Schools are inundated with paper and instructional materials at this time of year. Those of us who build education products and create marketing collateral should be cognizant of is how wasteful so much of this is.
In our personal lives many of us go through the “more shelves or less stuff” debate all the time, and all too often we end up at Ikea with another Sbrorg shelving unit strapped to the top of the car.
Please stop.
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?
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:
Virtual Reality and Education have a long and checkered history.
On-line worlds give students opportunities to experience things that would be too expensive, too dangerous, or too time consuming in the “real” world. It allows us to distill an experience into it’s essence while allowing learners to be active agents rather than passive recipients.
That said I would argue that the word “virtual” has little or no meaning for today’s students. It is an artifact from a time when the internet was not a pervasive presence. In todays on-line social spaces teens are making friends, sharing experiences, flirting, competing, earning status, and defining their identities. There is very little that is “virtual” about any of this for them – it is just one more aspect of reality.
What do Web 2.0 and Social Networking mean for Education Publishing? On February 7th I was on a panel at the Association of American Publishers (AAP) in Sacramento that tackled this question.
Ann Flynn Director of Education Technology at National School Boards Association (NSBA) reviewed the excellent study they released last fall that explored how these tools are being used in schools.
Sheryl Abshire CTO from Calcasieu Parish School System in Lake Charles, Louisiana talked about they are handling the very real complications that come with introducing these disruptive technologies into schools and classrooms.
Hype alert – Web 2.0 Marketing is a paradigm shift but only a portion of the market is using it today. In Part 1 I argued that market trends should be pushing you to use social networking, blogs, wikis, and the other tools of Web 2.0 in your marketing mix. Given the uneven adoption of these tools in your customer base you will be managing a mix of the old and new for quite some time. So think of it as expanding your paradigm.
Before we go on I want to add to what I said in Part 1. There is one additional reason for doing all this that is specific to the education market. Most teachers are isolated in their classrooms – they yearn to have their voice heard and to be part of a larger community. The asynchronous nature of most social media are ideal for meeting this need. It is one of the reasons there are so many education groups already on Ning.
So what does this “paradigm expansion kit” look like? Here are five ways of thinking like a Web 2.0 Marketer that you can add to your toolkit.
Sometimes in the rush to finish a chapter on deadline or to get six copies to Paducah by Friday we loose sight of the essence of what we are doing.
Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietanmese monk, writing about how everything is connected expressed it this way:
When you look at this sheet of paper, you think it belongs to the realm of being. There was a time that it came into existence, a moment in the factory it became a sheet of paper. But before the sheet of paper was born, was it nothing? Can nothing become something? Before it was recognizable as a sheet of paper, it must have been something else – a tree, a branch, sunshine, clouds, the earth. In its former life, the sheet of paper was all these things. If you ask the sheet of paper, “Tell me about your adventures,” she will tell you, “Talk to a flower, a tree, or a cloud and listen to their stories.”*
The worlds of textbook publishers and education technology companies are colliding. The market is driving this convergence – schools have had technology around long enough that they have figured out how it can integrate in with existing practices. Yet the list of successful educational products that blend print and technology is few and far between.
I moved into the publishing world 4 years ago from ed tech. From my perspective on both sides of this fence the problem has more to do with the vendors clashing paradigms than with customer demand.
The paradigms are radically different along several key vectors and reconciling these will be the central challenge as Riverdeep and Houghton merge and as Pearson absorbs Harcourt (announced today).
Follow me to the flip for a more detailed look at this problem.
The Education Business Blog