Last week the New York Times published a piece titled $200 Textbook vs. Free. You Do the Math by Ashlee Vance. Today we take up the challenge posed in the title and demonstrate that Open Source Textbooks are twice as expensive as books in the K12 market. Let me state…
This is creative thinking at work. How do you arrest someone for cleaning a tunnel – even if it looks like graffiti? I imagine the call to Police HQ was pretty amusing and resulted in a lot of head scratching. It often takes explicit subversion of our preconceptions to reveal…
Guest blogger Mike Baum of Sophia Consulting shares his insights on ISTE 2010. By Mike Baum In the old Road Runner cartoons, there’s always a point where the slavering coyote, relentlessly and enthusiastically pursuing his dinner, runs off a cliff. But he hangs in mid-air momentarily, falling only when he…
Yesterday the minority in the Senate ended the chances that the Extender’s Bill would pass the Senate. While 57 Senators – a clear majority – wanted to do the right thing a determined minority used procedural votes to force mass layoffs of teachers, firefighters, and police across the country (300,000-500,000).…
Common Core Standards (CCS) will have a profound impact on the instructional materials market. The big players like Pearson and McGraw-Hill are on-board as endorsing partners, but smaller supplemental publishers have as much (if not more) to gain if the initiative is successful. Common standards will reduce structural barriers to…
Funny and scary at the same time. J.A. Konrath on the end of print. HT to Bob Carlton
My take away from the first day of the Association of Education Publisher’s Content in Context Conference (#ciccon): educators have always needed Education Publishers, but they have never particularly wanted them. What are you doing at your company to remain necessary in the digital age?
It’s been four weeks and my iPad still has that new computer smell. Now that I’ve been using it in my workflow I wanted to post some additional comments on it’s utility in an educational setting. In general I think my original take holds up well – this is fantastic…
An iPad has been floating around the PCI office for the past week (thanks to Randy Pennington‘s ed-tech jones). Will it be a game changer for education? Can it redefine how we deliver instructional content? I’ve tried to refrain from commenting on the iPad until I could see and multi-touch…
Federal ARRA stimulus funding has been keeping schools around the country on life support for the past year. Despite significant layoffs around the country it headed off catastrophe in many states. That era is coming to an end later this year or early next year. It was heartening to see…