Keep it short and simple.
Brevity is a sign of respect for your reader’s time and attention.
Really.
Email Prime Directive
5 Reasons Numbered Lists Are Stupid – Friday Curmudgeon
Numbered lists on blogs are all the rage, particularly at the turn of a new year.
Since mid December my RSS feed has been stuffed with 10 best if 2011, 20 ways to do that, and 12 things to look for in the new year. Oh February please come soon.
If you find yourself falling for this brand of year-end-birdbrainery consider the following 5 points.
Edugames – Tangential Learning
My guess is that if you are in the office today you aren’t all that busy. So take 7 minutes and watch this great little video, particularly if you are skeptic about video games and learning.
His central point, that a well designed game experience tees up personally directed learning actually extends far beyond games.
Market Crash or Market Stall?
Is the instructional materials market in the tank? I’ve spoken with people at a dozen companies who are all seeing the same thing – since November 1st a moderately down market has dropped like a stone. A senior executive at one of the big 4 publishers flatly stated that this was the worst he’d seen it in 35 years. I’m inclined to agree.
Since this appears to be an industry wide phenomena how should companies react? That depends on whether you think this is a temporary stall or a permanent realignment of funding for materials. How you see that depends on whether you focus on the supplemental or basal market.
For the supplemental market the evidence points towards a stall – at least so far. Low sales numbers don’t match the funding availability, there is no evidence that a huge amount of funding has been pulled from the market all of a sudden, What we do have is an abundance of uncertainty which is prompting districts to sit on the funds they have.
China – Beginner’s Eyes
As the delegation returned to our hotel in smoggy dusk a lime green rickshaw was playing chicken with a big tan BMW 7 sedan. Some unseen signal passed between the cyclist and driver and the tangle resolved itself smoothly; the perfect metaphor for my adventures in China last week.
The country is a fascinating jumble of the old and new, the Chinese are inventing new ways of working together on the fly in the midst of unprecedented growth and change. The whole country smells of wet concrete. Construction is everywhere.
In the spirit of “Beginners Eyes” I’ve captured in this post a few of the things that caught my attention over my 6 day visit. We’ll be making an announcement soon about the business venture we worked on, but in this initial post I’ll focus on my personal experiences.
“Dedicated to the Human Spirit”
This made my day!
The kids are all right.
4 Ways To Grow A Publishing Company
eBooks, iPads, and the Kindle are changing the fundamental structure of the publishing industry. From a strategic perspective they are having the largest impact on the development and pricing of products. In other words it is affecting the “what” deeply. The “how” has not changed all that much, regardless of whether you are selling print and/or technology.
There are four fundamental strategies for a growing a company in the K12 sector because even in the best of times K12 is (mostly) a zero sum game. In 2008 I wrote a post about this competitive dynamic:
In normal times education budgets grow at 2%-5% a year. Most start-ups or new products need to grow at a huge multiple of that – 30% to 300% or even more. Mathematically in order for you to grow someone else is must lose out.
We are most definitely not living in “normal times” these days. Any growth strategy in today’s market is fighting gravity as school budgets are expected to fall next year after the stimulus has expired.
Reflections on Steve Jobs
I grew up just outside Rt 128 in Boston. The children of the founders of DEC and Wang were friends and classmates. I’ve spent most of my adult life shuttling between the other three great tech centers in the US – Silicon Valley, Seattle, and Austin. My domain expertise, such as it is, revolves around introducing new technologies to the market. As part of my apprenticeship I spent seven years at Apple.
This can be an insular world (a sub genre of humor that revolves around technical support?!) and from the inside it is hard to gauge where the work we do really fits into the larger scheme of things.
There is an enormous amount of self serving BS generated as part of the tech innovation cycle. One of the earliest survival skills young nerds need to cultivate is what we jokingly call Rule #1 – never believe your own BS.
Ear Tickle
Last week at EdNet Charlene Blohm was whinging about how I hadn’t posted some tunes in a while. Here are 25 of my favorites from this past few months.
iTunes no longer allows you to embed mixes outside of their service – so you will need to click through to hear the songs in this mix.
There is a bit of everything in here – americana, jazz, afro-pop, classical, bluegrass, classic rock, and a visit from GlaDOS. Enjoy
Monday Links
In “Four years into the ebook revolution: things we know and things we don’t know” Mike Shatzkin does a great job of summarizing the state of the trade publishing business. Education Publishers take note – this is your future.
In “Predicting Player Behavior and How Zynga Profits From Data Analysis” John Rice picks apart the Wall St. Journal’s article (paywall) with an eye to education. Talk about data driven business models is all the rage in EdTech – this is what it really looks like. Money quote:
“We feel that a purely data-driven approach has significant promise for creating accurate predictive models of player behavior in games without the difficulties associated with earlier modeling techniques.”
Stephen Coller at the Gates Foundation has a new blog Forking Education about their open source work on the Shared Learning Infrastructure (SLI), the Learning Resources Metadata Initiative (LRMI), and Learning Maps among other things. I’m not sure if the title is meant to evoke poking a fork to stir things up or if it is a bad pun.