The Education Business Blog

Textbook publishers have a checkered history with developing technology products - which I’ve already commented on here and here.

Yesterday Richard Carey sent me a link to Rockets, Cars, and Gardens, which does a very elegant job of explaining different software development paradigms.

One of the concepts that jumped out at me is the idea of developing products in a portfolio model. To quote:

“...the portfolio model is like firing a swarm of rockets and hoping one hits. The company greenlights a large number of projects, funds them fully and hopes that one of them will blossom into a success. In return for spending more money, you rarely have to wait until version 3.0 to observe success.”

This is the approach textbook publishers take with most supplemental products. Since it is hard to predict exactly what the market wants they throw a lot out of books there and make money off the winners.

This works swell in a market where your costs and design questions are known and well developed, like printing textbooks (or music in the article). You know what it costs to print a book of a certain length on a given paper stock. Its a given that it will have a table of contents, a teacher’s edition, and other standard elements.

With software almost none of those questions is known in advance. It is much harder to know exactly what is going to be needed - which would make an even stronger case for the kind of portfolio model the publishers are already using for print products.

The opposite usually happens. Software is seen as higher risk than print because of all the unknowns, so publishers only greenlight one or two projects at a time. When they do this they then go on to make additional problems for themselves by under funding or over funding the projects.

1. They fund it like a book - which isn’t nearly enough when you have so many unknowns to resolve. To the print folks it looks like the techies are just flailing around and doing a lot of analysis, but that is only because in the print world so many questions have rock solid answers in advance. The techies are actually working to best practices but have a hard time convincing the print folks of this.

2. They fund it like a war - it becomes the “mother of” all software projects. This drags development out, ratchets up costs, and ultimately means you are very distant from your customer’s needs. Eventually someone sane comes along and kills the whole thing leaving a bad taste in everyones mouth about technology.

What would be interesting to see is if a publisher had the stomach to take the funding they were doing on one mega project and spread it around on 20 small projects with the idea that they are going to kill at least 15 of them before they launch.

What is odd is that they already know and love this approach - its just that the costs and unknowns associated with software spook them into forgetting it.

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Posted In: Education Technology , K12 Publishing

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Homing is the foundation skill for the 21st Century. Homing is the ability to circle in on key information, untangle it, filter it, order it, and ultimately make sense of it.

A middle schooler writing a report on Madame Curie in the mid ‘80’s typically went to an encyclopedia and one or two books. Today's middle schooler is likely to start with Google which returns 2.9 million links. Even the Wikipedia article has over 200 links to other resources about her. Yikes!

There have been several good reports on 21st Century Skills. However, in an age of infinite input students can only develop those skills if they have a strong homing skill. Without it they will be lost in a sea of data (which is increasing at 66% per year).

My thinking on this topc was spurred by a very cool mind map that shows the forces that are affecting education. Will Richardson's comments on Weblogg-Ed led to the question "where do teachers start?" The map captures the complexity beautifully, but it will overwhelm all but the most stalwart digital warriors.

All skills are not equal - in the 19th and 20th Centuries reading was the foundational skill. Other skills were important - basic math, scientific literacy, civic awareness - but without reading it was extremely difficult to develop the others. You always start with reading.

For 21st Century Skills I believe homing is the foundation and the place to start.

What are 21st Century Skills?

For those who are not familiar there have been several groups that have defined the skills, talents, and mindset that education can cultivate for this century. A good example are the enGauge 21st Century Skills which are sorted into

* Digital Age Literacy (e.g. scientive, visual, multicultural)
* Inventive Thinking (e.g. adaptability, risk taking, creativity)
* Effective Communication (e.g. collaboration, responsibility, teamwork)
* High Productivity (e.g. prioritizing, tool use, results focus)

ETS and The Partnership for 21st Century Skills use similar categories in their schema. These reports represent some great thinking about the full range of skills required for success in the coming decades. If you would like to learn more about them I strongly encourage you to follow the links.

The Problem

But - assuming that kids can read and compute and do some independent thinking we still have a problem with the 21 Century Skills. Developing skills is contingent on access to the content to use the skills. If I want to be a lawyer but I have no access to law books or courtrooms I can’t develop the skills. If algebra is important to me but I haven’t mastered basic math I’ll be lost.

With the end of scarcity (at least for information) homing is going to serve the same role as reading did for earlier generations. It is the skill that will help them find the most relevant information at the same time that the information available is expanding dramatically.

The Solution

Homing: To move or lead toward a goal: The investigators were homing in on the truth

The question for publishers and teachers is how are you teaching homing skills? 21st Century Skills are not based on the ability to spit back a set of facts on demand, hence the textbook isn't the answer. We need to rethink products and curricula so that we are teaching kids how to develop their homing skills so that they can find the right information at the exact time they need it.

These solutions will have to be web based because that is where the information is. They will probably involve a mix of a formally recognized discipline of search and navigation growing out of Library Science, new search technologies, walled gardens, and open tools for exploration (see this very cool example).

It isn't enough to know how to push a mouse around, homing in the the right information is the critical foundation skill.

For More:

SREB EvaluTech for an overview of several schema

Metiri Group and enGauge

ETS ICT Literacy

Partnership for 21st Century Skills Report

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Life is tough, but it is tougher when you are stupid.

John Wayne

Helping people be smarter makes the world a better place. It really is that simple.

I'm a business guy - but I love THIS business because when we do well something good happens in the world. Except of course when we are being idiots.

Scott Adams has his own unique take on this:

...at any given moment, the majority of resources in a capitalist system are being pushed over a cliff by morons. This fascinates me. And it’s clearly the reason that humans rule the earth. We found a system to harness the power of stupid.

In the animal kingdom, being a moron is nothing but bad. A moron lion, for example, who can’t catch anything to eat, is adding nothing to the lion economy. But a moron human who starts a business selling garlic flavored mittens is stimulating the economy right up until the point of going out of business.

My point is that I hope the monkeys that already know how to use sticks for tools don’t start using leaves for money. If that happens, we’re screwed.

Indeed.

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I'm assuming this is just a rhetorical device but Wesley Fryer over at Infinite Thinking Machine is calling for a textbook moratorium so we can get laptops and digital curriculum in everywhere.

I don't disagree with his urge to shake things up and increase the rate of change in the market towards digital resources but the suggestion flys in the face of our experience with every other new technology that has come along.

YouTube hasn't killed Cable,
which didn't kill broadcast TV,
which didn't kill radio,
which didn't kill newspapers,
which didn't kill books,
which didn't kill handwriting
which didn't kill gossip
and well you get the general idea.

Everything is additive, people always manage to find the best use of a medium in their current information diet. The balance will certainly change over time but I can confidently predict based on several hundred years of technological change that textbooks will NEVER go away.

Their role in instruction will change, and they will evolve to reflect those changes, but calling for a moratorium actually misses the point. The conversation we need to be having revolves around how to best use the current suite of tools so that each is making the optimum contribution to teaching and learning. It isn't so much a fight between tech and print as it is between the 19th century and the 21st century. The tools are neutral in this.

Hat tip to elearnspace to posting about this earlier.

See also my earlier post Where is the Wii for Education?

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Virtual Worlds and Video Games for Education are getting a lot of press these days. With all the hoopla it helps to bring a little perspective to where we are in the development of this new market. It is feeling a lot like the web in 1997 and perhaps we can take some lessons from that era to help us make sense of today’s emerging opportunities.

Nick Wilson over at Metaversed did an excellent piece titled 7 Reasons Why Virtual Worlds are Like the Web Circa 1997. In this post is I delve a little deeper into his list as it relates specifically to education and the companies that serve this market.

Here is Silver’s premise:

The reality is that the 3D web is in its infancy...those people trying to make the best of the kludgy communications systems, poor system stability and all the other oddities that arise from using a system that's in constant development are at the forefront of something that will eventually change the way we all live and work on the internet.

That doesn't stop it feeling like some kind of insane time warp though. With that in mind, here's a fun, but true list of reasons why what we're doing in virtual worlds today is like what we did 10yrs ago.

He talks about the seven points for the broad general market, here are my expansions on his ideas for Education.

1. Return of the Walled Garden - No one wants to return to the browser wars, but in education there are valid reasons for creating walled gardens, children’s on-line safety being the leading one. There are also valid pedagogical reasons why a District or Classroom might want to restrict membership in a virtual world to their students. While this may be a negative in the consumer space it frequently is an advantage in educational spaces.

2. Clueless Corporations - In the late '90s there were a slew of education internet sites that were total disasters because people rushed in who didn’t understand either the web or the classroom. You could tell who they were because they oozed arrogance all over the table.

There are some enduring sites that emerged from this era and the common thread seems to be a basic economic model that doesn't rely on advertising and a focus on supporting teachers. Those sites that were going to spam the classroom with ads or who were going to rely on the students who “got it” to do their marketing failed. Often miserably and publicly.

3. Spinning Logos - Lots of people are building out education spaces in Second Life with no plan to actually build a community. A flashy building and cool amphitheater can’t overcome a lack of depth (or scalability). One of the most successful education sites around - Whyville - which has attracted 2.5 million kids since 1999 has a very simple interface based on older technologies. They succeed because they consciously put a great deal of effort into community building.

4. First Fever - Unlike the larger market where companies are piling into Second Life in education market investors burned last time are hesitant to make a bet today. They now believe the education market is the equivalent of lighting cigars with $100 bills.

But there is a real first mover advantage in education which can lower the investment risk profile. Education markets take longer to build, but once they do they are a far stabler annuity stream than the fickle consumer space. When teachers embed activities in their lesson plans and get good results the switching costs go up considerably, hence the first mover advantage.

5. Rock Star Designers - Many education companies know that they lack the expertise and processes to move aggressively in these spaces. As a result they are looking to outsiders to help them move quickly. The mistake they make is assuming that the new products somehow require a new approach to product launches and diffusion. Hire the rock stars to build the environments, but make sure they are guided by education expertise from internal staff and consultants. For education the overriding theme should be how these efforts fit in to existing practice, otherwise it becomes too much work for the average teacher.

6. If You Spam It, They Will Come - Silvers focuses on search noting that “its very easy to find stuff, but not very easy to find good stuff.” For education the key links have to be to the education standards. No one outside of a university setting has done a good job of tightly integrating standards and making it easy for teachers to see this and report on it. Right now the attitude seems to be “just throw some stuff up there” and we’ll see what happens. An intentional approach will win the day here.

7. Selling Picks and Shovels - The big winners last time were those who sold the tools. For educational virtual worlds the toolsets are changing quickly and reducing the cost of entry. There are several that can be used for educational tools and Richard Carey has done a nice job of explaining the differences. For those who want to play in this space the cost of getting your prototype done and in the hands of educators has come down considerably in just the past few months.

However the tool companies were not the biggest winners - the “content” providers (Amazon, eBay, Facebook, etc.) are where the serious money got made. For education this means finding a way to expand and amplify the core content areas. The virtual worlds that can do that in engaging and sustainable ways will be home runs.

This is a very exciting time to be involved in this arena - there is a great positive energy and a sense that we are on the cusp of building some powerful additions to the pool of tools that teachers use in the classroom. If we can learn a few things from the last time we went through this we can help that day arrive sooner and create products with real staying power.

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Collective writing is a critical 21st Century Skill. Wikis are the primary tool for teaching this skill today. What resources exist to help teachers use wikis in the classroom? Recently this issue has been bubbling up on several places.

The Wall Street Journal had an article on the discussions behind the Wikis. For educational purposes there is more meat in the discussion threads for classroom conversation and interesting opportunities for students to engage actively with content than there often is in the articles themselves. Money quote:

"But discussion pages are also where Wikipedians discuss and debate what an article should or shouldn't say.

This is where the fun begins. You'd be astonished at the sorts of things editors argue about, and the prolix vehemence they bring to stating their cases."

Will Richardson over at Weblogg-Ed followed up on this with a post that talked specifically about what this means for classroom use. His take:

"I keep thinking what a necessary part of the writing process this type of negotiation is going to be as we collaborate more and more on wikis and documents and videos and whatever else. When I ask teachers whether their students are writing employing truly collaborative practices (not simply “cooperative”) and whether they are writing either alone or together in hypertext environments (which I also believe is a part of writing literacy these days), blank stares usually ensue.

Teaching Wikipedia gives us the opportunity to do both, especially if we tune into those back channel conversations."

Lest you think this only applies to existing classroom content there are some folks working to integrate Wikis with Virtual Worlds so that you can have a parallel discussion/construction while experiencing the world. John Rice over at the Educational Games Blog notes:

"a wiki, can be combined with commercial gaming content. The possibilities seem very interesting. A professor can assign students tasks in a MMO, and the students can team up on producing a document in a wiki at the same time they are engaged in the MMO."

But it isn't all roses. Wikis can be gamed by those with an ideological or political angle. It was recently discovered that the CIA and voting maching manufacturer Diebold were editing entries. Even Fox News was unbalancing things by editing articles to make themselves look better and opponents look worse.

But of course that goes back to the Journal's point - the discussion threads where the knowledge is constructed are some of the most interesting and informative parts of the site. There are also where you would learn about who is editing a piece and what changes have been made over time.

Hmm - I wonder if there is a word for that constructive kind of learning....

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Yesterday I commented on Granof's Op-Ed - Course Requirement: Extortion. The New York Times Op-Ed made the case for reforming textbook pricing in higher education.

Granof was kind enought to respond with some feedback on my piece. Below I've included the parts he responded to, his comments, and my clarifications/additions/agreements.

Link to the related post - Textbook Price Cure...

Continue reading "Michael Granof Responds - NYT Article on Textbook Prices" »

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An idea for reforming the textbook market in higher education was floated on the editorial page of the New York Times this past Sunday. Fellow Austinite Michael Granof proposed converting the textbook market to a site license approach used in the software world. His ideas, while thought provoking, fail the reality test.

With a 16 year old son headed off to university in a couple of years I’m sensitive to the rapidly rising costs of higher education and the portion that textbooks represent. But I also think it is disingenuous to point at books as a major cause of this inflation. Students spend about 5% of their budgets on books, and the total is declining 1.8% this year. Compare this with the market for electronics where students spend twice as much and it is increasing at 25% per year. Was this topic worthy of a NYT Op-Ed?

But putting relevance aside lets look at his arguments. First - the numbers seem high. The article cites costs ranging from $120-$180 for a complete textbook. The Association of College Bookstores puts the average cost of a new textbook at $52. Even assuming his numbers are correct Granof overstates the problem by implying that this is a cost born by every student every semester. Oddly, his own statements contradict this central argument.

“Today the used-book market is exceedingly well organized and efficient.”

So which is it - an extortionate group of publishers or an efficient market? Even in the antediluvian ‘70’s and ‘80’s when I was making a run through Higher Education I never bought all new books. Your average student, unless they are an idiot or a millionaire, is never going to pay full freight for books. The majority of their purchases should be used-books with an occasional new title where absolutely necessary.

The average cost per title will be far below the numbers Granof cites. Lets use Granof’s own numbers to make this point. Averaging the prices he cites a book would cost $150. At the stated budget of $900/semester that means students are only buying 6 books a semester. That is a pretty light load. Students have to be buying lots of used-books to live within that budget.

Beyond this he also misses the mark by assuming that most students will be happy consuming books on-line. This of course adds the cost of a computer and ubiquitous network access to the equation (ignored in the article). This is a both a huge cost to the University and the student and for equity purposes can’t just be assumed away. In fact - as already noted - students spend twice as much in electronics as they spend on books.

More importantly this assumption flies in the face of in-market experience. Despite millions invested in re-creating the book experience on-line it hasn’t met with widespread acceptance in the market.

I’m willing to admit that this might be because publishers just haven’t figured it out yet. Most publishers have a pretty horrid track record with digital products due to the clashing paradigms of print and software.

But I also think there is a fair amount of common sense to the concept that re-creating the book experience on-line is a dumb idea and most students agree. This is a sign that their education is working for them. Books do what they do best and they have been refined for their purpose over several hundred years. Technology should be harnessed for what it does best (simulations, large scale number crunching, productivity tools, communication) not doing the functional equivalent of putting plays on early television.

There are some other points that are glossed over in the piece. For example I’m surprised that an accounting professor would assume that any company would be willing to accept “a small profit” unless there are serious market forces that make that a requirement. He also states that this radical restructuring of the market would be a “small modification” and “a slight change.”

Why doesn’t he complain that Apple is overcharging students for iPods? After all, if you wanted to control the costs associated with higher education that would have a bigger impact at this point than grinding more efficiency out of an already “well organized and efficient” market.

Visit the AAP sponsored Text Book Facts site for more detail on college spending and the place of books in it. Disclosure - I am not a member of AAP, but I am a recovering textbook publisher.

I also think that a much more interesting question is what will the role of textbooks be in a world where information is exploding exponentially. There is a role, but it is going to change in unpredictable ways.

That is a topic I'd love to sit down over a cup of coffee with Professor Granof and hash out.

There is a follow up to this article with a response from Michael Granof here.

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Input has become infinite while our individual output is still quite finite. What does this mean for teaching and learning in our schools?

“We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge. This level of information is clearly impossible to handle by present means. Uncontrolled and unorganized information is no longer a resource in an information society, instead it becomes the enemy.”

Does that sound like something written recently on one of the many blogs dedicated to helping us manage the deluge of information? No - it was written in 1988 by John Naisbett in his book Megatrends. We’ve seen this coming for a long long time.

At the Games Learning & Society Conference I had the luck to sit down next to Professsor Angela McFarlane at lunch one day. She is the Head of the Graduate School of Education at the University of Bristol in the UK and a leader at the Futurelab. She was very articulate about how we are “privileging” the wrong skills in school. What does this mean?

Parents want computers in schools and they know their kids should be learning new skills but they are reluctant to let go of the existing model of schooling because it is familiar. As a result we end up measuring things we no longer place value in. We keep awarding degrees and certificates for the antique skill of learning facts and being able to spit them back up on demand.

Why School Must Change

A recent study at Berkeley found that information - new information not digital copies - is growing at a rate of 66% per year.

“total production of new information in 2000 reached 1.5 exabytes. ...that is about 37,000 times as much information as is in the entire holdings Library of Congress. For one year! Three years later the annual total yielded 3.5 exabytes. That yields a 66% rate of growth in information per year.”
“What is growing faster than 66% for decades -- that is not information based? Economists peg physical production as growing at 3% a year in advanced countries, and maybe 7% a year in superstars like China. That means that information grows 10 times as rapidly as physical production.”

After two years of working on a master’s degree the information available is 2.75 times what was available at the start (through the miracle of compounding). What exactly does a “Master’s” degree mean anymore? It used to mean that you had read, discussed, and internalized the canon of a subject area. You literally mastered it. This is impossible today.

The other side of this coin is equally dynamic. 25% of the searches on Google every day are brand new - we have not even started to reach the limits of what people want to know. Based on personal observation I would argue that peoples interests are expanding at a rate close to that of information itself. There are 120,000 new blogs created every day. The more information we have the more (collectively) we want to know.

Even if it were possible to absorb this much information what good would it do? We can’t afford to be blubbering information sponges - slaves to our email inbox or obsessively checking our RSS reader all day long. We bring meaning to our lives by acting on information. But despite the technology at our disposal our individual capacity for action has not increased at anything remotely close to rate of increase in information itself. Our output remains woefully human and finite.

What Should the Change Look Like?

The trick is to find the right information quickly that can support and inform the next action you need to take. So what should we be teaching? The core skills for success in this world are:

1. Goal setting
2. Searching
3. Filtering
4. Pattern recognition
5. Persuading
6. Perseverence

Someone please tell me the standardized test that is used to grade a school’s success that measures these skills? Please. Crickets. Chirp - chirp - chirp.

This is what Professor McFarlane meant when she said we privilege the wrong skills.

I will examine these skills in detail in a future post, but for now consider the following questions. What is missing from the list above? How long will it take to make this change happen? How long do we really have? What products and services might be created to support the teaching of these skills in our schools? What do we already do that we could amplify to support this shift in priorities?

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