London – BETT claims to be the largest education technology convention in the world. From what I could see the scale of the show is about the same as ISTE (nee’ NECC) in the US, although the content is distinctly more international. There are some differences from US education trade shows, but the differences were not vast.
What follows are the impressions of a first time attendee and the lessons I hope I remember for next year.
Overall Take
Ed Note: One of my favorite thinkers and practitioners on engaging kids deeply with Math and Science is Jim Bower. Jim is that rare combination of theorist and practitioner who is successful in both realms. He is both a Professor of Neuroscience at UTSA and the Founder/CEO of Whyville.net, arguably the stickiest web destination for learning ever created.
Jim has strong opinions, but he has earned the right to hold them through deep thinking and risk taking that applies his theories successfully in the real/virtual world.
Please invest the time to read Jim’s post where he challenges us to see why the web is making us smarter, not dumber. The TEDx video then answers the question of exactly how you do this.
Education publishers and Learning Management Systems have a long and somewhat checkered history. Open source publishing, XML, and content digitization are changing the LMS landscape rapidly. In today’s guest post Louise Dube outlines the issues facing companies creating instructional materials.
By Louise Dube
What to do? Educator Buying Trends, a recently survey by MDR reveals that Moodle has the largest installed base of Learning Management systems (LMS) in K-12. Equally interesting is that Moodle’s strongest presence is in large districts. These districts have the IT infrastructure to support the development and customization of an open source platform.
Today’s walkabout focuses on a fundamental shift in the instructional materials industry away from the scale economics of the big textbook publishers to the value of niche focused expertise. I believe this is the future of our business.
In a world where Home Depot crushes the local hardware store only themselves to be crushed by Lowes this probably sounds foolish. Why shouldn’t Pearson and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt do the same in education? In their business model everything becomes a commodity and low prices rule. Indeed – that is precisely what has happened over the past couple of decades in education.
But there are fundamental and intersecting trends that are leading us away from this model and in a fresh new direction.
50% of the men did not wear neck ties at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair. Traditional publishers are struggling with appropriate responses to digital transformation and aping the casual style of Silicon Valley seems to be popular. Interesting fact – if you wear a suit without a tie you still look like a Book Rep.
This sartorial mis-match of rhetoric and reality summed up a lot of what I observed. Publishers are saying all the right things, but they haven’t quite figured out how to do them.
Educational Publishing Leaders
When textbooks go fully digital what will schools buy? Will they buy individual lessons, units of 2-3 weeks length, or full curriculum that span a year the way they do today? This is the $5 billion question facing our industry.
Mike Shatzkin has an excellent post on this topic over at The Shatzkin Files. His framing is concise and revealing for those of us mapping out strategy for the analog to digital transition in instructional materials.
He was on a working group preparing for a talk about copyright across different publishing markets:
E.D. Kain over at Balloon-Juice has a fascinating saunter through crime stats since video games became widely popular.
According to the FBI, since 1990 violent crime has been on a steady decline. E.D.’s basic hypothesis is that some of this can be attributed to people experimenting with rage and mayhem in video games and learning how to manage their emotions more effectively as a result.
Those of us advocating for video games in the classroom have been making a related argument. By allowing kids to experiment with activities that are too dangerous, too expensive, or too time consuming we can broaden their experience and expose them to epistemic frames they would not normally have access to. In the case of violence – it is far safer for everyone to experiment with it virtually.
In discussing the potential for ads in e-books – the latest hail mary pass of traditional media – Paul Carr at TechCrunch dropped this gem:
It’s a compelling argument, but like so many compelling arguments made about the future of books, it’s also hampered by consisting almost entirely of bullshit.
He then goes on to rend the idea to tiny shreds. Its an enjoyable read because he brings common sense and an attitude to area rife with guessing and angst.
Scribd is working hard to be the text version of YouTube. Upload some text, tag it, and let the world discover it. It isn’t just unpublished novels – many copyrighted textbooks are already there via unauthorized uploads.
Like YouTube, users can upload anything and the site isn’t under any legal obligation to screen for copyright protection. Copyright holders have to proactively scan and search for their content. Get it taken down today – it can be uploaded again tomorrow morning.
For example, Key Curriculum Press’s “Discovering Advanced Algebra” is available for anyone to download all 888 pages for free (and has been since last August when it was posted by “skihe63”). It has been accessed 8,898 times since it was loaded less than a year ago. It is an older copyright, but still – on Amazon it sells for $25. That is $222k in value.
Last week the New York Times published a piece titled $200 Textbook vs. Free. You Do the Math by Ashlee Vance.
Today we take up the challenge posed in the title and demonstrate that Open Source Textbooks are twice as expensive as books in the K12 market.
Let me state right up front that I’m all for using economic and technology forces to drive costs down while improving services. I agree that Open Source instructional materials have a place and will play a role in coming years in doing exactly this. But they are not the panacea painted by their advocates in the article.
The Education Business Blog