Mar
6
The Media Regeneration Game
Filed Under B2B, Blog, eBook, Education, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, social media, Uncategorized | 1 Comment
The last two days at Digital Media Strategies (Kings Place, London, 4-5 March 2014) have been amongst the best that I have spent in a conference hall in a decade. And I have wide experience to call upon! But Neil Thackray and Rory Brown and their team at the Media Briefing company pulled out all the stops to advance the game on their inaugural effort last year, and in the process pulled over 340 delegates and some first class “big names” and an even better class of “previously unknowns” from this diverse industry. And they really set me thinking: where were all these newspaper bosses and magazine tycoons during the long years when “it will never happen here” was the rule. Some still looked a bit nervous – Simon Fox, CEO of Trinity Mirror, caught in the headlights of a tigerish interrogation from Thackray, looked as if he were about to confess to war crimes at HMV and indecent assault on “The People”, but most of his colleagues were self-assured to the point of near-arrogance.
That at least could be an explanation of Mike Darcey, the News Corp CEO and his decision to spend 8 minutes of his own allotted time taking apart what he fancied to be the strategy of the next speaker, Andrew Miller, CEO, The Guardian Media Group. At least this precluded further dwelling upon the comparative failure of paywalls and the comparative lack of impact of digital advertising. And it enabled everyone to say that they were faithfully following the user experience. Yet it had the odd effect of making News Corp into a sort of John the Baptist warm up act for the Guardian, to which one felt that Andrew Miller responded by indicating that he had a better plan, but not revealing fully what he had up his sleeve. To those in the audience inured to the media having no plan at all, this was a tonic. At the moment the Guardian seems to be a connectivity junkie, rightly glorying in its content re-use and the amount of referral traffic it gets, celebrating its brand positioning as a global voice of liberal values and trying to draw the advertising it can get on this pitch. But I get an underlying feeling that they know that advertising is not the answer, and the room sat up when the topic turned to Guardian Membership.
Clearly if the Guardian can monetize its community effectively then it may be possible to get millions of people to subscribe to its values and buy into aspects of its content feed. Andrew Miller showed a picture of C P Scott and laid tributes before the lares and penates of great journalism, as indeed he should (and neither he nor I care that Edward Snowden appears to be a right wing Republican with a wholly eighteenth century view of the rights of the individual). However, if you have large populations of like-minded people with a strong community ethic then you can create – Guardian (Eye)witness. I well remember, while chairing Fish4, the frustration of the regional press competing with Mr Miller as he distributed free AutoTrader software to every used car dealer, enabling them to organize their inventory and upload easily – to AutoTrader. As a Guardian Member will I get the equivalent, thus broadening the scope (and reducing the cost?) of Great Journalism. Too early to say it yet, perhaps ? The editors would be talking quality control and the journos would be talking to the National Union of Journalists, but…
But at least we are all talking now. As a digital participant from 1980 and an internet – watcher from 1993, I am interested by how much of the industry response was fear and loathing. Hearst, at this conference a great example of digital thinking, spent the early years of the internet buying medical databases and B2B applications. Brilliant purchases, but what did they say about management’s view of their existing media futures? In the same terms, DMGT has turned itself in these time periods from being a newspaper company into a B2B player. No harm in that, but could earlier action have preserved the original structures. Or maybe the media is best re-invented not by its current practitioners but buy complete outsiders – great examples in this conference from Buzzfeed and from Business Insider? And then, what do we make of what seems to be a very European trend at present – letting the staff who know the markets create and test the ideas for recreating media and beyond media services.
I had heard a little about Sanoma’s regenerative Accelerator programmes before, and so was full of anticipation when Lassi Kurkijarvi covered the stage with energy and enthusiasm. With both internal and external venture activity he had a lot to cover. It is now fairly common for media players to invest in start-ups and develop incubators (Reed Elsevier have been venture capital investors for a decade; Holtzbrinck have their seed corn funding and efforts like Macmillan Digital Science and Digital Education; Gruner und Jahr spoke of their activities here) but getting 150 employees into a boot camp and encouraging ideation? Only for the Finns? Not at all, said Lassi. Here was a a planned process of open innovation starting with a mass kick off meeting, a webinar-based process, staff making quick pitches to get support for ideas, an initial selection of 20, crowd sourced selection of 5 for a boot camp experience and the result is 3 ideas which the company is now developing. So look out for Spot-a-shop, Huge or ClipScool – they did not come from Silicon Valley or Tech City, Old Street, but they may be none the less valuable as they express the knowledge of customers built up within a diversified media conglomerate like Sanoma.
So what does this mean? That media corporations can be regenerated from within? What would we have given to know that in 1993!
Feb
12
Schools in the Cloud
Filed Under data analytics, eBook, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, online advertising, Pearson, Publishing, social media, Uncategorized | 1 Comment
There is something about Professor Sugata Mitra. The award-winning TED exponent of individualized learning was speaking yesterday at the meeting organized at the British Library by Cambridge Assessment (and well done to them) and within moments he had subtly undermined the subject title. His respect for teachers was unlimited, he told an audience comprised mostly of teachers, even if the teacher was a machine. Using his celebrated Hole in the Wall work (http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/) he chatted affably while casually lighting sticks of dynamite and tossing them into his audience. Is there a barrier to learning that needs teacher moderation? Well, if you put Indian kids in his experience in the same context as a computer then they will learn for themselves. It takes nine months to get them to the same level of proficientcy that you would expect of an English office worker, but they get there – and they self teach English on the way. And it works in Northumbria (he is now Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle) as it did in Kalkaji (Delhi). No one could occupy the same space as this man without knowing that self-learning and group learning drive educational change, not teachers or technologies. And the group is vital (as is the Grandmother – he includes a reference point figure in his experiments, explaining that we all need praise and admiration to ensure that we persevere!).
In a crowded agenda (billed as a debate, though it transpired that there was little time for that) it is only possible to pick highlights. Like David Puttnam contrasting his 44 honorary degrees with his three “O” levels, and talking about the comic books that inspired him to learn. Or Clive Beale’s attack on ICT labs, with rows of screens but no space for collaboration. As the morning wore on you might have thought that all you needed was Raspberry Pi and self-taught Scratch and internet access at home (Mind the Gap: http://www.mindthegap.org.uk/about-mind-the-gap/), or the good fortune to have enrolled in Christine Swan’s class at Stourport High School, getting enabled as a builder of Minecraft worlds, and all would be well. And she reminded us too that while her school allows pupils Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) rights we still have no methodologies for assessing learner device knowledge or indeed assessing the outcomes of collaborative learning (which begs the question of whether we need to assess these things – maybe teachers need those assessments, but do they help learners?).
So we kept on talking about teachers, and not about learning. Which meant that it was good to hear from two Mooc providers, both in their different ways demonstrating that a Mooc is an undefined entity which can be just about anything you want it to be. Future Learn (https://www.futurelearn.com/about/team), from the Open University, provides one interesting twist. This is Mooc injected with social media. Here you can check your progress with your co-learners – no one wanders alone in this Cloud. It scores high levels – 34% is very distinguished here – of active engagement by users, so the social aspects seem to be working There are now 29 university and institutional backers, alongside sponsors like BT and IET. The scheme has 10,000 initial users from 190 different countries and some parts of this presentation seemed to me to go to the heart of the matter. For example, I applauded the stress on vicarious learning – those happy accidents that seem to follow, in all our learning experiences, through a conjunction of context and enthusiasm. And this is an environment designed explicitly for the smartphone screen, since this is the learning centre in so many of those countries. And then the Argugraph – an online tool for charting how arguments are changing in group discussion – seemed to me to show a real determination to match new styles of learning with appropriate instruments, even if those are not yet fully evolved.
Just as engaging, and now past breakeven and into modest margins, was the Galway-based private enterprize ALISON (Advanced Learning Interactive Systems OnLine; www.alison.com). Mike Feerick, its CEO, uses an advertising/sponsorship business model to propagate some 600 vocational and skills-based course to 3 million users, including 500,000 in Africa. Since they are growing at 200,000 users per month, even while bearing in mind that completion rates on all Moocs are low, there is a suggestion here that they have found a formula which works. The service is genuinely international, and Mike Feerick was at pains to point out, in a world of commoditized content for schools, that organizations like his can very rapidly move to cover national requirements (in weeks in the case of the maths curriculum, where he is also able to collaborate with partners like Macmillan’s Math Doctor: http://alison.com/news/Free-Maths-Lessons-on-the-Maths-everyone-needs-to-know). In other words, core courses can be rapidly re-framed around learner needs, which becomes competitively important if your chief competitor is YouTube. In that competition, ALISON would point out that they are the learning experience which is vetted, tracked, and standardized by length and level. They also want to speak clearly to employers, pointing out that an ALISON certification allows the learner to demonstrate exactly what he knows to a prospective employer by rehearsing the test online. At last Moocs are beginning to sound like sustainable businesses and less like an alternative revenue stream devised by university finance staff. And at last a speaker who recognized the importance of analytics in this context!
I could go on, for it was a rich day of 12 speakers. Helen Eccles of CIE, the international side of Cambridge Assessment, must, for example, deserve a mention for the teacher-free purity of Global Perspectives, the trial of broad cross-disciplinary subjects (“traffic congestion” is the trial example for the new IGCSE examination. Yet by the end, amidst all the opportunities they we now have to rethink the educational space, I was surprized that we did not speak more about assessment (considering who sponsored this meeting!), about content (there were three or four publishers in the audience, most from Pearson, but there should have been 50!) and about the Cloud! As I write this I note that McGraw Hill Education have followed the earlier acquisition of ALEKS with the purchase, this week, of the remaining 80% of Area9 Aps which they did not own (http://www.mheducation.com/about/news-room/mcgraw-hill-education-acquires-area9-developer-adaptive-learning-technologies-k-12): here then are investments in adaptive learning that also follow the idea that learning, if not the School, now goes to the Cloud. Are publishers really aware of the implications of this, and of the commoditization of content to which one speaker referred? We are now way beyond the world of the digital textbook.
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