Jun
3
After the Textbook is Over…
Filed Under Blog, Cengage, eBook, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Pearson, Publishing, social media, Uncategorized | 1 Comment
Now, class, this is a moment of real liberation. You are now free to learn on your own or collaboratively using new methods of learning which are as old as the hills and which depend on the acknowledgement of two Lessons:
LESSON 1: all learning is narrative. Unless it is conveyed in a story form we have no way of relating odd facts to each other.
LESSON 2: all true learning is enjoyable, whether it is done alone, in groups of learners, or by learners grouped around an inspired teacher.
We are now watching the far from inspiring sight of the world’s educational publishers, at all levels, trying to breathe fresh breath into the calcified corpses of print textbooks by recreating them as eTextbooks. This will fail. While we cannot recreate learning itself in the digital environment we can provide an entirely new learning experience, and it is an insult to the intelligence of learners to give them a book-look-alike format that apes print without adding value from digital. And to say that notes and bookmarks are significant value is rubbish. Only if you build a textbook ab initio online (Nature’s Principles of Biology is a case in point) can you claim some credit from instant updating and lifelong ownership. I spent a year of my life – 1969 – 1970 – editing and structuring Biology: A Functional Approach, which became a bestseller at its level for a decade. The narrative created was around deserting the study of plants and animals as classifications and species, the rote learning of a previous generation, and building a storyline around the way life on earth functions – from respiration to reproduction. A narrative about how life works. But that was telling stories then, in the great age of print. This week, I have seen two glimpses of the future, one expressed as as business organization, and the other as highly innovative technology. Both of them undermine completely the idea that the future has anything to do with the reconstituted formats of print.
In the first instance I found myself this week in the prestigious Mayfair offices of Direct Learning Marketplace (www.DLMplc.com). This, in the jargon of the investor, is a “buy and build” vehicle for acquiring future-facing business assets in the field of business education. Driven by the entrepreneurial energies of Andy Hasoon, it has at its core an idea about learning which is one sustainable arm of the two-pronged approach to what I now believe are the only viable metodologies for recreating learning in a networked society. By his purchase of Pixelearning, a Coventry company long on my map as an ideas centre in serious gaming, Andy signals an intention to place games at the heart of the learning experiences that he is tackling across the hugely fragmented territory of training, development, in-servicing etc in the business and industrial context. And since scale is a vital component here, and he works in a country with a gaming design tradition to be proud about, the acquisition approach is very appropriate. So to those traditional book publishers who have always said to me “Gaming is interesting but you can never build a big business around it”, I can now say “watch this space”!
And alongside gaming lets place the other future development strategy. In the 1990s, as a external director at Dorling Kindersley before it was bought by Pearson, I revelled in the development of CD-ROM-based multimedia learning experiences. The fact that this year, with the arrival of ePub3, we are at last able to do online what we could then do on disc in 1995 is surely a signal for something to happen. And it has, in Boulder, Colorado. There, a team with huge experience in multiple media development for education, led by Jeff Larsen, Larry Pape and Kevin Johnson, have begun to create video-based narratives that to me exemplify where we are going with tablet-based experiences. Their focus has been the iPad, and their initial field of engagement has again been business education (says a lot for how stroppy businesses can be when served “same old, same old” by training companies?). If you have reached this point please go immediately to http://www.inthetelling.com/tellit.html and then play the demo video (also on YouTube, where we, as learners/students, download 4 billion videos a day!). Here you will see a narrative core in video on one side of the iPad screen, with chapters, references and linkage on the other. Here you will also see navigation to other related resources. This is a licensable technology, backed by Cloud-based storage and streaming, and surrounded with the developer tools needed to create narrative based video learning on the TellIt technology.
And I thank this team for something else as well. They have avoided the over-hyped, near-meaningless term “multimedia”, which lost its meaning and its way in the dotcom boom/bust, and settled for Transmedia to express what they are doing. This is a good term for a new age of narrative-led, video-based, learning experiences and I hope it catches on. And one last note: everything spoken of here fits wonderfully onto the infrastructure of LMS/VLE/digital repositories that we have oversold to schools and learning institutions, and which now comes into its own. Alongside and around the installation of that infrastructure we also failed to persuade teachers, as well as learners, that learning could be recreated in the network, and improve in the process. Here are two initiatives – in games and video narrative – which at last make good that promise.
May
8
Fiddling with your Devices
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data protection, eBook, eLearning, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, privacy, Search, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
In our shuffling ascending spiral motion up the great Tower of Time, we do denial at every turn of the stair. A year ago: “Devices are just display tech and will never replace real multi-functional office computing”. Today: “Everything goes to the Cloud”. Last year: “Everybody must build all the functionality into Apps”. Now: “Personalization will overtake Apps before Apps take over publishing”. The result is familiar. Let me see if I can deepen the gloom and make the waters more muddy for a moment, knowing that our only hope of insight comes from bafflement and obscurity.
It seems to me for a start that publishers really do not like Apps. They are convenient, developers love them, they work at the subscription level, but as information products they are not very satisfying. Many of them lack the linkability which has now become a habit of mind for network users. They are certainly Workflow, and invaluable if you are buying a train ticket or booking an hotel. Elsewhere they are often Shortcuts to Nowhere. The statistics tell us that the vast majority of App downloads are never used twice. Since they are tied to devices and the formatting demanded by device manufacturers they do not meet the expectation that we encouraged the former print world to accept: go digital neutral and cover every channel of distribution. They work well for community and clubs, where they can act as a holding point for shared content and a jumping off point for discussion, but I am becoming so unsure of the hegemony of Devices that it is undermining my faith in Apps as well.
The last straw was a note on Pebble in the Guardian (8 May 2012). Pebble is a wristwatch lookalike device based on eInk and providing email and text access on Android and iPhone. (http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-04/12/pebble-e-ink-smartwatch). This really hurts. I have been going round for years telling everyone that the reason my children do not seem to wear watches is that they are people of a modern age who work (albeit late) on network time. But despite the founders of Pebble raising £5 million in funding through product pre-purchases, this only convinces me even more that we are wrong if we start “publishing to” devices as if they were a platform or a channel. I think that our efforts need to be directed elsewhere, while we watch devices morph into new forms and bifurcate across functions. The day will come when we shall each have several (I have unfortunately already arrived) and they will be dedicated to use purposes in our lives – this for flying, that for taking to meetings, this other for holidays etc. The device spec will be governed by our purposes and requirements in these functions, not by any attempt to put every function into every device. The device in the car will have different requirements from the one in the kitchen, though of course some of the functionality will be the same.
All of which rather begs the question of what environments we should be publishing for if not specifically for Apps and devices. And the answer, of course, is the personalized Cloud. The environments we should be watching are Apple’s iCloud, and Amazon (AWS)’s CloudSearch. In this sense, current battles in the book sector are simply a kindergarten warm-up for the big battles out in the playground at lunch hour. Current popular neurosis about privacy (an odd but real phenomenon, since the security services have always had unfettered access to our deepest secrets, at least since Sir Francis Walsingham bought his first thumb screw) and the business drive to Cloud computing will come together in Personal Cloud. There I will have my library, my searchable subscriptions and, above all things, my Cloud Server. This will end all questions about the Web as a service venue – it will become a place for browse and research, not a full service zone. That I will control for myself, as well as all the data derived from it, and on that server I will decide what access to content derived from me and my activities that I give to third parties (using long available services like Paoga – www.paoga.com – to do this). The device that measures my blood pressure files the results in my Cloud, gives me well-informed medical guidance from the selection of service vendors that I trust and subscribe to, but only releases my actual results to my physician at regular periodicity – and his monitoring devices tell him when we need to talk. Come to think of it, the Pebble strapped round my wrist could handle the pulse for a start!
I have too little space here to demonstrate the full extent of my ignorance more than superficially. My feeling from reading is that Amazon’s announcements last month now put them a little in the lead over Apple and Google (http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2012/04/amazon-beats-google-to-a-cloud.php). Apple’s concern was content sharing across devices (https//www.apple.com/uk/iCloud). Googles of course was search, but clearly both Amazon and Google are alike in the vastness of their server farm environments and their ability to support global personal and corporate Cloud usage. And Amazon, having started AWS in 2006, may be said to have the experience, and the readiness to move into these new worlds. We are entering the age of “he is so old he can remember when Amazon was a bookseller”. An annual rental of CloudSearch costs 100 USD.
So has my once upon a time dream of the consolidated omni device completely faded? Probably so, though we are likely to be bewildered by the range of device offerings and their narrow differentiation for many years to come. Meanwhile, the next virtual world builds quietly in the Cloud, and demands our total attention.
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