Jan
16
Method and Madness
Filed Under Blog, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, Publishing, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
To the great BETT show in London on Friday, now the largest educational technology show in the world. Packed and lively as ever, and its sisal carpets as tiring on the feet as some mini-Frankfurt. So it was not surprizing that I suddenly decided to sit down on a stand in the Innovation Corridor and listen like a good kid to whatever that stand chose to tell me. That stand was featuring a guest appearance by Jan Webb, and after 20 minutes I was as keenly attentive as any tribal elder of the Lilongwe being addressed by David Livingstone, or some rude Saul on the road up to Damascus from Tarsus. For here, in twenty slides, was a convincing demo of K-6 self made learning, all using software generally and freely available, content supplied by class and teacher, and the whole lot referenced via the Resources section of the TES, for whom, I learnt afterwards, Ms Webb now works. Having gratefully put myself in the hands of Teacher, what did I learn? Simply that there are more than enough free or cheap ways to manipulate content into lesson plans and lessons to revolutionize the primary school curriculum. That while teachers will be providing the pedagogy, learners can explore collaboratively or individually and the toolset provides the spine of the activity. We started by making some posters. http://edu.glogster.com came into its own there, allowing us to integrate text, music and video into our work, and just when I wished we had a wall to put them on, Ms Webb produced www.wallwisher.com for that very purpose. I noticed incidentally that some of these sites are beginning to add their own content for education: look at www.freeeslmaterials.com in conjunction with this poster background site. Want to add some sticky post-its – turn to http://linoit.com. Get the kids collaborating around these activities – you can go to www.stixy.com. But really collaboration is all over the place: Ms Webb pointed to www.twiddla.com for team whiteboarding, as well as www.123.whiteboard.c0m and www.dabbleboard.com. Finally and joyfully, under this tutelage, I have been improving my drawing skills on www.dumpr.net and, very happily, creating my own comics on www.comicmaster.org.uk.
And there are some real lessons in all of this. As a result, and almost freely (dumpr cost me $20) I now appreciate exactly why I have been saying for two years that the school textbook is a dodo. The richness of the tools and the potential in the screen-based learning experience bear real witness to this. Schools themselves can put together effective learning experiences very cheaply both to energize learners in every subject and level, and to support less able or confident teachers. TES Resources has led the way by creating a national signposting system to great teacher-produced lessons, effectively peer-reviewed by teachers. So lets stop producing textbooks, digital or otherwise, and start producing improved learning experiences? Is that the message? Well, in many ways it is. Just as teachers are moving into new roles, so are publishers. The best work that I have seen in education in the last year comes not from the great and the good of textbook publishing in the 1960s, when I practised it myself with more energy than effectiveness, but from services like Alfiesoft (supporting teachers in testing and marking and reporting: www.alfiesoft.com) and innovators like www.rendezvu.com, pushing out the boundaries around testing proficiency in a spoken language.
As I wandered away from the inspiring Jan Webb, a young woman stopped me in the crowded aisles and pressed into my hands a free…. newspaper. I was so shocked that I gulped and grasped it, and then said “thank-you”, before enquiring whether the schoolchildren who were about to receive it free as a result of a special offer would recognize it for what it was. After all most of them come from homes unvisited by such a thing. However, she said helpfully that kids knew they were the things you found in bins outside of petrol stations, so I thought it OK to take a copy of First News home and examine it. It certainly is a tabloid newspaper all right. Very little content and no learning. After Ms Webb I baulked at paying £875 per year for a class set of 32 copies of a non-collaborative, uncreative, non-experience. Then I did a little research. The paper is edited by a former BBC magazine publisher and its Editorial Director is Piers Morgan, erstwhile tabloid editor of the Daily Mirror and now the delight of US chat shows. His dark arts are everywhere evident, from the claim to a million readers every week (small print: Source – First News Readership Survey) to the picture of the Queen, the Union Jack – and David Cameron – on the front page. No ads and no topless girls, however. This whole confection is financed by Steve and Sarah Jane Thomson, who successfully sold their advertising monitoring bureau, Thomson Intermedia, to the eBiquity Group and now run Addictive Interactive, a “bespoke social loyalty platform”.
So how can we blame the textbook publishers for not changing their ways when someone thinks there is still a business selling newspapers to schoolchildren? I don’t think Ms Webb would have one in her classroom – unless the pupils had made it themselves.
Jan
5
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Filed Under B2B, Blog, data protection, eBook, Education, eLearning, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Pearson, privacy, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, Thomson, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
My holiday reading, courtesy of Skip Pritchard who gave it to me, has been Michael Korda’s vast biography of T E Lawrence, and despite my familiarity with the story, I have found it an entrancing experience. Lawrence is almost impossible to reconstruct, since he shone a different light in the direction of every individual he met, and one is left feeling that nowhere does a real Lawrence exist. So very like the information game, then! Every observer sees a different fraction of play, and no one can predict the outcome. This comment is meant to mask my residual guilt at reading my book while my knee mended and not writing pages of forecasts and predictions for the amusement of readers, and to confirm my frailties as a prophet of anything.
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!
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