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”.
May
13
Omniscience and Omerta
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data protection, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, news media, privacy, Search, semantic web, social media, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment
“Although we have long made limited
customer relationship data available to
our journalists, we realize this was a
mistake.” Doctoroff went on to note
that Bloomberg terminals are also
equipped with cameras that can see
through the clothing of female
subscribers, but he stressed that
images collected by the cameras are
not shared with ‘those nerds in the
News division.’
I much enjoyed the ChartGirl (http://chartgirl.com/pdf/BLOOMBERG.pdf) take on the Bloomberg story, and as is very often the case, Hilary Sargent got more sense into a chart than I can get into a thousand words. But we are now two days into the story, and already I note the appearance of stories saying we are giving Bloomberg too hard a time, that this could have happened anywhere, and that using online services is courting insecurity so we really should not be so very surprized. I am sorry, but this part of the development loses me completely. Is there any difference between Bloomberg allowing its news staff to access customer sign-on and usage data and News Corp tolerating a culture of news snooping that led to widespread phone-hacking? In principle, No. In degree, there may be differences, but if you aspire to be a trusted service provider then you simply cannot allow this to go on. I have no doubt that Thomson Reuters have spent the day checking their security, and Dow Jones have been explaining their policies at length. But neither so far has been revealed in the Bloomberg light, and it may say something about the cultures of these various players that this is the case.
The principle at stake here was taught me by the head of a London law practice in 1981. He was an early Eurolex user when I was running that early online service for lawyers, and he burst into my office at 8 am one morning bearing yards of printout. “Have you been watching the questions my staff have been asking”, he demanded, and when I said No, and explained we had confidentiality undertakings in our employment contracts, he calmed down and explained that the questions and search routines asked by his staff indicated exactly how he was going to defend a client insurer resisting a claim for damages to the wonderfully fragile legs of a famous actress who had fallen over at the film studios. As he departed he said “What I put into your machine is mine, and when and how I use it is mine also. You can use it, in anonymized form, to improve the service, but beyond that you may not go”.
It seems to me an important principle. As we as a society prepare to defend ownership of our supermarket bills, protect our phone usage from all comers, dream of building ePassports and eWallets to repatriate our own information to us, so that, if we wish, we can sell it to the highest bidder, we shall all of us call upon such principles, invoking them as property laws in our increasingly user-centric networked society. So how come that Bloomberg got things so shockingly wrong? Bloomberg, that secret cavern of a private company, whose whole culture is omerta and whose staff are sworn to secrecy beyond mortality? It comes down to an identifiable trait in private companies. It is about an omniscient esprit de corps. It reflects a certain arrogance that says that if you have grown fast enough and with enough certainty then you can make your own rules. In the pre BusinessWeek days Bloomberg was renowned for never buying anything, but instead for emulating what it wanted by “doing it again – better”. This admirable and industrial culture clearly also has a downside. It breeds people who can walk on water where confidentiality is concerned. The result will perhaps be a sobering ducking.
And hopefully the shock of cold water will touch the rest of the industry as well. Often, even in the financial services sector, users will want to put their content together to create a resource that the market needs. DataMonitor as a service combining anonymized information from banks and hedge funds on shorting contracts and equity leasing is a case in point. But it does not just indicate data that could be used to help create better markets. It comprises data that belonged to the traders and was theirs to sell, regardless of the ownership of terminals or networks which created that data. Unless we adhere to this idea we shall not have a networked society in any real sense, since all players will feel obligated to work one on one to prevent the data leakage.
We got this right 30 years ago: we cannot afford to sell the pass now, as we move into the Age of data analytics and the semantic web.
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