Jan
22
Things we said today…
Filed Under Blog, Education, eLearning, internet, Publishing | 2 Comments
In the second week in January I always seem to find myself at the very remarkable BETT. This UK trade show in London has become a world class venue for information technology for education, and while it sometimes lacks the just invented feel of Educa Online in Berlin each December, it has the glitz and polish that reminds you that whatever the ICT “deny-ers” may say, schools now run on networks and software just like the rest of our society, and that the suppliers of these goods and services make up a very considerable industry, with huge export implications, and an already globalized marketplace. Only the British Secretary of State for Education is forced into the humiliating position of saying that the curriculum must be revised to ensure that British kids learn more “facts” by heart through approved “traditional” education methods. But then, the British Conservative Party always had a schizophrenic view of education: it was always OK to go to Eton and its ilk, because they did not take education too far, but it was dangerous to expose the working classes to very much of it…
I digress. The thing that kept going through my mind as I trailed around the thronged halls behind Japanese delegations and Brazilian headteachers and parties of ICT teachers from Rochdale and Worksop on a day out in the Big City was the sameness of our messages about the benefits of IT in schools. We are making the same claims now as we made 30 years ago, yet now we have the experience and the timelines over which some real proofs can be offered. Remembering the things we said when the Beatles were around, we seem to have spoken about a greater degree of productivity, about allowing unattainable degrees of personalized learning, and escaping from the rigidity of “chalk and talk” to a world where we could make the child’s experience of learning more consistent. And we still are.
I listened with rapt attention while a nice man from Dell told me that 90% of what we stored was never recalled in any context. As little as that, I thought, remembering the dire forecasts of the ’60s and ’70s when IT was going to so radically change our working practises that half the workforce would lose their jobs and that the end result was greater employment. We always need more people to mind the machines. Mostly we re-invent the old processes inside the new ones, so only now is the whiteboard in the classroom beginning to do new things. And the VLE, which like the whiteboard sits in every school in the UK? Are we using the technology residue of a decade of catch-up funding in UK schools to really do anything different?
I found myself getting gloomy, so went to sit down in a lecture space. When I woke up, the Man from Newent was on the stage, and I found him hugely impressive. He runs IT in Newent Community School in my native Gloucestershire, and seems to be making an excellent job of it. He said that if your VLE is not delivering on the promises made, then Tomorrow will really sound just like Today. He told us that to be valuable the VLE must be central, so a good place to start was to survey all of the devices used by pupils and make sure they were connected to the hub. He taught us to accept small and not revolutionary advances, as long as the advances were sustainable. He wanted us to coax the VLE into the centre of performance management and measurement in our schools, so it was professionally as well as didactically important. He wanted to use the students as his shock troops and he wanted a sold-in teacher representative in each department of the school. And above all he wanted to see the VLE populated with bought-in, SCORM-compliant resources which could be used as starting points for lesson-planning. He showed us Nelephone and Nelevision, his branding of output and services from Nele – the Newent eLearning Environment. He showed his Bluetooth hub squirting out homework assignments on demand, he pointed out the revenue stream from feeder primary schools in his area to whom he could sell transitional content, he talked about virtualizing his server capacity, and when at length, after an hour of this excellent (though front of class, non-experiential) teaching I wandered out into the aisles – and renewed disappointment.
Let me, I said, now notionally stock the NeleVLE with wonderful resources, all SCORM compliant. After an age of wandering around blended learning solutions until I felt my head had been through a blender, I at length encountered Global Grid for Learning on the Cambridge University Press stand (http://www.globalgridforlearning.com). At last: huge files of copyright-cleared or free content to sit adjacent to the VLE and allow teachers to download under subscription or on-demand terms – and allow pupils to find content within a closed environment that is not the Wild West Open pornoWeb that teachers and Conservative ministers fear so much. This has been described elsewhere by a far better education analyst than I (https://clients.outsellinc.com/insights/index.php?p=11374) And then, not on any stand at all, I bumped into my friend Davd Gardner, founder of DDL (http://www.ddluk.com/), whose ePortfolio technology at last makes sense of much of the rubbish talked about personalized learning. And since Mr Gardner’s exhibition area was in the Hand and Flowers pub over the road, I came away from BETT in a very much happier frame of mind.
Jan
9
Decline and Fall of the Google Empire
Filed Under B2B, Blog, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, online advertising, Search, semantic web, Uncategorized | 2 Comments
In the course of this year I need to find a local source of shredding services in my desperate fight to stop this hut from drowning in paper. By the end of the year I shall need to have bought a new car. In the idle twilight between Christmas and new year I found myself Googling on both of these topics – and the process took longer and took me to more places than I had ever imagined. And I read more advertising, dodgy reviews and spam than I had ever imagined, so when I read that Paul Kedrosky had had an identical experience (http://broadstuff.com/archives/2370-On-the-increasing-uselessness-of-Google……html) then I perked up a bit. It is always good to find really clever people reacting just as you did. I then discovered a whole band of bloggers through December and January basically arguing that the Web of spam and misleading search of a decade ago, which Google had cleaned up effectively in its early days, had now returned to haunt us – on Google.
Whether this is the fault of Google is debatable. Some argue that it is SEO which causes the damage, others that it is the insatiable hunger for Google advertising. Some appear to think that a search environment without advertising will do the trick, and Vivek Wadhwa at UC Berkeley argues convincingly for Blekko (http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/01/why-we-desperately-need-a-new-and-better-google-2/). Both of these blogs demonstrate key facets of the debate, but, to my mind, the debate they are having is couched in the wrong terms entirely. What we must think about is not who replaces Google, but whether keyword searching has a future.
Now I must declare a prejudice. I have never been a huge fan of keyword searching. My experience of search began in the early 1980s, when as a (younger) Thomson manager I was deputed to build an online service for lawyers. We used a search package called STATUS which had been created for the UK’s Atomic Energy Research Establishment to search UK statutes and statutary instruments for references to the enactments which had set up the AERE. Both inventors worked for me, one as an advisor, the other as my CTO. Both warned me daily of the insufficiency of the system we were operating to do more than find words in documents, and not to fall victim to the idea that we were thereby creating “answers” or “solutions”. The result was that I was never a victim of the “myth of infallability ” that pervaded early web search engines and became an essential Google quality in the past 5 years. Infallable? A system that cannot distinguish the grossly out of date from today, that can be spoofed into presenting advertising copy as answers, or that can represent anything except a thought or a concept?
As a result of this early innoculation, my sights have long been set on finding search solutions, so I checked back with some of my legal market successors this week to see how they were faring. Was Google law going to sweep them away? Would the service principles of Google Scholar once applied to law, as Google have claimed, create universal free service values that would separate the lawyer from his dependence on subscription based legal retrieval engines? Not so, I learnt from Lexis Nexis. In fact, the opposite is the case. The body of law is finite, its authorship necessarily limited. In any legal domain, the retrieval engine investment is now dedicated towards tagging content with semantic metadata, developing the inference rules within the ontological structure created when taxonomies are being refined and redeveloped, and emerging as semantic search players. As law is increasingly defined in conceptual blocks which can be developed as a classification system for the ideas and arguments that lie behind legal concepts, systems are emerging which owe little to the world that Google still inhabit. And what Lexis (and undoubtedly Westlaw) are doing today will be the way in which law offices search contextually in their own and third party content tomorrow.
Is this just a law market phenomenon? Well, the techniques and ideas mentioned here have been very heavily involved in scientific research, especially in the life sciences, for the past five years. The whole standards environment created by Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web council predicted this development and the search engine software SPARQL is an experimental exemplar of a direction taken by a number of semantic search start-ups. The drawback has been the tendency for searching on concepts to become very domain-focussed, where taxonomy can be more precise and concepts easier to describe. But as we move forward, this may be the next big push behind vertical search. Despite (or because) we have stopped talking about them, community-based vertical sector players like Globalspec have been able to take a strong grip on the way in which professionals work in a sector like engineering. Once community activity – making engineering design specs available for cross-searching – becomes susceptible to semantic enquiry, the ability of vertical business players to lock in users and establish themselves as the performance benchmark (and compliance engine) of the sector becomes realistic. The scenario that results from this is sometimes monopolistic, often duopolistic, seldom capable of sustaining rafts of competing content players.
So Google remains in place just as a consumer environment? No, I think that Facebook and its successors become the consumer research environment. Search by asking someone you know, or at least have a connection with, and get recommendations and references which take you right to the place where you buy. Search in mobile environments is already taking too long and throwing up too many false leads. Anyone here used a shredding company in South Bucks? How did you rate them? How do I contact them? I have this fantasy that I mention “Google” to my grandchildren and they say “did you mean the phone company?” What is the best strategy job in the industry: the one that defines the line of migration for Google out of search and towards the next big marketplace (pity they missed Groupon!).
« go back — keep looking »