Articles Posted in Education Technology

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CowboyRoundup.jpgTeaching metaphors, the role of school in society, bad (i.e. wrong) press for video games, glitz vs. content, banned books, racism in games, phishing games, and monkeys at the keyboard. All featured on this weeks roundup!

Teachings of a Zen Gardener over at PickTheBrain is a beautiful analogy for what teachers do.

The always excellent Will Richardson posted “School as Node” over at Weblogg-Ed. The original post he references talked about revolution but Will argues that we need to engage in a conscious act of evolution. This is a nice follow on to the articles just published here by Paul Schumann.

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[Ed] Today’s installment shows the data on Supplemental Products, Basal Textbooks, Student Devices, Delivery Platforms, and Electronic Media.

Click here to read the introduction to this series.

Click here to read Part 1 – Methodology and Reference Library Case Study

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631729_csp_electric_zoom_i.jpg[ed] The business of textbooks and educational technology are in a period of disruption and change. Today we present part one of a three part series that takes a quantitative view of this change. This study uses modeling techniques that have proven themselves in numerous other industries. The implications for education are fascinating and challenging.

Click here to read the introduction to this series.

Click here to read Part 2 – The Data

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Textbooks and Education Technology are changing in disruptive and dramatic ways. Technology substitution is driving a great deal of this change. The recent sale of Harcourt’s various divisions to Pearson and Houghton/Riverdeep is only the tip of the iceberg. Education Publishers of print and technology products, large and small, are all wrestling with these changes.

654584_at_the_fair____7.jpgThe changes are affecting every aspect of our business including how products are created, priced, sold, packaged, promoted, and even what the basic definition of a product is. I believe these changes are only beginning and that they will accelerate in the next several years. Anecdotal evidence includes attendance at shows like the recent IRA (empty) and NECC (swamped). Sales of electronic whiteboards (Promethean, Smart, RM) are skyrocketing. Pearson swept the California Social Studies adoption with a hybrid technology and print product.

We ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

A Quantitative View

460802_statistical_tables.jpgThere is a more quantitative way to study this change. Over the next few days we will be publishing a study done by Paul Schumann a futurist and business analyst who has studied the sources and rate of change across many industries at IBM and as an independent consultant at Glocal Vantage. He has taken a detailed look at the Education Market and his findings have profound implications for where our industry is headed. Paul has published another version of this study on his blog Innovation Travelogue.

Paul’s analysis is a quantitative tour through what we can expect in the coming years. The punch line is that we are at the beginning of the product substitution shown in the chart below. Don’t discount the dramatic nature of this prediction. When disruptive technologies hit an industry the change often sneaks up on the unprepared and is largely over before there is time to react. Consider the tale of print encyclopedia’s which saw the value of their products plummet from over $2,000 to under $5 in a 3 year period in the 1990’s when CD-ROM based products were bundled with other software.

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Here is a small sample from the report:

“One of the interesting, and most insidious aspects of this type of substitution, when the substitution is taking place in a growing market, is that a large percentage of the substitution has taken place before the old technology sees two successive years of decreased revenue. This is the case [in Reference Libraries]. Fifty percent of the total time to 90% substitution has elapsed before the print media have experienced two years decline”

Think about that.

Other Articles in this Series

Introduction
Part 1 – Reference Libraries and Open Source

Part 2 – Supplemental materials, Basal textbooks, Student Devices (Laptops, handhelds), Delivery Platforms (CD-ROM, Internet), and Electronic Media.

Part 3 – Conclusions & Recommendations

Below the fold a bio of Paul Schumman

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Interesting links on education publishing, education technology, and virtual worlds in education.

Research shows schools that fund Libraries have higher scores. Annie Teich at Crazy for Kids Books talks about some work that AASL is doing to shed light on this. I’m surprised this research hasn’t been done before.

Student blogger censored by Judge for disparaging administrators. Everyone agrees that the student used unfortunate language on her personal blog to describe school officials, but the Judge sided with the school in abrogating her free speech rights. This one will get appealed. See my article on the disconnect between new technology and schools.

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My article busting myths about video games and learning is on Technology & Learning’s website now – you can find it here. The prior link was to the flash version of the whole magazine.

Many many many thanks to Jo-Ann McDevitt who encouraged this and especially to Susan McLester who was a great teacher and editor on this project. Give T+L some love – go read the whole thing there.

Here is a teaser from the lead –

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Technology & Learning published the first part of my article on myths about games in the classroom today. [updated to connect to the non-flash version]

This is a two part series. In next month’s issue I look at three more myths and suggest some paths forward for those who are interested.

Embir-70-Front-Full.jpgIt got a nice review on John Rice’s Educational Games Blog.

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Second Life in Education is a hot topic. In that vein EdNet had a strong panel that included folks from SRI, a Teacher who has been using it extensively in her school, and a representative from Second Life. This is the first of three articles on this presentation.

slgrid_logo.gifFirst off, I find it interesting that Second Life is getting most of the visibility in Education when other virtual worlds (Habbo Hotel, Whyville, etc.) are doing far more with K12 age kids and some have more intentionally educational content on them. Chalk it up to Second Life being a media darling and to good outreach from their Education team. If you are interested in this arena some of these other worlds merit a look.

SRI – An R&D Perspective

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qed_logo.gifBreaking down artificial boundaries in the world of Education emerged as a theme today at EdNet in Chicago. This applies to the curriculum, but it also applies to how schools are managed – it may be a new overarching meme for education.

Chuck House from Media X at Standford kicked things off with a keynote that touched on a lot of interesting ideas. One of them was that the big challenges our society faces (e.g. global warming, terrorism) cross many disciplines. Addressing them demands the ability to weave disparate ideas together. We need to proactively teach that skill. In addition, how we access knowledge via the web is going to force schools to start breaking down the artificial barriers we have set up between subject areas.

860640_cooperation.jpgThis thread was picked up early in the afternoon by panelist Jackson Grayson from the American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC). One of his central points was that most schools don’t do process management very well – they manage inputs and outcomes well but they don’t focus on what happens in the middle, which all about process. Moreover – when they do focus on process they do it in silos – they look at finance or curriculum but don’t look at where those things intersect. Echoing Chuck’s presentation Jackson noted that the big issues schools face require a systemic approach that crosses boundaries.

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