Jun

29

Learning from Ourselves

Filed Under Blog, eBook, Education, eLearning, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Pearson, Publishing, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment

It was a week. In the corridors of power, media tycoons planned post-imperial escape routes. And we who were content to play in a corner with, in the Yeatsian line, a looking glass and some beads, found revealed wonders in the very simplest of things. So Rupert Murdoch did a McGrawHill and divided his imperium into Good bank/Bad bank, and the latter got all the stricken print, from the Times to Harper Collins. The image which stuck with me, with the hacking debacle  somewhat in mind, was the US exit from Saigon. I tweeted that I could hear the helicopter’s whirling rotors above the embassy roof. The tycoon’s change of heart displayed just that sense of panic – “…OK , lets burn the papers and go …!” – leaving in the air the question of who can be persuaded to invest in the Bad bank, and at what price?

Back down at street level, two very encouraging developments took place in educational activities that I have been tracking for a very long time. While Mr Murdoch bundled Joel Klein’s educational division into the Bad bank category, I think we are pulling back round towards a very clear and obvious progressional framework for new service development. At the beginning of the month, in “After the Textbook is over” I tried to track the way in which narrative, especially in video base format, will change our approach – or, rather, allow it to revert to the ways in which learners have always learnt. And I looked at buy and build strategies aimed at creating real weight in the serious educational gaming markets. So now, at the end of the month, let me add two more elements to the mix. The platforms on which the new learning will be presented will be mobile, tablet and post-tablet, and their mobility will need support for teachers as narrative creators, learning journey planners, learning games implementors. The resources and assessments are even now being developed. And it will be critical to the success of all of this that teachers at all levels support each other, that successful learning journies can be adopted, amended and replicated, and that the behavioural tracking which we can do so much more effectively in these digital contexts is re-applied all the time to help get these environments grow responsively. (It remains an interesting question: why do we aspire so strongly to apply behavioural feedback to target advertising, yet use it so relatively sparingly to improve interfaces, online interactions, and, above all, the learning experience!).

Three news stories this week illustrate these matters for me. In the first instance I was very taken by the news (and it has been a long wait) that Global Grid for Learning (www.ggflondemand.com) is now an accredited part of the Microsoft Education Suite. Global Grid for Learning was developed by Cambridge University Press as the neutral storehouse and trusted broker for copyright-cleared information, allowing a teacher-facing aggregation of learning objects with good metadata connectivity to act as a quarry for lesson planning and narrative assembly. The service is now owned by EduTone in California, though why on earth Cambridge sold it last year when it was so  close to success still beats me. The fact that it is now the supply point in the Microsoft Education Suite in the very week when Microsoft announced its entry into the tablet market via its Surface strategy speaks volumes for the importance of this type of work (and also perhaps says something sad about the inability of some ancient University presses to change gear – Cambridge has now effectively left its domestic education market and removed its bridge to global markets).

But not all teachers will plan lessons or make journies or write narratives. Many or even most will borrow, imitate or adapt. This means that good practise has to be available and exposed, and that teachers have to respond to it. So it was hugely encouraging this week to read the announcement  from the American Federation of Teachers that their Share my Lesson site will become available in August. This is as a result of their collaboration with the UK’s TSL Education (the owner of the Times Educational Supplement, another Rupert Murdoch company dumped on the road to the Bad bank, but doing very well in private equity hands). TSL Education created TES Connect in 2008 as a way of creating a sharing environment for British teachers. The service currently has some 2 million members in 197 countries  and they download about 2.5 million lessons per month (http://www.tsleducation.com/). So gradually a global architecture moves into place to fuel the resource provision requirements of an education world which now has the other infrastructure environments it needs (networks, VLEs and LMS technology for storing, serving, collating results and communicating with parents, employers etc.). It is often said, and I have sometimes said it, that the system is now dominated by assessment: in truth, we are moving not just towards continuous assessment, but to the point where every learner knows when they have learnt something, and so does the systems around them. In order to make that vision sustainable we have to up the quality of the game in terms of the learning journey itself, and no one is doing more for that than TLS Education. The US is currently, in the bundle of 34 measured countries taking part in the Program for International Student Assessment (Associated Press 19 June 2012), 14th in reading, 17th in Science, and 25th in Mathematics. Whatever this means, it also means that  teething pains in re-engineering the teaching workforce should not be a deterrent when there is so much opportunity for improvement.

And the last story? It has nothing formally to do with educational, but it certainly demonstrates the feedback loop I was talking about earlier. Thomson Reuters launched its MarketPsych Indices (TRMIs) last week “in order to give real time psychological analysis of news and social media”. Here we are trying to “model the impact of investor psychology” and eventually develop “under the radar investment hypotheses”. In The whole field of learning more about what we know through analysis of how we talk about it, we are still in the nursery. Apply this in education and our learning journies may emerge in an interesting new light!

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.

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