Educating the Net Generation and What To Do About Printed Publications?

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Educating the Net Generation and What To Do About Printed Publications?

1/18/2006

By Terry Calhoun

There is this new book that you must read. It is edited by Diana G. Oblinger of the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, and James L. Oblinger of North Carolina State University. It's called Educating the Net Generation, and you will find it completely available online, at no cost to you, in HTML and PDF--but EDUCAUSE is not printing, warehousing, and distributing printed copies.

Instead, on the home page for the book there is a button for "Professional Printing Options." When you follow it, you'll find a note that suggests that you can (a) download the PDF to a local print shop and have them print it or that you can contact one of three companies that can print, bind, and ship copies in a variety of ways. Not that most of my readers will want to, given that the eBook version is free and full of links and other features.

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I'm intrigued by EDUCAUSE's method of solving the print versus digital dilemma and it helps me think through some issues, but it still d'esn't solve a dilemma I have in my day job at the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP).

SCUP also publishes books, interesting and useful books, but it's very, very difficult to make money on books with small print runs. Not that 501(c)(3) organizations are supposed to make money, but when we put $10,000 into the development of a book product, not including the time of our staff, we've got to find ways to recoup those dollars and pay that staff. It's getting harder and harder to do.

Herein lies the problem. There is a lot of good stuff in books, especially books published by professional organizations like SCUP and EDUCAUSE. Our members are where the real expertise is, in higher education administration, and finding ways to connect members, get their knowledge shared, and stimulate communication is a primary goal of the essential knowledge organization that is a professional association.

Personally, I am very excited by the technologies that encourage digital ways to do all that. However, I have not yet (with help, even) figured out the best way to deliver written products to SCUP's constituency, which can and d'es use the tools they find most useful, such as Blackberries and Treos and laptops, but very little so far in the way of Web services. We're experimenting with Wiki and Blog technologies and a number of virtual working group tools, but our members are on average in their fifties and very busy people with little time for potentially frustrating learning curves.

There is no doubt in my mind that by the time the kids in college right now constitute the bulk of SCUP's membersip, SCUP will have not printed a book in decades. Which brings me back to Educating the Net Generation: The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), which Diana Oblinger heads, has been doing plenty of good work directly focused on the academic core of higher education's mission: learning. There are plenty of eye-openers in such chapters as: "Is It Age or IT: First Steps Toward Understanding the Net Generation," "Convenience, Communications, and Control: How Students Use Technology," and "Planning for Neomillennial Learning Styles: Implications for Investment in Technology and Faculty."