much of my time calling acquaintances and arranging interviews.

Fortunately, the idea of the study was of interest to several journalists and articles appeared in local papers in NZ and then in Maine where I continued the work. Eventually I completed 104 personal interviews with uncles, aunts, nieces and nephews and accumulated over 80 hours of recorded conversations.

My intention was to get a variety of participants – some with very close relationships and some with modest or distant relationships. And to a certain extent the book represents a diversity of family forms and relationships. This is important because it helps us to understand how relationships with aunts, uncles, nieces and nephews vary in closeness, how they vary over time, and the features of individuals and families that influence closeness.

Reviewers indicate you offer information as to how aunts and uncles contribute to the daily lives of parents as well as to their children. Could you give a brief overview as to some of the basic ways that aunts and uncles contribute to the lives of parents?

This was one of the initial questions I had when I began the project. Are aunts and uncles important to parents? Well the simple answer is yes of course they are, sometimes.

Aunt Denise cared for her nieces especially when they were infants. As she said: “somebody would have to get some sleep in that house. So I would go over for a few hours. It was kind of a changing of the guard.”

But of course there is more to the story. Uncles and aunts were often parents themselves so they could draw on their own experience in counseling their siblings. At other times, aunts and uncles simply provided a listening ear and acted like good friends. On other occasions, parents would enlist an aunt or uncle to directly intervene with a child. And at times, nieces and nephews were more willing to listen to the counsel of an aunt or uncle.

Of course not all aunts and uncles are close to their siblings but when they are close their relationships can merge elements of family obligations and traditions with the strong bonds characteristic of best friendships. They can be some of the longest relationships we have. Brothers and sisters, when they are close, share their entire biographies.

My mother spoke with her sister Lena every day of her life and they both lived long lives, both married, had children and became grandparents. Intimacy is really about knowing things about another person that no one else would even care to know and doing so over a long period of time. For close siblings, intimacy is packaged over lifetimes of shared biography. That’s hard to match.

And to their children?

Not all aunts and uncles have significant relationships with their nieces and nephews, but many do. Aunts and uncles mentor children as well as older nieces and nephews. They provide advice concerning school, work and careers. They counsel their nieces and nephews about relationships with other family members and especially siblings and parents.

Raymond, age 26, described a unique relationship with his uncle. Raymond’s parents divorced when he was 2, and he speaks of his current relationship with his dad “as like two adults sitting in a bar talking about the weather.” Throughout Raymond’s life, his uncle has been an important source of support and companionship. Raymond consults his uncle about his career, his friendships, and nearly all of what he does. He describes frequent occasions of support and advice. They visited often during his adolescence when Uncle Les was the only important male figure in his life. In his words, his uncle “provided direction.” A highlight of their relationship is their mutual interest in music and playing guitars together. The contributions of his uncle are likely lifelong. At one point in the interview Raymond spoke of this influence:

One of the things we do is sort of a philosophy. We call it the Lost Chord…. In [learning a new] song you’re missing a chord and trying to find it, but then once you find that missing chord it puts the whole song in harmony and we realized we could apply that to life. So one of biggest things he taught me about life is always searching for that something to put in my life to make it a little bit smoother sounding. Eventually when you get 80 or 90 years old you can look back and find that you’ve had a lot of good music.

Throughout my interviews I was continually struck by the depth of relationships. I can’t emphasize enough that not all nieces and nephews are close with uncles and aunts, but for some, their relationships are truly extraordinary—they fuse elements of parent-like obligations with friendship.

Likewise, you suggest that aunts and uncles serve as mentors to their nieces and nephews, yet the adults themselves are also mentored by the children for whom they are responsible. Can you give a couple of concrete examples about this back and forth mentoring process?

This mentoring of aunts and uncles by nieces and nephews was a complete surprise. It occurred often among aunts and nieces as well as uncles and nephews.

In an ordinary but significant way, Aunt Rebecca recounted how her niece worked at a large department store and on occasion would purchase clothes for her because as Rebecca recounts “she thinks I need little skirts and stuff.” Although when her niece suggested a tattoo, Rebecca declined. It’s good to know one’s limits, I guess. These instances of reverse mentoring, however superficial at the outset, can serve as ways for nieces to express their affection and concern for their aunts. They are very much instances of care giving functioning to confirm, enrich and sometimes deepen their relationships.

Prior to your research, you must have had some specific items, a few informal postulates at least, as to what you thought you might find. After conducting the research, where there any major contradictions to some of those initial speculations?

I went into this project with an interest in documenting the relationships of a small array of family members. I assumed some aunts and uncles had active relationships, but I really didn’t expect the sheer number and depth of close relationships. In the big picture, we are not “bowling alone.”

Among the very best of friendships are relationships between family members, between siblings or between siblings and nieces and nephews. Towards the end of my interviews and after I had spoken with a passel of aunts, uncles, nieces and nephews, I began asking aunts and uncles how they thought about the future of their relationships. When I asked Aunt Michelle if she expects her relationship with her 7-year –old niece to develop into a friendship in the future, she replied: “I really have a hard time picturing it any other way.”

When conducting the research, were there some real surprises for you, things that you did not expect to find?

Another unanticipated finding was the importance of aunts and uncles in mediating adjustments to divorce. Aunts and uncles often spoke of helping nieces and nephews in adjusting to the divorce of parents. This is a source of support that has not really been acknowledged but proves to be important.

While the book is no doubt extremely valuable to other experts in the field, are there some specific things that a family can take away from the book that could help them extend their current family relationships? Or specific suggestions as to how parents can utilize aunts and uncles to help them with the challenging process of raising a child in today’s complex world?

I hope everyone will read this book. I hope it changes the way we talk about families and how we come to understand what makes them successful.

Over the years if there is one clear lesson I’ve encountered it is that families successfully arrange themselves in many ways. It would be a serious error to assume a single prescription for resilient well functioning families. There are many successful configurations, but at their best families are ensembles built across households. They include a variety of forms—some with children in the home, some single-parenting, and some with close ties to siblings. When adult siblings have reasonably close relationships, without question everyone can benefit.

Getting educated on the national debt – no room for politics.

Like most Americans, I am worried about our country. One of my worries, given my penchant for frugality, is the idea of proposing a federal budget with a deficit of nearly $1.5 trillion one year and $1.3 trillion the next. Such numbers truly scare the be-jesus out of me.

That comes even as I acknowledge another penchant, of listening to Princeton economist and New York Times blogger Paul Krugman. To hear Krugman tell it, government deficits are precisely the right thing to do at this moment.

He goes on to insist that the Republican fear-mongering over the current steps taken by the Obama administration is akin to the same group-think that led to the War in Iraq.

According to Krugman:

….the current sense of panic is that deficit fear-mongering has become a key part of Republican political strategy, doing double duty: it damages President Obama’s image even as it cripples his policy agenda. And if the hypocrisy is breathtaking — politicians who voted for budget-busting tax cuts posing as apostles of fiscal rectitude, politicians demonizing attempts to rein in Medicare costs one day (death panels!), then denouncing excessive government spending the next — well, what else is new?

The trouble, however, is that it’s apparently hard for many people to tell the difference between cynical posturing and serious economic argument. And that is having tragic consequences.

An American Issue

Yet, while it is easy to point fingers right now, to cast Republicans as naysayers and the Democrats as liberal spenders, the truth is the problem transcends party lines. And finally, a growing number of folks are pointing out some simple facts, that we could get the budget back on track with some very basic steps if the two political parties were to seek some middle ground and simply work towards solutions

One of the best tutorials was laid out recently by analyst Fareed Zakaria over at CNN. First, Zakaria notes that the issue really does not belong at the feet of Obama. Like Krugman, he believes that what has been done in recent months has been entirely necessary including the rescue of the financial system and the stimulus package to jump-start the American economy.

Her calls these short term decisions “understandable choices” that America has to make but “we have probably five years to try to bring our budget into some kind of manageable situation.”

And, instead of casting President Obama as an out-of-control free-spending liberal, Zakaria goes on to lay the issue at the feet of our past president and three fateful decisions made during that time:

The first was to have massive tax cuts, which was a decision made in the wake of the Clinton surpluses.

And the third, of course, was to have two wars that were going to be funded without any tax increases, the first time in modern American history that that decision was made. … A partial exception was Vietnam, which produced an economic catastrophe in the 1970s.

Political Posturing

Of course, such statements immediately start one on the basic path that is so popular in Washington today, the blame game. Referencing these give rise to the start of the he-said, she-said phenomena.

Of course, the answer is to take a different approach. We could attempt to get beyond the blame, get our so-called leaders to look at the current situation as it is and begin to search for collective solutions.

But instead, we have a toxic environment, one described by Zakaria thus:

if one side proposes any solution to these problems, the other side does not ask itself: How can we have a compromise that solves this problem?

Instead they think: How can we demagogue this issue to fundraise, to win votes, to scare people, to polarize the political climate and gain advantage from it? It’s almost that the entire strategy now is how can we take any proposal that anyone makes and turn it into a fundraising opportunity for our extreme wing.

And if you do that, you’re never going to actually solve the problems of the country because every proposal can be demagogued.

But amidst these harsh, but entirely accurate criticisms, Zakaria goes on to offer some concrete solutions. They include: the importance of containing health care costs especially and concerns that the current health care proposal “is mostly about expansion and adding to the costs;” tackling sacred cows in the federal budget such as the $250 billion a year hole in the federal budget due to employer tax deductions for health care plans; and the deduction of mortgage interest.

As Zakaria notes, “the real big money is in all these middle class entitlements that are regarded as sacred cows.”

But the third part, the anti-Republican measure, is about taxes, that we cannot balance our budget solely with tax cuts. As a suggestion, he offers a modest value added tax that would raise about $150-$250 billion a year while discouraging excessive consumption and encouraging savings.

Add to that some modest trimming of social security benefits and we could begin again to have a fiscally solvent government.

The Real Issue

I began by announcing my concern for our future and these massive budget deficits. But it is interesting to see what Zakaria sees as the real issue.

Around the world there is great unease about these negative numbers notes Zakaria, but:

the real unease is about the sense that Washington is no longer working, that you cannot count on the United States to be able to make hard decisions, to sort its own internal affairs out.

Zakaria goes on to point out:

One European CEO said to me, what worries us more than anything else is that problems you’re facing now are the same problems you were facing 10 or 15 years ago.

They don’t seem to go away. In other words, we keep kicking the can down the road.

And so in my fear, I say simply, forget these ideologue tea baggers that are drawing attention. It seems to me they are more of the same element.

What we need are centrists and individuals with a desire to move our country forward, folks who will willingly distance themselves from the left and right wings fringes. Folks who run for political office to serve rather than be served, who use their elected authority to solve problems instead of seeing it as a pathway to power.

Given the current blight that hovers over our two party system, it seems highly unlikely that we will readily see such candidates emerge from within the system.

Krugman and Zakaria are right – it is not the current deficit we should be fearful of – instead the fear is of a system that continually elects small-minded people to perform roles that demand so much more.

And as for real blame, we actually need to look beyond these small minded politicians. We, the electorate, continually allow our elected officials to demagogue important issues at our expense.

Despite the George W. Bush administration supporting abstinence-only sexual education, there previously had been little to no evidence that such programs worked. Even more significantly, notwithstanding this enormous influx of funding for such programming, recent data indicated that sexual activity, pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases were increasing among teens.

Such information lead us to proclaim on at least two prior occasions, Final Nail and Doesn’t Work, that funding abstinence-only education was a waste of taxpayer’s money. However, earlier this week proponents of abstinence-only education were finally given some reason to cheer with the release of the first ever study indicating the format may work.

According to the LA Times:

“A new study shows for the first time that a sex education class emphasizing abstinence only — ignoring moral implications of sexual activity — can reduce sexual activity by nearly a third in 12- and 13-year-olds compared with students who received no sex education.”

The results were considered extremely significant:

“This study, in our view, is game-changing science,” Bill Albert, chief program officer at the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group based in Washington, told the Times. “It provides, for the first time, evidence that abstinence-only intervention helped young teens delay sexual activity.”

But while proponents of abstinence-only education were quick to pounce, the Times also went on to write:

“Other forms of sex education also worked, however, reducing sexual activity by about 20% and reducing multiple sexual partners by about 40%, according to the study reported Monday in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.”

Moreover, an editorial accompanying the report insisted that “no public policy should be based on the results of one study, nor should policymakers selectively use scientific literature to formulate a policy that meets preconceived ideologies.”

In addition, it is important for readers to realize that the curriculum used did not match the approach of most of the previously funded, religiously-based programs. Instead, the option producing some positive results focused on the risks of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, and skipped the moral value or sex is negative approach.

According to the Washington Post, many deemed that aspect very significant:

“….. critics of an abstinence-only approach said that the curriculum tested did not represent most abstinence programs. It did not take a moralistic tone, as many abstinence programs do. Most notably, the sessions encouraged children to delay sex until they are ready, not necessarily until married; did not portray sex outside marriage as never appropriate; and did not disparage condoms.”

And before proponents get too excited, it must be noted that when it comes to effectiveness, the criteria used to measure the impact involved self-reporting by young teens of their sexual behavior over the two year period following the class. According to the Times, “diseases and pregnancies were not monitored.”

In addition, much of our prior criticism was based upon the Cochrane Collaboration study which previously indicated no enduring implications for abstinence-only approaches. We are assuming that two years cited in the recent study would not constitute a long term impact.

But the proponents of abstinence-only education have to be heartened by the response of the Obama administration. Citing the same studies we have mentioned previously, the administration has reduced funding for abstinence-only education as part of an overall approach to move away from all programs that are not scientifically proven to provide results.

Early indications had the administration adjusting their stance and considering funding this new program based upon the evidence of effectiveness.