How students acquire and use texts is a good example. Clearly, we’re taking a techno turn. We’re gettin’ all digital. And it’s happening pretty quickly. Better pay attention!
In this morning’s Inside Higher Ed (Textbook Bonanza), Doug Lederman reports that
…Monday saw a flurry of news about the campus bookstore and textbook markets, which, like many industries related to information and publishing, are being buffeted by technological and other trends. … [T]he array of news … does suggest a lot of intensity and interest surrounding the transformation of the college textbook market.
The highest-profile transaction by far on Monday was Barnes & Noble's agreement to buy Barnes & Noble College Booksellers for a total of $596 million….
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…[T]he combination of the two companies … would have significant benefits for college bookstores and their student and faculty customers, [Barnes and Noble's chief financial officer Joe] Lombardi said. Foremost among those is the 750,000-title electronic bookstore that Barnes & Noble's publicly traded self has developed, to which customers of the college store arm would have full access once the companies are merged.
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The digital textbook space is where Academos operates; it creates and manages online bookstores and market places for colleges under their own names. And on Monday, the company announced that it had taken in $2.5 million in additional funding from Kohlberg Ventures, a California venture capital firm.
“The online bookstore landscape is rapidly changing as schools and students increasingly rely on technology to meet their needs,” Jim Kohlberg, managing director of the venture firm, said in a news release about the investment. “Academic institutions across the nation, as well as their students, need low cost and easy-to-use options to streamline the purchase of textbooks. Akademos brings an innovative and timely service to a growing market – one that addresses a very real need for virtually every college, university and student body.”
The third and last of Monday's news developments also comes in the digital textbook arena – but from the free, rather than for-profit, perspective. The Community College Collaborative for Open Educational Resources said the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation had given it $1.5 million in new funds to expand its work, which focuses on increasing the number of free, online textbooks and training community college instructors on how best to use such books. Its main resource, the Community College Open Textbook Project, has dozens of college members and seeks to significantly expand the number of freely available digital textbooks it makes available.
"This grant comes at an opportune time,'' said Mike Brandy, chancellor of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District, which leads the online collaborative. "It coincides with the growing interest in open educational resources, such as President Obama's proposal to invest $500 million over the next decade in developing free high school and college courses. Open textbooks are moving into the mainstream as financially distressed states such as California look to free digital textbooks to reduce the cost of public education.''
THE RETURN OF REBEL GIRL:
Rebel Girl has returned from the Sierra Nevada, where she (and Louis B. Jones) run the fiction portion of the summer writers’ workshops of the famous Squaw Valley Community of Writers.
People write about the Squaw Valley group all the time, but, recently, they got a write up in, of all places, Business Week magazine:
Management as a Liberal Art:
At the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, there's a call to get business professors to integrate this Peter Drucker idea into their classes
By Rick Wartzman
Here’s an excerpt:
…The problem is that the broad world of ideas has become largely separated from the world of business.
"What [management guru Peter] Drucker wanted was for knowledge to "no longer be ornamental—to be consumed to refine oneself or to impress others," says Joseph Maciariello, the academic director at the Drucker Institute, which I run. Rather, knowledge is to be brought down to the grimy earth, where we all work, and integrated so that work can be made more productive and more humane."
Maciariello is spearheading an effort to bring the concept of "management as a liberal art" into the nation's colleges and universities. The goal is to have business professors integrate the humanities more fully into their classes, while liberal arts majors contemplate "not just applied reasoning and ethics but virtuous living," as Maciariello puts it, rooted in real results. Ultimately, the intention is for these ideals to transcend the academy and reach the realm of practice.
In the meantime, the creative souls at Squaw Valley have, unbeknownst to them, underscored a few things that all managers would profit from thinking about. For starters, there's the Community of Writers itself. Founded 40 years ago by novelists Blair Fuller and Oakley Hall, the organization is thriving, thanks in large measure to a strong sense of self. "Community" is not just a throwaway word in the name here, but the very essence of the place. The authors on staff, many of them highly acclaimed, are unfailingly unpretentious and nurturing of the young writers they teach.
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What has also been made clear at Squaw Valley this week is that work of value never comes easy. "I do not believe in genius," Dorothy Allison, the bestselling author of Bastard Out of Carolina and Cavedweller, declared the other night. With that, she implored everyone trying to get his or her first book published to keep honing the manuscript—through 19 drafts, need be—until it's just right.
Managers could benefit from the same basic advice. "Brilliant men," Drucker noted, "are often strikingly ineffectual; they fail to realize that the brilliant insight is not by itself achievement. They never have learned that insights become effectiveness only through hard systematic work."
Finally, and most importantly, there are the books. As I've sat and listened to Allison, Dagoberto Gilb, Lynn Freed, and others read from their latest narratives, I've been reminded how much literature can shed light on a subject that lies at the very heart of management: the human condition. "I am rereading each summer—and have for many years—the main novelists," Drucker wrote to a friend in 1997. Among them, he said, were Austen, Thackeray, Trollope, and George Eliot. "I never read management books," Drucker added. "All they do is corrupt the style."
