The Education Business Blog

In the US we just had the most interesting election of my lifetime. What to do now that all the hullabaloo is over? Take the civics quiz to see much you remember from Social Studies and how closely you have been paying attention.

Take the test here.

The core message - that we ignore civics at our peril - is well taken. Social Studies is one of the subjects that has taken a hit under NCLB. Publishers, to their credit, have tried to help by creating programs like QuickReads (Pearson) that teaches reading fluency through Social Studies and Science. The reading passages are aligned to grade level standards. But don't you think it is a little odd that we have to "sneak" this in?

Elected officials did significantly worse than average citizens on this test. While this sounds horrible - well it is. 79% don't know that the Bill of Rights expressly prohibits establishing an official state religion and only 32% can properly define the free enterprise system. If you wonder why we have an endless stream of deficits and a soaring national debt look no further than the 59% who were unable to identify business profit as "revenue minus expenses." Sigh.

Or not. I don't buy that somehow in the past we had this idyllic total knowledge of the public sphere and that all citizens were well informed. We have always been free to be informed and free to be ignorant. These days - with information overload hitting us from all sides - a little selective ignorance isn't a bad thing, its a survival instinct. That said - if ignorance is bliss why aren't more people happy?

I follow politics the way a lot of people follow sports so I'm fairly well tuned in. I was also a History/Political Science major in college. That would explain how I got 100% on the quiz. No - I didn't peek.

So in this week of Thanksgiving see how tuned in you are to civics and perhaps learn a thing or two. See if you can beat the 78% average for the month.

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute puts a survey out every year. Their mission is "to further in successive generations of American college youth a better understanding of the economic, political, and ethical values that sustain a free and humane society."

This short video chronicles the rise of credit default swaps and the subsequent impact on the financial industry better than anything else I've seen.

Through financial engineering - not value added - the Wizards of Wall Street were able to create a financial black hole that ultimately - well watch the video. You'll see.

What does this have to to with education? Our industry is going to suffer along with everyone else as we work our way out of this one.

Tap tap.

Phil Sansom and Olly Williams are the filmmakers responsible for this bit of fun.

Piping hot education related blog topics served here! The debate over formative assessment, the top 10 sites for educational games, crowd-sourcing the next great novel, controversy around Microsoft's new ads, the relationship between quality and advertising, and a hilarious spoof of Politicians all get the nod this week.

Education Week has a very interesting article about Formative Assessment. Given the burgeoning mantra that formative assessment makes the biggest difference in outcomes it is revealing to see how little consensus there is on what it really is. Is it a practice or is it a product?

John Rice has a list of the top 10 sites for free EduGames. It is worth a peek and linking through to get a sense of what kids are actually playing. This should dispel the myth that EduGames need to rival commercial games in graphics and sound. What matters most is fun game play.

HarperCollins launches Authonomy. The site uses crowd-sourcing to allow readers to vote on the next best seller. Springwise has a quick overview - Publisher Hopes Crowds Will Spot Next Bestseller. I'm working on a similar project for a client in education - should be interesting.

Microsoft's new ads - love 'em or hate 'em? Seth Godin thinks they are rot that won't fix what is wrong - What Ads Can't Fix. His thesis is that the company has a solid business serving the stolid core of the market, and ads are not going to turn it into Apple. Ben McConnel believes they are a great opening salvo in redefining who Microsoft is by reclaiming the definition from Apple. As a bonus all the ads are in his post if you want to see them. In this debate you could substitute mainline textbook publishers and come up with largely the same analysis - both posts are worth a 2 minute read and some reflection.

As always Indexed nails her topic. This graphic about quality vs. advertising is amusing and revealing. We know this is how the education market works - one teacher tells another when they like something. I think of her wry charts as Mad Magazine for grownups. There is no connection to the link above about Microsoft. Really.

The Front Fell Off. Perhaps because we are dealing with a financial disaster this comedy skit resurfaced recently. It is a drop-dead funny take on a Politician evading the truth and trying to sound like they have a clue when they really don't. It is non-partisan so enjoy.

Barack Obama is proposing significant new investments in early childhood education. More attention has been focused on his drive to recruit an army of new teachers but I believe the early childhood focus is equally important.

Why? As students age the gap between low performers and even average performers gets so wide that it becomes much harder to bridge it. The chart below illustrates this concept.

[This chart is for illustrative purposes only]

In the early grades - K-3 - the focus is on acquiring basic skills in reading and math. As soon as the shift to applying those skills to learning other subjects occurs in 4th and 5th grade the gap begins to widen. By the time students have reached 7th grade it is often so great that only heroic efforts can help. When a student drops out in 10th grade the cause can be traced all the way back to 2nd grade or even Kindergarten. Obama's experience in the Chicago Public Schools taught him this lesson.

We can see this clearly in the product lines of the supplemental publishers. Their materials for the early grades are mostly targeted interventions, what a friend dubbed "workbookity" stuff. Their materials for secondary schools are comprehensive alternative textbooks. In secondary schools the gap has widened so far that you can't teach all students with the same textbook because the low performers simply can't read it.

Oral language is hard wired into humans but reading and writing are acquired skills - very similar to music in that practice helps enormously. Hence the focus on fluency in the National Reading Panel's report. By the time students reach the 6th grade students who read regularly have often read at least 1 million more words than students who do not. That makes a huge difference.

So targeting the early grades - when the gap can be closed quickly and easily - is an essential part of school reform. Yes - it will take 12 years to see the benefits - but they will be long lasting throughout the lives of the children who benefit. I believe Obama has got this issue right.

Does this mean that there is no hope for kids in the higher grades? Absolutely not. One of the reasons I'm so passionate about video games for learning is that the research out of Harvard and other universities who are studying this topic shows that it disproportionately benefits students in the lower third of performance and that the biggest benefits come in the middle school years. The Tabula Digita study out of Florida is only the latest in a string of studies suggesting that this one way to reach these kids. One other interesting finding - for every 2 hours that kids play game they spend an hour reading about them.

As print and technology products in education blend together the distinctions between textbook publishers and ed-tech providers are blurring in some very interesting ways.

A recent report by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press on how on-line and traditional news media are blending together raises some provocative questions for how this will play out in education.

Several years ago schools bought technology and print products from completely different budgets and with very different purchase processes. As educators have become more sophisticated about what technology can do and what it can't do they are demanding that providers blend the best of technology with the best of print.

We are already seeing this play out in how people consume news and the Pew study sheds some valuable light on this topic. Here are four big ideas that came out of it for me.

1. The Integrators - the 23% of the population who are actively using traditional and new media - tend to be affluent, highly educated, and middle aged. They grew up with traditional media and are comfortable with it, but due to their interest in politics and sports are using on-line media to dig deeper and in more personalized ways than the general public. This group corresponds to the teaching corps in this country. If you want to sell instructional products to schools teachers are the gatekeepers - if they won't use it in their classroom you have no sustainable business. To reach their comfort zone you will need to blend the old and the new.

2. Net-Newsers - this is the most affluent and best educated group but also the youngest. 30% of them watch news clips on the web - only 18% of them watch the evening news on TV. They also are the heaviest consumers of news - digging in all day long. This group corresponds to students. While you may produce blended products in order to sell to teachers you need to make your on-line offerings rich enough to satisfy the younger users - it will be their primary interface to the content.

3. The use of print will decline - but not go away. The numbers in the report about newspaper usage are a wake up call to textbook publishers. In 1993 58% of the population read the paper daily, by 2008 this was down to 34%. Nightly network news saw an even greater drop - it went from 60% down to 29%. Meanwhile on-line went from 0% in 1993 to 37% in 2008.

The pied pipers of ed-tech who sing sweet songs about the end of print are going to have a wait a long time for that to happen. But - I do believe that just as newspapers and magazines are getting thinner and thinner our textbooks will slim down as more of the content moves on-line. The rise of the Kindle and other reading devices may also spark an evolution in how we consume "print" in the same way the youTube is changing how we consume video.

4. Politics and sports are a key drivers of on-line usage. Both the Integrators and the Net-Newsers valued the on-line tools for the insights into politics and sports. Social studies is probably the area where having on-line content that changes on a daily or weekly basis has the most value. Districts that want to bring parents into their own web resources might stress school sports - something that not even the most dedicated local paper can do for every school in their area.

Publishers can learn valuable lessons about how this transition is likely to play out in schools by watching what has happened in the news arena. This study is worth a look if you are interested in this topic.

Related Posts

Textbooks vs. Education Technology - Clash of Paradigms
The Future of Education Publishing
Web 2.0 and Education Publishing
Open Source and Education

Hot sizzling education publishing and ed-tech related links here! Obama's call for more teachers, kids media preferences, 2.0 de jour, and assessing 21st Century skills all get a nod in a short week.

Eduflack talks about Obama's call for an army of teachers. I confess that I worry about federalizing education too much, we don't need more Reading First scandals. Having 50 laboratories is better than 1. Another wag noted a contradiction on the right - if the free market knows best and if education is the foundation for economic growth why aren't conservatives fighting to pay teachers more? That would bring higher quality candidates into the profession via market forces.

Kids 10-14 prefer the internet to TV. AHCI Lunch has commentary on a New York Times article that revealed this finding about teens media preferences. Here is my question - why didn't TV take off in the classroom given the power it holds over our culture? One of the core arguments about why internet tools, social media, and virtual worlds should be in classrooms is that they are where the kids already are. The same could be said for TV at any time in the last 50 years.

I believe the reason on-line tools will take off is that TV is passive while the internet and social media are interactive and social. TV is a baby sitter, the internet is a tutor. But it could be that there are larger institutional barriers to technology diffusion in the classroom that we can learn about from TV's failure to penetrate deeply into teaching and learning.

Web 2.0 vs. Enterprise 2.0? Elearnspace does a nice job of mapping out the differences and talking about what it means for learning. K12 Education is most definitely in the Enterprise 2.0 camp which has implications for the kinds of products that need to be built and the speed at which they will be adopted.

Will Richardson has some great comments about Assessing Network Building and how critical this 21st Century skill is. It is related to the observations I've made about homing - the ability to vector in on the most important information in a sea of data. If you know of anyone doing interesting work on assessment in these areas post a comment. I've seen a lot of talk, but very little in the way of real solutions or products.

Fresh hot blog links to education topics here. These are some of the posts that caught my attention recently - enjoy.

Facebook for Teachers. This article is sad - lots of promise and money invested by people who just don't get it. One district can not support their own social network - it takes hundreds of thousands of users to make these communities vibrant. How about we look at what is actually happening on Facebook for teachers? I Am Teacher - a Facebook plugin from We Are Teachers - already has almost 10,000 active users and over registered 50,000 users.

Video Games Improve Cognitive Skills. The title says it all. Go read about it on Richard Carey's blog.

John Rice has a nice summary of Seven Question to Ask Before Using a Video Game in the Classroom. I do disagree with John on two points.

• I don't believe the majority of teachers want to modify games - even in the commercial game world modding is restricted to small group of devotees.

• I also don't believe Edugames need to match commercial grade production values. Look no further than the casual games kids are playing on the web by the millions for evidence. Game play trumps graphics (see the Wii too).

"I suspect a lot has to do with the principal - whether the school is together as a unit...I never believed you solved the problems with a better building."

A kid booted from Little League because he is too good? Eduflack has a suitably angry take on this. This story is "man bites dog" rarity - but the overall point is well taken. Punishing gifted kids is how you turn a country dumb.

The Ignite Presentation Method - this is a pretty cool concept. 5 minutes to present your idea and the 20 slides automatically change every 20 seconds. One idea per slide - razor sharp focus on your message. See my post Powerpoint=Billboard on a related topic. Imagine the power of teaching kids to communicate with this level of focus and discipline?

My prior post on iTunes and Textbooks started with this iMix. As I mulled the educational implications over I realized that this was exactly how teachers should be sharing instructional materials.

As a musician and music aficionado I listen to a lot of new music. My tastes range across genres - what draws my interest is solid musicianship, great lyrics, and a good tune. Over 2-3 months I probably listen to 200-300 new songs inspired by recommendations from friends, recommendations from iTunes and Pandora, and stuff I hear randomly. Oddly, I find some of the best stuff on political blogs (Juan Luis Guerra below). I rank the songs using iTunes and from the short list of 5 star songs I create a mix to share. I also toss in a couple of old favorites that I haven't listened to in a while (like Cocker on this mix).

My musical adventures are not typical - but I hope that is why playlists like this are valuable to others. I've done the leg work of culling through a lot of new stuff to find the best (for my ears).

There are teachers and former teachers who do the same thing with lessons and lesson plans. Most teachers have other priorities - but those that do scan for new stuff should have a tool that allows them to take the best of the best (as they see it) and publish it easily for others to sample.

Ears up! In this mix you will find latin, rock, gospel, folk, jazz, and bluegrass. These are many of the tunes I listened to as I blog.

Sample the ones you like or download the whole mix. Let me know your favorites too.

Next up in this series - why a database in your pocket is the killer app for the age of social media.

Are you interested in how video games and simulations support teaching and learning? Then the 4th annual GLS is where you should be this week. For my money it is the lowest signal to noise event that I attend all year. Oh - and you get to play some really fun games.

Here are a few random observations from day one - by no means a comprehensive review of the event or the topics covered.

In the opening session Cory Ondrejka noted that all the interesting questions about games and learning are interdisciplinary. This is a real challenge because in the institutional structure of a university there is no political base to sustain research.

Katie Salen challenged the group to think bigger - she feels we are in danger of not working to implement the things we are finding out at scale. I'm not sure I agree completely with here given some projects that I'm aware of - but those may not be visible to the academic community.

Kurt Squire noted that we need to move beyond just games and look at the conditions they create. This is in sync with a conversation I had with Atsusi "2C" Hirumi the other day where he talked about focusing on the elements of "interactive media" rather than just "games." I think this is an excellent distinction and could also help address Katie's concerns.

David Shaffer presented some really interesting work on assessment - essentially a model for testing an evolving worldview (epistemic frame) not just discrete knowledge and skills. There is a lot of math - but this approach basically measures the relationship between several important criteria (values, skills, etc.) over time. It has some really intriguing implications for measuring 21st Century Skills. To Cory's point this is possible because David is bringing a cross disciplinary toolkit of psychological techniques together educational theory and interactive media.

There is a strong thread of using game design itself to teach 21st Century Skills. I worry that this is a bit of having a hammer so the world looks like a nail. In the end while many schools are giving lip service to 21st Century Skills they are getting measured and rewarded for improving reading and math scores. Until we can help them directly with that challenge we won't get permission to go deeper.

A random observation - if you want to encourage groups of kids to work together your games need to work more like Craps and less like Blackjack. The whole table wins at Craps together so you get a lot of crosstalk. In Blackjack you can take my "pefect" card - we play against the dealer but we don't play together. It is a quieter game.

The game room is also great - Madison is alive with GTA, Wii Fitness Fanatics, Rock Star. and Portal. Lots of fun stuff to preview and test out. I'm embarrassed about my Wii Fitness score - my only excuse is I'm coming off a month of back problems. Sigh.

The Jason Project previewed Resilient Planet - which looks like a great game for teaching scientific thinking by recreating ground breaking experiments in the field with guidance from experts. Kudos to them for this work.

I did a preliminary release of the white paper I'm writing for the Software Information Industry Association on Best Practices for Implementing Games in the Classroom. It was well received and several practitioners validated the findings as consistent with their experience. I''ll post more on this separately.

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.

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

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."

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.

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 before the internet our paradigm of information consumption is built on two assumptions that are no longer true.

1. Information is scarce - This manifested itself in SCANNING - a need to constantly scan the media landscape to find the stuff you needed to know. If you missed information when it passed by it was gone. We learned to read the paper every day, read 3-4 magazines, and watch the news on TV. The more sources of information you had the more likely you were to be well informed.

2. Information is hard to find. This flows from the first assumption and led to HOARDING. If you wanted to have easy access to information you better catch it as it passes by: tear it from the magazine, throw it in a file, put it on a 3x5 card. Finding it later involved a couple of hours of going down to the library, locating it, and copying it or making notes from the source material. Usually it was just too much trouble.

Scanning and hoarding information made sense right up until the mid to late 90’s. Adult learners want just-in-time information. We scanned and hoarded so that information would be on hand when we needed it. I took pride in being an information omnivore.

The Game Has Changed

But with the vast resources of the web at our disposal both assumptions no longer hold and the behaviors have gone from effective survival techniques to threatening our very sanity. Scanning and hoarding in an age of infinite input will make your head and your hard drive explode.

If we can let all that go we can set ourselves free from the brutal info-treadmill most of us find ourselves on. Information may seem like it is free these days, but the real cost is the time it takes to process and manage it.

Think about that in the context of the resources at our fingertips today. Don’t bother scanning, and don’t gather and hold information close to you. Stop it - just stop it!

In 30 seconds with a good search strategy you can find what you need right when you need it. We need to learn how to ignore what we once thought was important and we need to embrace the idea that we can easily and quickly find whatever information we need whenever we need it. This is a complete paradigm shift.

Next in the series I explore some hands on practical things you can do to start working smarter not harder.

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

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...

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.

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.

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?

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....

Unpacking the Zeitgeist is an amusing post about World of Warcraft (WoW). In it Sci Fi Author Charlie Stross attempts to explain to someone from 1977 how Gnomes dropped from the sky in the shape of a URL advertisement in WoW. He unpacks 30 years of assumed knowledge (what is the internet, what is a PC, why do people play games dressed up as furry animals?). As Raph Koster noted this represents pre-traumatic stress disorder as we contemplate what this means for 2037.

Think of the ingenuity and focus it took to pull this stunt off. The intellect behind it is creative, transgressive, technical, and funny - all at the same time! Where are we teaching these skills in today's classrooms? Talk about your 21st Century Skills.

As a side note I happened to be wandering through Ironforge that day on my toon (Embir - Level 70 Mage on Stonemaul). I was stumped when I happened upon the neat piles of gnomes in front of the bank. It was only later that I realized what I'd seen.

If none of this makes any sense to you I highly recommend that you engage with games and gamers. Blizzard announced today that over 9 million people worldwide are now active subscribers to World of Warcraft. A whole culture has emerged around these gaming communities. Tapping the elements of that culture that tap into 21st Century Skills - and there are a lot of them - would make a huge difference in schools. (This will be the subject of a later post.)

But it can't be learned by reading about it - GO PLAY!

Here is a mix of some of my favorites from this past spring. You will find an eclectic mix of alternative, country, power pop, mexican guitar virtuosity, folk and retro 60's chic. Enjoy.

Cell phone ettiquette check. This morning on my outbound flight I cleared security and headed for the bathroom. For the second time in two weeks I encountered that most noxious creature - the guy who thinks it is appropriate to chat away on his cell phone while taking care of more personal business.

This wasn’t an urgently expected call with a quick “can I call you back in a couple of minutes” plea. No, this moron was prating on in full baritone about some meaningless bit of office gossip, and on, and on. On the concourse I wouldn’t have noticed it. But in the porcelain echo chamber every nuance was amplified.

As noted in my entries on email etiquette - our tools have changed so dramatically in the last 20 years that our cultural norms are struggling to keep pace. But puleeze, no one has to be 24/7/365 that much. One of the great liberating technologies of the last 25 years is ubiquitous voice messaging. Trust me, if it is important they will leave a message.

We live in a sea of continuous partial attention these days and we desperately need new norms and practices to navigate the barrage of information coming our way.

The good news is that given time our minds are really good at separating signal from noise. One of the most interesting aspects of living right now is that we are in a transition era where most of us haven’t yet figured out how to do that with the endless barrage of information coming our way. It is also one of the most frustrating things about living now.

But don’t bury your head in the sand. This stuff isn’t going away - engage with it but on terms you can live with.

I currently subscribe to 60 RSS feeds. When I started I was looking at about 10 and it took me hours because I hadn’t yet developed filters for how to move through it. I read everything.

Now I find I can get through all 60 feeds in 30-45 minutes. As I have gained more experience with the tools I’ve learned to separate the few articles I want/need to read from the chaff quickly and ruthlessly. Better yet - I get information that is specific to my interests every single day. This has been a huge improvement in my information diet, but for a while it was really overwhelming.

I hope the fellow in the bathroom had a learning moment after he walked out and thought to himself - “gosh I guess that was kind of inconsiderate, better not do that again.” But then again, no matter the technology we’ve always had boors in our midst. Next time I’ve resolved to just hit the flush button repeatedly in range of his microphone.

Students and Educators might as well live on different planets when it comes to social media, blogs, and other Web 2.0 technologies. The educators are making fear based decisions because the new technologies are unfamiliar to them. The students are too busy figuring out how it all works to bother paying attention to the restrictions the educators are putting in place. Fear and hope in sharp contrast.

This disconnect was starkly drawn at the Association of Educational Publishers (AEP) annual summit in DC last week. A meeting ran long and I arrived at the sessions a few minutes late. I intended to lurk in the doorway of a couple of different presentations to see where I wanted to spend the next hour. What I observed sent my head spinning.

In one room a panel of distinguished educators was discussing the challenges of bringing in new technologies. Their discussion centered on what the lawyers would let them do and the endless committee structures they had set up to screen what was permissible with blogs and other social media. Short answer - not much.

Next door the Weekly Reader was presenting their in-depth research on what kids are doing with technology these days. This is wonderful longitudinal research that they make available to anyone who is interested. Bottom line - the kids have completely embraced the new tools.

There are potential dangers with the new tools - but that is the case with any tool new or old. What matters is the character of those who wield the tool. Plagiarism is much easier with the web - but it isn’t a new behavior. Over time tools like turnitin.com have arisen to help address the problem in new and powerful ways. The net result is that it is easier to plagiarize and it is easier to catch someone doing it. The real challenge is the same as it has always been - teaching kids that it is wrong.

The saddest part of this disconnect from my perspective is that schools today are struggling to be relevant. Every time they resist the new tools the more they are teaching the kids to ignore the formal system.

I'm always on the lookout for new tunes and in the spirit of share and share alike I've posted an iMix on iTunes of my farvorite stuff from the past year.

Follow to the backside for more details and the complete list.

Continue reading "What's On My iPod" »