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Yesterday I moderated a panel at the Association of Education Publishers meeting in Washington DC on innovative business models for education companies. The panel was made up of:

We talked about subscription based models, an iTunes like model for instructional content, open source SaaS, embedded assessment, and Micro-distributorships. All of these are new to the education market. The panelists shared lessons learned from pioneering these approaches.

The slides from the presentation are in the attached file (3.7mb download)

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Globe w $$How will the economic downturn affect education budgets? How are executives at publishing houses and education technology firms planning for the recession?

Education Week noted a couple of weeks ago:

“…states across the country are confronting deteriorating budget conditions that have tied the hands of legislators and governors hoping to spare K-12 education…Altogether, the 2009 budget gaps—the difference between what states are expected to collect in revenue and what they’re expected to spend on services—will exceed $26 billion, the NCSL says.”

I recently conducted an informal poll of 30 Education Industry executives on this topic. They expect that the impact will be far more immediate than past downturns but generally they expect it be moderate.

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550832_alone_in_the_rain“A Cranky, Skeptical, Loudmouth looks at Social Media Marketing” is a little rain on the “Conversation Economy” parade. It was written by Bob Hoffman over at Copyblogger. The 55 comments are as good or better than the article itself (alert the Irony Police).

“You and I are web geeks. We spend way more time than we should looking at computer screens. We are not normal. Especially you. The biggest mistake any marketer can make is marketing to himself, i.e. assuming his customer is just like him. They’re not and they never will be.”

I can’t disagree with that.

I like his definition of interaction as well.

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DSC01549.jpgWhat do large school districts need from ed-tech providers? Michael Casserly Executive Director of the Council of the Great City Schools spoke at the Software Information Industry Association (SIIA) conference this week in San Francisco. The speech was direct, honest, and well balanced in tackling some difficult issues like NCLB.

Towards the close of the speech he made the following 10 requests of the Ed-Tech community. I’ve added my perspective from the industry’s side of the conversation.

1. Provide tools that build academic vocabulary and develop high order thinking skills. I found this an interesting request given that all the major publishers and several mid and small sized publishers have materials that do all of these things. Either we are not meeting the real need with our products or we are not getting the word out effectively. This should give all of these providers cause to reflect on their offerings and their go-to-market strategies.

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963329_bygone_era_1Don’t miss Gary Stager’s scathing take down of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) over at the Huffington Post.

He cites a recent review by the Department of Education’s Institute for Education Sciences that stated:

“The program did not increase the percentages of students in grades one, two or three whose reading comprehension scores were at or above grade level.”

From there he goes on to compare it to the Iraq War and Katrina. Ouch!

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By Randy Wilhelm, CEO Thinkronize – Guest Blogger

Did George Washington’s dog play multiplication math games with Abraham Lincoln’s animals during the Civil War?

I would guess the answer is a resounding no. However, a new Index reveals the most popular keywords that K-12 students are searching for on the Internet. It includes these terms in the top 15. netTrekker d.i.’s quarterly “Top 15 In-School Search Index” for spring 2008 will be announced on Wednesday, with Games coming in at #1, Dogs at #2 and George Washington, at #5.

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186873_world_cyber_games_2004_finalsThe reaction of many parents and educators to the idea of playing games in school is horror. School is supposed to be serious hard work. What these people don’t know is that in modern video games doing tasks repetitively to slowly build skills and status is the norm not the exception. These games are all about “hard” play.

Gamers have a term for this – grinding. Grinding is spending two months getting your mining skills up so that you can make a special suit of armor for your friends. Grinding is repeatedly doing some menial chore for a faction so you can earn status with them and get access to skills they can teach you.

Educators also have a term of art for this kind of activity – they call it building fluency. We learn most of the hardest skills in life through a slow process of accretion that amounts to building fluency. According to reading experts a child needs to read several million words in order to become a fluent reader.

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1037Information 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 world.

I’ve written elsewhere about how our old behavior patterns make this worse than it needs to be. The question for today is – are you managing your information diet or is the information managing you?

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DSC00106.jpgBlog years and dog years have a lot in common. They go fast, take constant care and feeding, and bring companionship and warmth into your life. Dogs force you to get up and move your body, blogs force you to get out and work your mind.

Social media are reshaping the business landscape and I’ve never found a better way of learning something than just wading in and messing with it. Under the tutelage of my blogfather Richard Carey and the folks at Justia I launched this site last May.

So what have I learned?

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Washing Plane - Self ServeIt 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 are some of the most valuable private tech firms in the world. I would add to Matt’s observation that 3 of the 4 firms he cites in the top 20 are for kids. Silicon Alley Insider’s original article is here.

Chris Anderson over at The Long Tail has an interesting take on the decline of the newspaper industry that is directly relevant to education publishing. Sure, readership is down, but at $45b it is still twice as big as Google and Yahoo combined. The money quote:

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