Retrenchment, Day 46

I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn't immediately get back to sleep. This happens to me sometimes when my brain is at work on something it wants me to write down. So I grabbed my iPad and started putting down some thoughts about the question of how much to give away and what I should think about packaging for sale, if I end up aa a free-lancer. It occurred to me that the problem of providing ”excerpts” or shorter versions of long explorations of a topic to give away free as advertisements for the more in-depth coverage is similar to the ways that textbooks summarize and simplify complex subjects. My current solution in American Environmental History is to give my chapter version and then refer the student to a monograph that deals with the topic in greater detail. I wonder whether I could do this effectively with a branching ebook design, where the chapters were not really linear and were maybe sections made up of sub-chapters that could explore topics in greater detail, optionally.

The issue of optionality is made much easier when we drop the grading requirement. If a student doesn’t have to read everything. Because, let's face it, a reader of a book doesn’t have to. They can go to the part that interests them and it’s the author’s job to keep them interested. That’s an obligation professors don’t always feel as urgently. We have the advantage of being able to say, “It’s going to be on the test”. If we didn’t have that, we’d have to give the student the incentive that the material is actually interesting, just like someone who was reading for their own edification.

So how would a course for people not getting college credits differ from what I’m doing now?

I would be able to tell just as rigorous a story/interpretation as I would do in a classroom, I think. There are plenty of bestsellers that are complicated and nuanced, at least as much as any undergraduate course. How would a branching textbook work? In order to keep it relatively simple to publish, it would be great if I could figure out a way to do this in Pressbooks. Obviously I can already add multimedia. And hyperlinks. So if I don’t worry as much about the linearity and allow myself to add runners or rhizomes that shoot out from a main narrative, that might be a step in the right direction. Then the glimpses of the topic that point to the more developed ideas in the pages to the “side” could double as content of "teaser" public posts (videos, etc.) that “advertise" these more detailed (and maybe not free) elements.

This obviously also has the potential the answer the question I've had a hard time resolving of how to create a layered content strategy, where I give a way a lot but maybe not quite everything. If I’m going to earn a living producing stuff for the world on the web, I need to get paid for some of it. Another big element of a paid online class, of course, could be interaction. At first, I suppose, with me; since I won’t be able to insure there are enough other people at any given time to interact with. But once there are folks reliably showing up for a course, then I could create cohorts that would interact with each other.

So I can begin by taking a course (let’s say American Environmental History to start) and identifying areas where I could condense the content a bit in the “chapter” and then expand it on the “side”. This might make the chapter a bit shorter. I’ll have to make sure there’s enough of a narrative in the chapter that remains to make the point I want to make. Then I’ll be able to expand on some of the stuff that may have been a bit tangential. It too should contribute to the overall theme, but I’ll be able to indulge myself a bit more.

One of the things I’ve already been doing is discussing the monograph that is the basis for each chapter. Because I’m teaching undergrads, I’m only having them read and discuss a single chapter. There’s nothing saying I couldn’t give a much more detailed synopsis of the entire book. Copyright doesn’t prevent me from talking about someone else’s entire work, as long as I cite the source. If anything, it might interest my readers in picking up the texts I describe.

I could also use this as a way of modeling how to create a web of knowledge. The ideas in American Environmental History are really that already, I’ve just sort of hammered them into a story of sorts, following the chronology of American History. In a strange way, this train of thought may have come to me in the night as my brain was processing the discussion I had in my book club yesterday. We were talking about chapters five through nine of Adler and Van Doren’s How to Read a Book. The authors had been describing how to discover the “unity” of a book, which I interpreted as the overall theme. I was a bit annoyed with their somewhat magisterial tone, as I frequently am. Adler wrote the original edition in 1940 and the book probably tries to do a bit too much and to appeal to readers at too wide a level of reading experience. In any case, I started thinking about what it would be like to write a book that had multiple themes? Or if it had an overall theme, but the sub-themes were the more interesting elements? Maybe this is what attracts me to the idea of a web of knowledge, with interesting little jewels scattered across it. Something like an obsidian graph. Maybe someday the textbook will be something like that; but I’ll start with a hyperlinked ebook!