In this second of a two part series, guest blogger James Mayfield Smith responds to my post on Storyline in Textbooks and Video Games. James is an educational consultant, sales executive, and trained applied mythologist.
Part 2 of 2: The Tactical Use of Story to Sell
In this first of a two part series, guest blogger James Mayfield Smith responds to my post on Storyline in Textbooks and Video Games. James has the coolest job title I think I’ve ever seen – Applied Mythologist. We worked together at Pearson several years ago, he speaks about Education Publishing from direct experience on the front lines of selling and authoring.
Part 1 of 2: The Strategic Use of Story to Sell
By James Mayfield Smith
Why did I destroy a perfectly good book today? Actually more than good – Murukami never disappoints. Kafka on the Shore isn’t in quite the same league as The Windup Bird Chronicle – but it is a damn fine book.
Did I burn it? No.
Did I rip out the pages and make airplanes? No.
This iTunes mix contains my favorite songs from the past two to three months. As usual it is a broad mix of tunes that caught my fancy. Brazilians Bajofondo kick if off (see the video if you get a chance). I took a couple of trips to the time machine to catch up on stuff I’d missed (Big Head Todd) and to enjoy old favorites (dare you to listen to Radar Love while driving and do the speed limit). Jason Collett is a new favorite and reading Clapton’s biography got me to go back and listen to a lot of his stuff. Jackson brown tosses off the funniest lines I’ve heard in a song in a long time. Oxford Comma is for all my friends in publishing (explicit warning however..)
Enjoy.
At 35,000 feet, with a steaming Starbucks and a purring iPod I read my Grandfather’s memoirs last Wednesday. I’d already put in several hours of work when I decided to crack the sheaf of Xeroxed reflections written three years before he passed in 1964.
Ninety eight years ago in the summer of 1911 he was young Officer in Training in the English Army. Then poetry happened.
“I was on a march across Salisbury Plain in full regalia because we were going to sleep out that night. It turned out to be the hottest day on record and out of 600 more than 200 collapsed on the way. We were not a happy company, but we managed to bathe in the river when we reached out destination and that revived us. At night we lay down on the ground near the old ruins of Stone Henge, the oldest and most astonishing group of temple stones in England…The evenings are very short in England in summer and I think it was shortly after 4 in the morning when I was stamping around trying to get some circulation in my cold feet that I noticed the sun starting to rise over the old temple stones. At the same moment there was a racket and over the stones came one of the earliest aeroplanes in the world, the first I had seen and about 1,000 feet up. I was looking at a combination of the oldest and newest in the world. While I stood transfixed the motor of the plane conked out and the plane wobbled all over the place, but finally landed right side up. We rushed over and there was the pilot strapped in but shaking so hard he couldn’t do a thing. We unstrapped him and laid him on the ground to carry on his shaking because he had had a close brush with death.”
Danah Boyd – one of the most incisive thinkers about how new technology is reshaping our lives (and more importantly to readers of this blog the lives of teenagers) – was recently hired by Microsoft Research. She gave a talk that summarized at a high level the history of social media, how teens and adults use it differently, and policy and behavioral implications for all of us to consider.
Social Media Is Here to Stay – Now What?
Its brilliant. Go read it. It will only take about 15 minutes and you will learn something – I guarantee it.
It has been amusing for the past 10 years to smirk and say “Well, this internet thing – it’s just a fad…” when discussing educational policy with print advocates. The reality is far more sobering and frankly more uplifting than the arch cynicism of the joke.
Below is a chart showing internet usage around the world and the growth since 2000. Staggering growth is an understatement. While we reach saturation in North America (at about 70% of the population) Africa is only at 5.6% and Asia is at 17.2% and already has has the most users of any area even at this low penetration level.
I’m inspired by this data – it speaks to a potential for building connections between people that is expanding at a dramatic rate. In the world of education this brings home how essential the skills of communication, team building, and diversity already are and how central they will be to the world today’s First Graders inherit.
Are you Twitter curious? For the past few months I’ve been on the fence about Twitter – lurking but minimally engaged. Like all new technologies as people play with it they are discovering what it is best for. Recently I’ve watched as my friend Charlene Blohm has begun leveraging it to help drive her business.
Twitter seems to be following a similar path to other new technologies. The enthusiasm of early adopters misrepresents what the technology is really capable of. Think LaserWriters/Postcript and flyers with 23 different fonts on them (circa 1986) or web pages cluttered with frames (circa 1998). Once the dust settled and a “grammar” of usage emerged we all benefited. But every new technology has to pass through a stage of wild and random experimentation to get there.
Twitter is passing out of this stage right now so it is a good time for the rest of us to engage with it.
Wondering how to spend that iTunes gift card you got from Aunt Millie? Here are few suggestions from my latest favorites that you might want to consider.
1. Look at your own iTunes library for artists that you like but whom you only have one or two songs from.iTunes will show you their whole catalog and which are their most popular tunes. It helps if you rate all the songs in your library – you can do this on your iPod while listening by hitting the center button a couple of times. Then it is easy to search for all top rated songs and scan the list for singletons by an artist.
In the US we just had the most interesting election of my lifetime. What to do now that all the hullabaloo is over? Take the civics quiz to see much you remember from Social Studies and how closely you have been paying attention.
The core message – that we ignore civics at our peril – is well taken. Social Studies is one of the subjects that has taken a hit under NCLB. Publishers, to their credit, have tried to help by creating programs like QuickReads (Pearson) that teaches reading fluency through Social Studies and Science. The reading passages are aligned to grade level standards. But don’t you think it is a little odd that we have to “sneak” this in?
The Education Business Blog