Endesha - Where Leaders Meet

Knowledge is movement.

It’s summer and while across the Northern hemisphere teachers are enjoying well deserved holidays they’re also preparing themselves for the school year 2009-2010. These days each school year starts as a great unknown. The question is not if disruption will happen during next school year; it’s when, how and how often.

The outcome of next school year will be determined by the dominant assumptions with which we’ll start in September. We have a choice between two opposing assumptions:

1. Content is fixed, learning process is variable or incidental.
2. Content is variable, learning process is fixed.

The first assumption – that content in the class room is fixed – is the world of standardized tests. Under these assumptions how students grasp the content of an entire  school year is of secondary importance. The dominating force during the school year is preparing students for standardized tests, one way or another. This force is the result of the interplay between educational institutions, teachers and students who want to get into college. Learning is memorizing. Schooling is testing. Competence is the capability to perform.

The second assumption – that the learning process is fixed – is the vision of Carl Wieman, Will Richardson, Micheal Wesch and many others inside and outside of education. Under these assumptions learning is a personal, social yet understood process. I define learning as the process through which the muscles of our body – including our brain – grow capabilities that weren’t there before. It’s the world where students look for the help and support by expert tutors to facilitate and improve their learning. Learning is social. Knowledge is movement. Competence is the capability to succeed.

Under the first assumption schools are the facilities and institutions that prepare students for unavoidable and inescapable tests. Competence is performance. Performance is judged through impersonal processes by remote antagonists. The relationship between self and the world is determined by test results, governed by bureaucratic imperatives.

Under the second assumption schools are the most important and formative arena in year-long, round the clock learning. Competence is success. Success is demonstrated by the achievements in the student’s own social space which is publicly visible. The relationship between self and the world is determined by the place one finds through one’s own achievements over the entire year.

It’s clear that if the the first assumptions prevail – content is fixed – next school year will be a failure. Only the prevalence of the second assumptions will turn next school year into a success.

It’s also obvious that if only 1% or 2% of the teacher population strive to make the second assumptions come true next school year will be on the road towards success yet success is not yet in reach.

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Babies are assumed unable to create anything so we create for them, mostly toys. Because they’re not expected to create there is no media where babies can publish. And because they can’t publish there is no way for babies to stay in touch.

Baby brains are severely limited compared to older children. Yet at the same time baby brains are capable of something that older brains cannot do: learn to recognize and use the complicated patterns of language.

A child aged 7 or 8 that hasn’t learned a language will never be able to speak. Babies are born with a growing brain and it is this growing brain that can learn language. Beyond a certain point in the growth of the brain language can no longer be learned.

While babies can’t do much they are able to learn things older brains can’t. There is language, but there’s also the awareness of other people. Babies don’t know that when they can’t see somebody that person still exists, it’s something they have to learn.

This makes me wonder: what else can babies learn, really complicated stuff that only very young brains can learn? What would happen if babies could communicate with each other remotely through some kind of devices? Which patterns would emerge, and what would they learn from them?

I think baby media is a completely unexplored but potentially huge domain.

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Every post-war decade has it’s dominant or remarkable youth subculture: rock’n’roll in the fifties, hippies in the sixties, punkers in the seventies, yuppies in the eighties and nerds in the nineties and 2000’s.

Each subcultures was defined primarily by two things:

1. Their novel ways of engaging with media ranging from music to open-source software, and in the process redefining media for their decade.
2. Their puberty experience as a function of how rebellious they were towards society, their caretakers and parents.

Media seems to be defining for youth culture more than anything else, and the acceptance or rejection by adults of the novel media phenomena of the day seems to be directly correlated with the degree of rebellion experienced by all parties during puberty.

The rock’n’roll and hippie teens were expressing themselves through their musical preferences more than anything else. It just happened to be that their parents didn’t approve of their children’s taste in music, and by rejecting their media of choice they also rejected their children’s youth experience.

Punkers were very different. They also expressed themselves through their musical preferences but clothing, hairstyles and attitude were equally important. The punker “fuck you” attitude towards society at large was just as defining as owning bootleg tapes of The Clash concerts.

Yuppies were riding Toffler’s Third Wave: striking it rich on Wall Street or in the City of London, owning a Lamborghini Countach or dreaming about dating Cindy Crowford. This was what the media of the eighties had to offer, together with New Wave music that was all in all a non-event compared to the musical upheaval of the previous decades. Media in the eighties were much less exciting than before: consolidating the media freedoms gained in previous decades but not yet affected by the up and coming digital media. Puberty was already loosing its grip on media innovation.

The nineties and 2000’s completely changed our understanding of media. The nerdy youths certainly played their part but they no longer owned media innovation. Bearded baby boomers in California were now just as influential for media as teen culture was.

Youth rebellion against the society of their parents and grand-parents necessarily is a function of how much youth culture affects media innovation. In the fifties and sixties their influence in media was very high and their rebellion was strong. Today teen culture has been absorbed in the cultural diversity and abundance that marks this moment.  In other words: teens don’t have to rebel because everybody is rebelling.

Today everybody is going through their puberty (again). And because everybody is in puberty nobody is in puberty. The physiological phenomena related to puberty are no longer driving cultural and media innovation.

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I use my Asus EEE 901 with 12Gb for flash storage (no hard drive!) and 2Gb of memory for all my computing needs. Here’s a list of things you can do with a netbook, and things you can’t, drawn from my own experiences. I run Windows XP SP3.

You can be pretty sure this list applies to all netbooks. The fact that mine doesn’t have a hard drive of +100 Gb doesn’t seem to make a difference. Keep in mind that most notebooks have a 1024×600 screen resolution and that this may impact your user experience for certain applications.

Things you can do:

• Web surfing: I use Google Chrome, but I did disable caching. With caching enabled the web surfing was very slow.
• Watching videos online: I did set up a 500Mb RAM driver for temporary file storage, otherwise videos wouldn’t play smoothly.
• Office applications: I use Open Office, but I know from experience that Microsoft Office 2007 runs pretty smooth as well.
• FTP uploading and downloading: I use FileZilla.
• Web development with LAMP: I use XAMPP Lite.
• Java development: I use Java 5 and Eclipse 3.3.
• Skype: the audio quality is just as good as on any other computer, the built-in webcam works very well.
• Skype call recording: I use PrettyMay Call Recorder for Skype.
• LiveStation.
• Kaspersky Anti-Virus.
• Windows Live Writer.
• Screencast recording: I use Cam Studio Portable and the Cam Studio Lossless codec. I do use an external hard drive for recording screen casts. I did follow these configuration instructions, otherwise recording quality was not good. These settings produce very good results.
• Video encoding: I use the MEncoder utility that comes with MPlayer. I also use the external hard drive for this.

Things you can’t do:

• Itunes: it just doesn’t want to install properly on my netbook, I don’t know why.
• Inkscape: the Atom CPU is not powerful enough.
• TweetDeck: it works but it uses so much memory, it’s unbearable.

I’m very happy with my little netbook, I can recommend them to anyone. They’re also pretty powerful and versatile although they’re not as powerful as proper notebooks. But they’re much smaller and much lighters, making them easy to carry and use. Their keyboard is also smaller, my keyboard is 92% of the size of a proper notebook keyboard. I have to say that without the upgrade to 2Gb RAM my netbook wouldn’ have been as versatile as it is now.

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Why do wild flowers have such magnificent and diverse colors? If you look at most wild flora it’s quite an anomaly yet at the same time a very consistent anomaly. Most plants are green yet very few flowers are green. Why is this?

The answer is: because of emergence. Bees and other pollinating insects have color vision. Hence, flowers with attractive colors have a reproductive advantage in being able to attract the insects they depend on for pollination.

Bees get color vision, wild flowers become colorful. This is emergence: a mindless, long-lasting, open process based on positive feedback loops. Positive feedback loops are behavioral circular actions in a system where the output of one part becomes the input of another part.

Bees see (input of A) the color of flowers (output A) and are attracted. Bees carry the pollen of flowers (output B) to other plants (input of B). This creates a positive feedback loop: the more pollen bees spread the more the genes responsible for colorful flowers spread. And because bees are attracted to colorful flowers almost all flowers are colorful.

The same goes for primates and the color of fruits: primates are one of the few mammals that have developed color vision. When colorful fruits gets eaten by a primate and its seeds sometime later end up in a nice pile of fertilizer, this is a very good outcome for the plant.

The most important aspect of emergence is that it’s mindless. Emergence describes complicated systems that arise out of very simple but often repeated actions. Emergence can be best compared to choreography.

The opposite of emergence is central control: the mindful orchestration of processes. Central control is very expensive: systems are custom-build out of parts that need to be made to work together. That is why central control can only work when there are minds around.

Yet minds often have a will of their own and make mistakes. Central control – what arises out of mindful orchestration – has to compensate for the flawed minds it depends on.

Central control leads to a complexity limit: a level above which mindful complexity cannot rise without becoming extremely expensive yet yielding diminishing returns. Central control also leads to investment traps: built systems may not be as good as they could be, only the cost of building them prevents the minds from starting over again. Nuclear energy is a good example of both a complexity limit and an investment trap.

Both complexity limits and investment traps  require mindful beings like us to resort to emergence to establish complex systems. This leads to the mindful paradox: the smarter we become, the more we choose to rely on mindless emergence.

Central control however – because it’s mindful –  is based on values. Emergence – because it’s mindless – is value-free. This is the big problem proponents of central control have with emergence: it can’t be controlled. Without control there is no power so the point of central control is to concentrate as much power as possible by getting as much control as possible.

Until humans came along nature – as far as we know – has always relied on emergence. We are nature’s first experiment in central control. Yet at the same time we’re also extending nature’s emergence capabilities. The effects that can be achieved through the emergence over a global network of interconnected computers are amazing.

What has changed in recent years is this: the best and cheapest way to build a global communication network appeared to be through emergence. If such a feat can be achieved by humans through emergence, what else is possible?

The key insight of emergence – which is demonstrated by the Internet every day – is that each participant in a emergent system has to bear her own costs in order to profit from the benefits. That’s why there has to be a positive feedback loop: for each participant the output (cost) has to yield a substantial input (benefit).

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Packet-switching networks – like the Internet – have a center and edges. The resilience of packet-switching networks in terms of failure, growth and speed lies in two critical design principles:

1. The center doesn’t know about the edges.
2. The edges don’t know about the center.

When I’m on my computer at home and I visit any odd website this is what happens:

1. My computer looks up the IP address of the website’s server and sends a packet with as destination this IP address to my wireless router at home.
2. My wireless router acts as my gateway to the Internet: it acts as middleman between my private network at home and the cable modem of my Internet provider. My little router forwards the packet to a router of my Internet provider.
3. This router on the network of my Internet provider forwards the packet to another router which forwards it to another one and so on, gradually bringing my packet physically closer to its destination which might be across the globe.
4. Finally the web server I’m trying to reach receives my packet from a nearby router, probably a router belonging to the Internet provider it is connected to.
5. The web server handles the packet and if everything goes well sends a new packet as a reply with as destination the IP address of my wireless router. And the same thing happens all over again.

Each router along the trajectory of my packet doesn’t know nor cares whether a server actually exists at the destination I’m trying to reach. All they do is forward the packet to yet another router who might bring the packet one step closer to its destination. It is not guaranteed that the packet will actually reach its destination yet that is of no concern to these intermediate routers.

Nor to these routers wonder why I want to reach this destination, how I got hold of this address, whether I’ve been there before, … . The center doesn’t care what the edges are trying to achieve, they just facilitate and regulate the center. The role of the center is to serve the edges, not to worry or wonder about them.

This is a near perfect analogy for society. We know there exist gigantic bureaucratic apparatus, we might even know some people who work there, but they aren’t visible, they’re in the center. These apparatuses sometimes act as edges in the form of police officers, nurses or civil servants. But by and large these apparatuses are not only invisible, they’re inaccessible.

The center of the Internet is not transparent. There are maps and topologies that describe its architecture and layout, but from the edge the parts that constitute the center can’t be poked or inspected at will. The center of the Internet is opaque to its users.

Same for society. The bureaucrats that calculate your taxes are invisible. Once a year you might hear from them but you can’t visit them, inspect their work and make modifications as you see fit. The center of society – like the center of the Internet – is there to serve the edges, not to undergo their every wish.

As with the Internet there’s a firm set of relationships between the edges and the center that regulates the emergent whole:

• Edges can’t exist without the center, and there can be no center without edges.
• Edges create value, the center can’t create value. The center can only become more efficient, less expensive.
• Edges are taxed by the center for access.
• The cost of access to the center for one edge node is insignificant compared to the advantages, except for health care.
• The center is forced to become transparent, fair and accountable because of the edges.

Yet society is only like a packet-switching network, it isn’t one. What’s critically missing in society’s center is emergence, that what grows out of disruption. The center of society is an institutional zone with central control which extracts wealth out of the edges. There’s not necessarily an interest in stopping overly restrictive negative feedback loops and problematic positive feedback loops in the center by the center. The lack of self-control by the central control is parasitic on the edges.

Because it is generally not allowed at the center of society to create new options and opportunities for many people there’s also no emergence. Also, people employed at the center of society fulfill roles: dealing with certain aspects while ignoring everything else.

This combination – no disruption or emergence plus ignorance – leads the center of society to become increasingly less productive and at the same time increasingly more expensive. Cutting costs doesn’t always lead to increased productivity, most of the time it just leads to less costs.

Yet the center of society doesn’t have to be institutional. It just happens to be institutional because it’s always been like that. Yet institutions can only be replaced with one thing: permanent transparency. We need a center of society for the edges to create value but that doesn’t mean we need an institutionalized center.

The center of society is not a mindless feedback loop like the center of the Internet is. Decisions need to be taken, priorities set, redundancies need to be in place for resilience to emerge. Yet the center of society shouldn’t be based on a principle of self-interest as it is today.

The center of society can only function on a tax-base or contribution-base from the edges. Yet the center should only burden the edges with those activities that can only be dealt with effectively from the center. The center should not burden the edges with self-inflicted problems.

But neither should the edges try to replace the center. Wikipedia is maintained by the edges yet it still has a central character. Institutions not only bring people to the problem, they bring people to the problem to take on a role. Those roles are a function of the self-preservation of the institutions.

Institutions aren’t expensive because there are people working together, they are expensive because it has been decided up front that only certain outcomes are desirable. Roles are a function of this predetermination of what constitutes as success. Often those images of success cannot be reached through emergence. Whenever emergence is not desirable people’s actions and relationships have to be controlled. Emergence is a result of people creating and exchanging freely.

Wikipedia is a central yet emergent piece of real estate. Actions aren’t blocked, but if my modifications are deemed undesirable by others they will be rolled back. I have the freedom to act yet that doesn’t mean that I will always reach my objectives. If my objectives for the content on Wikipedia are not in line with what other have in mind I most likely won’t be successful. Permanent transparency in the form of Wikipedia’s revision history is enough to thwart subversive plots. It’s not necessarily effective against backroom dealings.

We can only de-institutionalize the center of society by making everything transparent, navigable and open for inspection at will. That’s not easy to achieve but there is a lot of value down this road. De-institutionalizing the center of society will change everything we do significantly, it will completely reshape our societies and it won’t be a conscious act by a few people. Instead it will have to emerge, meaning that we need behavior that can be copied and mutated.

The center of society currently shields itself off from outside inspection and modification more than ever before precisely because it is understood what lays down the road. That doesn’t make it any easier which means we’ll have to be inventive and innovative in the new kinds of behavior we want to propagate in society.

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I’m writing this post from memory yet based on The Age of Capital, Eric Hobsbawn’s terrific history book of the period between 1848 and 1875.

Factories – and mass-production which is their economic superposition – used to be an extremely profitable way to make a living, at least for factory owners. Those days are gone now yet we’re going through the period where the consequences  of the decline of factories are playing out.

In 1848 the bourgeoisie across Europe was faced with countless revolutions which all failed. Yet the important consequence of this period was that the bourgeoisie realized that they had to give the poor population of their region something, or else face revolution after revolution after revolution.

Their plan was simple: take the idea of the factory that came to prominence in the late 18th century in England and elsewhere and use it to out-price and out-perform the medieval trade professions. A factory owner – through the accumulation of enough capital – could build machines, hire workers and pay highly specialized workers higher salaries than they ever got before.

Not all workers were specialized, most did work for which no qualification was required. But by creating an elite group within the working population within the walls of factories the bourgeoisie was giving anybody willing to improve themselves in a craft the chance to make a decent living.

This was a revolution. Before trades – and the money to be made – was inaccessible to the working population at large. Only people born into trading families – or willing to become part of the trading communities – could make a decent living. Others were excluded and were destined to hard agrarian work for their entire lives.

Factories changed this all defining social balance. Now any adolescent farmer’s daughter of son could move to the city and start working in a factory were they would learn a profession. After many years of low pay and hard work they would become skilled and would start to make more money.

Because of these new disruptive opportunities and mass production an entirely new market emerged. Workers making a better living could afford to buy more things, especially textile but also better housing and better food. The opening of specialized jobs to anybody who wanted to work hard completely changed society. This revolution happened before public schooling became the norm in Europe. Skilled workers could only the trained on the factory floor, they weren’t formed in schools.

This revolution continued in the twentieth century although some important changes occurred. Media and media consumption increased dramatically. Much more children went to school and became literate. Technological innovation boomed, requiring more factories and more skilled workers in more niches than ever before.

School started engineering education, delivering knowledge workers which could be in charge of factories and their production processes. Henry Ford introduced significant productivity improvements in factories. Tasks that previously required skilled workers could now be performed by unskilled workers, again decreasing their salaries.

This increase in productivity – producing the same at a lower cost, or producing more for the same cost – decreased the marginal cost of mass production. The economic boom in the two decades after WW2 increased the market for mass produced goods significantly.

But in a way mass production went the way of agriculture, albeit in a much faster pace of only 150 years. In the 19th century a small farmer hardly made a living, and a failed harvest meant harsh poverty, illness and eventually death. Today we’re seeing the same happening in factories.

They have moved to low wage territories, work is hard and people hardly make a living. A few qualified engineers can prepare a mass production process after which hundreds or thousands of unqualified workers can step in.  When demand declines there is no safety net, only poverty, illness and eventually death.

In short, we seem to have reached the productivity maximum in factories. Increasingly bigger investment are required yet only increase productivity marginally. Production and productivity require such specialized and secret knowledge that entering a mass market for new players is all but impossible, think for example computer processors.

In our time the credit bubble has masqueraded this stagnation of productivity and decline in salaries for at least a decade, but finally the curtain has fallen. Productivity increases in the mass production of goods can no longer be expected. The only way forward is to reduce costs, especially wages.

This drive to keep the marginal cost low will unavoidably lead to deflation: the decrease of the amount of money in circulation. When people start to make less because they can’t create growth anymore in their jobs we’ll unavoidably end up on a deflationary spiral.

The only way out is to increase productivity in other areas, namely on the edges, away from the center and away from mass production. Seth’s post today is a timely reminder of this issue.

(the making of)

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My friend monika hardy is pushing me these days to create a teacher course around my ideas on media, literacy, education, learning, emergence and a whole lot more. I don’t know how to get started since I’ve never done such a thing before. So I might just as well start here. I think this material fits in nicely with the book I’m trying to write which might pay dividends later on.

The current state of teaching is such that we don’t understand what we’re supposed to be doing. This is not without consequence. In fact, due to our being lost in education we’ve actually turned education into a zombie industry.

The main symptoms of our attitudes and actions in education – which typify any zombie industry – are these:

• We underestimate the true costs of our current attitudes and actions.
• We overestimate the true value of our current attitudes and actions.

We underestimate the true costs as in social costs, personal costs, lost and missed opportunities, … . We overestimate the value of our teaching methods, what students actually learn, our education system and institutions, our core assumptions, … .

We shouldn’t expect that we will be able to carry on behaving as we have for much longer, something will have to give. But what does this have to do with new media abundance? A lot, it turns out.

I believe that accepting we don’t understand what we’re supposed to be doing is the hardest but also the most important step we can take at this hour. Umair Haque says that our “world [or society] is a function of what we do.” Marshal McLuhan in his wonderful book The Gutenberg Galaxy says that “media makes people.”

If we accept that children beyond 7 or 8 years old who haven’t learned a mother tongue will never be able able to speak a language then we must also accept that media – of which language is one – determines who we are. That means that our ancestors 500 years ago were very different people from who we are today because their media were very different.

In fact, today’s new media abundance really is just one step in a centuries old media revolution. Our period and our new media is only a interlude in this historical process. The future will hold more interludes with their own new media. Learning due to new media is an ongoing process across the centuries.

What’s perhaps most remarkable about our new media is how it has changed our understanding of literacy. Puritans in our time insist that literacy is being able to read and write and that we shouldn’t try to make it into something else. But what is reading other than turning the meaningless symbols of our alphabets into ideas? And what is writing other than turning ideas into the meaningless symbols of our alphabets?

Our understanding of literacy is inherently linked to our dominant media. Literacy is being able to read in terms of books, newspapers, advertisements and television. New media comes with a more general understanding of literacy. Today literacy has come to mean being educated.

Being educated in the new media means something very different than being able to read and write when media consists of books, newspapers, radio and television. In books and newspapers the audience has no choice but to passively read the visual cues as alphabetic symbols on paper. There is no room for participation and no expectation to participate either. Radio and television are auditory but there is again no comment button.

New media is centered around participation. Being literate in new media means not just being able to participate, but also being able to create chances for others to participate. Participation unavoidably forces us to reconsider our assumptions about human capabilities and especially learning. It turns out that our assumptions that determine the classroom experiences we create are not at all in line with how people learn.

In his lecture Science Education in the 21th Century: Using the Tools of Science to Teach Science Nobel laureate Carl Wieman gives an overview of what recent research in education has taught us about teaching. There are too many interesting points in this lecture to sum here, but the ones that struck me the most are these:

• We typically reach our maximum cognitive load after having heard 7 new terms and 4 new ideas.
• The brain is much more like a muscle than previously thought and requires strenuous extended use for learning.
• Students need to do three things in order to learn: make connections, participate in activities related to the topic, reflect on one’s own knowledge and skills.

Is it a coincidence that the activities promoted by new media are exactly these: making new connections, taking up an active role in the online community and reflecting on one’s own place in the world? I don’t think that’s a coincidence. It does mean people constantly learn online.

My tentative conclusion is that the era where passive students learned from visual cues without much participation and without having the right to reflect, comment and object is over. This is the direct cause of why we don’t understand what we’re supposed to be doing. The teacher course I’m thinking of would pave the road for teachers to come to this conclusion.

I would love to get some feedback on how to proceed, on what you think, and what you would like to see. Thanks.

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This is edupunk.

It doesn’t make any sense to clutter our sights with arcane signs and notations whose origins and usage are not explained nor motivated. Visual clutter does not contribute to learning in any way.

The idea behind visual hygiene is simple: when we’re being asked to learn new concepts that include visual cues we have the right to question what we’re looking at and why these cues are there. Visual hygiene is an attitude which has to be learned. Visual hygiene in schools is rare and it certainly isn’t being taught.

There are many things visual, including written language, signs, notations, charts and graph so the visual hygiene attitude forcefully has to cover a lot of ground. Visual clutter is used by dominant regimes – also in education – to demonstrate who is in control and who isn’t. The visually abused are not afforded with any defensive measures – at least no official ones – against their visual torturers.

Tax forms are notoriously inaccessible. They are designed to be visually complex, nonsense and hard to navigate. Only experts know how to handle them correctly yet those experts depend on their working relationships with the bureaucracies that issue these visual disaster areas. The experts are obliged to the bureaucracies as are the citizens who need to comply with the inaccessible tax code.

The visual hygiene attitude won’t take visual clutter issued by dominant organizations for granted. Instead, people with the visual hygiene attitude will discard the official visual clutter and create their own alternatives. Visual cues are much more social than the spoken word because they can reach much more people. The culture of visual clutter reaches billions of people every day while visual hygiene is scarce but could be abundant if want it to. Striving for visual hygiene is thus striving for social hygiene: an attitude or condition where old structures of social power are not automatically taken for granted.

Bureaucracies and other institutions which derive their social power from their social status prefer to overcharge our visual senses as their favorite means of intimidating us. Visual hygiene is thus a very important attitude because it’s the most invasive way to shift the balance of power between us and impersonal institutions.

The most important aspect of visual hygiene is that it’s personal: you may prefer other visual cues than I do but by playing with each other’s visual preferences we can more easily accept each other’s differences and start working together. Visual hygiene requires and is a conversation.

In education the worst offender is probably mathematics, that is mathematics as interpreted by educational institutions. We force our students to absorb and take for granted the invasive visual clutter of school mathematics. There is no room for honest conversation in mathematics. It’s no wonder that by the time students get out at the other end they can no longer learn, only mimic.

If you want to learn more about the visual hygiene attitude I encourage you to read these two sources:

• A Mathematician’s Lament (PDF), about two hours of reading, very readable. I recommend you read this paper first.
• The Gutenberg Galaxy (Google Books), a 293 page book published in 1962, a bit more challenging to read but well worth the effort.

(turn the volume up!)

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