The Auto Textbook Algorithm

There are many dire predictions that have all human workers being replaced by machines in the not too distant future, so this article from MIT Technology Review is likely to make educational textbook staff nervous.  That said, the underlying content from Wikipedia wasn't created by a robot - at least as far as we know...

The article explores how a group of researchers were able to create viable textbooks by building an algorithm which sources Wikipedea content.

That raises an interesting question. Given the advances in artificial intelligence in recent years, is there a way to automatically edit Wikipedia content so as to create a coherent whole that is useful as a textbook?

Enter Shahar Admati and colleagues at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. These guys have developed a way to automatically generate Wikibooks using machine learning. They call their machine the Wikibook-bot. “The novelty of our technique is that it is aimed at generating an entire Wikibook, without human involvement,” they say

The approach is relatively straightforward. The researchers began by identifying a set of existing Wikibooks that can act as a training data set. They started with 6,700 Wikibooks included in a data set made available by Wikipedia for this kind of academic study.

MIT Technology Review Link

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 16): Texas Custom, Apps For Education, William Boyd, Official Chinese Authors, + More

Tarrant county (Texas) attempts to save students money on textbooks runs into faculty resistance (IHEd):

The push for cheaper textbooks isn’t new, and the spat in Tarrant County frames larger debates about the use of open-source texts and the best way to increase student learning while controlling costs. Some community colleges have saved money by working with publishers to create custom books for widespread adoption. Some textbook writers have started making their materials free on the Web, and a recent Rice University effort expanded that medium. Tarrant County administrators hope that using a common textbook in every class will help push costs down, which will allow more students to buy the books and in turn perform better in the classroom.
But some professors aren’t convinced. The faculty resolution expressed agreement with the goal of reducing textbook costs, but questioned whether this was the best way to do it. We "ask that the 'common course textbook' plan be suspended and that the college faculty be allowed to develop meaningful, realistic strategies for reducing student textbook costs to be implemented by the fall semester of 2014," the resolution reads.

Efforts to open up education information might create an App culture which has educators and technologists keenly interested (Chronicle):

In the case of the MyData button being promoted by the Education Department, it's not clear how many different types of information will be made available, although the data will exist in machine-readable, open formats. Participants will be required to specify how the exported data are formatted. Because participants are not required to export data in an identical format, a department official explains, developers may have to do more work upfront, but the information will get into students' hands more quickly.
At least one company, Fidelis Education, has committed itself to use the data students can download from the Veterans Administration's blue button.
As an enterprise that helps veterans pursue higher education and training for civilian careers, Fidelis plans to use the blue button's military-service data in the admissions process to verify that applicants are who they claim to be. Gunnar Counselman, a co-founder and chief executive of the company, says having access to an even more robust set of data about alumni satisfaction and employment could provide students with a personalized way to pick colleges that goes beyond rankings.
He's not convinced that such data will be available anytime soon. But the emergence of start-ups has had a "Hawthorne effect" on universities, he says—they're more open as a result of being observed so intently by outsiders.

 Profile of William Boyd who has been tasked with giving James Bond some new assignments (Independent):

They're still reviewed, however, in the serious, literary-fiction pages of the national press. Although Restless was a "Richard and Judy" selection in 2007, it won the high-profile Costa Award. Literary editors and judges refuse to relinquish their view of Boyd as a superior literary being, a writer of subtlety, poignancy and psychological nuance, as his earlier novels revealed him to be. He is, they admit, a 21st-century avatar of Graham Greene, who blithely interspersed "serious" works (The End of the Affair, A Burnt-Out Case) with action-thriller "entertainments" such as Brighton Rock and Our Man in Havana. The reading public couldn't care tuppence about such matters. They buy Boyd's books in hundreds of thousands because they know him to be the most reliably page-turning of modern English novelists, full of old-fashioned storytelling virtues, of place evocation, pace, drama and sex.
Of the generation nominated "Best of Young British Writers" by Granta in 1983 – the generation of Amis, Barnes, McEwan, Rushdie, Rose Tremain, Pat Barker, A N Wilson, Adam Mars-Jones et al – Boyd's probably the author for whom ordinary readers feel the most fondness. The Queen is known to be a fan, though possibly more because of his Commonwealth background and blue-eyed charm than his prose style. He lives in a handsome Chelsea townhouse, with his wife Susan, editor-at-large at the American Harper's Bazaar magazine (he married her at 23 – they've been married for 37 years, and have no children) and in a converted farmhouse in Bergerac, where he owns a vineyard, Chateau Pecachard. For a chap who turned 60 in March, it seems an enviable life.

China is the focus at London Bookfair which predictably has raised some commentary about how some authors where chosen over others (Independent):

Did the BC have any alternative? Almost certainly not. But, via its literature director, it has chosen to tell us, chillingly, that "There was no disagreement with the Chinese government about the final list of... writers who regularly appear on well-respected lists of the best novelists and poets in China." Indeed. But so do many other Chinese writers - who live not only in exile but also at home, where they may have a vexing relationship with the cultural authorities. That's not to mention the dozens brutally silenced in the courts. At Amnesty International, the Tiananmen Square veteran Shao Jiang has greeted the run-up to the Book Fair with an invaluable day-by-day log of imprisoned Chinese writers: learn their stories at amnesty.org.uk/ blogs/countdown-china.
The non-state Chinese Independent PEN Centre comments, with grave courtesy: "We cannot but ask: to understand Chinese literature, should the British people rely on... recommendations by the Chinese government alone?" The Centre has objected to the British Council's collaboration with the GAPP, saying that if it "wishes to promote an authentic cultural exchange in a free and civilised way, please do not disregard the independent writers whose works are dedicated to shaping Chinese civil society".

Juicy gripping true crime story reviewed in the Observer:

In 1877, Harriet Staunton's husband and three others were accused of starving her to death and lurid newspaper reports of the Penge murder trial held the nation's rapt attention. A bestselling novel about the affair – written in 1934 and now republished – proves as gripping today .

Creating, writing editing and producing a magazine as performance art (Observer):

The idea to create twenty-four began selfishly: I wanted to make a magazine. For me, print magazines are a fascinating medium, combining content, design, a crafted physical object and the opportunity to curate an ongoing conversation around a single idea. Twenty-four is simultaneously a print magazine, an online experience and a creative challenge. The goal is simple: a small team of creative professionals conceptualise, design, write and photograph a print magazine in 24 hours and document everything via Flickr, Tumblr, YouTube, Storify and Kickstarter, making the process part of the product. Time-restricted projects have been done for comics, art shows, albums and other magazines before; it seems we increasingly invest in experiences over products and we want more transparency from the artists we love. This is why twenty-four was designed with documentation in mind; revealing our process live meant that we were not only producing a magazine for print but also creating a sort of online improv show.

From Twitter this week:

Amazon Massively Inflates Its Streaming Library Size http://bit.ly/IaQ0XW

(In case you missed it) BBC News - US sues Apple and publishers over e-book prices http://bbc.in/Hxfe8R

ALA Releases State of American Libraries 2012 Report. http://ow.ly/ab3NB

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 14): Long Distance Learning, OpenSource Textbooks, CCC, Harpercollins

Forbes takes a look at the rapidly expanding long distance learning market in India (Forbes):

The $260 million (market cap) Everonn uses a satellite network, with two-way video and audio. It reaches 1,800 colleges and 7,800 schools across 24 of India's 28 states. It offers everything from digitized school lessons to entrance exam prep for aspiring engineers and has training for job-seekers, too. "Never in my wildest imagination did I ever think I would be doing what I am doing today," says 49-year-old Kishore, who along with his family owns nearly 19% of the company. "When I started out I would have been happy if I'd reached 50 schools in south India."
Everonn debuted on FORBES ASIA's Best Under A Billion list in 2010. Revenues for the first three quarters of this fiscal year, through December, rose to $65 million--from $40 million the previous year. Profits touched $9.2 million--up from $6.1 million last year.

Edutopia opines about open source textbooks:

The Argument for Open-Source Curricular Materials:
The week this announcement was made, Edutopia had an article on the use of open source curricular materials – a growing trend being driven, in part, by the extraordinary cost of commercial textbooks. The argument for open curriculum has many elements in common with the argument for the increased use of open-source software. The most obvious feature of free open source (FOS) materials is the lack of cost for the materials themselves – most open-source content is free of cost in digital form. Historically there has been a tradeoff: low-cost (or free) comes at the expense of quality. (In other words, "There is no free lunch.") But FOS is different. Indeed, I've long argued that FOS software has the advantage of being free of cost, while, at the same time, providing greater value to the users.

This Lunch Is Not Only Free, It's Really Good:
The pairing of high quality with reduced cost seems counter-intuitive at first glance, but makes sense once you look into the open source community more deeply. Many of the developers and maintainers of open source materials are people who use these materials themselves, and thus have a strong interest in keeping the quality as high as possible. Historically this has been true since the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary – arguably the definitive dictionary of the English language whose entries were (and are) submitted by language fanatics, making it one of the largest and earliest open-source documents.

Washington Post on Orphans:

This may well be a practical solution, but the issue should not be Google’s to decide. As the lawfully elected representatives of rights holders and readers, Congress is best positioned to determine how copyright should apply in this case. An essential piece of any such solution is a body, similar to the recording industry’s ASCAP, that would be able to search for rights holders, disperse funds and oversee collective licensing of copyrighted works. This is an accepted strategy for exactly such situations, where an opt-in approach would be prohibitively onerous.

And Tracey Armstrong CEO of CCC comments on the above that this entity already exists (WAPO):

In fact, such an organization has been in existence for more than 30 years: the Copyright Clearance Center.

Mercury News on Orphan legislation:

However, Google might choose to a drop its court efforts altogether and take its cause to the legislative branch, one that would benefit the public interest.

This new strategy would be to have Congress pass legislation that would primarily make orphan works available to the public. Congress has considered similar legislation before, once in 2006. At that time, the U.S. Copyright Office advocated that after a thorough search failed to uncover the rightsholder, orphan books should be made available to the public. The legislation stalled because Congressional policy makers wanted to see how the Google Books case would play out in the courts.

Now that the outcome is known, Congress can act. Legislation would not only allow Google and commercialized enterprises from digitizing works, but libraries and universities too.

Allowing these organizations to scan out-of-print books and make millions of printed works readily available to the public will usher in an era of digital enlightenment.

Cory Doctrow in the Guardian on loaning eBooks:

Now, in point of fact, many ordinary trade books circulate far more than 26 times before they're ready for the discard pile. If a group of untrained school kids working as part-time pages can keep a copy of the Toronto Star in readable shape for 30 days' worth of several-times-per-day usage, then it's certainly the case that the skilled gluepot ninjas working behind the counter at your local library can easily keep a book patched up and running around the course for a lot more than 26 circuits.

Indeed, the HarperCollins editions of my own books are superb and robust examples of the bookbinder's art (take note!), and judging from the comments of outraged librarians, it's common for HarperCollins printed volumes to stay in circulation for a very long time indeed.But this is the wrong thing to argue about. Whether a HarperCollins book has the circulatory vigour to cope with 26 checkouts or 200, it's bizarre to argue that this finite durability is a feature that we should carefully import into new media. It would be like assuming the contractual obligation to attack the microfilm with nail-scissors every time someone looked up an old article, to simulate the damage that might have been done by our careless patrons to the newsprint that had once borne it.

From the twitter:

Reuters Special Report: Nic Callaway the publisher of the Madonna "Sex" book now building book Apps Reuters

Gallimard: 100 years in publishing Guardian