John Miedema

OpenBook 3 will be the final version of OpenBook. I have always planned to make a video about how to use OpenBook, so I will be making a good one after the release of version 3. As a trial run, I made a short video that provides a sneak peek at the new features I have been working on. I think you will be pleased. OpenBook 3 makes it very easy to insert instances of OpenBook using a new button and form on the Visual Editor. This version also speeds …

Last week I experienced my first earthquake. It was 5.0 at its origin in Quebec, and managed to shake up downtown Ottawa quite nicely too. I was plunking down code at my computer when it happened. I looked up, wondering for a moment if the walls were going to collapse. No damage happened and no one was hurt, but it was a reminder that digital technology, powerful though it seems, is fragile.
Where is digital technology going next? Web 2.0 is over. What a rush. Web participation went mainstream with blogs, …

I did not know that Monday was the International Day of Slowness. Perhaps that explains the recent spike of interest in slow reading. Malcolm Jones picks up on the Associated Press story with a related article in Newsweek. Another article by Richard James makes a connection with Nicholas Carr’s new book, The Shallows, which explains how our fast internet reading habits interfere with the formation of long-term memories.
James, Richard (June 20, 2010). Unaccelerated Reading. Deleware Division of Libraries.
Jones, Malcolm (June 23, 2010). Slow Reading: An Antidote for a Fast …

Holly Ramer, Associated Press, interviewed me yesterday about slow reading. She was doing on story on Thomas Newkirk, a New Hampshire professor who is encouraging schools to use traditional reading techniques like reading aloud and memorization. In her research she came across my book, Slow Reading, The first chapter in my book talks about slow reading techniques being used in the classroom. Ramer also interviewed Mary Ellen Webb, a third-grade teacher, and Patti Flynn, an assistant principal. We share a conviction about the value of slow reading for students of …

If you have several instances of OpenBook 2 on your WordPress site, you will notice occasional load lags, maybe a few seconds. Currently, when a user visits your website, OpenBook makes a live call to Open Library for the book data before displaying it as HTML. Version 3 of OpenBook promises a major performance upgrade in two ways. One, use of Open Library’s new Books API. Two, a local cache of OpenBook instances.
Open Library is busy upgrading their Books API, so I spent some time looking at the local …

You’ve heard Nicholas Carr’s question, Is Google making us stupid? Why stop with Google and the Internet? Media mogul Moses Znaimer claimed that print created illiteracy. If you think Znaimer lacks credibility on this subject, how about Socrates? In the Phaedrus, Socrates shares the view that written accounts cause forgetfulness, giving only the semblance of knowledge, making us shallower thinkers. Socrates preferred the oral tradition, and is only known to us today through the writings of Plato.
Perhaps all technologies take something away from us. Or not. Our brains have evolved …

I’m one of those people who is concerned about how the Internet is changing our brains. Nicholas Carr addresses this theme in his new book, The Shallows. I will review it soon. Don’t get me wrong, I like the Internet. And it’s true that everything changes the brain. This has become increasingly apparent with new research on brain plasticity. But the Internet is an intellectual technology, extending our brains and changing the way we process information. It changes the way we perceive the world. That’s not necessarily bad. Past intellectual …

Is the web changing us? Nicholas Carr (Is Google Making Us Stupid?) has come out with a new book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains. It’s next on my reading list. I share Carr’s feeling that information technology is rewiring my neural circuitry. It’s a “distant” feeling, happening in the background, slowly. It’s not all bad. I can manage a lot more information these days. I’m a fan of information technology. Google is a brilliant resource for starting searches, just not for ending them, at least …

While I’ve been blogging loudly about critical theory and grand narratives, I’ve also been pecking quietly at my OpenBook 3 upgrade.
Faster APIs Implemented. You’re going to like this. I implemented Open Library’s Books API. This is a higher level API that combines book data from different sources into one call. OpenBook calls could triple in speed as result of this enhancement.
Some Display Elements Missing in New API. This API seems to be missing a few display elements, e.g., series, edition, and genre. It is also missing some elements that …

Generation X’ers have a unique perspective on information technology. Born in the sixties, this generation had their primary education in the old world of print and analog technologies, and their secondary education and first jobs in the new world of digital information technologies. I participated in the transformation of my family’s printing business, from old style presses to digital typesetting and copying. Having a foot in both world allows for a two-step, a dance between worlds.
The two-step is a universal pattern. On the surface we see opposites: male and female, …

Diane Mizrachi (UCLA) has published a scholarly review of Slow Reading in InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies. She commends the breadth of the literature review, while critiquing the brevity of the treatment. I appreciate the ongoing interest. The observation about brevity by Mizrachi and others is fair. Is it worth writing a second, expanded edition at some point? I do not lack for additional material and ideas.

Critical theory is a way of understanding culture. It proposes a theory to analyze literature, music, entertainment, politics, religion, and so on. It is typically interested in political change. Marxism is a classic example, but there are many other theories, e.g., deconstructionism, feminism, queer theory, and black politics.
Alienation. A core concept in critical theory is alienation, a condition of existing on the outside, in estrangement from a community or nature or even one’s self.
Dialectic. The dialectic refers to the alienation or contradiction latent in all thinking. An idea …

I just returned from hearing Raj Patel speak on his book, The Value of Nothing: Why Everything Costs so Much More than We Think. For example, the hidden ecological and social costs of a hamburger can be as much as $200. He had many good ideas, particularly around a shift back (forward) to local agriculture. Why not also implement full cost economics, i.e., putting a full price tag on things, including a bill for damages. He didn’t speak about it during his talk so I got up and asked. He …

The mantra of the new book order is that the container doesn’t matter. E-book, p-book (yuk), vook (yeah, video book), laptop, mobile device, dead tree (give me a break). The container doesn’t matter. In a reasonable discussion with an intelligent person, knowledgeable about new trends in publishing, I offhandedly repeated an older mantra that I thought went without question, the medium is the message. I took this as self-evident but he rejected it. He said, the message is the message. As superficially accurate as that is, it occurred to me …

Speaking of grand narratives, I have one of my own.
My grand narrative is about digital technology and how it is changing human intelligence and identity. To explain this, I go back the beginning. Since the big bang, the unfolding of the universe has been a two-step dance. On the macro-scale, the universe is expanding away from its original highly ordered state (a singularity) to a distributed state. In a sense the universe is decreasing in intelligence because it is getting less organized. At the same time, this process is …