The Education Business Blog

I grew up just outside Rt 128 in Boston. The children of the founders of DEC and Wang were friends and classmates. I've spent most of my adult life shuttling between the other three great tech centers in the US - Silicon Valley, Seattle, and Austin. My domain expertise, such as it is, revolves around introducing new technologies to the market. As part of my apprenticeship I spent seven years at Apple.

This can be an insular world (a sub genre of humor that revolves around technical support?!) and from the inside it is hard to gauge where the work we do really fits into the larger scheme of things.

There is an enormous amount of self serving BS generated as part of the tech innovation cycle. One of the earliest survival skills young nerds need to cultivate is what we jokingly call Rule #1 - never believe your own BS.

Thus it was a bit of a surprise to wake in London this morning and see the news about Steve Jobs on the front pages of The Guardian and The Telegraph littering the halls of our hotel.

Steve (in Apple that was all he went by) embodied so much of what makes brand USA so compelling and so aggravating. The sweeping braggadocio backed up by staggeringly creative innovation executed with precision and efficiency. He was perhaps the best ambassador the technocracy has ever had.

Mountains of press will be spilled over this event. All I wanted to say today is that one of my great heroes has passed - but his genius lives on in the tools every one of us uses to express ourselves. He was far more than a tech genius, he was a citizen of the world.

Last week at EdNet Charlene Blohm was whinging about how I hadn't posted some tunes in a while. Here are 25 of my favorites from this past few months.

iTunes no longer allows you to embed mixes outside of their service - so you will need to click through to hear the songs in this mix.

There is a bit of everything in here - americana, jazz, afro-pop, classical, bluegrass, classic rock, and a visit from GlaDOS. Enjoy

Lee's Faves Mid 11

In "Four years into the ebook revolution: things we know and things we don’t know" Mike Shatzkin does a great job of summarizing the state of the trade publishing business. Education Publishers take note - this is your future.

In "Predicting Player Behavior and How Zynga Profits From Data Analysis" John Rice picks apart the Wall St. Journal's article (paywall) with an eye to education. Talk about data driven business models is all the rage in EdTech - this is what it really looks like. Money quote:

"We feel that a purely data-driven approach has significant promise for creating accurate predictive models of player behavior in games without the difficulties associated with earlier modeling techniques."

Stephen Coller at the Gates Foundation has a new blog Forking Education about their open source work on the Shared Learning Infrastructure (SLI), the Learning Resources Metadata Initiative (LRMI), and Learning Maps among other things. I'm not sure if the title is meant to evoke poking a fork to stir things up or if it is a bad pun.

I'm involved in the LRMI (which I'll be blogging about in more detail). I'll also be speaking about this in the at the Frankfurt Book Fair in two weeks (Hall 4.2 Hot Spot Stage Fri Oct 4th, 4:15 PM).

As I used to say to my kids when I dropped them off at school "Have a great day, if you can't have a great day have a good day, if you can't have a good day there is always tomorrow."

OPOL