When textbooks go fully digital what will schools buy? Will they buy individual lessons, units of 2-3 weeks length, or full curriculum that span a year the way they do today? This is the $5 billion question facing our industry. Mike Shatzkin has an excellent post on this topic over…
This is genius. Someone carefully thought this through and executed well. I laughed out loud several times. You have to engage as you write the story. And we know that stories are powerful learning tools… There is some cussing – but whether it is truly NSFW is up to you.…
E.D. Kain over at Balloon-Juice has a fascinating saunter through crime stats since video games became widely popular. According to the FBI, since 1990 violent crime has been on a steady decline. E.D.’s basic hypothesis is that some of this can be attributed to people experimenting with rage and mayhem…
“With the right support and intervention…people with learning disabilities can succeed in school and go on to be successful later in life.” Wikipedia Last week PCI acquired SpellRead, Momentum Math, Text Connections, Summer Ventures, and an unreleased Algebra program from Kaplan. I don’t normally use this blog to talk about…
In discussing the potential for ads in e-books – the latest hail mary pass of traditional media – Paul Carr at TechCrunch dropped this gem: It’s a compelling argument, but like so many compelling arguments made about the future of books, it’s also hampered by consisting almost entirely of bullshit.…
Scribd is working hard to be the text version of YouTube. Upload some text, tag it, and let the world discover it. It isn’t just unpublished novels – many copyrighted textbooks are already there via unauthorized uploads. Like YouTube, users can upload anything and the site isn’t under any legal…
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…
Congress finally passed some support for state budgets to make sure there are enough teachers as school opens. Kind of “yay.” We accomplished this by planning to cut food stamps starting in 2014. This comic succinctly captures the essence of our national experience since the summer of 2007 when all…
Richard Carey points to an outstanding article by Shane Snow on using game mechanics to power your business over at Mashable. This rings true in my personal use of social media (see here re Foursquare) as well as in a lot of the thinking that has gone into what will…
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…