Apr
4
Editorial Views and Viewers
Filed Under Blog, data protection, eBook, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, social media, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
So thanks so much for all the comments on the last piece. I am now truly troubled and confused. Some of you seem to think that the regional press never will re-create itself, so it must be left to innovators to innovate and old brands to die. Yet those who are deeply involved in the regional press claim that the tools and utilities required for innovative services are simply not available. I decided to look at the latter this week, to look only in the UK, and to follow up some of the leads I received as a result of the first piece.
Since the premiere brand of Johnston Press is the Scotsman, I started my search in Edinburgh. There I found the Edinburgh Reporter, and a small team of local reporters working around an editor (Phyllis Stephens) to create, at www.theedinburghreporter.co.uk, a start-up local event site. This is powered by the nOtice web software currently being trialled (progress report awaited) by Guardian Media Group, which is itself an innovative newspaper project, given that it is an invite-only beta run by a group that sold its regional division and exited hyperlocal. But have a look at the intentions listed 18 months ago (http://gigaom.com/2011/10/28/guardians-n0tice-puts-a-new-twist-on-hyperlocal/) and look at http//nOtice.com to see what is being trialled. Clearly the effort here is to find ways in which users can post content and link to existing content. If you look at The Edinburgh Reporter, then you can see how they use Bambuser and You Tube to provide the image and video upload elements. The principle of hyperlocal is emerging here: we are all our own reporters and freelances, and whether or not we need an editorial hub depends more on brand and business model than on anything else. But the vital feature of this model is the need for someone to be able to signal what sort of news update they need so that those “closest” to the news can create media – video, audio, text – and send it back to be accessed and posted.
Which is when I was introduced to CivicBoom (http://civicboom.wordpress.com/about/). A great deal of the communication around nOtice is twitter-based. CivicBoom, from Canterbury in Kent, has its own mobile app, Boomlly, which acts as the reporting link, and the means of signalling when stories are needed. As far as I know, CivicBoom is not currently in active use in the newsroom of any UK regional, yet it is the perfect tool for experimenting with hyperlocal on the smartphones of a local youth (or mature) audience. As we move into the 4G world, the image and video output of an observant community can be turned into hyperlocal news and information, and the news organization/newspaper can tune and frame this content flow by using apps like Boomlly to request coverage, seek other views, repeat coverage or request similar coverage from different places. In other words, citizen journalism can now be organized on a far better basis than ever before, to the extent that it really does become the answer to “how can we do all that we need to do for hyperlocal on a reduced and reducing journalist workforce”. The first examples of citizen journalism at any scale that I mapped were in Florida in the early years of this century, and they plainly lacked the tools to do the job. Well, the answer is now clear – recognize and adopt your own community as participants and partners, follow the interests of that community, seek quality and set standards but do not forget who is doing what for whom. In order to succeed at hyperlocal the regional press may need to retire its editors, turn its remaining reporters into Boomlly operators and forget what was learnt in the age of print about editorial power. But since the alternative is a slow road to extinction then I strongly recommend anyone interested in survival to contact Lizzie Hodgson (e.hodgson@civicboom.com) at Civicboom and discuss the re-integration of community around news. Now.
And if the partial answer to “there is no hyperlocal news is a community answer, the other important reminder is to underline the fact that local news organizations do not mine existing database resources for hyperlocal news. Thus, for example, the national database of roadworks (www.elgin.com) is not used in any active news environment, as far as I know. Yet one of the most important pieces of information you can give anyone on a hyperlocal smrtphone service would be where delays and disruption can be expected, when it starts and when it is due to end. Much more data of this type is now becoming available, both through Open Data mandates and commercial efforts. You do not need Big Data in a local context to find it, and it blends beautifully with citizen journalism.
If the regional press is to hold its post-print position and move forward, then the size and shape of the local opportunity must be re-defined. Successful citizen journalism can point to entrepreneurial activity in local eBook or local eLearning activity. The media organization as a one delivery, advertising-driven, wholly broadcast news operation in the locality may finally be dead; visions of its future are experimental, but it is only by iteration that we drive netorked publishing forward. There are plenty of US models, and even if Patch.com will not eventually succeed then the broadcast media work around EasyBlock (MSNBC) and iReport (CNN) should provide some clues – and TownSquareBuzz and The Batavian suggest others. This is the eleventh hour – there is not a minute to spare!
Mar
22
The Atomization of Education
Filed Under Big Data, Blog, Cengage, eBook, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, news media, Pearson, Publishing, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
When lofty, intellectual figures like Mike Shatzkin (http://www.idealog.com/blog/atomization-publishing-as-a-function-rather-than-an-industry/) quote one’s sayings of many years ago there is real danger of a sudden rush of blood to the head. Thankfully, his purpose is more to mark the entry of Google as a publisher than to say “Worlock told you so”, but he really started me rethinking this turf in the process. You see, “atomization” is the growing experience of all markets. Nature, this week, described the work of a computational biologist at a drug company, searching 23,000 articles in one text mining enquiry” to pick out hundreds of proteins that could relieve a mouse model of multiple sclerosis”. This is not the world of articles and journals in which most journal publishers think they are still living. The practice of law is a workflow now designed around procedural requirements fed by precedents. Readers here will have heard almost ad nauseam of the collapse of newspaper and magazine business models, replaced online and in the device in your hand with filtered references and the ability to call for more. Artificial intelligence and computer written information ( Narrative Science) will take an ever larger role in content creation, and this content will be increasingly read by machines that protect us from the full onslaught of the information-based networked society that we have created. And that machine-generated information will be created in atoms from the very beginning. Addressable, metadata-identifiable atoms. We will collect them, review them, put them into different orders and create, from these objects, the information structures of the future – and some of them we shall probably call “books” just because we cannot think of a better name.
Amongst my reading this week has been a pair of reports from Eduventures (www.eduventures.com) on Predictive Analytics and Adaptive Learning. While they do not take us very far they do very adequately describe the present and I am delighted to see subjects like this being covered in contexts where educational administrators may get to read them. The educational mold probably broke about a decade ago, and much of what now happens in education reflects the dim and distant echoes of the works of true scholars like Seymour Pappert and Marvin Minsky at MIT, or Alan Kay at Zerox and Apple. But for all that long decade of talking about learning objects and SCORM, of learning journeys and personalized learning, where are we now? Still talking about “the migration to the electronic textbook”!
And why? Publishers say teachers demand texts, Teachers say students demand them. Everyone says parents insist on them, only please make them digital (easier to carry, cheaper to buy). And in every part of the developed world you hear the low moan of “falling standards, education is not gripping or immersive, kids are now exam monkies being trained to pass tests etc etc”. The inescapable conclusion is that our society is in denial in the education space so maybe our thinking should be turning towards what we do to change the fundamentals. And here the Eduventures work carries seeds of hope. The report which looks at adaptive learning focusses on “developmental education (for European readers, this is yet another euphemism for remedial work with less able learners). And this is critical in all of our societies: only where most traditional techniques failed completely will we seem to trust ourselves to something else. So where students must play catch-up we can go to people like Pearson Learning Solutions, who by investment or partnership have now put together a considerable hand of potential plays, from SmartThinking in the US to TutorVista in India covering the individualized instruction side of the deal, while the work with Knewton, mentioned here before, moves Pearson centrally into the service-led domain centred on creating course material for specific students with known and diagnosed problems, and making it adapt with them. Only the complete atomization of learning materials into objects with defined learning outcomes will allow these solutions to succeed, and publishers to survive. And yet, this outcome is still far from the minds of the biggest “textbook” publishers in the line behind Pearson.
Who else does good work in adaptive learning, then? Eduventures single out Carnegie Learning, now part of Apollo (the University of Phoenix, not the investor). Here is one of the future patterns: owners of schools and distribution systems, like Pearson and Apollo, custom to their own needs while the textbook players just melt in the heat. Another quoted player is Edmentum (PLATO plus Archipelago), now refinanced and with a strong bias to the developmental education field. Meanwhile a quite different and disruptive set of players are atomizing at the teacher level. Beyond the scope of these reports, note how rapidly systems are developing all over the world to network successful lessons, resources and techniques. When I was a textbook publisher our mantra, in times when the only tech was Monotype, was that we justified our existence by reflecting through our authors the best teaching practice that we could research and locate. Now every teacher can do that for themselves: TSL Education claims a network outreach to 47 million teachers globally from its UK and US sites, while teacherspayteachers.com publicizes a teacher in North Carolina who has earnt $1 million from selling learning resources online. Atomization pays!
But the revolution comes full turn when you apply predictive analytics. Education is a live Big Data environment, with huge caches of material concerning each learner, and increasingly, each learner’s reaction to each learning process. At the moment, these reports note, the focus of predictive analytics is finding out who is likely to fail and trying to help them in time. With 25% of US college learners dropping out before the end, this is a very expensive problem which needs to be solved. Predictive Analytics can be demonstrated to improve retention, both by improving selection and by diagnosing reasons for failure before it is too late. College teaching staff will be worried: failure to learn is also about failure to teach. Typically, the interviews in these reports show that data is siloed, that LMS data does not mix well with other content, that those who use predictive analysis mostly do so in terms of IBM’s SPSS software, and that the use of these analytic techniques was just as prevalent now in retention as in recruitment. Just what one would have expected. But when data analytics becomes an accurate prediction of outcomes, then personalized learning can really begin. Do not be stubbornly publishing textbooks, whether they are digital facsimiles or not, when that golden dawn arrives!
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