The first time I encountered teachers and designers building serious gaming scenarios to help learners learn was in the late 1990s. “Gamification” according to its wiki, http://gamification.org, has been in the bloodstream since 2004. If it has taken Farmville and AngryBirds and X Box to awaken some people to the pervasive presence of game theory within all of our thinking about the way we learn, then they stand convicted of not living in the twenty first century. Gaming is now tightly wrapped around the way we learn: the problem is that we still do not do it consistently, in large enough contexts, to create ultimate learning value. People who call themselves publishers, information service solution providers, content developers etc still have the notion that the game is something you add to the mix to lighten the load, provide some variety, change the pace or overcome a tricky and boring learning essential. But what if gaming was the core to our learning, the methodological base for instruction and measurement. What if it was the package that replaced the training manual and accomplished its assessment as well as handled its updating? What if, as much biological evidence demonstrates, games are the way we learn and we are just now returning to a full recognition of what that means?

Sitting in an armchair in the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco one foggy day in June 2007 I opened a copy of Mackenzie Wark’s Gamer Theory, published that year as Version 2.0 of his blog GAM3Y 7H3ORY, a networked book hosted online by Bob Stein’s Institute for the Future of the Book. Here is a sample: “Here is the guiding principle of a future utopia, now long past: “To each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities”. In gamespace, what do we have? An atopia, a senseless, placeless realm where quite a different maxim rules: “From each according to his abilities – to each a rank and score? Needs no longer enter into it. Not even desire matters. Uncritical gamers do not win what they desire: they desire what they win. The score is the thing. The rest is agony.” (para 021).  Is this different to what you thought? Is it closer to passing that test, completing that continuous development assignment, getting those SATs, or satisfying all of those humiliating hurdles placed in the way of forward progress by those who have already progressed far enough forward not to be troubled by them any more. If you say “yes” to any of these questions then you are in danger of joining me on a dangerous road – towards a future for learning dominated by gaming.

But we are in good company. That hugely serious player, SAP, employs Mario Herger as its  Global Head of Gamification  (www.enterprize-gamification.com). MIT’s Learning Lab spawned Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/) to create and test learning games for younger people and Microsoft created Kodu (http://www.kodugamelab.com/), a programming environment designed to allow users to build their own games on the XBox. And in most countries there is now a serious gaming industry, often with 10 to 15 years of experience behind them, mostly making serious games for user organizations, and unvisited and unblest by the publishers who should be their natural collaborators. Centres of excellence here in the UK include inventive survivors like Desq (www.desq.co.uk), the Sheffield -based developer with almost 15 years of intensive work around immersive experiences like DoomEd or the SimScience environment built for the Institute of Physics. Or look at Pixelearning (www.pixelearning.com) in Birmingham and its training environments, or the company created by its founder, Kevin Corti (SoshiGames – http://www.soshigames.com/, exploiting customer retention through social gaming). Then, around London’s Old Street Silicon Roundabout, see how many of the 800 start-ups are games related, like Michael Acton Smith’s hugely successful MoshiMonsters (http://www.moshimonsters.com/). As a director of CreatureLabs many years ago I recognize the DNA! The games thing is on the march, but the content businesses old-style are not yet aligned with it.

So lets drop “gamification” if we are going to get into some social backlash. Really, games for learning are not like that lesson on Friday afternoon when the teacher showed a filmstrip (younger readers can insert film-loop, film, TV programme, slides, video etc according to age or taste) and we all slept or gazed out of the window. They are the very stuff of learning and the keywords which we shall associate with them are engagement, immersion, collaboration. They will have their problems, but as well as the future of learning they are also the future of assessment.

FOOTNOTE  While continuing to use this blog to record a view of information marketplaces and the players within them, I would also like to devote a regular item to looking at what I am increasingly calling the Post Digital Information World. This does not mean that I think that we shall renege at all on the digitalization of all forms of communication – just that once infrastructures are in place, and the majority of human society is connected to a networked society, it is conceivable that the next stages of development, while they are faster and even less supportive of current business models, will be different in type and style. The current debate about the future of email highlights this. More from me here later.

Lawrence wrote “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom”, one of the world’s unread classics (and almost unreadable in parts: he lost the only copy of the full manuscript on Reading train station and had to recreate 200,000 words, during which he clearly became bored.) In 800 words I can communicate seven thoughts – not so much Pillars  as pillows, and not predictions but observations of this unknowable industry. Here goes:

1.  Some think its about content and others that it is about platforms and technology. For me it is still about communications, and the greatest challenge is still holding people’s attention, having gained their recognition. Even Facebook hits a plateau. The gods remain Reputation, Identity, and Attention.

2. You are either a communication company or you are not. News Corp is a format company. It does newspapers, film and television and has little corporate bandwidth for non-format communications. This cannot be changed by executive whim, and the collapse of Beyond Oblivion, its music initiative, before the holidays (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jan/04/music-service-beyond-oblivion-folds), as well as the veil of silence around the performance of The Daily on the iPad, following on as they do the oblivion that was My Space, demonstrates all of this very well. Yet Mr Murdoch has signed on to Twitter. There is no evidence yet that the world can be saved with a single Tweet. There is no evidence yet that traditional media and information businesses can recreate themselves in new marketplaces without either starting afresh somewhere else  or by buying a new business and moving into it. Boinc.

3. Apple, according to MacRumors (http://www.macrumors.com/2012/01/03/apples-january-media-event-to-involve-digital-textbooks-and-education/), is about to enter the textbook market, maybe with Pearson and certainly via the iPad. This was apparently a dearly held dream of Steve Jobs, at least according to Walter Isaacson, who is shaping up to be not just the biographer but also the Delphic oracle. I have some doubts – not about the iPad as a display device, but about whether markets want textbooks re-invented. Learners would like learning re-invented, and made easier and more compelling. Textbooks are an extinct format. And learning should operate equally well on whatever platform you have available. What a waste of all this energy around eLearning if we abolish the old formats like textbooks and replace them with rigid device platforms. And yet I am sure that the analysts are right – there are only a few global growth markets and education is the largest.

4. Then I had a great comment from Brad Patterson at EduLang (www.edulang.com). He points out that 500 million people are trying to learn English and only 50 million can afford textbooks, online or otherwise. So his business model for his interesting TOEFL and TOIEC Simulators is “pay what you can”, with half going to a reading charity. In many ways this is very neat – it reaches out to 450 million people with a trust relationship, and could be a really interesting business model to watch. Above all, how encouraging it is to see someone moving the goalposts – we did not score many goals in regular business model configurations so lets applaud the courage of someone doing something different.

5. Semantic Web technology and deployment in mass markets is getting closer and closer. I took part in the beta of Garlik (www.garlik.com) some 3 years ago, partly because of an interest in technology around identity, and partly out of interest in technologies derived from the University of Southampton Computer Science department, and blessed by such eminences as Wendy Hall, Nigel Shadbolt – and Sir Tim Berners Lee himself. Two days before Christmas Garlik was sold to Experian, in a move that I think was as significant as Reuters buying ClearForest all those years ago. Garlik protects personal identity through web search, was founded by the men who built the UK online banks Egg and First Direct, and backed by Doughty Hanson. This is a straw in a wind which will go galeforce.

6. But if the Semantic Web is going to be so clever, and linked data will recreate so many service environments, where is it now? Well, look at the obvious places. In most of our economies building and construction is the largest sector in terms of activity and players, large and small, and has great companies serving it with supplier and materials information. Thus, in a US market replete with Reed Construction, Hanley Wood and McGraw-Hill. But what if a semantic web-based environment were able to search all online catalogues and directories to produce a sweeping coverage of suppliers and products that was at once more detailed and more comprehensive than any directory-style database, and could include more metadata from suppliers and users to create a continually developing industry specification site, deliverable and self-formatting to every platform and device? That is what interests me about MaterialSource, (http://www.materialsource.com/about) as well as its use of SPARQL, Semantic Web Pages for faceted and graph-based browsing, smartphone and tablet Apps using HTML5, ontologies etc, etc. If they do it, someone will have to buy them!

7. I keep on thinking about the neglect of audio, so I was delighted to see SoundCloud (http://soundcloud.com/). There has to be room for an audio portal, and a community for sharing sound and cross-referencing its sources and users. I anticipate that they know things about users that Beyond Oblivion didn’t.

Last words of a predictive nature before I get back to real work. A correspondent asks “what technology are you following in 2012!” Since I say every week that I am not following technologies but users, I take mild offense at this, but I do admit to a penchant for 3D printing. Now that really could have an impact. Especially in medical workflow. I have also been asked by a venture capitalist who should know better what is likely “to be certain” to succeed this year. He is a serious man so I owe him a serious answer: anything that saves more time and money than it costs. The prime example this year in the UK has been Shutl, a delivery logistics service that gets your online purchases to you physically (average delivery time in London was 90 minutes, with a cost of £5). Is that all the queries? I am beginning to feel like an Agony Aunt!

Which brings me to Siri. The Apple iPhone voice App has now had three months of shrill publicity (http://www.transhumanistic.com/2011/10/new-iphone%E2%80%99s-killer-app-%E2%80%93-voice-controlled-personal-assistant/) and (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uo5CUgEYKI&noredirect=1).

Given its ability with natural language searching, which gives it a degree of “intelligence”, reviewers think this should be a winner, and I agree on one level. On another I have some reservations, and these are largely concerned with our apparent inability to position and market voice services effectively.

Twenty years ago a senior executive at Random House told me that I was wasting my time with “Multimedia”, which was what we were then working on for CD-ROM. All the market wanted, he said, were good audio readings to play in the car on long distance travel, and he introduced me to his bright young manager who was providing just that. That manager told me two things that have stuck with me: one was the now obvious reflection that publishers were rubbish at marketing anything at all, and this would never change since they believed that they could sell anything. The second was that voice markets appeared to him to be finite: you quickly reached the voice susceptible segment, then growth got very hard. It is a thought that comes back as even Barnes and Noble discover digital (http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/49567-barnes–noble-sees-bright-future-in-digital.html). And who would have thought that would happen!

My young friend of then is now the manager of an important media venture fund, so I will preserve his anonymity. And I do not want to argue that eBook or digital versioning is similarly finite. But I do want to suggest that voice is a vital component of the network and thus of digital service provision, that we grossly neglect its impact in product and service development, and that but for two unfortunate voice misuse environments we would be using a great deal more in more intelligent environments. I am told for example that voice search is now a really easy application to roll out in many service contexts. However, the reason given for its relatively modest showing is the prevalence of hugely annoying telephone voice menu systems, which daily have reasonable people howling in frustration. Having discovered a rare four tier example this week in a hospital group, I am tempted to initiate an award scheme for organizations who employ human beings to answer the phone. The second is automated public service messaging in airports and elsewhere, but in terms of both the problem is not voice, but marketing. I even encountered an airport lounge in my October travels which announced, every five minutes, that no flight departure announcements would be made and that passengers should consult the information screens!

For all of these reasons the future of voice is vital. Siri may point the direction towards intelligent guidance, but completely voice-directed computing has been feasible for a long time and must be a part of the five year scenario. And you do not need to have a Babelfish in your ear to believe in voice/language text translation, which the network is begging for in countless sectors and which is increasingly feasible at a basic level. Slowly we will edit out poor voice practises and it will become rare for web environments to lack audio components as it is for them now to lack video activity. I have had the pleasure recently to work with a group in Dublin who are creating virtual environments to help students pass tests in proficiency in spoken languages. There is an early example at http://www.examspeak.com but there is much more to come. The network is the ideal environment for voice-based training, language learning and virtual voice service development. Eventually the digital communications revolution will come full circle and re-integrate voice as the critical element in networked communications that it always has been, and we shall wonder why this component took so long to fall into place.

And then, we shall call the health insurer through the network and hear his computer say, “Forget all those options and numbers – tell me how I can help”!

And in a month of travel it was a relief to reach a small town, in a country of 2 million people, where you can see a third of the territory from the castle roof. Yet IFRRO has been concerned with lofty and global matters, and I and others have been trying to help by stimulating the argument in the vital sector of education. I will put my slides for the keynote at the business models forum in the download section of this website (and they will also be at www.ifrro.org) and will not rehearse them now, but I have been very interested by the arguments around a conference room of some 230 delegates from 130 countries. Faced with the ever-increasing extension of fair use and fair dealings claims (the Canadian government is the latest to push for extensions of educational concessions), it seems that education is becoming the battleground for networked rights. I continue to believe that the word “copyright”, and the perpetual discussion of ex-print formats (books, articles, newspapers, magazines etc) tempts legislators and administrators to try to regulate digital networks as if they were simply extensions of the non-digital world. I think we need a new language, the removal of the copyright exceptions, blanket (and often metered) licenses and the ability to wrap content into software-governed packages and still protect it, and the new content it morphs into, on the network. If Google can measure the value of every click we make, then we should be able to measure usage. Lets dump copyright and start over with a new approach to network licensing which rewards authors and risk-taking entrepreneurial investors (even publishers where they can cope with that description) for making education work in the individualized learning context online which I have described before.

This educational push – creating a world of collaborative learning – will be the most important thing that our society accomplishes in our lifetimes, so making sure it works economically is totally worthwhile. And after a panel debate on some of the legal issues I then had the pleasure of hearing a following speaker take some of my themes and arguments, exemplify them brilliantly, and then drive the discussion forward in a wholly compelling and committed manner. Melissa Sabella, who runs Pearson’s custom publishing business in EMEA from London, justified every word of my recent blog on that company. Standing on a corporate platform that is now 29% digital (some $2.5 billion in network-derived  digital educational revenues), she was able to be ruthlessly authoritative about the necessity to protect the educational economy at this point of rapid change. While Pearson has major digital businesses like MyLab (revenues of some $8 million this year) it is the startling shift to eBook here in the last year which has made the critical change: some 25% of Pearson’s textbook business is now digital, and the big and recent push has been from the onset of a mobile networked marketplace.

Two factors underlie all of this, and Melissa met them square on. One is that in order for custom and individualized learning to work, you have to have frictionless purchase. The other is that networked learners are living in a world where, increasingly, the content knows them. The ability to allow content to track the learner, building associations and next steps, recognizing the need and providing the assessment, the diagnostic and the learning object to rehearse or re-inforce the learning provides the values that people will pay for in the future.

Of course, the first question from the sceptics is always “when”. I floundered around, pointing out that the developed world was taking its time ( and in economic down turn would take longer), partly because it was such a book-based culture, while the developing world could reach more easily, or leap-frog, to these conclusions. Melissa was more direct, citing her own experience of the 75,000 students in the Nigerian equivalent of the Open University (or its South African equivalent, which predates the UK distance learning landmark and which I recall visiting when I was publishing textbooks in Africa in the 1970s). But now the courseware must be customized, and, again in South Africa, the 40,000 students in the CTI scheme wanted learning that fitted their smartphones (a third of students have them). Africa. We are used to Asia Pacific being held up as a beacon of change. But this was Africa, and it was good stuff to hear.

It has eventually stopped raining in Slovenia and I have been able to walk around the town of Ljubljana. Before I go I hope to see more, but the watery sunshine of a late October day following heavy rain did surely betoken something, I hope? Maybe, at last, the men and women who control the author/publisher side of reproduction rights can  persuade governments, globally, that the huge promise of networked education through individualized learning has to be paid for somehow, and since it is the powerful economic need in our society to create a workforce which can respond to the challenges of the networked world, then it had better be the state, and sooner rather than later. Meanwhile, I have put “fair dealing” on my watch list, along with that other horror, “blended learning”!

“Particularly noteworthy was a talk by Professor Terri Attwood and Dr Steve Pettifer from the University of Manchester (how good to see a biochemistry informatician and a computer scientist sharing the same platform!). They spoke about Utopia Documents, a next generation document reader developed for the Biochemical Journal which identifies features in PDFs and semantically annotates them, seamlessly connecting documents to online data. All of a sudden we are emerging onto the semantic web stage with very practical and pragmatic demonstrations of the virtues of Linked Data. The message was very clear: go home and mark-up everything you have, for no one now knows what content will need to link to what in a web of increasing linkage universality and complexity. At the very least every one who considers themselves a publisher, and especially a science publisher, should read the review article by Attwood, Pettifer and their colleagues in Biochemical Journal (Calling International Rescue: Knowledge Lost in the Literature and information Landslide  http://www.biochemj.org/bj/424/0317/bj4240317.htm). Incidentally, they cite Amos Bairoch and his reflections on Annotation in Nature Precedings (http://precedings.nature.com/documents/3092/version/1) and this is hugely useful if you can generalize from the problems of biocuration to the chaos that each of us faces in our own domains.”

And the reference to Steve Pettifer recalled to mind my old friend Jan Velterop, once agent-provocateur in Springer’s thrust into OA (how grateful they should be to him now, given that his work drew them alongside BMC, and thus to real growth in this year of OA and eBooks compensating for negative trends elsewhere). Dr Pettifer advises Utopia Documents  (http://getutopia.com), who have been developing in parallel to Labiva and Mendeley in the workflow space for PDFs. Each is different, though they have common attributes. The fact that there are now three environments in this space is a strength for all of them. Isolated good ideas rarely work out. Constantly re-iterated solutions “invented” separately in several places shows a sector responding to the same calls from many customers – “Help me out of here – I am losing control!”.

Utopia Documents is also running a public trial on Elsevier’s SciVerse environment. This is critical, and prompts a question: if Nature and Elsevier see this, why doesn’t everyone else? And I think this may be in part because we have been confusing the workflow utility of PDF handling with the strange world of scientific networking. In one of the many frank and helpful comments made by Annette Thomas in the interview I referred to earlier this week, she remarked that much of what Nature had done to “create” networking between scientists had shown very modest results. She said that while scientists showed a modest appetite for networking via news and blog comments, she thought that Nature Networks did not succeed because they lacked the immediacy and involvement of workflow tools, and it was more likely that in this context real contact between self-formed interest groups would take place. Here she seems to be moving closer to the Mendeley (www.mendeley.com) position, but with a qualification. She clearly feels that you build the utilities first, and then see how interest groups develop their own dynamic using the shared information created by the toolset. Crowd-sourcing a la Mendeley is good, but self determination may be better.

Thinking about Portland Press and Jan Velterop also took me back to Jan’s company, Academic Concept Knowledge Ltd (AQnowledge – http://aqnowledge.tumblr.com). The semantic search environment created here is now embedded in Utopia Documents. But this is not what strikes me most emphatically about Jan’s work in recent years. Here is a hugely experienced academic research publisher who is not format bound and can think beyond the book, the journal, and even the article. Integrating antibodies-online.com, with its 300,000 antibodies and related products for concept matching shows that he and his team are creating a small player with an eye for data and for what research workflow really entails. By putting together all of the laboratory supply sources and the raft of descriptive material that they generate AQnowledge may be doing more for using article stores as a live element in workflow than any of their peers. Yet it has taken a company like BioRAFT  (www.bioraft.com) to push this home with compliance information, demonstrating once again that we are in the sectoral tools age of workflow, unable as yet to envisage the full desktop of tools and utilities, or the way they link together, or indeed the Electronic Lab Manual to which they in all probability lead.

Finally, STM now has major players – think of MarkLogic, TEMIS and SilverChair to name but three – quite capable of deploying the technology to drive towards the Big Data vision which I referenced in my previous piece. So, with all of this in the wings, why do the publishers still want to pursue the parochial and eschew the visionary?

Let me try to illustrate what I mean. The looming crisis in STM, in my warped view, is the data crisis. In every other sector it is rapidly becoming clear that increasingly sophisticated data mining and extraction techniques will come into play as users seek to extract new meaning from existing files, and further discovery as they cross search those files with currently unstructured content held elsewhere. STM, it seems to me, is peculiarly susceptible to this Big Data syndrome, for behind the proprietory content stores of perfectly preserved published research articles “owned” by publishers lies the terra incognito of research data and findings held in labs and on research networks. Future scholars will want to search everything together, and will be impatient with barriers which prevent this. Once the tools and utilities which comprise research workflow become generally available and the techniques and value of semantic searching locks into this, the urge becomes irresistible, and scholarly article data gets versioned, commoditized, “outed “. It does not really matter if it is located on the open web, the closed web, or in the cloud or in a university repository.

The implications of this are vast. Scholars want to be published by prestigious branded journals as a way of being noted: they also want to be searched in the bloodstream of science. They will make sure they are everywhere, and that their data is where it needs to be as well. The metadata may note that this article was Gold OA and that one was published by Science, but this may be of most interest to the filtering interface in the workflow environment, which uses the information to rank or value results. And there is a finding from 25 years ago which continues to haunt me in STM, which alleges that most searches are performed not to find claims or results, but to discover, check and compare experimental methodologies and techniques. In a world where regulation and compliance grew ever more powerful, this is unlikely to diminish.

So I have come to feel that Open Access (one participant asked me what market share it would eventually have, and was appalled when I said 15% – before it becomes wholly irrelevant) and Peer Review (increasingly all research validation exercises will be multi-metric, so even the traditional argument collapses) are more about the preservation of publishers than the future of scholarly communication. Not that I object to that preservation, but I really did sit up as Annette Thomas, in her interview, began to describe some of the game changing activity that Digital Science, child of Nature, is doing as an investor in a variety of workflow-enhancing technologies built by bench researchers for themselves (http://digital-science.com/products).

And in particular the announcement, made during the session, that Labtiva, a Digital Science investment at Harvard (sited in Dogpatch Labs) was launching ReadCube as an App (http://www.readCube.com). If anything bespeaks workflow then it is the App. And what does this one do? It allows researchers to order their current world of articles as a personal content library, free and Cloud-based, with features like a filing system for PDFs, fast download from a university or institutional login, the ability to save and re-read annotations, cite and create references and a personalised recommendation services. In other words, a smart App, worthy of the world of iPad, which solves the distressing everyday issues of finding what you once downloaded and recalling what you once thought about it, and finding more of the same. What could be more simple? But in simplicity like this there is a form of beauty. An App is definable as a workload tool which takes clumsy pieces of multi-stage routine out daily interactions with work – and makes sure you do not have to remember next time the cumbersome process you had to perform to do that.

So, whatever the introspective mood in the room, here is one publisher setting off on the migration to new values, determinedly seeking the pain points in the researchers’ working life and seeking to solve them. And indeed, other publishers (including Elsevier with their SciVerse and SciVal developments) are heading in the same direction. Yet the contrast between this and the generality of players in the sector is profound. At one point in the meeting I found myself in a discussion about what was going right with STM in a difficult marketplace dependent on government finance. Well, said one very knowledgeable source, we are doing a great deal with eBooks, selling them into places we never thought we would reach. Enhanced with video or audio? No, just reversioning of text. And library subscriptions are holding up really quite well, said another, and the market seems to have been able to absorb some limited price increases. And so I took away a picture of a sector holding its breath and hoping that things would revert to normal, and traditional business models would prevail. But we all knew in our hearts that when “normal” came back it would be different. Postponing the trek down the road to Dogpatch Labs only loses first mover advantage, the experience born of re-iteration, and ensures that it will be more difficult to change successfully in the long term.

As a result we have two vessels now heading in opposite directions. McGraw Markets (everything which is not education), including all the B2B and credit rating assets, is in one, and everything education is in the other. But Pat English, a shareholder and CEO of Fiduciary Management Inc, told Reuters that this was only the start: “It doesn’t make sense to have S&P ratings, S&P indices, Capital IQ, Platts, and other companies under one roof”. So what happens in October? Do we see Chairman McGraw skip down the gangplank and set sail in the SS S&P, leaving the waste barge B2B to sink in the Hudson? Anything is possible of course: we are watching one of the largest corporate deconstructions in the sector since D&B sold all of their global subsidiaries to franchise holders.

And why? The answer is a not inconsequential $3 billion. This is the difference between the valuations expected for Markets and Education apart, compared to the current, or pre-announcement, values. Education is seen to be in the slow lane and holding back an advanced valuation of S&P. No one has ever explained cogently to me why companies, however large, cannot have valuations which reflect the intrinsic worth of their parts, and why “true” valuations cannot be exhibited without break out, but clearly I am in the nursery class in these matters. And my eye also caught the Chairman’s statement that $1 billion in overheads would be saved. That I really appreciate. I can see that the corporate office of a chairman, for example, would need less aides, fewer executive jets and less travel in a global $4.5 billion company than in a $6.5 billion global company, but since Chairman Terry is going to Markets, there will have to be another Chairman at Education, also aided and abetted and privately flying around a $2 billion company. So where does the saving come in?

And where does the future come in? The US education market is grossly over-published. Margins are too low to attract investment (hence this deal). The nation hovers on the brink of radical IT solutions to address a national standards deficit, present across the developed world, which can only be tackled through individualized digital learning: everything else has failed. McGraw Education have a decent record of innovation, good assessment assets like the California Bureau, and 20 years of struggle, from Primis onwards, to show in justification. But they sit on the edge of the same decreasingly relevant mountain of textbook assets that also contains Harcourt Houghton Mifflin. They have a junior position in non-US markets, compared with their major competitor. But no one can currently compete with Pearson. Cengage have learnt to go global and diversify. McGraw could go with Harcourt, but the resulting debt pile would be bigger than the Greek economy, so this is unlikely. Maybe the “we now have the message” boys at IBM, or Intel, or Cisco, will buy them. But why? There are some good assets in medical education (Harrisons) but are we looking here at a slow death from asset sales until only the unsaleable are left? Eventually Pearsons’ major competitor in global markets will be a borne digital platform company, but these assets will not help them substantively to reach that position. On the other hand, my telescope, scanning the horizon desperately for a rescue vessel, sees the sleek global liner HP, just refuelling on high octane Autonomy. Vast interests in education there, and the potential to be the platform player to fight Pearson?

Back at Markets there are problems of a different kind. Platts, aviation and construction all have heavy data capable of real impact in workflow orientated networking. Although serious attempts have been made to leverage this, there is no evidence of much stomach for the fight, some critical people left, and the failing magazine/advertising/subscription businesses are, well, still failing. Pity that the “very best thinking” of the management team, which the Chairman quoted as the reason for the split, was not applied here some years ago. Alongside these are really good, but unrelated, businesses like JD Powers. And then this high grade financial services stuff, with high growth Capital IQ and of course the S&P play most valuable of all. I am forced to repeat the question of Mr English in other words: unless these businesses are radically changed in strategic direction, this company looks as much like a portfolio conglomerate as ever its now deceased parent did. Will this management make those changes? Or will they sell the most marginal assets next year and use the cash to buy back more shares? And is this portfolio nature a real poison pill against a purchase by another mega corp? So eventual break-up is eventually inevitable?

More questions than answers, but as we all search for value on the ocean bed of this recession, there can be no doubt that this will become a common path for beleaguered corporates in years to come. Until, in fact markets recover and growth seriously returns.

The economic reasons for all of this are fairly obvious, but my feeling at the moment is that the traditional coursebook ELT publishers are not going to inherit the Earth. In fact, quite the opposite. They will get an uplift but the real prizes will go elsewhere. The BRICs winners will be assessment-led, mobile platform driven, self-diagnostic learning systems controlled by the user (in terms of learning process) and by accreditation/certification in terms of content. In fact, I am still where I was last week when writing about strategies for integrating automated marking into learning processes, and events this week have driven the point home for me in a very emphatic way.

The announcement that ETS bought Edusoft Learning three days ago (http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ets-acquires-edusoft-ltd-computer-based-learning-firm-129298618.html) suggests to me that the theme of assessment driven learning is alive and well in the most important global assessment factory, the not for profit Educational Testing Services outfit in Princeton, NJ. Home of TOEIC and TOEFL, the most important American English examinations on the planet, ETS have long nurtured ambitions to move into a broader engagement with users than simple certification. In earlier years it might have seemed appropriate to buy a publisher and produce course materials that supported examination candidates, but those were shark-infested waters, with heavy competition from Pearson, OUP, Macmillan, Cengage (on the move, as I noted last week), CUP and a host of local others. Now the dramatic influx of heavy technologically driven platforms has stretched out the competition, from Pearson, with a host of implanted acquisitions and a great deal of contingent technology clearly in the lead. Pearson, however, plainly lack the ability to integrate branded certification in the ELT sector. The only other publisher who really could do that is Cambridge, but there the inhibitions are organizational (why Cambridge University Press and Cambridge Assessments, the foremost source of British English accreditation cannot work together defeats understanding), and, apparently, psychological – having made a capital start on learning platforms with English 360 they are apparently allowing their best shot at a competitive positioning to go its own way).

Which leaves ETS with a real opportunity to make the English Discoveries Online platform a vital part of the delivery for mobile and fixed English learning activities, in special purposes English as well as certified competency. And in the process this answers a question which is becoming more important to every educational publisher who has spent a decade in a halfway house called Blended Learning. What do we do after Blended Learning? We do Integrated Learning, where the workflow around the qualification, and the ability to concentrate skills acquisition, diagnose problems and ensure that acquired skills are embedded can be delivered on the output device of your choice, with full integration of voice, image and text. In other words, real blending of real learning, not just a convenient reason for keeping comforting old courseware/textbooks in the mix!

And why will this work first in ELT? Crudely, because teachers often work alone, and find it easier to adapt to a mentor role. And because commercial teaching outfits want low cost (less people) solutions. And because more and more students want to study alone and control their learning processes. Edusoft know the structure of these markets very well. For 20 years the Israeli software house has had to turn itself into a local/global presence, and its contracted activity with universities and schools, public and private, in every important ELT market, whether or not this represents the hard to measure global leadership it claims, certainly indicates a penetration close to that point. The 19 education ministeries with whom they have contracts do not quite map yet to the 180 countries and 50 million examinees claimed by ETS, but growth is the objective. Edusoft have distribution in 30 countries, and have localized their platforms in 30 languages. All this represents a high degree of success for owner Soly Kanes and current CEO, Rafi Moran, who was formerly the marketing man. The critical European, Asia Pacific and, above all, Latin American markets are well invested.

I had the pleasure a few months ago of speaking to the senior executives of one of the competing players in this sector. One of the questions from the floor was “What relevance does workflow have to an educational experience?”.  I am aware that my answer was not as coherent as it might have been: I hope this note makes it clearer that educational processes are a form of workflow, and that we seem to be moving towards pure demonstrations of that in software terms at a very fast rate.

About ten years ago I first saw prototypes of automated essay marking systems, then produced as research projects by that wonderful combination of research and assessment development, the Educational Testing Service (http://www.ets.org). This research has now blossomed into written assignment marking tools which are as widespread in the US examination system as they are rare in Europe and the rest of the world. But, and perhaps more importantly, they are starting to go mainstream in learning processes themselves, and this was clearly signified this week by the announcement of Write Experience by Cengage (http://www.cengagesites.com/academic/?site=4994&secid=3882). In a world where teachers cannot set written assignments in the quantities that they would like because they do not have sufficient time to mark them, this seems to plug into needs in the system at several different levels.

So what is Write Experience and what does it do? Using technologies rather broadly described as “artificial intelligence” (in fact eWrite IntelimetricWithin) it gives a real time guidance system to the essay writing process. The system makes suggestions (if it works like autotext then it could be seriously trying as well) and provides pointers and support. So far it is available in the US in Basic Writing, whatever that may be, and in a range of higher education business education contexts -accountancy, organizational behaviour, small business studies, strategic business management etc. Cengage promise a widening range of coverage: if they get the next elements right then a significant part of the future is here.

The next elements are the next three tools out of the box. Students who are hooked into MyTutor then move on through MyEditor, which explains mistakes, suggests other strategies and helps develop strategies for learning from them. Then comes the Performance Report element, which will be the piece which gives constant feedback and helps the student to appreciate where she is in the learning process, and then the Revision Plan, which re-integrates the learning activity for the user. Bear in mind that this is a first commercial launch, and clearly there is a great deal of progress to be made. The partnership of Cengage with McCann Associates is an interesting one, since the latter’s long association with GMAT testing has included the development of automated writing assignment marking systems and it is clearly their technology which is doing the heavy lifting here.

Elsewhere in the world we are still desperately convinced that it is content which does the trick and works the magic in terms of what we still, for want of a better expression, call “educational publishing”. But Pearson, and, here, Cengage, are clearly concerned to take bigger strides into unknown territory which concerns strategies for the future of learning and not for the maintenance of publishing formats. And, no, I am not saying that eBooks, resources, reference etc have no future here. Plugged into these learning systems they become mighty again, but unless you are a systems/platform developer then you simply license content for use in the context of workflow. That is a different business from the business publishers have now, with different quality of returns and earnings. Cengage seem to be clearly concerned to hold onto their centrality in the learning process and this must be right. Whether you take the view that the future of education belongs in the infrastructure layer (in which case Pearson and Cengage will be bought by Oracle, or IBM, or new-look HP) or not, some of the current crop of former publishing players must move strategically into the learning systems developer layer. Cengage, with Write Experience, seem to have the right strategy in mind.

So that is the topic that I do not choose to talk about. And I would have liked to talk about Facebook: everything in the social network devolves to video is a theory I have held for a long time. The Skype-Facebook alliance brings Microsoft back into play, but Google+, the social network, while it has few takers, has group video. The manifest destiny of social networks is video chat, and that is a subject for another day. Meanwhile, Facebook has seen its first net user declines. Watch this space.

Still with me? The most important issue of the week was definitely getting a copy of a new report on Market Sizing and forecasts for eBooks. I was delighted to see that this came from my erstwhile friends and colleagues at Outsell, not least because they have filled a real gap and we are all going to be grateful to them. As they would expect, I could argue with the forecasts, but so could most of us: the important thing is to have a forecast, based on historical data, which can be the focus of debate going forward. Outsell have decided to divide the market to be measured into three – consumer, educational and professional. This was very wise. They have also made the very first attempt that I have seen to get global estimates – Europe, Asia-Pacific and the USA will all be markedly different in their development in this area. It is comforting, after so many attempts at global trend analysis (thinly disguised US forecasting globally extrapolated) to see genuine attempts to understand players like Kodansha and fit them into the grid. The future is manga as well as Stephanie Meyer. So, inspired by these efforts, let me add a couple of thoughts on top:

• the three vertical sectors chosen are developing in markedly different directions. Having a global figure for market size is less important than tracking those differences.
• while I agree that children’s books will be a focus in consumer, surely the self-published efforts of Amanda Hockings, John Locke, et al, come in here ? At 99 cents and the huge volumes already indicated in this blog and others, they will profoundly change the US market. Amazon is probably the largest eBook player already.
• as we come to the end of the reprint/facsimile phase of eBooks for consumers, and move into it as an original publishing medium prepare to see these figures alter drastically. While I am sure that the report is quite correct in seeing eBooks as 3%+ of consumer sales in 2010, be prepared for 12% in 2011 (that self-published stuff must go in), and 50% by 2015. This will effectively reconstruct this side of the marketplace.
• then think of education solely in terms of portability. Moving textbooks to eBook is a short term factor , in my view, mostly driven by the cost of print textbooks. Moving content into VLEs and LMS storage and whiteboard re-utilization will be a big game when it is on, but in education’s full manifestation as a networked workflow in K-12, there will only be a limited role for this type of transfer technology. I expect to see market share go up to 10% and then start to decline.
• in the professional sector other thoughts come to mind. For example, this is where custom publishing via eBook is taking strongest root. So I expect to see continued steady growth to a 50:50 market by 2017, but in order to see this we have to measure Safari as well as McGraw Hill.

The report notes that many publishers feel happy with eBooks. They should be deeply disturbed, in my view. The eBook is a transitory phase, and anyone complacent enough to believe that it “solves” any of the underlying issues of movement to a networked, digital marketplace needs a strong cup of tea and a good talking to, as my mother would have said. It is already clear that the only thing that these three markets examined by Outsell have in common is that they all define the word “book” in “eBook” very differently. “Book” is the packaging word of the print world: calling something an “eBook” does not mean that publishers can regard it as a format environment in the same way. In current attitudes to ebooks, especially in those devoted to ePub3 who point to the newly announced standard as a breakthrough in multimedia publishing, there remains the hope that eBooks can become an extension of businesses which are primarily print-based and wish to see change at their own pace. The problem is that neither customers or self-publishers, or custom course content producers or anyone else, is going to wait for them.

In the meanwhile, we all need to know where we are on the change graph, and then we can begin to adjust our own strategies as we guage how fast the water is running. Outsell have done us all a real service in getting all the data together: now we need to acquire it and begin the internal argument from here.

Worldwide e-Books: Market Size and Forecast Report, 2009-2013 (June 30, 2011) (www.outsellinc.com)