school

I saw the headline (Click here to download textbooks) of a recent article in the Minnesota Daily (the U of M newspaper) and thought it was great. Unfortunately the article didn’t introduce a great new legal way for students to save time and money – it introduced a huge copyright and piracy issue – students downloading textbooks illegally.

So it just reminds me that in a lot of ways, policy, business and education aren’t even keeping up with the broadband we do have.

Policy – OK there are piracy statutes on the books but I think the music industry has shown that those are at best sporadically enforced. Admittedly I think the policy makers have the toughest time keeping up with the technology but right now not much is happening on that front.

Business – Here’s where I’m a little surprised. Can’t the textbook industry come up with some better solutions – maybe by starting with publishing textbooks as interactive e-books? It seems as if now is the time to start integrating more e-learning and an easy step in that direction would be to improve on the existing textbooks. Or for the heavy class droppers (and you know who you were) maybe you could just download a chapter at a time. It just seems as if with a little creativity the ability to download a textbook would be a huge benefit. If nothing else just making them available for a lower cost would be great. Somewhere between the $976 average spent on textbooks a year and the illegal free method is a price point that students and publishers will like.

Education – Here’s where I get downright annoyed. With great power come great responsibility and students don’t seem to realize it – and that’s fair enough because I don’t think parents or teachers do either. People just don’t seem to understand that copying things from the Internet is illegal. (OK, it’s legal if they pay of it, or if it’s with the realm of fair use, but mostly it isn’t.) Partially it’s a tough concept to teach. When my three-year-old walks out of Target with a ball, I can make her walk back and return it and say sorry. When 5 years later she downloads the latest Hannah Montana song illegally, what can I do? Hannah doesn’t want her calling to return it. But we do talk about why we shouldn’t do it. Then their friend gives them a pirated CD and we’re back to square one. I know that teachers are caught in the middle: they don’t have enough funds so they improvise, they don’t necessarily understand the ins and outs of digital copyright and they have a ton of other things to teach.

OK, thanks for letting me rant a bit. I just think that learning to use broadband is a big part of promoting broadband. And learning to use broadband goes beyond the actual technology.