Schools are inundated with paper and instructional materials at this time of year. Those of us who build education products and create marketing collateral should be cognizant of is how wasteful so much of this is. In our personal lives many of us go through the “more shelves or less…
Information overload is one of the defining trends of the last 10 years. The explosion of email, social media, and cellular technologies have created 24/7 leashes that drown us in information. As publishers (and citizens) we have a responsibility to help today’s kids build good information habits in this new…
It has been a while since I did a round up of blog articles, time to clean a few items out. Rather than dump a long list I’ve picked four articles I’ve found particularly interesting in the past few weeks. Matt Mihaly over at The Forge notes that MMO’s/Virtual Worlds…
Virtual Reality and Education have a long and checkered history. On-line worlds give students opportunities to experience things that would be too expensive, too dangerous, or too time consuming in the “real” world. It allows us to distill an experience into it’s essence while allowing learners to be active agents…
What do Web 2.0 and Social Networking mean for Education Publishing? On February 7th I was on a panel at the Association of American Publishers (AAP) in Sacramento that tackled this question. Ann Flynn Director of Education Technology at National School Boards Association (NSBA) reviewed the excellent study they released…
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.…
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…
The worlds of textbook publishers and education technology companies are colliding. The market is driving this convergence – schools have had technology around long enough that they have figured out how it can integrate in with existing practices. Yet the list of successful educational products that blend print and technology…