May
22
Education: Ignore the Tablets, Eat the Box!
Filed Under Blog, eBook, Education, eLearning, internet, mobile content, Publishing, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Yesterday may have seen the largest single step forward for school-based educational publishing globally for a decade, which makes it confusing, but rather appropriate, that the word “education” did not intrude at all in the hullabaloo of the major product/service launch on the West Coast. Yet I suspect that if we convened a panel of enlightened educationalists from all sorts of international K-12 environments and asked them what they needed in order to deliver a vision of tomorrow’s educational technology then they might put together a shopping list something like this:
* Video, video, video – from the internet, terrestrial and satellite, and DVD/Blu-ray, all in one place, seamlessly
* Games – serious gaming in a context that makes sense to kids in and out of the classroom, capable of collaborative or single user working anywhere
* Connectivity, making the learner a real participant in the process as well as ensuring that all online and broadcast environments were linked into this hub
* Voice and gesture control, and the ability to profile and remember individual participants
* Multiscreen and split screen working, using video and internet at the same time
* Skype connections to remote teachers or wider collaborative groups
* Each user to have the computing power of a top range laptop at their disposal, backed by a network of 300,000 servers – the computing power of 1991 in one application
These are, of course, the headlines from yesterday’s launch of Microsoft’s Xbox One (http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-05/21/new-xbox-console). And I do not care about the numbering system, or whether we get Halo or Call of Duty: Ghosts. Or that some platforms are more backward-compatible than others. Frankly, my son had passed me by as a gamer by the time he was seven, and was making allowances for my mental and physical inability to keep up. But Convergence – that is something else. In the long years while we lurched from one technology to another – from CD-ROM to the iPad – all of our efforts seemed one – dimensional. Which is not to say that the iPad is not a useful tool in an educational context. But dilute the Apple Kool-Aid, please. Whatever Steve Job’s lifelong wishes were about creating a new start in education, nothing that has happened since Apple made its specific education launch convinces me that it is the textbook of the future. Or, as far as el-hi education is concerned, that it is desirable or appropriate to look for an eTextbook of the future. “Textbook” may be an albatross that we have to cut loose from the neck of education 7-18, and especially 11-18, if we are going to make meaningful progress at all.
If education at these ages is going to enter the immersive world of the network, then it has to be rooted in the multiservice environment of the home, as well as the school. Indeed, looking at the expensive and pitiful struggle in the UK to keep the actual physical buildings of the school together I wonder sometimes about how we will keep these locations open for more than one-on-one progress checking and assessment. As K-12 becomes more virtual, here are some of the issues we must look out for:
* the continuing progress towards personalised education, driven through specified learning journeys which are loaded with appropriate learning outcomes. Education is Workflow.
* the ability to monitor in the network the compliance of these outcomes with overall curriculum requirements demanded by education authorities, politicians, parents
* the ability to monitor and assess learner progress on the fly and tweak the system to allow repeat/re-iteration on topics where a full understanding has not been achieved
* the ability of teachers to morph into moderators, enabling them to select and suggest good learning strategies for individual learners, adopt best practice from successful peers and recognize, with the assistance of good monitoring and guidance solutions, where progress is made and when help is needed
* the ability to use this system architecture to keep parents informed of progress and problems, using the same systems for communication and dialogue as those in place in the home. Education is social media.
In this world there will be no examinations, since we shall know who knows what at which required level. In this world, every parent, every night, will be able to know what has been done and how well it has been accomplished. In this world, education will return to being the exploratory journey towards understanding that it has been at its most successful. And while it will take a long time for this world to come about, I think that the only road to the future is not the route of adding more and better devices at the edge of education, but by taking a holistic view through the only available architecture – the games platform.
All of this begs many interesting questions. Will Sony come up with a better answer in the new PlayStation? Perhaps. Will Nintendo make the Wii move here as its gesture control gets refined? Maybe. Of more concern to me is that now that games have come out of the bedroom and into the living room, and are now bidding to be the multiscreen service that runs television and streaming DVD in the home as the Home Hub, it will not be long before they emerge in the school as well. And this time teachers will not be able to say “leave your devices at the door”. OK, Microsoft may have to rebrand and call it XBox Ed. And make it available through its smartphone technology. But maybe, just maybe, yesterday was a new dawn. As EM Forster could not have resisted saying at this point: “Only Kinect”.
Apr
24
Spring in the Ku’damm
Filed Under Big Data, Blog, eBook, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment
Spring came late to Berlin this year, as elsewhere in Europe. But with the Spargel festival just starting, the trees in bud on Unter den Linden, the German courts ruling that you cannot re-sell an ebook and the German Government’s technical advisors indicating that government-funded research must be Open Access, it was clearly time to be there for the 10th annual Publishers’ Forum. Developed by Helmut von Berg and his colleagues at Klopotek, this has now clearly emerged as one of the leading places in Europe to talk about the future of what we are increasingly calling “networked publishing”. The meeting has moved from the Brandenburg Gate and the Pariserplatz back to the regenerating West Berlin of the Kurfurstendamm, but the urge to get to the roots of progressive development in what we once called the book business has not diminished.
By design and accident (loss of a keynoter) I played to more halls in this meeting than in any of the previous five that I have attended. Leave that to one side: my slideset is available under downloads on this site and on the conference site at www.publishersforum.de you will find slides, summaries, images, videos and references (including a very interesting tweetstream at #publishersforum) as these meetings get increasingly blanket-documented with linked description, comment and commentary. Data, in fact. An audience of 350 people at work with speakers, organizers, and media to discuss and share. Collaboration. And that was the theme of the meeting – Collaboration in the Age of Data adds up to Networked Publishing.
And from these sessions it is now clear where we are headed This Spring is definitive in ways that other Springs have not quite been. In every previous year you could be sure, here in thoughtful, conservative Germany, that someone would say that we wee jumping the gun, that format would survive fragmentation, that the “book would never die”. No such voices this week. In an audience that loves books and lives by them, I felt an absolute certainty that while “book as comforting metaphor” would survive, my friends and colleagues in the body of the hall knew that they had entered the Age of Data. We described network publishing as allusive, particulate, and above all, linked. We talked about workflow: our customer’s workflow as well as our own. This was the age of Metadata as well as the Age of Data. Speaker after speaker spoke of the potential to release new value from content as data, and the need for systems and services to support that monetization potential.
And the feedback loop was everywhere in evidence. The user and the networked power of users has completely shifted the balance from the editorial selectivity of gatekeeper producers to the individualized requirements of users. We once Pushed where now the increasingly Pull. But loyalty was not sacrificed on the way: if you provide solutions that fit user needs exactly then you can experience what Jan Reicert of Mendeley described in a private session as “amazing user love”. On the main agenda, Brian O’Leary spoke, with his usual lucid intelligence, on the disaggregation of supply, and amongst publishers Dan Pollock (formerly Nature, now Jordans) effectively defined the network publishing challenge, (replete like the auto industry with lack of standards) while Fionnuala Duggan of Coursesmart tracked the way in which the textbook in digital form becomes a change agent in conservative teaching societies while enabling the development of new learning tools. Kim Sienkiewicz of IIl demonstrated the semantic web at work in educational metadata. And Christian Dirschl of Wolters Kluwer Germany updated us on the continued development of the Jurion project, a landmark in semantic web publishing for lawyers.
Alongside the publishers stood the Enablers. Publishing seldom realises the value that it gets from its suppliers. Indeed, one of my current mantras is that the importance of software in the industry is now so great that few content players are not also software developers, and that the relationships they enter into with third parties are often no longer supplier agreements, but really partnership and often strategic alliance agreements, and need to be recognized as such. They not only add value, but they materially affect the valuation of the content players themselves. It is no accident that it was Uli von Klopotek who opened this event for his company, and it was gratifying to see on the platform a range of services that are symptomatic of the re-birth described here. Hugh McGuire from Pressbooks in Canada exemplifies that enablement, as does Martin Kaltenbock of Austria’s Semantic Web Company. Jack Freivald of Information Builders, Adam DuVander of Progammable Web, and Anna Lewis and Oliver Brooks of ValoBox were each able to demonstrate further value additionality through an elaboration of networked publishing. The result was a rich gulasch suppe of networked expedients ( far more nutritional than the prevalent currywurst of this city!).
The conference agenda spoke of momentum. Laura Dawson (Bowker), a prescient commentator, noted how far we had gone in her Open Book presentation. And if we still lack standards, we have people like BISG and Editeur on this agenda struggling towards them. One of the most attractive features of the old book business was its anarchic and “cottage industry” flavour. I think it will retain many anarchic and small business qualities in the network, but it will be increasing bounded by standards of networked communication.
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