Hype alert – Web 2.0 Marketing is a paradigm shift but only a portion of the market is using it today. In Part 1 I argued that market trends should be pushing you to use social networking, blogs, wikis, and the other tools of Web 2.0 in your marketing mix.…
Education marketers have been slow to adopt wikis, blogs, social networks, and virtual worlds. There are valid reasons for this (see below), but it is time for us as an industry to begin embracing these tools. In this series I’m going to explore the industry context, the gestalt, and some…
By Guest Blogger Randy Wilhelm Educator’s love the internet but they have valid concerns about using it in the classroom. Thinkronize’s study, “Schools & Generation ‘Net” uncovered compelling insights from nearly 1,000 principals and library media specialists. Relevancy, commercialization, information literacy, instructional validity, and children’s safety were all significant issues.…
Sometimes in the rush to finish a chapter on deadline or to get six copies to Paducah by Friday we loose sight of the essence of what we are doing. Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietanmese monk, writing about how everything is connected expressed it this way: When you look at…
Barbara Russell, founder of Options Publishing, was honored at the Association of Education Publishers (AEP) awards breakfast this week in New York. She spoke about entrepreneurship in the education market and why it matters to those of us who care deeply about providing schools with innovative high quality instructional products.…
Open Source culture in K12 Education will have a profound impact on our industry over the next 10-15 years. Open source already touches instructional content, classroom management, student information systems, and IT services. Where else will it find a purchase? Ironically, the attempts by the old guard industries to protect…
I’m thankful that I get to work in a business that actually means something in this world. When we do our jobs well good things happen for teachers and kids. Thanks to my friend and mentor Peter Lycurgus for giving me the nudge in this direction 18 years ago. I’m…
Information Overload is a serious problem in our culture today. People are frustrated and overwhelmed by the fire hose of information they are trying to absorb. But, as the American Philosopher Ann Landers was fond of saying: “No one can take advantage of you without your permission.”In summary: Personally we…
Marketing and selling in the era of infinite input feels like howling into a gale. The average urban dweller is subject to 4,000 ads a day, 1 every 14 seconds. The only sane defense is to tune it all out, to turn it into wallpaper for your world. Earlier in…
How should we design textbooks and education technology for a world where information is no longer scarce or hard to find? It is time to rethink how we build education products based on new paradigms of information management. In Part 1 of this series we explored the broken paradigms about…