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Mike Morhaime, President & Co-Founder of Blizzard Entertainment kicked off the Austin Game Developers Conference (AGDC) this morning. Blizzard produces the wildly successful World of Warcraft on-line multiplayer behemouth (9 million+ players worldwide). AGDC is focusing on on-line games this year and a packed auditorium was eager to pick up some pearls of wisdom from the industry leader.

wowlogo.jpgBlizzard matters to education because when you strip away the Orcs and Elves under the hood they have built an extremely elegant learning management system. As the undisputed world wide leader in the MMO space we have a lot to learn from their approach to building products and structuring their business.

Morhaime started by taking us over some familiar ground – the extreme rate of change we are living through and how it is difficult for us to see it from the midst of it. For example, in 1991 it took 9 hours to fly from Los Angeles to Paris. If airlines had kept pace with the rate of improvement in computer speeds it would now take 2 minutes.

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Textbook publishers have a checkered history with developing technology products – which I’ve already commented on here and here.

Yesterday Richard Carey sent me a link to Rockets, Cars, and Gardens, which does a very elegant job of explaining different software development paradigms.

One of the concepts that jumped out at me is the idea of developing products in a portfolio model. To quote:

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200px-Mariecurie.jpgHoming is the foundation skill for the 21st Century. Homing is the ability to circle in on key information, untangle it, filter it, order it, and ultimately make sense of it.

A middle schooler writing a report on Madame Curie in the mid ‘80’s typically went to an encyclopedia and one or two books. Today’s middle schooler is likely to start with Google which returns 2.9 million links. Even the Wikipedia article has over 200 links to other resources about her. Yikes!

There have been several good reports on 21st Century Skills. However, in an age of infinite input students can only develop those skills if they have a strong homing skill. Without it they will be lost in a sea of data (which is increasing at 66% per year).

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I’m assuming this is just a rhetorical device but Wesley Fryer over at Infinite Thinking Machine is calling for a textbook moratorium so we can get laptops and digital curriculum in everywhere.

I don’t disagree with his urge to shake things up and increase the rate of change in the market towards digital resources but the suggestion flys in the face of our experience with every other new technology that has come along.

YouTube hasn’t killed Cable,

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Brass-At-Sign.jpgVirtual Worlds and Video Games for Education are getting a lot of press these days. With all the hoopla it helps to bring a little perspective to where we are in the development of this new market. It is feeling a lot like the web in 1997 and perhaps we can take some lessons from that era to help us make sense of today’s emerging opportunities.

Nick Wilson over at Metaversed did an excellent piece titled 7 Reasons Why Virtual Worlds are Like the Web Circa 1997. In this post is I delve a little deeper into his list as it relates specifically to education and the companies that serve this market.

Here is Silver’s premise:

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Collective writing is a critical 21st Century Skill. Wikis are the primary tool for teaching this skill today. What resources exist to help teachers use wikis in the classroom? Recently this issue has been bubbling up on several places.

The Wall Street Journal had an article on the discussions behind the Wikis. For educational purposes there is more meat in the discussion threads for classroom conversation and interesting opportunities for students to engage actively with content than there often is in the articles themselves. Money quote:

“But discussion pages are also where Wikipedians discuss and debate what an article should or shouldn’t say.

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Apple-on-Scale.jpgYesterday I commented on Granof’s Op-Ed – Course Requirement: Extortion. The New York Times Op-Ed made the case for reforming textbook pricing in higher education.

Granof was kind enought to respond with some feedback on my piece. Below I’ve included the parts he responded to, his comments, and my clarifications/additions/agreements.

Link to the related post – Textbook Price Cure…

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An idea for reforming the textbook market in higher education was floated on the editorial page of the New York Times this past Sunday. Fellow Austinite Michael Granof proposed converting the textbook market to a site license approach used in the software world. His ideas, while thought provoking, fail the reality test.

Book_a_finger_.jpgWith a 16 year old son headed off to university in a couple of years I’m sensitive to the rapidly rising costs of higher education and the portion that textbooks represent. But I also think it is disingenuous to point at books as a major cause of this inflation. Students spend about 5% of their budgets on books, and the total is declining 1.8% this year. Compare this with the market for electronics where students spend twice as much and it is increasing at 25% per year. Was this topic worthy of a NYT Op-Ed?

But putting relevance aside lets look at his arguments. First – the numbers seem high. The article cites costs ranging from $120-$180 for a complete textbook. The Association of College Bookstores puts the average cost of a new textbook at $52. Even assuming his numbers are correct Granof overstates the problem by implying that this is a cost born by every student every semester. Oddly, his own statements contradict this central argument.

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