May
18
From the walls of ancient Merv
Filed Under Blog, eBook, Education, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, online advertising, Publishing, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment
Three weeks without email is a wonderful restorative . And if you catch at something really important to replace the daily messaging fix then you are weaned of the habit within a few hours . For me , travel is just such a replacement habit . As we wandered in the Registan at Samarkand or across the Maidan in Isfahan , then my head was alive to the possibilities of town planning in (ancient) civilized cities . The palace complex at Persepolis awoke ideas of power concentrations and communications , just as the tomb of Cyrus at Pasargarde reminded me of how easy it is to lay a trail which misleads as much as informs one’s successors.
But it was the walls of ancient Merv that brought me down . Having struggled arthritically to the top , and then onto the citadel , the view from what was once the greatest city in the world barring only Babylon exhibits – a desert . After Genghis Khan , the great city , which may have had a population close to one million , was never re-occupied . The deserts of Turkmenistan are unforgiving. Progress stopped here .
Almost the first thing that I saw on my return to work was the agenda for the next ePublishing Innovation Forum 2010 (www.epublishing-forum.com) which I am chairing in London on 25-26 May – next week – in London . Like the view from the top of the walls of Merv , it is inspiring , but for utterly different reasons . It reminds me of the pace and iterative nature of change in an information marketplace that is recreating itself from ground level in cycles that used to take a decade to complete , but which can now take 10 months .
Peering from the top of the walls , I know that I can no longer envisage an agenda that covers the whole spectrum of change . The great team who organize this event now know this too , so the keynotes are particularly important , from Simon Waldman of the Guardian at the beginning ( “The internet ate my business” !) to Shane O’Neill and his political perspective on using third party ( government) content at the end . In between come some case studies I really want to hear – Chris Pilling on the Complinet experience , or the Economist strategy on networks from Aeneas McDonnell . Evan Schnittman at OUP is a wonderful commentator on distribution issues , and Jonathan Glasspool at Bloomsbury is building a new digital world of professional and academic publishing with some interesting acquisitions .
Out there on the walls are also some seasoned observors , eyes narrowed to slits in the face of blinding sun and sandstorms . Adam Hodgkin , one of the industries most experienced venturers , will tell us how you build businesses which exploit iPhone and iPad , while Hugo Drayton , veteran of the Advertising Legion , puts fresh heart into markets which have at times looked like the Karakoram Desert itself .
And I have only scratched the surface .Ian Eckert knows all about publishing platforms – from newspapers ( I first met him at Portsmouth and Sunderland , a group now as well forgotten as Merv itself ) to UBM , to TES and now back to making things work at Abacus . And TES’s current CEO , Louise Rogers , will be there to show how UGC really works .Other case studies include Fish4 ( who will no doubt remind me that I was once their chairman too ) and Conde Nast . And the panellists come from vital places like Nature , Penguin , Incisive Media and Pearson Education .All this gets somehow shoe-horned into two days ( pity the chairman ) and has so far gained a bigger audience than last year . I am pleased and proud that my colleagues at Outsell are once more , for a third year , its media partners .
Unlike ancient Merv , the network allows media to die in one context while regenerating in another . We have to use events like this to tap into the collective experience of that powerfull speaking team to find out what natural laws govern that regeneration , whether experience can be replicated , how we can really understand user behaviour , what constitutes value add in the eyes of our users and whether we can understand and work with them successfully before they decide that we are part of the problem , not the solution . While I remain confident that publishing will never become a deserted city , it may be best to find out now what is in the minds of the Mongol horde on the network ,something which the citizens of old Merv never deigned to do .
I look forward to seeing you there .
Mar
24
Eyeless in Gaza
Filed Under eBook, Education, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, Uncategorized, Workflow | 2 Comments
Apologies for an enforced absence . Minor eye surgery took longer to heal than anticipated , so I was left in the dark for two whole weeks . Imagine it : the horrifying compound growth of email , the buckets of spam , the listserv viral multiplication . Oh , the agony of life without the delete key !
In my darkness a kindly amanuensis has intervened to warn me that tomorrow They will call to ask me about “The Future of the Textbook “. They have sent 10 questions , apparently . They say I could answer them with my eyes shut , which may be fortunate this week . They also say that I am to concentrate on the 10 years out scenario. I love research when I am asking the questions , but , somehow , I feel a bit worried about providing the answers . Do you mind if , like Old Tiresias beneath the wall of crumbling Troy , I count my beads in public for a space and soundlessly mouth some types of answers ?
Crumbling Troy ? Surely the age of the textbook is over . In ten years there will not be a textbook market , but a market in networked mass customization of learning objects , held in commercial stores but also freely created by teachers online and traded between teachers . Lesson planning softeware , deriving objects from stores , from teacher networks , and from VLE/LMS environments where these survive in open network usage , will enable teachers to create and trade learning journies/pathways designed for particular ability levels or learning problems . As education becomes more self-applied in older age ranges , higher education and vocational training , so these pathways will be increasingly designed by their users .Learning plans will have assessment and diagnostic tools on board , with the opportunity to rehearse or create new pathways of greater intensity to accomplish remedial requirements . Where these learning workflows are developed by teachers for learners , only a small proportion of teachers will be the creatives , but the work of peer schools and teachers will be widely acknowledged and imitated and customized in other contexts .
So how will textbook publishers survive here ? The answer is that most of them won’t .Like newspaper publishers in the last five years we shall hear them intone ” Textbook content is king ” and “No one feels safe without a textbook ” until it is obvious to all that like Tom and Jerry in a madcap chase , they have run off the cliff edge and only the violent oscillation of their feet will keep them from plunging into the valley floor . Which they then inevitably do .
Some publishers have hedged this change . Pearson will sell textbooks until the end , but I suspect that long before that Pearson’s Learning Solutions , providing contracted -in school consortia systems integration to cope with these new workflows , will be the dominant revenue source . Elsewhere others have grasped enough of the point to go to interim customization, with Safari Books and Macmillan’s new Dynamic Textbooks demonstrating some of the range of possibilities .
This change to the personalized learning route is independent of gadgets . iPad will not revolutionize it , or iPhone or Android or anything else . These access modes will create accessibility , and add access features , but the learning services requirement here is more about the network than the device . Collaboration between learners is a key element here.And it is all about mark-up , standards and accessible objects . Most of these are already in place .
Who will win here ? Two or three integrated software/content houses with global markets will dominate . Pearson plus who ? Small software players offering enhanced user experiences will rip across the market like comets , but mostly end up as acquisitions for the big players , or widely emulated feature sets . About a third of content in the market will be created as proprietory objects , another third available to teachers by local school board/authority licensing deals – and the rest will be free and Web-located. The major role for “publishers ” , if we use such an archaic term , will be in locating , indexing and relating suitable objects , and sometimes encouraging teachers to invent new ones if required . Come to think of it , to behave like educational publishers used to do when they sought to s eflect the best practice of the best schools back to the rest .
I could go on , but having had more light today than I am used to , I need to stop . What do you say ? One last question ? Will blended learning prevail ? Since I am on record as saying that blended learning is as much an oxymoron as military intelligence , I am surprized that you ask . The only thing that blends properly is coffee . If you are suggesting that blended learning is as interesting as instant coffee then I might agree . But other markets show us likely patterns : when people grasp the digital point they very soon go for it unadulterated .
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