AppleInsider reports that the NY Times intends to charge digital only subscribers $15 a month beginning within a few months. I guess we all will then have to make personal decisions regarding the value of access to the NY Times. I link to NY Times articles frequently and I scan a couple of sections daily, but $200 is more than I am willing to pay. I was hoping for something like $50. I guess my argument would be that I have and desire access to many information sources and this seems like a lot for access to just one no matter what the quality. The Times will continue to allow access to up to 20 articles a month. If I could select the ones I want, this might be about the extent of my present interest, but I would pay something for a little more.
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Instapaper 3.0 is here. One of the interesting new features is the opportunity to share resources. You can share with designated individuals or allow anyone to view the resources you have identified.
Resources can be shared using several services. The example I am using here makes use of Evernote. I have set up a special folder in Evernote for shared content (grabeshared). I then use the share option in Instapaper to select Evernote and then indicate grabeshared as the destination folder. The following image should give you an idea of how this works.
Here is a link to the archived presentation of Diane Ravitch speaking in Madison, WI, on the future of public education (you need Silverlight installed to view).
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I wrote several weeks ago that I was going to try Readability for a year. This is an application that strips out the material surrounding articles and saves the articles in a format that is supposed to be easier to read. Part of the company’s strategy is to compensate the sites for removing the context (including ads) from the content. Users commit a minimum of $5 a month and $3.50 is divided up among the sites (I think you have to register your sites to receive compensation).
So, in the first month, I stored 23 articles in Readability or Instapaper. The NYTimes was my most common provider (76 cents worth) and it looks like I downloaded an article from myself. Not sure why I would download something I wrote – I was probably just learning the system. However, if they send me 17 cents I will probably not be able to resist posting that someone finally paid me.
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This is curious or at least amusing. I have an add-on to my Firefox browser called WOT (web of trust) – it is supposed to use community recommendations to identify questionable sites.
Today, I learned that the Wall Street Journal Online was not to be trusted. 😉
I have likely provided a link to this Frontline program before, but it was recently presented again and it came at a time I was particularly sensitive to the issue of revenue and online instruction.
College Inc. is pretty much about the abuses and scams associated with online instruction. It is about online, for profit, colleges that buy in to small failing institutions to purchase accreditation and encourage students to take out government loans for their education at an inflated price – twice the cost of a public state college. Often, the degrees are not useful in obtaining employment resulting in a high loan default rate and long term credit problems for the students. We all pay and the institutions continue to profit.
Why am I sensitive? I am a departmental administrator involved in offering two online programs (a graduate MA in forensic psychology and an undergraduate BA in psychology). I understand the cost of offering such programs when instruction is part of a faculty member’s teaching load and reasonable limits are placed on class size to provide students a reasonable experience. I am also now faced with the failure of my institution to pay the department some of the money generated by these programs because students switched from campus-based to online programs and the administration failed to plan for this switch when promoting the online programs. I would like to think, in contrast to the description of online education in the Frontline special that we do it right, but this approach may be more costly than some anticipate. You cannot mass produce education. No good deed goes unpunished?
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