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By Guest Blogger Randy Wilhelm – CEO of netTrekker

DSC_5684One of the most obvious ways to engage students is to give them access INSIDE of school to all of the amazing Web 2.0 tools that engage them OUTSIDE of school. Who hasn’t tried to get through to his 15 year old with an iPod cranked in his ears and a cell phone glued to his hands?

But as students’ familiarity with and reliance on the Web 2.0 technologies grows, schools are still fighting the battle of how to incorporate these engaging tools while keeping kids safe and protecting them from inappropriate content and online activities.

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IMG_7349.jpgVast is too small a word to describe the Frankfurt Book Fair. Spread over several buildings – each the size of a normal convention center – one can find everything related to publishing in the world. It’s literally literature.

We attended this year because education publishing, a business with deep local ties based on culture and economics, is globalizing along with everything else.

In my consulting practice prior to PCI half my clients were international companies, not traditional US based publishers. This was my first clue.

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070_picsGrowing up in New England I was taught that it was rude to discuss politics, religion, or money with casual acquaintances. Later, when I entered the business world, I was never one to socialize much with co-workers beyond lunch or meals on the road. It isn’t that I have a problem with making friends through work – I often do – but as a matter of preference I like to keep a little distance between my work life and my personal life.

Thus, when I dove headfirst into social media and on-line gaming four to five years ago I tried to establish different outposts for the compartments of my life. LinkedIn was for work, Facebook was for friends. Twitter and World of Warcraft were supposed to be for friends. Plaxo was work related. This blog is my professional on-line persona. I reserved politics and spirituality for other blogs.

FAILURE

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Its time again for a mix of my favorite tunes from the past few months. There was an unusually large crop of great music this summer – and whittling it down to just 20 songs was tough.

This mix is pretty rootsy although there is some rock, jazz, and folk tossed in there. I also listened to a lot cello this summer – but somehow it just didn’t fit with the other stuff.

A theme many of these songs share is the banjo – but it is a subtle background texture not the in your face bluegrass style (not that there’s anything wrong with that). I really enjoy seeing the instrument – and in particular the old time style which I play – finding a new niche. Check out Heart of Sawdust, Wind in the Wires, Big Bird in a Small Cage, and Hey Joe (yes Hendrix) in particular.

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1135507_paletteHow is the marketing mix for companies that sell to K12 schools evolving? At a time when we are experiencing an explosion in the number and type of marketing programs we are also seeing rebalanced budgets and a consolidation among the large support organizations. The economic downturn has only accelerated these trends – it isn’t responsible for them.

The Paradigm is Shifting – Slowly

To begin with – maturing internet search and peer to peer social media networks are changing some of the underlying assumptions of what marketing does. Put simply, it is far more important to be found today when someone is searching than it is to interrupt them when they are not. A customer who has typed in relevant search terms and come upon your site or who reaches out to their network to help them solve a problem and been referred to you is the highest quality lead you can possess. They are actively seeking a solution that may include your products.

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IMG_6382.jpgEducation jobs fell for the first time since 1959 while enrollments were increasing. There were only three other years in the past 50 years where education employment shrank – and all of them were during periods of declining enrollment as the baby boom petered out.

Business Week has the details.

The decline was -0.9%, or 121,000 jobs lost. It is also the biggest drop by a wide margin in both percentage and actual jobs (the previous record was 1981 where it was down -0.4% or 29,000 jobs).

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fail-owned-my-first-failMy last post on the difficulty of educational reform got me thinking about that other massive system we are trying to reform – healthcare. One way to understand the healthcare system is to compare it to education – where we have had universal single payer access for over 100 years.

In that vein – what would education look like if if it were run like the healthcare system? By transporting our healthcare practices to another environment we can strip away the patina of familiarity and acceptance and see some of the insanity in our system in a harsher light.

Well meaning people can disagree strongly on the specifics of what is needed (and they do). I found as I wrote this that I had to examine my own pre-conceived notions. For example – state funding for education creates some of the same problems the system of private monopolies in medical insurance forces us to wrestle with. The public option in healthcare is the mirror image of charter schools in education – both aim to open up competition and provide alternatives.

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66_picsThe Superintendent’s panel at EdNet this week featured a discussion about education reform that was like a cold bucket of water to the face.

The Supers were teaching us about inertia, the tendency of objects to maintain their current state. As Newton himself put it:

The vis insita, or innate force of matter is a power of resisting, by which every body, as much as in it lies, endeavors to preserve in its present state, whether it be of rest, or of moving uniformly forward in a straight line.

The panelists were discussing what will change in the next 5-10 years in education. They were looking globally at the overall system (teacher evaluation, bell schedule, technology, instructional materials, funding flows, etc.). In this context the Superintendent of one of the largest districts in the country (LACOE), in a state (CA) that is experiencing a state of extreme financial distress, stated that she didn’t think anything significant would change until we had a “major crisis.”

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image001Clive Thompson over at Wired has a great short essay on the modern revival of the written word in the age of social media. He cites work done at Stanford that shows that todays students are writing more than their parents – in fact 38% of their writing is has nothing to do with school. Better yet – they are writing for an audience – or at least an audience wider than a single Professor.

Here are a couple of key quotes (emphasis added):

…young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text.

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