Mar
24
Eyeless in Gaza
Filed Under eBook, Education, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, Uncategorized, Workflow | 2 Comments
Apologies for an enforced absence . Minor eye surgery took longer to heal than anticipated , so I was left in the dark for two whole weeks . Imagine it : the horrifying compound growth of email , the buckets of spam , the listserv viral multiplication . Oh , the agony of life without the delete key !
In my darkness a kindly amanuensis has intervened to warn me that tomorrow They will call to ask me about “The Future of the Textbook “. They have sent 10 questions , apparently . They say I could answer them with my eyes shut , which may be fortunate this week . They also say that I am to concentrate on the 10 years out scenario. I love research when I am asking the questions , but , somehow , I feel a bit worried about providing the answers . Do you mind if , like Old Tiresias beneath the wall of crumbling Troy , I count my beads in public for a space and soundlessly mouth some types of answers ?
Crumbling Troy ? Surely the age of the textbook is over . In ten years there will not be a textbook market , but a market in networked mass customization of learning objects , held in commercial stores but also freely created by teachers online and traded between teachers . Lesson planning softeware , deriving objects from stores , from teacher networks , and from VLE/LMS environments where these survive in open network usage , will enable teachers to create and trade learning journies/pathways designed for particular ability levels or learning problems . As education becomes more self-applied in older age ranges , higher education and vocational training , so these pathways will be increasingly designed by their users .Learning plans will have assessment and diagnostic tools on board , with the opportunity to rehearse or create new pathways of greater intensity to accomplish remedial requirements . Where these learning workflows are developed by teachers for learners , only a small proportion of teachers will be the creatives , but the work of peer schools and teachers will be widely acknowledged and imitated and customized in other contexts .
So how will textbook publishers survive here ? The answer is that most of them won’t .Like newspaper publishers in the last five years we shall hear them intone ” Textbook content is king ” and “No one feels safe without a textbook ” until it is obvious to all that like Tom and Jerry in a madcap chase , they have run off the cliff edge and only the violent oscillation of their feet will keep them from plunging into the valley floor . Which they then inevitably do .
Some publishers have hedged this change . Pearson will sell textbooks until the end , but I suspect that long before that Pearson’s Learning Solutions , providing contracted -in school consortia systems integration to cope with these new workflows , will be the dominant revenue source . Elsewhere others have grasped enough of the point to go to interim customization, with Safari Books and Macmillan’s new Dynamic Textbooks demonstrating some of the range of possibilities .
This change to the personalized learning route is independent of gadgets . iPad will not revolutionize it , or iPhone or Android or anything else . These access modes will create accessibility , and add access features , but the learning services requirement here is more about the network than the device . Collaboration between learners is a key element here.And it is all about mark-up , standards and accessible objects . Most of these are already in place .
Who will win here ? Two or three integrated software/content houses with global markets will dominate . Pearson plus who ? Small software players offering enhanced user experiences will rip across the market like comets , but mostly end up as acquisitions for the big players , or widely emulated feature sets . About a third of content in the market will be created as proprietory objects , another third available to teachers by local school board/authority licensing deals – and the rest will be free and Web-located. The major role for “publishers ” , if we use such an archaic term , will be in locating , indexing and relating suitable objects , and sometimes encouraging teachers to invent new ones if required . Come to think of it , to behave like educational publishers used to do when they sought to s eflect the best practice of the best schools back to the rest .
I could go on , but having had more light today than I am used to , I need to stop . What do you say ? One last question ? Will blended learning prevail ? Since I am on record as saying that blended learning is as much an oxymoron as military intelligence , I am surprized that you ask . The only thing that blends properly is coffee . If you are suggesting that blended learning is as interesting as instant coffee then I might agree . But other markets show us likely patterns : when people grasp the digital point they very soon go for it unadulterated .
Mar
10
Contains No Nuts
Filed Under B2B, Blog, internet, online advertising, Publishing, STM, Uncategorized | 1 Comment
I am used to the questions . Many arise from a need to challenge or or a need for re-assurance or a fear of silence . So the person who asked , this week , ” what is the technology launch that is the best indicator of media futures ?” , wanted , I think , something like ” iPad , or , err , something else mobile-ish….”.This would have helped her view that she is afloat on a sea of uncertainty , but bobbing in the right direction .
My answer is the Cisco CRS-3 , the newest router which really equips the internet as an integrator of digital video (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2011300638_cisco10.html) . It could , say Cisco , move the entire Library of Congress in one second , or the entire archive of every film ever made in four minutes . But the thing that fascinates me at the moment is the way in which networks with embedded technologies like this will remove the volume/speed excuse that has traditionally lain beneath the reluctance of niched information providers to give whole solutions to user problems/demands . This is no where more obvious than in STM , which is where my second question arose .
“Well, ” he said , ” you clearly took a shine to Globalspec : what is the equivalent in STM and why are they any better than we are “. I ignored the challenge implicit here , and replied that my pick in STM over a decade had been Nature Publishing , and this was about attitude . ” Full of geeks and nerds , eh ? ” Not at all , I replied ( mentally writing the title to this piece as I did so),
but it is certainly true that they are very quickly responsive to change , and experiment publicly in beta and in conjunction with their users until they find useful combinations that fit . Clearly therefore the new Nature iPhone App ( http://www.nature.com/mobileapps/) is not the end of the story , but it demonstrates Nature’s keen concern to get involved , early on and with an open mind , and strive to create utility for their users . This was the case with Connotea , their ground-breaking social tagging environment , with Scintilla , their news-tagging activity , with Nature Networks and with the network local hubs . It seems to me that the attitude here is service -orientated and not product -centric , and that the logic says that users who are involved in service developments and have a stake in them are less likely to go elsewhere , especially if they started with Nature as grad students .
This does not mean that more traditional business development activities can be ignored . Nature has to be top of the heap in quality terms . Over a decade its content coverage has improved mightily and , through its associated publishing , it is now well on the way to core coverage across the “hard ” sciences . In one sense nothing is more traditional than recruitment advertising : once an area of neglect this is now a keystone of the arch and a factor which helps cement the Nature community together . I predicted to my interlocutor that I thought education would be a continuing interest , and that I was vitally concerned to see how Nature was able in time to make rafts of multiple media experimental evidential data available to users . Their Gateway strategy , from Cell Signalling and Neuroscience , had led the way in this field : when , I wondered , would it become the norm for research published by Nature to be linked to the evidential databases behind the work .
He leapt upon “education “. ” You mean Second Nature on Second Life – if we had all gone there we would be bankrupt “. Well , I have no idea what Nature has spent with Second Life , but I do know that when people like me stop writing about things , then other people tend to think that they have ceased to exist . Plainly wrong . Traded revenues on Second Life in 2009 totalled , in real world dollars , 567 million , a 65% increase on the previous year . And in December , with 770,000 unique users during the month , residents/users checked out $ 55 million in earnings converted into cash . Not centre stage , but certainly not dead ( see also .http://lindenlab.com/pressroom/releases/22_09_09 )
And no doubt Nature will be pursuing other educational initiatives : pulling Scientific American under the same management is undoubtedly a step forward in this regard. While continually consolidating and refining their offerings through the lessons taught by their users , I have also no doubt that their tradition of experimentation will continue to thrive in a company increasing divergent from its peers in this respect . Elsewhere the impact of technology , while far-reaching , has often been isolated from the thinking about editorially constructing a research journal . But then , Nature was always more than just a research journal .
Last word with Google . In the week of the Cisco announcement , they indicated an experiment with Dish to create Google TV-Search (http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10465956-93.html ) , a way of intercombining a Google search and a set-top box , while TiVo announced new digital video recorders which bring back video from the Web . This is the next New Frontier : we need to calculate the impact on the expectations of users in B2B, STM or other areas of business and professional information now , while we are at the on-ramp , not when we are facing new competitors . This is what Nature have done so well .
PS In my note Viva , Las Vegas , and here , I have tried to emphasize the continuing importance of virtual reality , so it was good to see UBM relaunch the Comdex compueter show as VR only(.http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10463726-93.html )
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