The Annals of Technology: The Pros And Cons Of Going Audible

Many years ago, when I was commuting between Zenith and New York, I tried what were then called "books on tape." At that point in time, every car had a "tape deck," a now defunct technology that was, from time to time, carved out of the dashboard of one's car by enterprising youths on the Lower East Side. Books on tape would arrive in the mail, much as Netflix do today, but in a large padded envelope. Contained within would be a large plastic folio with multiple cassette tapes in numbered order (usually 8-12.)

Listening to books was, and is, a project about which I am conflicted. For reasons I don't quite understand, I dislike being read to, and prefer to have text be a starting point for inserting myself in another narrative world (is this why the young enjoy video games?) On the other hand, when I first tried listening to books in the 1990s, I had a highly literary and elderly friend who was losing her eyesight and, sadly, her capacity to read. Books were something we shared, part of the glue of our friendship. In addition to spending my commuting time in the car in a more elevated way, listening to these books allowed me to prolong an intellectual relationship that might otherwise have become restricted by her disability.

I am now nearly twenty years older: my elderly friend passed on about a decade ago, I no longer commute such a long distance (although I drive a minimum of 50 minutes a day, four days a week, on the low side for Nutmeg staters), and I am far closer to a time when I might, myself, be unable to see well enough to read. When I discovered that I could download MP3 files directly to my iPhone, I thought, Why not improve the moment and try again? Listening to books might, after all, be an acquired taste; and I never get to read as much during the term as I like.

So I signed up for Audible.com, purchased a cord to plug my iPhone into the auxiliary jack in the new Toyota, and I was off.

But what to choose? I decided to go with something in which I was interested, but might not otherwise read: Lady Antonia Fraser's Must You Go? My Life With Harold Pinter (reviewed here by Blake Morrison of The Guardian.) As soon as I began listening, I began to worry that -- well, I didn't like her, and that I would have to stop, something I had not expected. To forge on, I came up with reasons for our differences, which I think had principally to do with her hero worship for Pinter. Fraser is, of course, a biographer, which I kept reminding myself at the frequent points where she subsumed her own story to Pinter's, which is what a biographer would do on principle; she is a popular writer, and he is a Nobel laureate; and she makes a point of distancing herself from feminism at various points in the narrative and naturalizing certain kinds of gender hierarchy. A leftist, Fraser's non- (rather than anti-) feminism becomes particularly clear when she happily marches to the polls to cast her vote for Margaret Thatcher in May, 1979, so pleased is she with the idea that Thatcher will become the first woman PM (yes, Antonia, but that woman?)

But instead of reviewing the book (which is, in the end, as Antonia would say "a lark!"), let me just summarize what I think, at this point, is the difference between listening and reading.

Listening takes longer. While the time might have been compressed had I not confined myself to listening only in the car, by reading it I would have finished a book of this nature in about a day. Listening in the car took me about ten days, which was a long time to live with these people. That said, I grew more rather than less involved with them; I was often eager to get back to the "book;" and I was thus happier in my commute than I have been in years. A prolonged exposure to the ins and outs of Pinter at the height of his success and political activism also made me want to read his plays from beginning to end.

The tone of the prose changes when read, and heard, aloud. Perhaps it was the irritatingly lilting accent of the British actress tasked with Fraser's voice, but turns of phrase and choices of language I might not have noticed as I read grated on me, as did the winsome upswing of tone at the end of sentences and paragraphs. It misrepresented Fraser as a lightweight; differently, the male actor who leaped in from time to time to read Pinter's poetry, was firm, decisive and substantive, snapping out his sentences with a snap and a bang. This made the book very highly gendered, in addition to being almost cartoonishly heterosexual. Hyperbole -- something I have never noticed about Fraser's prose -- stands out in a way I'm not sure it would as one's eyes dash over the page. Women are "raven-haired;" plays are "brilliant successes" or "disasters;" men are "dashing" and "heroic." This can be irritating, as can turns of phrase which forecast the loss of Pinter almost as soon as they meet -- the title, "Must you go?" is one of them.

Listening, the first chapters seem positively mawkish at times, interspersed as they are with stuffy, British-y scenes where the Pinters and the Frasers rearrange their households, a process that is utterly civilized but for actress Vivien Merchant, a binge drinker who did not like being usurped as Pinter's wife and muse by a swanky peeress and acted out in a way that would be perfectly normal in the United States. There is one hilarious chapter where the affair is admitted to all around, and Harold calls formally upon Hugh Fraser (as one might have called upon a father decades ago) for drinks to let him know that he is reliable and serious in his intentions towards Antonia. The two men chat -- not about her, but about cricket -- for hours, and Antonia falls asleep on the couch. When she wakes up Hugh has handed her over to Pinter like the agreeable chap he was, and everyone parts friends. Conveniently, Hugh then dies seven years later, and Antonia can remarry and be a good Catholic too!

The diary format is tedious. The memoir is reconstructed from Fraser's journals, which Pinter read from time to time and annotated with his own memories and observations. Strange but true, although it is a glimpse into how very intimate the couple was. This is also a jarring detail. Because the actress reads everything that is printed, she also reads the dates -- something you might not notice when reading. "October 4. Blah, blah October 26. Blah blah. November 14...." There is this sense of being force-marched through someone's life which is hard to shake, and a compulsion to do the math: "Let's see, Pinter dies on Christmas Eve 2008, so they have approximately 24 years, eight months and six days left to go."

It is easy to miss important points if you lack prior knowledge, or are misinformed, about them. For example, Fraser kept referring to someone named "Poole" to whom she was related, who was clearly a Big Deal, but I couldn't figure out why. I was well into the book before I discovered, because of a reference to one of his major works, Dance to the Music of Time, that she was referring to Anthony Powell, which I have never heard pronounced "Poole." As it turns out, that was something I had gotten wrong from reading, but never really discussing Powell's novels -- which is kind of interesting if you think about it.

You can't take notes. There is a function which allows you to mark passages in the Audible file, but doing this in the car strikes me as hazardous, so I didn't try. This means my constant thought -- "I must do a blog post!" was accompanied by the daily realization that I would have to retrain my memory to remember enough about the book to do so. Will I be able to do this? Will it be good for my aging cerebellum? Only time will tell.

A final note is that buying these Audibles, even with the monthly subscription costs as much or more than buying the book-object. On a certain level this is fine: it's a greener process, for sure, and I am getting to a point where I don't want things in my library that are not of some lasting value to me. However, it does make it difficult to share a book, as the files are not easily transferred to a third-party, and you certainly can't read it together.

Network Down! And Other Thoughts On Shifting Our Educational Practice To A Virtual World

Yesterday the Zenith network went down.  While the message that informed us that things were working again said something about a hardware upgrade, it is difficult to believe that they really intended to take the whole system down during finals week.  I suspect that, although tinkering may have been part of the issue, the network was also overwhelmed.

This happens periodically because of two institutional impulses, neither of which is inherently bad, but which together can create havoc:  putting as much of our work on-line as possible and cutting the university budget.  It is only a guess that these two things are related, but I can't recall a year during which we have lost our online services abruptly so very many times (the last occurrence was in the middle of uploading senior honors theses.)  Here's a lesson for you, if you are an aspiring administrator:  money saved by implementing technological innovations often requires spending the same money to maintain the system better, expand it and do ongoing maintenance so that it can handle the additional traffic. 

Of course, it isn't just budget cutting that has produced this massive shift to putting things on-line.  Some things are genuinely better and more convenient, as long as the system stays up.  Submitting grades, registering for courses, and the various approvals that go up the line from faculty member to chair to dean to the provost (or registrar) work much better without the many forms we used to sign, many of which were folded, spindled, mutilated and left to molder at the bottom of backpacks long after the deadline to hand them in had come and gone. 

Eliminating the forms is often articulated as a positive step, in and of itself.  Whipped up by eco-enthusiasms, the university has created many opportunities to do everything pedagogical and organizational through our computers.  Rumor had it that they were going to pick a couple courses to shift onto iPads, and that everyone would get a free iPad to experiment with this.  I was, like, "Pick me! Pick me!" They did not, so I had to buy my own iPad, but I can see how an iPad would enhance a course in all kinds of ways and I wouldn't mind trying it.  The only down side, as far as I can see, is that you can't use any book that doesn't already have an e-edition, and many university presses are not up to speed with this. The up side would be:  if you are teaching Jane Austen or any other text where the copyright has run out, every reading in the course is free.

This semester,  responding to the periodic exhortations to avoid the use of paper whenever possible, saving entire budget lines and forests of trees, I shifted one course entirely onto Moodle, an open source course management system (CMS) that made our work 100% paperless.  All in all, I would say this has been a real success, I have gained a great deal and I have not sacrificed a single thing that I value.  We do not yet teach on-line, mind you, although I fully expect that we will be invited to do so in the future to support the various graduate liberal studies degrees that Zenith offers, and I fully expect this will be greeted with hoots of derision and warnings about the coming Apocalypse.  But the more you fiddle with the various platforms available, and Moodle is the best one I have yet tinkered with, the clearer it becomes how one might easily teach on-line from the comfort of one's own boudoir. In fact, during the snow emergencies this semester I quelled my anxiety about missing too much face-time by putting entire classes up on-line so that they could review the material themselves, with some gentle guidance from me.  I was able to do this using simple applications available on my Mac and my iPhone, without any instruction from anyone, and to my great surprise and pleasure, it actually worked.  Some of the material from those classes has reappeared in subsequent assignments as texts that had, for many students, the greatest impact of any they read in the course.

Now you might say, "Isn't shifting so much of your teaching to the Internet alienating, Professor Radical?  Is encountering you as a virtual professor really what your students are really paying all that fancy-pants tuition for?"  Here is an important point:  they actually saw me twice a week, and they also had a teaching assistant who ran discussion groups outside of class and worked with them on their writing to great effect.  So I am not yet an expert on what you can accomplish without any human contact whatsoever.  That said, after a semester of Moodling, I find that -- other than the possibility of making all assigned texts and everything used in class available in one place -- the latter feature truly improves my relations with my students.  As you move through the course, they can add things that they think are important, and you can tailor future classes to the students who actually enrolled in the course  (as opposed to the fantasy students who might have enrolled, whose interests will exactly match yours, and who will hang on your every word regardless of what you say to them.)  Although I didn't use these functions as much as I might have, there are also numerous functions that permit/force student participation and create opportunities for students to share their ideas with each other.

I would also say that, overall, I found the business of the course (turning work in and returning it) far more straightforward.  Either the paper was, or was not, in the drop box when it is due, and it can be due at midnight if you want, making it more likely that students who work at the last minute will get it done.  There was no haggling about whether the administrative assistant was -- or was not -- in the office at the designated witching hour. There were no papers slid under the office door, and we had no hoo-hah about printers that mysteriously ceased to function at the unluckiest possible moment.  Importantly, exams taken on-line allowed those with accommodations for learning disability to take the extra time they are permitted with absolutely no effort or planning on my part:  this is actually a very big deal in a lecture course, where you can have as many as ten or twelve different diagnoses that require as many different accommodations.  Exams are clocked in by the Moodle, and there is no need for elaborate proctoring arrangements that also, not incidentally, reveal the identities of those with learning disabilities, invite stigma and, I am convinced, often cause students who would perform better with an accommodation to not reveal themselves..

Marking papers is also more fruitful, in my view.  Instead of scribbling graffitti all over their work, I enable the editing function and add comments, re-arrange their sentences so they are grammatical, explain errors of syntax and structure, and so on.  It took less time on my part, was far more legible (in the past, in order to make my point, I would find myself writing elaborate paragraphs at the bottom of the page, and connecting them to the offending passage with a long, curvy arrow.)  By comparing the original (which remains in the drop box) to the graded version (which you upload later) students who wanted to improve (which is nearly all of them) could actually see the differences between the two versions laid out in front of them, rather than trying to figure out from a hopeless sea of red, green what good writing really looks like.

Downsides?  I can't think of one for the pedagogical experience, except that I had to devise new techniques for learning names, something I normally did by handing back graded work and free writing exercises in class. A second issue that will affect some people more than others is simply spending too much time at the keyboard and risking ligament and tendon damage in the

Here's the catch, however. When the system goes down you can't work, unless you have had the foresight and the wit to download all the written work at once,.  Having the university server crash, or become unstable and need to be taken down for maintenance, in the portion of your day or week that you have set aside expressly to mark papers or do final grades does temporary havoc to your sense of control and order, something we faculty prize enormously.  When this happens, there is literally nothing that you can do but turn your computer off and catch up on the episodes of The Borgias that you have missed because of the intensity of the semester's end.

Why this forced work stoppage occurred yesterday at Zenith is anyone's guess, but it seems obvious that it is most likely to occur at exactly the time of year when we are all using the system most intensely -- finals week -- and during which a crash or downtime will also result  the greatest inconvenience.  Universities are going to have to take what they are saving on paper and administrative assistants and redeploy it to hiring more IT people, updating their systems more frequently, and having emergency crews on retainer to monitor the system during moments of abnormally high usage.

Here's my prediction:  ultimately, universities will no longer maintain their own servers, and IT staffs will exist mainly to  work on server space that is rented from Google, Apple or one of the megaliths.  This will make systems more reliable under normal and extraordinary usage.  But it will raise other challenges, one being a possible narrowing of the choices we have as institutions to decide what platforms and software we are using as those who own the servers have greater power over what kinds of innovation they will support.  Another challenge is that, while each of our universities is vulnerable on its own, by linking our fate to the One Big Server (OBS) we become highly vulnerable together:  a breach of security in one location can take us all down. This is something to anticipate and understand before that moment in which change is inevitable but the terms of change have already been decided entirely by corporations.