The Education Business Blog

By Randy Wilhelm, CEO Thinkronize - Guest Blogger

Did George Washington's dog play multiplication math games with Abraham Lincoln's animals during the Civil War?

I would guess the answer is a resounding no. However, a new Index reveals the most popular keywords that K-12 students are searching for on the Internet. It includes these terms in the top 15. netTrekker d.i.’s quarterly “Top 15 In-School Search Index” for spring 2008 will be announced on Wednesday, with Games coming in at #1, Dogs at #2 and George Washington, at #5.

Search engines like Google™ and Yahoo® frequently pull together lists of the most popular keyword queries, underscoring our nation’s interests and fixations and showcasing trends and patterns. This index, however, offers a different view—a real-time school-based mirror of what our children are searching for—both for academic purposes and out of genuine curiosity.

With five school age kids of my own, an academically curious wife and wireless-device-addicted me, I think our humble family averages about 50 searches a day. And, as my sons are crazy about electronic games and occasionally pine for another dog – I can certainly understand the top results of the netTrekker d.i. ranking. Although it would have been heartening to see more academic search terms in the top 5, it is comforting to know that kids will be kids, whether at school or at home.

Every day, across the nation, our digitally native students are punching search terms into their school’s Internet browsers. Now, with this first-ever quarterly index, we have new insight into what our nation’s students are learning about, care about and want to know more about.

Following are the top 15 most active keyword searches in schools for the spring quarter, from February through April, 2008:

Rank Keyword
1 Games
2 Dogs
3 Animals
4 Civil War
5 George Washington
6 Holocaust
7 Abraham Lincoln
8 Multiplication
9 Math Games
10 Weather
11 Frogs
12 Fractions
13 Planets
14 Sharks
15 Plants

About Thinkronize - They are the creators of netTrekker d.i. the #1 K-12 safe search engine.
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Lee's Comment

For publishers, teachers, and students who are building on-line activities this index will be a great asset. By using these popular search terms as starting points for long-tail keyword phrase mining you will be able to find phrases that are easy to rank high on.

The Dig function in Wordze is one place this would be invaluable. For example - if you start with "George Washington" you can find 3094 phrases that are possibly related. While George Washington" would be extremely difficult to rank for (30,000+ searches a month and 18,700,000 pages) "George Washington Biography" has much less competition (3,899 searches a month and 440,000 pages). Quantitatively this means the second phrase has 10% of the search volume but only 2% of the competition. With web savvy writing you could create content that would surface at the top of that list much more easily than plain "george washington."

Big kudos and thanks to nettrekker for creating this index.

The reaction of many parents and educators to the idea of playing games in school is horror. School is supposed to be serious hard work. What these people don't know is that in modern video games doing tasks repetitively to slowly build skills and status is the norm not the exception. These games are all about "hard" play.

Gamers have a term for this - grinding. Grinding is spending two months getting your mining skills up so that you can make a special suit of armor for your friends. Grinding is repeatedly doing some menial chore for a faction so you can earn status with them and get access to skills they can teach you.

Educators also have a term of art for this kind of activity - they call it building fluency. We learn most of the hardest skills in life through a slow process of accretion that amounts to building fluency. According to reading experts a child needs to read several million words in order to become a fluent reader.

Accelerated Reader is essentially a game about reading that is a long steady grind. Like a game you get rapid feedback, frequent promotions, and status from completing the tasks. It didn't get to be "the world's most widely used reading software" by mistake.

But the concept of fluency goes far beyond reading. Learning to play an instrument, writing, using a knife, flirting, skateboarding and thousands of other human activities all share the need to grind it out over time to develop that effortless fluency that is the mark of an expert.

This raises the question of why a child would engage in the grind to fluency? My theory, based on gamer culture, is that it is a critical part of building identity. Players will do routine and menial tasks over and over again to build the story line of their character in the game. It is a fundamental building block of identity - if it was easy there would be no status associated with becoming fluent.

How does this apply to school? Many (not all) low performing students don't have a story thread in their lives that helps motivate them to grind in school (doing homework). Students who are high achievers generally have a story line that is central to their identity that gives the grind meaning and a purpose. Without that story line much school work is just tedium.

If this is true (a big if) what is role of publishers in helping educators and parents guide students to the stories that will motivate them? I believe our role is to bring new tools and approaches to bear that have more story embedded in them, stories that students can appropriate and make their own as they build their identity.

If you want clues on how to do that - you only need to head down to your local Game Stop.

Information overload is one of the defining trends of the last 10 years. The explosion of email, social media, and cellular technologies have created 24/7 leashes that drown us in information.

As publishers (and citizens) we have a responsibility to help today's kids build good information habits in this new world.

I've written elsewhere about how our old behavior patterns make this worse than it needs to be. The question for today is - are you managing your information diet or is the information managing you?

When you sit down to your Cheerios tomorrow morning will you read the paper or will you read a book? In the paper you HOPE to learn something - anything really. If you have picked out a book you INTEND to learn something - something specific you can use.

It is the same 30 minutes a day but at the end of a month the newspaper reader will have garnered some gossip and a few insights along with recycled conventional wisdom on the editorial pages. The book reader will have challenged their thinking in some very specific ways that will help them grow, learn, and help others.

There is a place for randomness in your information diet - but with so much information at our fingertips today this can be a much smaller portion of our information diet than it used to be.

This is one small example of what the "low information diet" looks like. For those of us in the education publishing world we really have to start thinking about how we build these new skills into our products. This is doubly hard for us because most of us are built our habits in the old paradigm.

Try not reading the newspaper for the next two weeks and substituting something you have been wanting to learn but putting off. Check in with yourself at the end of the experiment and see how it went.

PS - Go ahead - read the funnies and do the crossword.

Blog years and dog years have a lot in common. They go fast, take constant care and feeding, and bring companionship and warmth into your life. Dogs force you to get up and move your body, blogs force you to get out and work your mind.

Social media are reshaping the business landscape and I've never found a better way of learning something than just wading in and messing with it. Under the tutelage of my blogfather Richard Carey and the folks at Justia I launched this site last May.

So what have I learned?

1. It works. 11,528 people interacting with my ideas has helped my business immensely (see stats below). As Jim Bower over at Numdeon is fond of saying - "it isn't about eyeballs, it is about eyeballs connected to brains." Half of my clients come from web referrals and the trend-line is up. It is far better than advertising and its "free." At April's rate there will be 24,000+ visits in the coming year.

2. Writing for a public sharpens your thinking in all contexts. Personally this has been the most rewarding part of blogging. It has forced me to organize and articulate my thoughts on key issues that affect our industry. It is far different than internal corporate writing, blog articles stand or fall on their own merits.

3. Focus = Traction. To succeed a blog has to have a clearly defined audience. I always try to bring my posts back to what the topic means for the companies that serve the education market. If you search on "education business consultant" or "K12 education marketing consultant" this blog is #1 or #2 in Google. That happens because Google rewards sustained focus and original content.

4. Networking is part of the job. Blogging is all about a conversation - know who your peers are and engage with them. Read about related industries and bring the insight back to ours. I use my blog roundups to share things other bloggers are saying that I think are relevant. Some of the most popular posts on the site also came from guest bloggers (thanks Randy, NT, and Paul).

5. Mix up depth and breadth to keep it interesting. People like the depth a 4-5 part series can bring to a topic, but for everyday browsing they also like short pieces that engage their interest.

6. Make it personal. This medium is all about being genuine. Speak your mind, share your story, and be real. Every few months I post what I'm listening to on my iPod - and I get a lot of positive feedback about it even though it isn't on topic. I also enjoy putting in human interest pieces and humor - but that is also part of my personality.

7. Key words matter - a lot. Learning to write blog posts is an art - and doing it well without it looking artificially structured to parse in a search engine isn't always easy. Knowing what words to use and where to use them in your articles is a skill you need to master.

8. Links and visual cues bring a post alive. Having quality links to support your arguments (or provide alternative viewpoints) adds credibility. Picking a graphic that amplifies the message also helps a lot. There are tons of free or near free images out there today so you have no excuse.

9. Good tools make it easier. I use Ecto to draft posts - it allows me to work off-line and is seamlessly integrated with iPhoto and Amazon. Movable Type isn't as user friendly as I'd like it to be - Ecto makes up for that and then some.

10. Patience. Gaining traction takes time - there is no short cut around this. It takes about 20 posts before the search engines take you seriously - with the 10's of thousands of new blogs started every day this is just common sense. But even after you have build a corpus of posts it takes time for people to discover you and become regulars. Don't be discouraged early on.

My thanks go out to those who helped me get started on this path and to the many readers who have provided feedback and encouragement as this adventure has unfolded.

The most popular posts from the last year:

1. Education Publishing - A Wave of Change Sweeps Over the Industry (multi part series)
2. Information Overload (how to build materials for the 21st century - multi-part series)
3. Teachers and the Internet - Five Things You Should Know
4. Lifelong Learning - Retired Construction Worker Deciphers Stonehenge Construction
5. Where is the Wii for Education?
6. Textbooks vs. Education Technology - Clash of Paradigms
7. Target Market Selection
8. The Future of Education Publishing - Panel Report from the Education Industry Investment Forum
9. Ethics Video Game - Using Frankenstein to Teach Ethics?
10. Are We Producing New Education Entrepreneurs

Some stats from the last year.

11,528 visits - This does not include RSS. Not having Feedburner set up from the get go was a mistake. We are putting it in place now.

19,740 page views. This might seem low, but since the landing page is the blog this makes sense. Most people go there, read the latest posts, and move on. Again - without Feedburner this the low end.

1:38 minutes is the average time on the site. This means 314 hours of people interacting with my ideas (or 40 eight hour days). This is a highly leveraged use of my time. Consider these alternatives

• At 7 minutes prep and talk time per call (assuming you got through on the first call) this would take 168 eight hour days.
• To get this kind of engagement via direct mail with a 1.5% response rate it would take 768,000 mail pieces.
• To reach this number of people by speaking at conferences with an average room count of 100 it would take 115 presentations.
• You get the idea.
• Actual time on task - 2-3 hours a week (or 16 eight hour days a year).

122 countries. 71% are from the US. Others in the top 10 are Canada, UK, India, Australia, Singapore, Philippines, Malaysia, Germany, and China. I love going into the mapview in Google Analytics to see where people have come from. It took me forever to hit all 50 states - Montana and Delaware were the hold outs! Globally Tibet, Cambodia, the Stans, Syria, Central Africa, Greenland, Guyana, and Uruguay are still terra incognita for this blog.

95% of readers were on a high speed connection. I no longer worry about putting video and other high bandwidth links in my posts. I'm toying with doing some v-casts as well.

79% of users were on Windows, 20% on Macs 1 % on Linux. 7 People came in on a phone and 1 came from a Playstation (WTF?). Why the oversampling of Macs? It probably has something to do with Education being the target market.

5% of users were on 800x600 screens. It looks like we could have comfortably designed for a minimum of 1024x768 and hit 95% of the users.

It has been a while since I did a round up of blog articles, time to clean a few items out. Rather than dump a long list I've picked four articles I've found particularly interesting in the past few weeks.

Matt Mihaly over at The Forge notes that MMO's/Virtual Worlds are some of the most valuable private tech firms in the world. I would add to Matt's observation that 3 of the 4 firms he cites in the top 20 are for kids. Silicon Alley Insider's original article is here.

Chris Anderson over at The Long Tail has an interesting take on the decline of the newspaper industry that is directly relevant to education publishing. Sure, readership is down, but at $45b it is still twice as big as Google and Yahoo combined. The money quote:

The truth is that the newspaper business is still a huge industry and will be around in one form or another for the rest of my life. That is not to dismiss the declines, but only to note that there's still a lot of money there and what is required is strategic change, not giving up the ghost.

New information is like opium? Wikipedia as an act of love? Will Richardson, as ever, is interesting.

The Happy Worker Kit - coming to an office near you soon. Funny.

Virtual Reality and Education have a long and checkered history.

On-line worlds give students opportunities to experience things that would be too expensive, too dangerous, or too time consuming in the "real" world. It allows us to distill an experience into it's essence while allowing learners to be active agents rather than passive recipients.

That said I would argue that the word "virtual" has little or no meaning for today's students. It is an artifact from a time when the internet was not a pervasive presence. In todays on-line social spaces teens are making friends, sharing experiences, flirting, competing, earning status, and defining their identities. There is very little that is "virtual" about any of this for them - it is just one more aspect of reality.

As anyone who has spent more than an hour or two developing an on-line avatar can attest you begin to invest your identity in that character - it starts to have a "real" world impact on your self-perception. As a testament to this one on-line world for teens knows that if they can get students to visit at least 10 times they will be on the site for 2-3 hours a week for at least 18 months. Once the on-line identity has progressed past a certain point it begins to address real needs for recognition, status, play, and identity.

For publishers this means thinking of ways to tap these virtual worlds to support the core goal of teaching in the classroom. How much could you improve outcomes if you could find a way to have students voluntarily engaging for an additional 2-3 hours a week for a year and a half? Those improved outcomes are very real, not virtual.

Seeing virtual and real world experiences as separate is an outdated paradigm that may be limiting what you can do with your products to improve learning.

Here is some food for thought from Seth Godin on how social networking can help us organize. His main point - the side in an argument that is better organized usually wins. Whether your issue is education reform, textbook and software adoption, privatization, highly qualified teachers, NCLB, or any of the other issues of the day there is a worthy nugget of wisdom in his thinking.

What Happens When We Organize?

As Seth points out these tools upset the power dynamic and if harnessed can lead to positive change.

On caveat - once you engage be prepared to go on forever. These issues are never permanently resolved - and that is probably as it should be. In an arena as complicated and nuanced as learning no one has a monopoly on the truth.

Another caveat - organization is just a tool for change, not necessarily a tool for doing good. Witness email - the spammers are better organized than the rest of us and they are killing it. So - be the change you want to see and find others who want the same things you do.

Here are a couple of places to start:

Classroom 2.0 - For all of us
EduCon - For educators
We Are Teachers - For teachers
AEP and SIIA Education Division - For publishers

Come on - join the conversation!

A family member - who works in a Texas middle school - forwarded this bit of wit and wisdom to me today.

A teacher dies and goes to Heaven. When she gets there, she meets Peter at the pearly white gates.

Peter says to her, 'Welcome to Heaven. Let me give you an orientation first.'

So, Peter takes her to some beautiful mansions. The teacher asks, 'Who lives here in these beautiful houses?' 'These are for doctors. They did a lot of good on Earth so they get a nice mansion,' replied Peter.

Peter takes the teacher to some more mansions. These were more magnificent than the first. 'Wow, who lives here?' 'These mansions are for social workers. They did a lot of good on Earth but didn't make a lot of money so they get a better house.'

Peter took the teacher to some more mansions. These were the most gorgeous homes she had ever seen. They had huge columns, well-manicured lawns, beautiful stained glass windows; the works! 'These are the most beautiful homes I have ever seen,' exclaimed the teacher, 'Who lives here?'

'Teachers live here.' said Peter, 'They did much good on Earth and received very little money so they get the best houses in all of Heaven.'

'But where are all of the teachers?' inquired the teacher.

Peter answered, 'Oh, they'll be back soon. They're all in Hell giving a TAKS test.'

An instructional monoculture is a world where all children are expected to learn the same things, the same way, at the same time.

Are we building instructional monocultures in our schools? By we I mean publishers, policy makers, and district level decision makers. The forces of conformity are driving hard against the need for instructional diversity.

More importantly in the Web 2.0 world is it even possible to assert this level of control? Is it an effort doomed to failure as Citizen Marketers invade traditional publishing and turn it on it's ear.

What may save us all from ourselves is the emerging Web 2.0 culture of mashups, collaboration, open source, and people empowered as digital publishers. As publishers this directly threatens our current business model and the short term temptation is to dig in and try to protect it. But as many other industries have already learned the forces at play here are inexorable.

Agricultural monocultures are an efficient way to drive up yields in the short term. In computer science monocultures are universally used platforms (like Microsoft). In both cases the by standardizing (recognize that word?) you gain significant efficiencies. But you also create fragility and susceptibility to catastrophe. The Irish Potato Famine is an agricultural example. In computing almost all viruses are on Windows.

Just as genetic diversity in a population decreases the chance of a single disease wiping out a population, the diversity of software systems on a network similarly limits the destructive potential of viruses. - Wikipedia

Textbook publishers have assumed that their materials were complete systems used by teachers. In reality teachers have adapted and blended the materials with other resources. But each year the package of materials around a textbook becomes more complex and larger (and more expensive) as the product tries to be all things to all people.

Policy makers, in a vain attempt to assert control and drive standards, have become increasingly strident in their push to have every moment of every school year scripted and directed by a committee of designated experts. To abet this some have deliberately bred a mistrust of teachers - "we can't have them making decisions..." In an unholy alliance with adoption committees we have seen attempts to drive a single direct instruction product across an entire state (CA) and by design drive all other approaches out of the classroom.

District decision makers, under the gun to deliver on the promises of NCLB have seized more and more control from school sites in selecting supplemental materials. Even when they know teachers need some latitude their fear of failing AYP drives them to assert more control.

But what students really need are individual instruction plans - and plenty of people are working on making that a possibility. But until we change how we create materials, how they are adopted, and the decision making process that select resources we won't make much progress on this promise. Also - if we are going to individualize instruction we are need to empower teachers to make decisions.

In a world that is changing rapidly having a monoculture is a recipe for disaster. We need to be able to adapt to quickly shifting priorities and needs. Biological systems do this by promoting diversity - the more options you have to respond the more adaptable and resilient you are.

Does this mean that standards don't have a place? Absolutely not. There are clear taxonomies of knowledge and logical ladders of learning that are efficient. But - how we move through those should be open to variations in learning style, timing, context, culture, and sometimes just whimsy.

There - I feel better. Rant complete (for now).

Here are a few suggestions for publishers on how to build products that fit into the Web 2.0 culture rather than fight it.

New York, Texas, California, and Florida have opted out of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and will be abandoning all high stakes testing. It is unclear at this time if other states will follow, although indications from across the political spectrum are clear there is strong interest.

In a joint press conference the Chief State School Officers for the big 4 expressed a commitment to move the money they are currently spending on high stakes testing into Art, Music, and Intramural Sports.

"Frankly we were not seeing real gains. We kept tweaking the tests and measurements to give the illusion that progress was being made - but at the end of the day it was the same old same old" stated one Chief. Another added that it was difficult to measure whether the tests were really making a difference. As he pointed out - "the mortgage crisis was driven by people educated 15-30 years ago, it is hard to see how today's students could be dumber than that."

In related news Pearson announced that in response to the announcement that they have added Video Professor to their eLearning line-up and are excited about the opportunity to start adding the Pearson portfolio into the beloved late night cable advertorials. "We think NovaNet and Pearson Inform will be big hits with this audience and we are excited to be extending our elearning reach into new markets."

They plan on rolling out new video products targeted at the revived art, music, and drama markets. The announcement stated "Schools have thousands of laserdisc players in their inventory and we are proud to offer them a new use for this technology. Think of it as Gray-Ray and we all win!"

In response to these developments a spokesman for Houghton/Harcourt sniffed that this was a clear sign that it is time for Pearson to drop out of the race for dominance so that the nation can come together for the fall back to school season. He then added that if Pearson was as experienced as they keep claiming to be why did they buy the now moribund testing side of Harcourt? He added "Books, books, books - thats where we see all the action and growth over the next 15-20 years. Glad we dodged that assessment bullet in the Harcourt acquisition."

Tom Chapin's satirical song "Its Not On The Test" is worth a look. Even if you are a fan of No Child Left Behind this issues he raises need an answer.

I particularly like the jab at shout TV which reduces all discourse to name calling. Education reform is a deep and important topic and our current confrontational political culture isn't serving us well in this - or many other - areas.

He has a web site with good links and more information at Its Not On the Test.

Yeah the video production values could have been better - but the music is great and the message is delivered in a fun way using the kids.

Crayon Physics from Kloonigames is a very cool serious game. I can see young kids in particular playing with this for hours. The designer said about one comment "Chris Baker wrote a great article about Crayon Physics Deluxe for Slate. He wrote that the game looks like it was designed by a third-grater. I take that as a compliment."

If you don't get video games this is an excellent video to watch. The kinds of puzzles kids are solving in Portal and World of Warcraft are very similar to the ones you see here. But with the interface stripped down to bare essentials you can get a sense of the brain work that is going on while players wrestle with the more complicated games.

If you want a sense of how engaging this kind of simple interface with some basic physics can be go play Linerider for a while. It only take a couple of minutes to learn it - then see if you don't want to just PLAY.

This also reminds me a lot of And Yet It Moves - a great indie game that got some attention last year at GDC.