The idea that the tech industry is a secure field with jobs and opportunities for growth is a myth. There is widespread precarity among software developers, who experience uncertainty, anxiety, and imposter syndrome as technological advancements threaten job security. Max Papadantonakis investigates this phenomenon in his revealing study, Canaries in the Code Mine. He indicates that precarity is not just about the risk of losing one’s job; it is about living in a career where basic needs and rights are not guaranteed.

Interviewing 120 software developers from leading tech firms, Papadantonakis shows how temporary contracts, project cancellations, and company downsizing undermine the security of even highly skilled professionals. He also highlights the systemic inequalities that shape the tech industry, showing how age, race, and gender often dictate the opportunities and responsibilities software developers have—or are denied.  

Canaries in the Code Mine highlights a disturbing reality of privilege and vulnerability within the tech industry. Papadantonakis engages in a critical discourse on the evolving nature of work in the digital era, emphasizing the need to shape an equitable future in the rapidly evolving landscape.

Human impacts on the environment are largely driven by economic forces. If a more ecologically sustainable world is to be achieved, significant changes must be made to the current growth- and consumption-dependent economic system. The Frontier Issues in Economic Thought series was designed to assist the growing number of economists and others who are responding to the need for new thinking about economics in the face of environmental and social forces that are reshaping the world.The Changing Nature of Work examines the causes and effects of the rapid transformation of the world of work. It provides concise summaries of the key writings on work and workplace issues, extending the frontiers of labor economics to include the often overlooked social and psychological dimensions of work.The book begins with a foreword by former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich that presents labor in contemporary perspective. An introductory overview provides a brief history of the changing nature of work and situates current problems in the context of longer-term developments. Following that are eight topical sections that feature three- to five-page summaries for each of the ten to twelve most important articles or book chapters on a subject.Sections cover.new directions in labor economics social and psychological dimensions of work and unemployment globalization and labor new technologies and organizational change flexibility and internal labor markets new patterns of industrial relations family, gender, paid and unpaid work difference and diversity in the workplaceThe book provides a roadmap for scholars on the vast and diverse literature concerning labor issues, and affords students a quick overview of that rapidly changing field. It is an important contribution to the series and is a valuable book for anyone interested in labor, as well as for students and scholars of labor economics, industrial sociology, industrial relations, social psychology, and their respective disciplines.

At the heart of digital scholarship are universal questions, lessons, and principles relating both to the mission of higher education and the shared values that make an academic library culture. But while global in aspirations, digital scholarship starts with local culture drawn from the community. Editors Chin Roemer and Kern invite you into their institutional workspace, the University of Washington, gathering voices from a range of positions that speak to the facets of digital scholarship. This mosaic of perspectives reveals the challenges, questions, and personalities that sit at the nexus of academic libraries and digital scholarship culture. Reflecting on UW’s approach, you’ll gain insights for your own institution on topics such as

• ways to create awareness of digital services through training;
• supporting students as creators of content;
• blending existing analog collections with ongoing digital initiatives using a media lab;
• creating a campus-wide, discipline agnostic, data repository service;
• how a popular digital storytelling workshop spawned digital scholarship across campus;
• digital scholarship consultations, viewed from an instructional technologist’s approach;
• the place of digital scholarship in the fabric of a revitalized urban community;
• four strategies for teaching research skills within an online-only bachelor’s degree program; and
• assessment findings from focus groups, surveys, digital pedagogy projects, and Omeka case studies.

By thoroughly exploring a single institution, this unique volume elucidates the many ways in which digital scholarship can express the values, priorities, opportunities, and challenges of the community’s intellectual and technical environment.

Evaluating skills and knowledge capture lies at the cutting edge of contemporary higher education where there is a drive towards increasing evaluation of classroom performance and use of digital technologies in pedagogy. Developing Educators for the Digital Age is a book that provides a narrative account of teacher development geared towards the further usage of technologies (including iPads, MOOCs and whiteboards) in the classroom presented via the histories and observation of a diverse group of teachers engaged in the multiple dimensions of their profession.

Drawing on the insights of a variety of educational theories and approaches (including TPACK) it presents a practical framework for capturing knowledge in action of these English language teachers – in their own voices – indicating how such methods, processes and experiences shed light more widely on related contexts within HE and may be transferable to other situations.

This book will be of interest to the growing body of scholars interested in TPACK theory, or communities of practice theory and more widely anyone concerned with how new pedagogical skills and knowledge with technology may be incorporated in better practice and concrete instances of teaching.

In this hard-hitting history of "the gospel of education," W. Norton Grubb and Marvin Lazerson reveal the allure, and the fallacy, of the longstanding American faith that more schooling for more people is the remedy for all our social and economic problems--and that the central purpose of education is workplace preparation.

But do increasing levels of education accurately represent the demands of today's jobs? Grubb and Lazerson argue that the abilities developed in schools and universities and the competencies required in work are often mismatched--since many Americans are under-educated for serious work while at least a third are over-educated for the jobs they hold. The ongoing race for personal advancement and the focus on worker preparation have squeezed out civic education and learning for its own sake. Paradoxically, the focus on schooling as a mechanism of equity has reinforced social inequality. The challenge now, the authors show, is to create environments for learning that incorporate both economic and civic goals, and to prevent the further descent of education into a preoccupation with narrow work skills and empty credentials.

A New York Times Favorite Book of the Year for Healthy Living
A Fortune Best Book of the Year
An AIA New York Book of the Year

“This book should be essential reading for all who commission, design, manage, and use buildings—indeed anyone who is interested in a healthy environment.”
—Norman Foster

As schools and businesses around the world consider when and how to reopen their doors to fight COVID-19, the Director of Harvard’s Healthy Buildings Program and Harvard Business School’s leading expert on urban resilience reveal what you can do to harness the power of your offices, homes, and schools to protect your health—and boost every aspect of your performance and well-being.

Ever feel tired during a meeting? That’s because most conference rooms are not bringing in enough fresh air. When that door opens, it literally breathes life back into the room. But there is a lot more acting on your body that you can’t feel or see. From our offices and homes to schools, hospitals, and restaurants, the indoor spaces where we work, learn, play, eat, and heal have an outsized impact on our performance and well-being. They affect our creativity, focus, and problem-solving ability and can make us sick—jeopardizing our future and dragging down profits in the process.

Charismatic pioneers of the healthy building movement who have paired up to combine the cutting-edge science of Harvard’s School of Public Health with the financial know-how of the Harvard Business School, Joseph Allen and John Macomber make a compelling case in this urgently needed book for why every business and home owner should make certain relatively low-cost investments a top priority. Grounded in exposure and risk science and relevant to anyone newly concerned about how their surroundings impact their health, Healthy Buildings can help you evaluate the impact of small, easily controllable environmental fluctuations on your immediate well-being and long-term reproductive and lung health. It shows how our indoor environment can have a dramatic impact on a whole host of higher order cognitive functions—including things like concentration, strategic thinking, troubleshooting, and decision-making. Study after study has found that your performance will dramatically improve if you are working in optimal conditions (with high rates of ventilation, few damaging persistent chemicals, and optimal humidity, lighting and noise control). So what would it take to turn that knowledge into action?

Cutting through the jargon to explain complex processes in simple and compelling language, Allen and Macomber show how buildings can both expose you to and protect you from disease. They reveal the 9 Foundations of a Healthy Building, share insider tips, and show how tracking what they call “health performance indicators” with smart technology can boost a company’s performance and create economic value. With decades of practice in protecting worker health, they offer a clear way forward right now, and show us what comes next in a post-COVID world. While the “green” building movement introduced important new efficiencies, it’s time to look beyond the four walls—placing the decisions we make around buildings into the larger conversation around development and health, and prioritizing the most important and vulnerable asset of any building: its people.

In How Machines Came to Speak Jennifer Petersen constructs a genealogy of how legal conceptions of “speech” have transformed over the last century in response to new media technologies. Drawing on media and legal history, Petersen shows that the legal category of speech has varied considerably, evolving from a narrow category of oratory and print publication to a broad, abstract conception encompassing expressive nonverbal actions, algorithms, and data. She examines a series of pivotal US court cases in which new media technologies—such as phonographs, radio, film, and computer code—were integral to this shift. In judicial decisions ranging from the determination that silent films were not a form of speech to the expansion of speech rights to include algorithmic outputs, courts understood speech as mediated through technology. Speech thus became disarticulated from individual speakers. By outlining how legal definitions of speech are indelibly dependent on technology, Petersen demonstrates that future innovations such as artificial intelligence will continue to restructure speech law in ways that threaten to protect corporate and institutional forms of speech over the rights and interests of citizens.

Essential reading for those seeking solutions to the new jobless economy. This widely reviewed and highly successful book examines the job market of tomorrow. Aronowitz and DiFazio take you behind the headlines to challenge the idea that a high-tech economy will provide high-paying jobs for all who want them. Instead, they demonstrate that we're more likely to see continued layoffs and job displacement. "Imagine a Brave New Work World in which unemployment is so rampant that more than a third of the adult population can't find a job and millions of others have stopped looking. Another third works only part-time, or at temporary or dead-end jobs. Meanwhile, the number of those still holding full-time positions steadily diminishes, their wages depressed because of the premium placed simply on having a job. . . . 'People need to start thinking about a jobless future,' insist [Aronowitz and DeFazio] . . . . Tha authors attribute rising unemployment to economic stagnation coupled with revolutionary technological change that has fostered workplace trends such as downsizing, re-engineering, with part-time jobs, temporary jobs and job-sharing replacing full-time work." --Washington Post "Looks beyond the shadow play of welfare politics to the real source of that anxiety-the modern workplace. . . . Aronowitz and DiFazio are quite right to look beyond the dismal realities of today's workplace and envision a society that uses the fruits of technology to abolish-or at least diminish-what the left used to call wage slavery." --The Nation "Replete with such futuristic concepts as cybernetics, technoculture, de-skilling, and informatics, this book is as timely as today's headlines announcing the latest round of layoffs and down-sizing. . . an important and thought-provoking work." --Library Journal Stanley Aronowitz is professor of sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. William DiFazio is professor of sociology at St. John's University

Winner of the 2020 Joseph L. Andrews Legal Literature Award by the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL)

Futurists predict that in the next ten years the profession of “lawyer” will splinter into job titles like “legal process analyst” or “legal knowledge engineer.” And some in the field are already taking a proactive approach ⁠— in fact, more than two dozen law schools have developed innovation centers to explore artificial intelligence (AI) and the law. In a competitive marketplace, both firms and individuals need to familiarize themselves with the dazzling array of new products and enhanced features capable of improving efficiency. Written by leading practitioners and visionaries like Robert Ambrogi, this groundbreaking survey of current practices and future trends offers an incisive examination of the evolving roles for law librarians. Readers will learn how AI technology is changing law school curricula, lawyer practice, marketing, and other key aspects of the field through coverage of such topics as

• the benefits of AI to law librarianship, including areas like legal research, contract review, compliance, and administration, and their associated risks;
• four professional ethics rules that apply to the use or (non-use) of AI;
• how lawyers and staff work side by side with AI, utilizing intelligence like RAVN ACE or FastCase to attack the drudgery of due diligence and document review;
• surprising machine-learning insights from tokenizing, stemming, and lemmatizing the text of Shakespeare’s plays;
• the potential for chatbots and new natural language processing products to improve access to justice; and
• ways to develop sought-after skills through new technology departments, practice management groups, and legal innovation labs.

Reading this collection will give you a firm grasp of the innovations, tools, benefits, and risks of AI in law librarianship.

Today's emphasis on metrics and personalization make evidence-based instruction an imperative. In this practice-based handbook, the authors draw on the research of the humanistic psychologist and educator Carl Rogers to present an empathetic approach to information literacy sessions, reference service, and outreach.  With an eye on everyday library work, they offer concrete, empirically-based strategies to connect with learners at all levels. Offering plentiful examples of pedagogy in action, this book covers:

• 6 cognitive principles for organizing information literacy instruction, with sample worksheets and organization tools for instruction planning;
• how to establish rapport and kindle learners' motivation;
• tactics for transcending "cite 5 sources" and other uninspiring research assignments;
• educational evidence debunking the mythical perception that because students are skilled at computers and mobile technology, they already know how to do research;
• questions to keep in mind for inspiring autonomous learning;
• the power of story, as described by Joan Didion, Brené Brown's Ted Talk, and educational psychology research;
• the science behind information overload; and
• a balanced framework for evaluating specific educational technology tools.

Fusing theory with practice, this handbook is a valuable resource to help every practitioner connect with learners more effectively.

The death of the daily newspaper in the internet age has been predicted for decades. While print newspapers are struggling from drops in advertising and circulation, their survival has been based on original reporting. Instead of a death knell, metro dailies are experiencing an identity crisis—a clash between traditional print journalism’s formality and detail and digital journalism’s informality and brevity.  

In Metro Dailies in the Age of Multimedia Journalism, Mary Lou Nemanic provides in-depth case studies of five mid-size city newspapers to show how these publications are adapting to the transition from print-only to multiplatform content delivery—and how newsroom practices are evolving to address this change. She considers the successes when owners allow journalists to manage their newspapers—to ensure production of quality journalism under the protection of newspaper guilds—as well as how layoffs and resource cutbacks have jeopardized quality standards.

Arguing for an integrated approach in which print and online reporting are considered complementary and visual journalism is emphasized across platforms, Nemanic suggests that there is a future for the endangered daily metro newspaper.

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year

In Minds on Fire, Mark C. Carnes shows how role-immersion games channel students’ competitive (and sometimes mischievous) impulses into transformative learning experiences. His discussion is based on interviews with scores of students and faculty who have used a pedagogy called Reacting to the Past, which features month-long games set during the French Revolution, Galileo’s trial, the partition of India, and dozens of other epochal moments in disciplines ranging from art history to the sciences. These games have spread to over three hundred campuses around the world, where many of their benefits defy expectations.

“[Minds on Fire is] Carnes’s beautifully written apologia for this fascinating and powerful approach to teaching and learning in higher education. If we are willing to open our minds and explore student-centered approaches like Reacting [to the Past], we might just find that the spark of student engagement we have been searching for in higher education’s mythical past can catch fire in the classrooms of the present.”
—James M. Lang, Chronicle of Higher Education

“This book is a highly engaging and inspirational study of a ‘new’ technique that just might change the way educators bring students to learning in the 21st century.”
—D. D. Bouchard, Choice

As recently as 2012, massive open online courses (MOOCs) looked poised to revolutionize higher education, but in just a few years their flaws and problems have made them into a less relevant model. In More than a Moment, Steven D. Krause explores MOOCs and their continuing impact on distance learning in higher education, putting them in the context of technical innovations that have come before and those that will be part of the educational future.
 
Krause writes about his own experiences as a participant in several MOOCs and the experiences of faculty who developed and taught MOOCs. Contrary to many early claims from educational entrepreneurs, they were never entirely “new,” and MOOCs and their aftermath are still at the heart of the tensions between nonprofit universities and for-profit entities, particularly online program management firms, in delivering distance education.
 
While MOOCs are no longer a threat to education in the United States, they are part of the ongoing corporatization of education and remain part of conversations about experienced-based credit, corporate training, and open education. Presenting historical, student, teacher, and administrative perspectives, More than a Moment is a well-rounded treatment that will be of interest to academics and entrepreneurs interested in distance education, online pedagogy, online program management, and public-private partnerships in higher education.

An incisive history of American education—its great success in creating prosperity and equality during the twentieth century and its relative decline since the 1970s.

“As Goldin and Katz have argued, the 20th century was the American century in large part because it was the human-capital century. Education—knowledge—can help people live better by allowing them to learn from past errors and make new discoveries.” —David Leonhardt, New York Times

This book provides a careful historical analysis of the co-evolution of educational attainment and the wage structure in the United States through the twentieth century. The authors propose that the twentieth century was not only the American Century but also the Human Capital Century. That is, the American educational system is what made America the richest nation in the world. Its educational system had always been less elite than that of most European nations. By 1900 the U.S. had begun to educate its masses at the secondary level, not just in the primary schools that had remarkable success in the nineteenth century.

The book argues that technological change, education, and inequality have been involved in a kind of race. During the first eight decades of the twentieth century, the increase of educated workers was higher than the demand for them. This had the effect of boosting income for most people and lowering inequality. However, the reverse has been true since about 1980. This educational slowdown was accompanied by rising inequality. The authors discuss the complex reasons for this, and what might be done to ameliorate it.

What does memory mean for learning in an age of smartphones and search engines?

Human minds are made of memories, and today those memories have competition. Biological memory capacities are being supplanted, or at least supplemented, by digital ones, as we rely on recording—phone cameras, digital video, speech-to-text—to capture information we’ll need in the future and then rely on those stored recordings to know what happened in the past. Search engines have taken over not only traditional reference materials but also the knowledge base that used to be encoded in our own brains. Google remembers, so we don’t have to. And when we don’t have to, we no longer can. Or can we?

Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology offers concise, nontechnical explanations of major principles of memory and attention—concepts that all teachers should know and that can inform how technology is used in their classes. Teachers will come away with a new appreciation of the importance of memory for learning, useful ideas for handling and discussing technology with their students, and an understanding of how memory is changing in our technology-saturated world.

Students are reading on screens more than ever—how can we teach them to be better digital readers?

Smartphones, laptops, tablets: college students are reading on-screen all the time, and digital devices shape students’ understanding of and experiences with reading. In higher education, however, teachers rarely consider how digital reading experiences may have an impact on learning abilities, unless they’re lamenting students’ attention spans or the distractions available to students when they’re learning online.

Skim, Dive, Surface offers a corrective to these conversations—an invitation to focus not on losses to student learning but on the spectrum of affordances available within digital learning environments. It is designed to help college instructors across the curriculum teach digital reading in their classes, whether they teach face-to-face, fully online, or somewhere in between. Placing research from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, learning science, and composition in dialogue with insight from the scholarship of teaching and learning, Jenae Cohn shows how teachers can better frame, scaffold, and implement effective digital reading assignments. She positions digital reading as part of a cluster of literacies that students should develop in order to communicate effectively in a digital environment.

This book explores the growing tension between the requirements of employers for a flexible work force and the ability of parents and communities to nurture their children and provide for their health, welfare, and education. Global competition and the spread of information technology are forcing businesses to engage in rapid, worldwide production changes, customized marketing, and just-in-time delivery. They are reorganizing work around decentralized management, work differentiation, and short-term and part-time employment. Increasingly, workers must be able to move across firms and even across types of work, as jobs get redefined.

But there is a stiff price being paid for this labor market flexibility. It separates workers from the social institutions—family, long-term jobs, and stable communities—that sustained economic expansions in the past and supported the growth and development of the next generation. This is exacerbated by the continuing movement of women into paid work, which puts a greater strain on the family's ability to care for and rear children. Unless government fosters the development of new, integrative institutions to support the new world of work, the author argues, the conditions required for long-term economic growth and social stability will be threatened. He concludes by laying out a framework for creating such institutions.

Voices of Indigenuity collects the voices of the Indigenous Speaker Series and multigenerational Indigenous peoples to introduce best practices for traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). In this edited collection, presenters from the series, both within and outside of the academy, examine the ways they have utilized TEK for inclusive teaching practices and in environmental justice efforts.

Advocating for and providing an expansion of place-based Indigenized education that infuses Indigenous epistemologies for student success in both K–12 and higher education curricula, these essays explore topics such as land fragmentation, remote sensing, and outreach through the lens of TEK, demonstrating methods of fusing learning with Indigenous knowledge (IK). Contributors emphasize the need to increase the perspectives of IK within institutionalized knowledge beyond being co-opted into non-Indigenous frameworks that may be fundamentally different from Indigenous ways of thinking.

Decolonizing current harmful pedagogical curricula and research training about the natural world through an Indigenous- guided approach is an essential first step to rebuilding a healthy relationship with our environment while acknowledging that all relationships come with an ethical responsibility. Voices of Indigenuity captures the complexities of exploring the contextu- alized meanings for why TEK should be integrated into Western environmental science processes and frameworks while rooted in Indigenous studies programs.
 
 

An essential investigation that pulls back the curtain on automation, like AI, to show human workers’ hidden labor.
 
Artificial Intelligence fuels both enthusiasm and panic. Technologists are inclined to give their creations leeway, pretend they’re animated beings, and consider them efficient. As users, we may complain when these technologies don’t obey, or worry about their influence on our choices and our livelihoods. And yet, we also yearn for their convenience, see ourselves reflected in them, and treat them as something entirely new. But when we overestimate the automation of these tools, award-winning author Antonio A. Casilli argues, we fail to recognize how our fellow humans are essential to their efficiency. The danger is not that robots will take our jobs, but that humans will have to do theirs.
 
In this bracing and powerful book, Casilli uses up-to-the-minute research to show how today’s technologies, including AI, continue to exploit human labor—even ours. He connects the diverse activities of today’s tech laborers: platform workers, like Uber drivers and Airbnb hosts; “micro workers,” including those performing atomized tasks like data entry on Amazon Mechanical Turk; and the rest of us, as we evaluate text or images to show we’re not robots, react to Facebook posts, or approve or improve the output of generative AI. As Casilli shows us, algorithms, search engines, and voice assistants wouldn’t function without unpaid or underpaid human contributions. Further, he warns that if we fail to recognize this human work, we risk a dark future for all human labor.
 
Waiting for Robots urges us to move beyond the simplistic notion that machines are intelligent and autonomous. As the proverbial Godot, robots are the bearers of a messianic promise that is always postponed. Instead of bringing prosperity for all, they discipline the workforce, so we don’t dream of a world without drudgery and exploitation. Casilli’s eye-opening book makes clear that most “automation” requires human labor—and likely always will—shedding new light on today’s consequences and tomorrow’s threats of failing to recognize and compensate the “click workers” of today.

An interdisciplinary investigation of the co-creation of gender and technology

Each of the ten chapters in Women, Gender, and Technology explores a different aspect of how gender and technology work--and are at work--in particular domains, including film narratives, reproductive technologies, information technology, and the profession of engineering. The volume's contributors include representatives of over half a dozen different disciplines, and each provides a novel perspective on the foundational idea that gender and technology co-create one another. Together, their articles provide a window on to the rich and complex issues that arise in the attempt to understand the relationship between these profoundly intertwined notions.

Writing program administrators have a long history of advocating for their students, fellow faculty, and programs. This advocacy includes defending their work against other entities that seek to dictate the work, challenging institutional policies that define student success in a narrow way or create untenable conditions for writing faculty workloads, and making antiracism a central part of writing programs. The COVID-19 pandemic undoubtedly created a variety of additional challenges for those working in education at all levels. WPAs suddenly had to navigate new public health mandates alongside student and instructor fears as well as pressures by administrations and publics to teach in person.

The chapters in this collection include a variety of voices who have been involved in writing program administration in recent years to reflect on the work done in this moment of crisis. Through both short vignettes and longer chapters, this book explores the complicated interactions between WPA work and navigating times of crisis to provide insights for moving forward. Authors explore a variety of topics including professional development, curricular change, advocating in the face of intransigent administrations and others, caring for students, and taking time for self-care. Pointing to specific actions for continued advocacy, WPAing in a Pandemic and Beyond will be of great interest to WPAs and writing studies scholars.