Dec

3

Slowly back to Earth

Filed Under B2B, Blog, Education, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, STM, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Or at least to the hut.  And I wasn’t the victim of mirage between here and Germany, since I had a cup of coffee with a very real Richard Charkin on the way back.  He had been with Berlin Verlag, and as always re-routed my speculations about recent events down entirely different lines from those that I had thought obvious, or at least  likely.  So when I reached my seat on the plane I did begin to rethink a great deal , and so relaxed into restful and much needed sleep.

Several things were clear when I woke up.  In the first instance we are coming out of recession just as we did in 2000-2002.  Internet services are once again leading the charge, and Monday was a real eye-opener in this regard.  Hopefully this time we shall see major plays in cross-border services development in Europe.  This certainly seemed the case on Monday.  All these companies were start-ups in the past five years: none of them owed anything to existing media players except where they needed to trade legacy content.

Then again, in Berlin, you could see the start-ups but not the traditional players (excepting only Pearson, as I said yesterday).  So is it really true that publishers are not investing in next generation educational developments?  No , not at all, but it is true that publishers start from the point of view of creating the successor to yesterday’s marketplace by building electronic content in the shape of an eTextbook , or a blended learning environment.  So at least two pictures of the future are in contention here: in one the teacher is still directing the learning process, though now doing it digitally.  In the other, the learning process is pursued by learners or groups of learners, moderated by teachers or assistants.  This gap is as wide as that between textbook publishing and what we then called ” resource – based learning ” in the late 1960s, which was when I entered educational publishing.  We returned in the 1980s to the textbook: will the same happen in a digital world?

And then, between these events, I spent a day walking around Online at Olympia.  And there I felt, once more, that content was becoming less important in a digital age, and that secondary aggregation through licensing would fill most requirements.  The real priority in business and professional markets was to create the service environment.  This is light years from the crusade fought by my old Chairman, Michael Brown, at Thomson when we scoured the earth to buy, usually pretty expensively, ” have-to-have and need-to-know ” content, that was owned by us and proprietary to us.  I left Online more concerned than ever that players who could not migrate to the service level would be left with only one option – to rent content to those who could.  And that means that however powerful and proprietary the content , its owner was exposed to the risks of losing touch with end-users and being ” emulated ” by those who do not care to pay for content, but who believe it can all be reconstructed from the Web.

I had a bottle of champagne on the plane, not to celebrate the sidelining of traditional publishing, but as a symbolic gesture marking the thought that we must not allow ourselves to go gentle into that good night …

Dec

2

Winter Unter den Linden

Filed Under Blog, Education, Publishing | Leave a Comment

The conference season blows hot and strong.  Here is the third in three days, necessitating a 4 am awakening to get to Berlin.  Did I dream that I met and shook hands with Richard Charkin on the plane, or was it just my reverence for  that master blogger in these, my tyro years, that made him manifest himself there, as if he were asking “You’ve started, but do you, like me, know when to stop?”

Plainly the answer at present is negative.  I came here to Berlin to help in an ELIG session at Educa. This latter is a major educational software and learning systems show, full of real innovators and few publishers barring Pearson. ELIG is the European Learning Industry Group, a trade body created to represent the whole learning enterprise to Europe’s governments.  Today we were in the experienced hands of Richard Straub, its ex-IBM co-chair, and Matty Smith, in a symposium designed to stress test and sharpen ELIG’s manifesto.  In a meeting room at the InterContinental we had some 60 participants from all sides of the business of learning.  The wonderfully diverse Roland Deiser led off in typical fashion, but never revealed how you maintain a positon as a senior fellow at USC Annenburg’s Centre for the Digital Future in LA while being at once founder and chairman of the European Corporate Learning Forum.  He was ably supported by Mike Morris of Cisco and Mick Slivecko of IBM.  Incidentally, Cisco and its governing councils emerged as important avatars of change in the networked world.

Bringing up the tail were that passionate advocate of change, Fabrizio Cardinali. (CEO of Giunti Labs and ELIG’s other co-chair) and this blogger.  I tried to re-emphasize the shift in relative power from provider to user, reminding the group that we are all publishers now.  In the early years of online, when the battles were around content, the block to progress was often the elitism of some librarians.  Today it is some teachers who perform this function.  Education is the last frontier for the networked society: teachers have to be prepared to move from instructor to mentor, becoming ringmasters and advisors in a learning experience increasingly directed by the learner.

If the battles ahead are around behaviours and skills, and I supported other speakers in that view, then we must stop leaving the skills base at the classroom door.   We want citizens with better reasoning powers, with good spatial location sense, with enhanced estimating skills, with a taste for enquiry-led learning, and, above all, with a sense of the collaborative nature of the network.  The fact that these are all attributes of video games – and serious gaming – means that those things as well belong in the learning cycle.

We can all find short-term drivers of change, and here the Compliance word waxed strong.  But this is Trend, not Vision.  We were all convinced that digital revolution everywhere would complete when the education fortress fell, but at present the defenders of the status quo seemed to hold most of the firepower, especially in recession.  ELIG needed to come back with a bigger picture, and it had to be about society and values , not just productivity and ROI.

You will find more in this vein on the ELIG site in due course. It remains true that we are all still far from enunciating the full vision, but this session provided some strong  insights in how to flesh that out.

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