The Education Business Blog

Textbooks and Education Technology are changing in disruptive and dramatic ways. Technology substitution is driving a great deal of this change. The recent sale of Harcourt’s various divisions to Pearson and Houghton/Riverdeep is only the tip of the iceberg. Education Publishers of print and technology products, large and small, are all wrestling with these changes.

The changes are affecting every aspect of our business including how products are created, priced, sold, packaged, promoted, and even what the basic definition of a product is. I believe these changes are only beginning and that they will accelerate in the next several years. Anecdotal evidence includes attendance at shows like the recent IRA (empty) and NECC (swamped). Sales of electronic whiteboards (Promethean, Smart, RM) are skyrocketing. Pearson swept the California Social Studies adoption with a hybrid technology and print product.

We ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

A Quantitative View

There is a more quantitative way to study this change. Over the next few days we will be publishing a study done by Paul Schumann a futurist and business analyst who has studied the sources and rate of change across many industries at IBM and as an independent consultant at Glocal Vantage. He has taken a detailed look at the Education Market and his findings have profound implications for where our industry is headed. Paul has published another version of this study on his blog Innovation Travelogue.

Paul’s analysis is a quantitative tour through what we can expect in the coming years. The punch line is that we are at the beginning of the product substitution shown in the chart below. Don’t discount the dramatic nature of this prediction. When disruptive technologies hit an industry the change often sneaks up on the unprepared and is largely over before there is time to react. Consider the tale of print encyclopedia’s which saw the value of their products plummet from over $2,000 to under $5 in a 3 year period in the 1990’s when CD-ROM based products were bundled with other software.

Here is a small sample from the report:

“One of the interesting, and most insidious aspects of this type of substitution, when the substitution is taking place in a growing market, is that a large percentage of the substitution has taken place before the old technology sees two successive years of decreased revenue. This is the case [in Reference Libraries]. Fifty percent of the total time to 90% substitution has elapsed before the print media have experienced two years decline”

Think about that.

Other Articles in this Series

Introduction
Part 1 - Reference Libraries and Open Source
Part 2 - Supplemental materials, Basal textbooks, Student Devices (Laptops, handhelds), Delivery Platforms (CD-ROM, Internet), and Electronic Media.
Part 3 – Conclusions & Recommendations

Below the fold a bio of Paul Schumman

Continue reading "Education Publishing - A Wave of Change Sweeps Over The Industry - Introduction" »

Interesting links on education publishing, education technology, and virtual worlds in education.

Research shows schools that fund Libraries have higher scores. Annie Teich at Crazy for Kids Books talks about some work that AASL is doing to shed light on this. I'm surprised this research hasn't been done before.

Student blogger censored by Judge for disparaging administrators. Everyone agrees that the student used unfortunate language on her personal blog to describe school officials, but the Judge sided with the school in abrogating her free speech rights. This one will get appealed. See my article on the disconnect between new technology and schools.

Effects of videogames on spatial learning and awareness are long lasting (and even between the genders). Commercial Gaming guro Damien Schubert comments on some fascinating early results from research in this area.

Google gets into virtual worlds? Raph Koster and others are reporting that it looks like Google is partnering with ASU on a virtual world build on top of Google Earth. Does this have anything to do with James Gee moving down there recently?

Teachers excited about learning due to new technologies! Carolyn Foote at the excellent Not So Distant Future blog talks about how excited she and her peers are about learning and collaborating internationally and muses about how we can share that with the students. (Disclosure - my son attends her school).

Serious Games are not just for kids. John Rice over at Educational Games Research does a nice roundup of some of the recent news around Seniors and videogames. The cognitive benefits apply to all ages!

We need teachers more than ever with new technologies. I agree. There will be more on this in part 2 of my article in Technology & Learning.

Update on game engines for Education. Richard Carey does a nice job of updating his reporting on this critical topic.

The perfect marketing plan. Solid advice on making marketing plans mean something from John Jantsch at Duck Tape Marketing.

Hi-larious IBM video from the '60's about home shopping. Oh well - they did the best they could. They did see the basics - they just had no way to imagine the real breakthroughs and the many ways that society itself would change.

This meme has been running around the blogosphere. In the spirit of "getting to know your blogger better" here is my version of this fun little collection of random facts.

Four jobs I have had in my life (not including your current job):

Street Musican (Seville, Paris, Madrid, Amsterdam, New York, San Francisco, Montreal, well you get the idea)
Planning Synthesist (so much more interesting than analyst)
Pot Boy (no not THAT - I washed pots when the Chef was done with them)
Credit Manager

Four Movies I have watched over and over:

Dr. Strangelove
Lord of the Rings (counts as one really looooong one)
Bladerunner
And Now for Something Completely Different (Monty Python)

Four places I have lived:

Concord MA
Fujinomiya Japan
Albuquerque NM
Bellingham WA
(and 14 other places)

Four Shows I love to watch:

Mythbusters
The Daily Show
Friday Night Lights
Get Smart

Four Places I have been on vacation:

Grindlewald Switzerland
Maui
Whistler BC
Isle Au Haut ME

Four of my favorite foods:

Artichokes
Halibut
Pickles
Sourdough (anything)

Four favorite drinks:

Cafe Americano
Lemon Sparkling Water
Diet Coke (caffiene free)
Guava Juice

Four places I would rather be right now:

Taos
Mt. Baker
San Francisco
New Zealand (ok - I've neven been there but I really want to go)

Four things I know but will never blog about:

Tuning a banjo
Hidden ski trails (that's kind of the point)
Philadelphia
Making Beer

Four Bloggers I Tag:

Richard Carey
John Rice
Chris Keene
Annie Teich

Your turn guys...

My article busting myths about video games and learning is on Technology & Learning's website now - you can find it here. The prior link was to the flash version of the whole magazine.

Many many many thanks to Jo-Ann McDevitt who encouraged this and especially to Susan McLester who was a great teacher and editor on this project. Give T+L some love - go read the whole thing there.

Here is a teaser from the lead -

"...When you look past the Orcs, Gnomes, and other fanciful inhabitants and elements, you find Blizzard has built an elegant and engaging learning management system. WoW does an outstanding job of guiding players to their zone of proximal development and provides a neverending stream of feedback and fresh challenges while leaving the player in charge. My guess is that philosopher and psychologist Jean Piaget would be proud and amused to see his ideas implemented in this context and on such a global scale."

If you want to see the Flash version of the whole magazine it is here. The article starts on page 16.

As always - come back and tell me what I missed!

Technology & Learning published the first part of my article on myths about games in the classroom today. [updated to connect to the non-flash version]

This is a two part series. In next month's issue I look at three more myths and suggest some paths forward for those who are interested.

It got a nice review on John Rice's Educational Games Blog.

As a side note it was kind of cool to see my WoW character on the opening page. If my sons hadn't been at camp when I wrote it we would have had all three of us together.

Go read it - then come back here and tell me what I got wrong!

Can you build a target market for taco fine art photography? Bobby Henderson is trying it in an attempt to answer the question

"Is there a niche so small that it will fail because it's so small?"

Think about this in the context of my article on selecting a target market. In the age of social media this is no longer a joke (ok - only a bit of one).

When was the last time your organization made some really hard choices about focusing on very specific customers? Are you willing to say "no" to be more focused? Are you #1 in the niche you have defined or are you trying to be something to everyone and limping along?

Second Life in Education is a hot topic. In that vein EdNet had a strong panel that included folks from SRI, a Teacher who has been using it extensively in her school, and a representative from Second Life. This is the first of three articles on this presentation.

First off, I find it interesting that Second Life is getting most of the visibility in Education when other virtual worlds (Habbo Hotel, Whyville, etc.) are doing far more with K12 age kids and some have more intentionally educational content on them. Chalk it up to Second Life being a media darling and to good outreach from their Education team. If you are interested in this arena some of these other worlds merit a look.

SRI - An R&D Perspective

John Brecht from the Center for Technology in Learning (CTL) at SRI kicked things off. He talked about Lakamaka, a project that focused on language learning in context. In Lakamaka the narrative thread is built around travel - you need to check into hotels, order meals, etc. They have a developed voice recognition engine which allows players to practice their language skills without access to native speakers.

He then shared the lessons learned from this project. They are:

Second Life is a big investment, but not where you think it will be. The software itself is free and content is inexpensive. It is expensive to train teachers how to use the new tools and it requires a high end machines (this alone is enough to give many schools a pause).

Focus on the interactivity aspects - that is where the power lies. It is a great tool for collaborative interactivity, immersion, visualization, and simulation.

Don’t make 3D PowerPoint sites. This isn’t a good environment for virtual lectures, it isn’t great for media delivery (even with high end machines), and chat is better in RL (real life).

Integrate it into existing practice. It isn’t going to replace what works well, so spend the time to figure out how it can compliment the learning ecosystem.

He also listed the challenges of working with Second Life. There isn’t a plug in architecture (its coming), security for teens may be an issue since everything runs on Linden’s servers, and it is relatively high maintenance since Linden does weekly updates.

Brecht also mentioned some worthy alternatives to consider if you are doing development work in this area including Croquet , Sun's Wonderland , Multiverse, and private worlds from Sony and Microsoft. He might have added Muzzy Lane and Numedeon’s NICE to this list as well (both of which were specifically built for educational use).

Tomorrow - Ramapo Middle School - A Practitioner’s View

Breaking down artificial boundaries in the world of Education emerged as a theme today at EdNet in Chicago. This applies to the curriculum, but it also applies to how schools are managed - it may be a new overarching meme for education.

Chuck House from Media X at Standford kicked things off with a keynote that touched on a lot of interesting ideas. One of them was that the big challenges our society faces (e.g. global warming, terrorism) cross many disciplines. Addressing them demands the ability to weave disparate ideas together. We need to proactively teach that skill. In addition, how we access knowledge via the web is going to force schools to start breaking down the artificial barriers we have set up between subject areas.

This thread was picked up early in the afternoon by panelist Jackson Grayson from the American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC). One of his central points was that most schools don't do process management very well - they manage inputs and outcomes well but they don't focus on what happens in the middle, which all about process. Moreover - when they do focus on process they do it in silos - they look at finance or curriculum but don't look at where those things intersect. Echoing Chuck's presentation Jackson noted that the big issues schools face require a systemic approach that crosses boundaries.

As publishers we have our own set of challenges in this area. We tend to silo products - print vs. technology or basal vs. supplemental - in ways that may not serve our customers well. Some of the more interesting projects - like Pearson's California Social Studies submission - have shown the power of breaking those barriers down.

This is a great meeting for making contacts, catching up, and getting some new ideas about our business. Many thanks to Quality Education Data and their many sponsors for supporting the meeting.

On-line games and virtual worlds were the theme at this year’s Austin Game Developers Conference (AGDC). This is the third of a few roundup articles about the conference with a focus on topics of interest to education and education publishers.

The parallels between how the web is changing the game industry and the world of education publishing are fascinating. Because of the inherent lag in the education market we can learn a lot from how gaming companies are adapting to the web’s incursion into their business.

Raph Koster - Designing for Everywhere

Raph, President of Areae, started by pointing out that 7 of the 8 largest MMOs are web based, not CD-ROM based, and that they have millions of monthly users. His message to the game developers was that by their standards the web based MMOs have horrible interfaces and very low production values. Game developers need to break out of their paradigms and start thinking of games that can be separated from their interface and design and still be compelling. Water dripping from your sword in foggy moonlight is cool, but it isn’t the game. Can you play on a phone? Can you play it on your TV? Could you play it on paper? Can you interface to the game from your GPS? The customers are already going there, better follow!

For publishers this has some interesting parallels. Textbooks in particular have become highly focused on their covers and the free-with-order stuff that wraps around them. Publishers rightly take a great deal of pride the production quality of the products including the instructional design. But, in the age of the web that production quality isn’t nearly as important as it used to be.

One could argue that the most successful textbook product today is Wikipedia which gets 7 billion page views per month for a two color interface. In this view of learning the impact of textbooks is a rounding error.

This was a sobering reminder of how much the web changes the game even for industries that we tend to think of as cutting edge. It will only be more disruptive to industries that are unused to rapid change.

I’m gong to write a deeper and long post on Raph’s design ideas in the next couple of weeks.

Denis Dyack - The Medium is the Message

Dyack, President of Silicon Knights publishers of Too Human, Metal Gear Solid, and Eternal Darkness was an excellent late addition to the agenda.

One of the more interesting ideas (among many) that he shared is that Video Games are the 8th Art Form. This concept grew out of early film theory - Ricciotto Canudo (1879-1923) called cinema the 7th art form when it blended the spatial arts (architecture, sculpture, painting) with the temporal arts (music, poetry, dance). Dyack’s thesis is that with the addition of interactivity video games have created an 8th art form.

Because it is so new we are still finding our way with it, for example learning to write stories for video games is still in its infancy - we really don’t know how to do it well yet.

For education this presents some interesting challenges. A good game requires a narrative thread (even Pac Man had this) but we rarely build education products around a story. Its all about standards and pedagogy and correlations and if we add something to it we tend to focus on adding images and design elements.
What is puzzling about this is that education at its root is passing on access to our collective knowledge, and that knowledge is nothing more than the story of man’s messy tragicomic progress.

One of the most interesting histories I’ve ever read was George Stewart’s “Names on the Land” published in 1945 which tells the story of American History through the prism of how and why we named places.

As one reviewer on Amazon put it:

"I myself half-expected this book to be organized by state, perhaps in alphabetical order. This is not the case. Stewart has organized his data by THEMES in naming, and how these themes have emerged in our history. Therefore, the book (very roughly) follows our history chronologically, as various naming trends have come and gone, in the context of various cultural waves. This pattern tends to approximately follow the "peopling" of the continent (by descendants of Europeans) from east to west."

There are a few education products that do something similar today. What is exciting is that games are uniquely suited to reintroducing learning through stories while adding the power of interactivity - the 8th Art.

Sulka Haro - Fostering Open-Ended Play: Unleashing the Creative Community

Sulka Haro, one of the founders of Habbo Hotel was the keynote on the second day. Habbo has been around since 2000. Today they have 7.5 million unique players per month and their largest demographic is 13-16 years with a 51%/49% split between boys and girls. Their user base puts them in the same league as World of Warcraft (see Koster’s point above) but they have done this with an unconventional model.

In Habbo users create a character and get a room they can decorate. Haro described their business as giving users tools and space with the confidence that something will happen. Access is free but users buy “products” like furniture to decorate their rooms through micro-transactions. This might not look like much - but they have built at $50 million business around it.

They believe there are a couple of reasons they appeal to the 13-16 year old demographic - and these are highly relevant for education publishers.

1. Kids at this age are developing their identities and starting to engage much more with the social aspects of life. Today’s 14 year olds were born in 1994, after the web came out. An environment like this feels natural to them. If you are building products for this group a web based component is expected and they are sophisticated consumers of on-line resources so you’d be well served to get it right.

2. The site is really about open play - something that kids this age still remember how to do but lack the social permission to do in real life. Habbo provides an outlet for this. One example he gave is that someone built their room into a McDonalds and kids will go and “play” a minimum wage job for a couple of hours at a time.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of their model is that the content scales with the user base. Haro’s formula was f(players)=f(content) because as the players create content the content scales to the size of the community. He dislikes the phrase “user generated content” (UGC) and prefers “player created activity” which actually describes it in a way a player might (not a publisher).

This talk was relevant for showing a very real alternative business model and a model of a user driven virtual world that is extremely successful with teenagers. To Koster’s point about interface and UI - if you looked at Habbo from a traditional gamer perspective it looks simplistic and even ugly. Yet more kids are "playing" it every month than any video game available (WoW has all ages).

What could publishers do with their vast backlists if they could atomize them and make them available through microtransactions in a virtual world - allowing kids and/or teachers to build their own learning libraries?

Other articles in this series:

Morhaime From Blizzard

Nurturing Influencers for Education Products

The panel on Managing Influencers at the Austin Game Developers Conference yesterday got me thinking about a frequently ignored aspect of the K12 publishing world - building and nurturing communities of key influencers around education products.

In education influencers are the people who speak at regional trade shows, who write blogs and podcasts, who participate in on-line forums, and who serve on state and national committees. We often rely on our Sales Reps and the Curriculum Consultants to handle this aspect of the business. But managing influencers is very different than maitaining good relationships with key customers and it is fundamentally a post sales responsibility.

"Managing key customers" is a transactional view - it is about the next sale. Reps will tell you that relationships are the key - and they are - but they are based on transactions. Influencers want a different kind of recognition - they want to be respected for their ideas not for their wallets. This means they need a different approach. As one of the speakers put it - "Marketing brings customers in - Community Management keeps them there."

What lessons from the on-line Community Managers in the game world could we benefit from in education?

1. Assign influencer management to customer support not marketing or sales.
2. Treat this as a high level hire not entry level. The people managing influencers need to be able to go toe to toe with them. Ex- Principals, Lead Teachers, Department Chairs would all be good candidates.
3. Make sure the program is tightly in sync with Customer Support and Marketing - no surprises either way should be the mantra. When things go wrong you want your Community Managers to be able to quickly tap the influencers for feedback.
4. Listen more than you talk to them. And when you do talk make sure it is a conversation not a sales pitch.
5. Don't over use them - you can burn influencers out by bombarding them with information and requests.
6. Support their credibility - don't ask them to only talk about your products or only say good things about them.

Mike Morhaime, President & Co-Founder of Blizzard Entertainment kicked off the Austin Game Developers Conference (AGDC) this morning. Blizzard produces the wildly successful World of Warcraft on-line multiplayer behemouth (9 million+ players worldwide). AGDC is focusing on on-line games this year and a packed auditorium was eager to pick up some pearls of wisdom from the industry leader.

Blizzard matters to education because when you strip away the Orcs and Elves under the hood they have built an extremely elegant learning management system. As the undisputed world wide leader in the MMO space we have a lot to learn from their approach to building products and structuring their business.

Morhaime started by taking us over some familiar ground - the extreme rate of change we are living through and how it is difficult for us to see it from the midst of it. For example, in 1991 it took 9 hours to fly from Los Angeles to Paris. If airlines had kept pace with the rate of improvement in computer speeds it would now take 2 minutes.

My surprise of the morning came when he revealed how Blizzard has deep roots in the Education Technology space. They were founded in 1991 by three recent UCLA Engineering Grads with 2 PCs in an apartment. In 1993 they were purchased by Davidson and Associates. Through various corporate mergers they are now part of Vivendi.

One has to wonder if some of the lessons from ed tech about neurscience and learning rubbed off on the game guys - after all the first task a successful game has to master is teaching the user how to play the game. Without this it becomes an excercise in frustration - i.e. a bomb of a game. It is an economic imperitive that they get this right. Hence the elegant learning management system underlying the whole game.

From there he walked us through a series of solid business advice from a hugely successful company. There wasn't anything earth shattering, but then success is usually built on solid execution of some great ideas. In order they are:

1. Gameplay first

Their first priority is always to make great games. If they don’t get this right none of the rest of it matters. The game market is like a donut - in the center are the core markets (hard core players, opinion makers) but the casual markets are the much bigger ring. The combination is success not one or the other. They try to build games that are deep and replayable while still accessable.

Another way to put this is that game should be easy to learn, difficult to master. As an example he cited Guitar Hero. Anyone can get into it quickly.

2. Build and Protect the Brand

They want to be seen as high quality - with fun and polish One way to test this goal is to have a player see an unknown game from Blizzard and they buy it because they trust the brand so much.

They strive to only make “brand deposits” only - not “brand withdrawels.” This drives promo plans, fees (value equation).

3. Resist the pressure to ship early

You only have one chance to make a first impression.

Think long term - don’t mortgage the future to meet the quarter. In 1996 when they were working on Diablo - they were shooting for xMas. Instead they released it on Dec 31st. It sold well through the whole following year. No one looks back and says “of only they had released it 3 weeks earlier”. Players love it but if it had gone out early they would only think about it as a buggy game.

4. Resist the pressure to do everything at once

Don’t let the distractors pull you away from what is important. Build on your successes, gain expertise, then get more ambitious. If you try to do everything at once you risk actually goes up.

5. Estimating Demand is always a challenge.

WoW was their first on-line subscription based game. Their launch night was off the charts and they realized they needed more hardware immediately. Several times in the first year they had to stop retail distribution because they didn’t have capacity to support new users.

When they launched the latest release to WoW they overestimated but the system held up to 2.1 million units moving in the first blush of the release.

6. HR is Really Important

They went from 250 employees (estimate from the chart) to 3,000 between 2003 and 2007. As business exploded they had to scale across the entire business - every function. They could not have done it without putting a solid HR team in place. He didn't mention it, but this is the kind of advantage you can get from being part of a major corporation - this type of expertise and the systems needed to support it can be quickly grafted on.

7. Running a MMORPG is not just game development.

You need 24/7 IT, community management, and global services. Everything that impacts a players experience are as important as the game play itself. They became a service company.

8. Communicate - or people will make stuff up.

They found they needed formal processes to keep the community and international divisions informed - particularly during fire drills. This involved things like formalized email lists to push information and a layer of people who were around the development team to keep internal info flowing. Another example is a process for dealing with problems when they didn’t know when it can be fixed (e.g. check back in an hour).

9. Avoid financial incentives

If there is a financial reward - a lot of people will go out and do it. Gold farming, account stealing, credit card fraud. This has bad implications for the wider group of players who just want to play the game. They do whatever they can to minimize the financial rewards but it is a constant battle. The believe it is important that they fight this behavior to protect their players.

10 Testing - never trust version 1.0

Everyone at the company tests, then they do a public beta. In the public beta you find out from more about load balancing. More importantly you uncover exploits or what they call "cheese" - a most efficient path that gets you game rewards faster even if isn’t fun. People will do it if it is there - which will rub off on the game negatively. They strive to loop back to number one - gameplay matters.

He also spent a fair amount of time talking about how they have evolved as a global corporation. They now get more than half their subscribers from Asia and when they released the Burning Crusade they did it in a series of midnight releases rolling around the globe. In the old days (the 90's) they would release it in the US and then some time later do translations and release it overseas.

As education goes more and more global this has interesting implications for our business. It will clearly move much more closely than it will in the gaming world. But you just have to listen to Marjorie Scardino of Pearson talk about China to get a sense of how it is coming at us and quickly.

Burger King and the Simpsons producers have teamed up in a brilliant marketing campaign - you can upload a photo of yourself (or victim) and create a Simpsonized image.

Thats me to the left there, d'oh.

If you need to waste 15 minutes today I recommend this activity!

Its got humor (a rotating donut for the processing icon), personalization, and active involvement. The details are right too - obvious links to the promotional partners, a good solid URL, easy export, etc. Someone thought this through carefully and had a lot of fun with it at the same time. Not an easy trick to pull off.

When was the last time we saw humor used well in education marketing? Playful is engaging, but we are all caught up on meeting standards and aligning to correlations. Something to think about as we all head back to school.