The Education Business Blog

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.

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.

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.

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.

In Japan novels are serialized for cell phone delivery and published as dead tree editions only after they are hits. John Rice has a great post on on this at his Educational Games Research blog.

While this works because of Japan's rather unique commuting environment the central point that any reading helps build fluency is well taken. Here is the money quote:

"It boils down to literacy events in the life of a child. The exposure to text, in whatever venue, increases the reading and writing skills of children. If children read a book, a comic book, or the story line in a videogame, they are reading. And that makes all the difference."

This novel approach hits on two interesting themes. First, it takes advantage of the new format rather than trying to shoehorn the old way of doing things into the new platform. Publishers have worked hard to recreate the book experience on-line with very limited success. I would argue that this innovation is the reverse - making an on-line experience into a book, which is why it works.

Second, the Japanese are not fighting the new tools but finding ways to use them effectively. Cell phones can be disruptive in schools and there are definitely places they don't belong. On the other hand the blanket prohibitions that many schools have in place show that they haven't been provided with products like this that take advantage of the new technology for learning.

Products like Amazon's Kindle and Sony's eReader are interesting and may be better platforms for delivering educational content but they cost almost as much as a laptop. On the other hand, most kids have access to a cell phone today at no cost to the schools at all.

Does exposure to classics matter? Of course it does. The quality of what you read helps your higher order thinking by exposing you to new ideas and concepts. But why can't a classic can't come out on a cell phone first? Dickens serialized most of his work in magazines, the broadband distribution network of his day.

It would be interesting to see an ed-tech company partner with a publisher to reach out to students here in the US with something similar.

A retired construction worker has solved the mystery of how Stonehenge could have been constructed using wood, sand, and gravity as his only tools.

I'm a nerd for this kind of stuff - I think this is so cool. One man, an obscure passion for moving heavy things, and an age old riddle is solved.

If you ever need a great example of lifelong learning at work share this.

Thanks to my friend Hugh Lewis for passing this along.

Every 2-3 months I share the new (to me) tunes that have been getting heavy rotation on my iPod.

This mix has a bit of everything - Dylanesque folk from Old Crow Medicine Show, the tube amplifier hum of Eels, Guy Forsyth grinding out blues, Linkin Park speaking out, Johnny Cash on the book of Revalations, Regina Spektor singing from the heart, Ozomatli with their Mexi-Rap, and Lyle Lovett swinging it.

Enjoy.

You need to have iTunes installed on your computer to hear samples of each of the songs.

Other Mixes:

Summer 07 Favorites
Spring 07

I'm thankful that I get to work in a business that actually means something in this world. When we do our jobs well good things happen for teachers and kids. Thanks to my friend and mentor Peter Lycurgus for giving me the nudge in this direction 18 years ago.

I'm grateful for boundless curiosity, mans drive to overcome ignorance. It is the engine that drives learning. I'm also thankful for the endless pool of ignorance out there - without it we wouldn't have a market.

With gratitude I think of all the wonderful people I've met over the years in education. From the pinnacle of power in DC to a 1 building district in rural Washington state it has been a privilege to know people who care passionately about our children and their future.

I appreciate all the idiots and jerks I've encountered over the years. Occasionally their efforts have taught me patience, more frequently they have shown me a mirror into my own capacity to be a moron.

I welcome the battles we have about ideas and pedagogy - without this creative tension we can't make progress and do a better job.

But most of all thanks to all the great teachers who have challenged me to step up to my potential (yeah, I'm still working on it most days).

• Mrs. Sheehan in 2nd grade who ignited a passion for reading
• Mr. Lapine in 4th grade who taught about the solar system and patience
• Mr. Faison at Middle School who shared his love of Shakespeare and Gilbert and Sullivan
• John O'Connor in High School for teaching a college level Russian History course because he thought we were ready for it
• Sean Scully in college who showed me how to see color and paint it
• Professor Steven Cohen in college who tossed off my thesis topic as a parenthetical aside. In exploring how a person's political philosophy evolves over their life I met some amazing folks.
• Professor Van Merkenstein in Grad School who gently tried to show us that in business it is always first about people, second about numbers.
• Marty Shoemaker who gave me the tools to look deeper and to see things from another person's perspective.

This list could go on forever. If our paths have crossed you have shared something of yourself and hopefully we have both come away richer in spirit and understanding.

Thank YOU.

Busking teaches fundamental business concepts. As a young man I saw the world by tossing open my banjo case and belting out a few tunes. I played in Boston, Montreal, Tokyo, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Seville, New Orleans, and Amsterdam to name just a few spots.

Along the way I absorbed some interesting lessons that have helped me be more effective in the business world.

1 - Make people feel something. People respond to musicians who make an emotional investment in their performance. Laugh, sigh, get that ache in your voice, and share your joy.

• Address your customer's unstated social needs. Will your product make them look better? Will they feel more professional using it? Is it cool?
• Build products and deliver services that go beyond the basic spec. Make your product something people are proud to have around.
• Never check your soul at the door of the workplace. If you have to - find another job

2 - Respect your audience by mastering your craft. The goal of practice is to work so hard that performance looks effortless. When you play well the audience will reward you, not the guy who knows three chords and two songs.

• If you can afford the time, get things right on a small scale before you try to master the universe. Build practice time into your business plans.
• Read, go back to school, fill the gaps in your knowledge in any way that you can. Make opportunities to practice your craft in service work.
• Learn the black art of setting and making a budget.
• Cross train - invest in your career by doing a variety of jobs.

3 - Play well with others. Street scenes are like market niches, you run into the same people every day. Most afternoons in Paris I would trade off sets with a Peruvian pipe flute band in an alcove down in the Metro. It had heavenly acoustics (that I still dream of) and we both made tons of money.

• Get involved with your industry associations. They tackle problems no individual business can.
• Never speak ill of your competition - just out-hustle them. Customers don't want to know about your rivalries - they want a solution.
• Network to find others with complimentary skills and bring them into deals. Most (not all) will do the same for you in return, expanding your deal flow.
• Be loyal to people. Look after each other because the company won't.

4 - No one wants to be the first customer. Buskers always start by throwing $3 their own change into the case.

• Give a new product away to the first two customers. Factor this in to your business model as an expense. If it makes you feel better make them pay for training.
• Donate your time to get started in something new. My first consulting client several years ago paid me a straight commission for business development work. I was able to show up at conferences legitimately representing a client which made it a lot easier to find other clients. That first deal was lousy for me, the other deals were the gravy.

5 - Don't rush to judgement, sometimes it is just a bad day. There are days when the weather is wrong, you are there at the wrong time, your fly is down, or people are just being ornery.

• Give ideas and people more than one chance to make an impression.
• Be leery of a single focus group - if you get the same result from several then you are on the right track.
• Bring job candidates back for multiple interviews and make sure they talk to a variety of people.

6 - Have fun. The purpose of busking is to pay for your adventures. Go see the ruins, sleep in, enjoy a long coffee, stay out late, and enjoy your trip. In the business world this means:

• Take risks that move you towards your personal goals.
• Remember that you work to support your life, not the other way around.
• Have a laugh or two in meetings.
• Take your dog and your office down to the coffee shop by the lake.

Information Overload is a serious problem in our culture today. People are frustrated and overwhelmed by the fire hose of information they are trying to absorb. But, as the American Philosopher Ann Landers was fond of saying:

"No one can take advantage of you without your permission."

In summary:

• Personally we need to take control of our information diet. We need to discard our old paradigms and seek information only when we need it.
• As publishers we need to create products that equip students to be effective in the conversation economy.
• Professionally we need our customer's permission to have a long-term conversation with them.

I've pulled together some resources that you can tap if you are interested in learning more about this topic.

Blogs

43 Folders - Great site for productivity - a fan of David Allen's work.

Unclutterer - Great daily tips on how to unclutter your life. We can all use this one.

Seth Godin - Marketing maven and a great blog with short punchy articles. It never takes more than a minute to read.

David Armano - An incredibly crisp and visual thinker on marketing. He coined the phrase "conversation economy."

Tim Ferriss - Author of The 4 Hour Workweek - tips, downloads, and worksheets.

Pick The Brain - Ideas for how to be more effective. Another David Allen acolyte.

Marc Andreeson - Wit and wisdom from the founder of Netscape.

Steve Pavlina - Personal Productivity guru. He has some odd ideas but they are worth reading even if it only stretches your thinking.

Books

"Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity" (David Allen)

"The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich" (Timothy Ferriss)

"Power Sleep : The Revolutionary Program That Prepares Your Mind for Peak Performance" (James B. Maas, David J. Axelrod)

"The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More" (Chris Anderson)

"Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything" (Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams)

This was an interesting series of articles to write and it represents a summary of what I've learned over the past couple of years. I hope that you got some insights to help you personally as well as some ideas that you can use professionally.

Information Overload Series

Part 1 - It’s all in your head - really
Part 2 - A cure for “a poverty of attention”
Part 3 - 10 Ways to Build Instructional Products For 21st Century Skills
Part 4 - 10 Ideas to For Marketing & Selling In An Age of Infinite Input
Summary - Closing Thoughts and Resources

How should we design textbooks and education technology for a world where information is no longer scarce or hard to find? It is time to rethink how we build education products based on new paradigms of information management.

In Part 1 of this series we explored the broken paradigms about information that are driving most of batty. In Part 2 we explored strategies for adopting a new information paradigm to help us survive and thrive in the new climate.

Today we take a look at ten ideas for how we can build products that tap into the new zeitgeist. These are nuts and bolts tactics publishers can use to rethink product development.

In what follows I assume you have read the two prior installments. If you have not you may want to spend a couple of minutes on them first. In a nutshell we need to move from scanning and hoarding “scarce” information to treating it as an infinite resource that can be accessed as it is needed. Just-in-time instruction is no longer for adult learners only.

10 Ideas to Try

1. Start with a call to action. Traditional textbooks are set up backwards for today’s learners. Rather than tacking some practice problems on at the end of the chapter start with an activity that will motivate learners to seek out answers. This is how they work in the rest of their lives and we should mirror and model it in teaching. Projects, thought experiments, team challenges, and research activities are all examples of experiences that promote information seeking. These can be classroom discussions, paper-based activities, or on-line challenges (virtual worlds, games etc.).

2. Network your learners - Often we treat collaboration as cheating - but in a world of Facebook and Twitter we have no choice but to harness it. Encourage people working on the same problem to find each other through virtual study groups, student written FAQs, and peer-tutoring. Imagine a system that could help students working on the same problem all over the world find each other on any given evening. There is a precedent for this in on-line games where players can join a queue of people who are looking for others working on the same challenge. Another feature from the on-line game world that you might consider incorporating are guilds - formal associations of players who assist and help each other out. These strategies apply for teachers too!

3. Design instructional approaches that are open - Publishers have worked under the conceit that their materials were self-contained systems. You can’t build self-contained products anymore so don’t even try. Assume that teachers and learners are going to use your materials as a small part of a much larger set of resources.

4. Build for Dynamic Content - It is more important that you provide a framework for asking questions than the definitive set of facts. We can and should provide a core set of facts, but anticipate that new information will be available before the paper is dry on a new book and make a place for it in your on-line presence.

5. Build RSS into your products - Proactively deliver a steady stream of new content to users. For example, recent data on global warming shows that most of the projections were flat out wrong - they were far too conservative. Structure RSS streams for students, parents, and teachers. Will Richardson at Weblogg-Ed has some interesting ideas on this topic.

6. Adopt a software business model of continuous improvement. I’ve written elsewhere about the difference between book publishing and software development. This is clearly one area where you will want to build a business model (pricing, editorial resources) that assumes you will be improving a product long after it is “published.”

7. Encourage advanced on-line search techniques. This is one of the most important skills we can give students - and many of our teachers are not equipped to coach students in this area. There is an opportunity for publishers to provide the scaffolding for this skill. Tap into the advanced features of Google search or if you want a safe walled garden use NetTrekker. Hire a Librarian to show you how to do this.

8. Plant virtual easter eggs. Seed the web with relevant actionable content (web sites, wikis, and blogs) that good searches will find. Don’t rely completely on serendipity when kids are searching for content. Learn to use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) so your content floats to the top.

9. Build a two way street - Expect kids to find other relevant materials in their searches. Teacher materials should support incorporating outside information. Allow students and teachers to send you resources that they create or find as they work with your materials. Reward and recognize them for this - make it a competition and you will harness the power of user generated content.

10. Don’t be part of the problem. Filter what is included in everything you do to make sure it is relevant, important, and actionable. Strictly limit the outbound amount of content you generate - don’t overwhelm your audience with spammed content. Be a good information provider in a world of overwhelming information flow. Less is more.

Next Steps

Some of this may look a little weird - it runs against long established paradigms. But these ideas are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. I challenge publishers to take one product suite and try all of these ideas with it. Don’t change your whole catalog, but when you do try it don’t use half-measures. Give it your all. And if you would like some help putting these ideas into your context give me a call.

Next in this series we look at how information overload is changing how we should be selling and marketing products.

In comments let us all know about products that are already employing these ideas, suggest other strategies that we could try, or just tell me where I’m wrong.

Information Overload Series

Part 1 - It’s all in your head - really
Part 2 - A cure for “a poverty of attention”
Part 3 - 10 Ways to Build Instructional Products For 21st Century Skills
Part 4 - 10 Ideas to For Marketing & Selling In An Age of Infinite Input
Summary - Closing Thoughts and Resources

Are you drowning in information? You are not alone, almost all of us are. But the information is not to blame - we are.

Information overload is a meta societal problem that affects our whole industry. From the personal (we are overwhelmed) to the products we build (we need to teach kids how to avoid it) to marketing (cutting through the noise) it is driving change across our businesses.

Most of us have had the experience of going to a web site to find something and 45 minutes later found ourselves off in some far corner of the internet on a completely unrelated topic. Or maybe you have been unable to empty your email inbox for the last year - or two. You didn’t take your Blackberry on your last vacation did you? You did take a vacation - right?

There is a solution, but it involves stepping outside your comfort zone. This is important to education because the old habits of mind about consuming information that we are passing along to today’s children are hurting their ability to think and act in new and more productive ways. We need to model the change for them.

This is the first in a series of posts that address how we can learn to live with information overload, what it means for instructional products, and how it affects our ability to sell and market effectively.

Our Broken Paradigm

For those of us who came of age