Articles Tagged with AEP

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noosetie50% of the men did not wear neck ties at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair. Traditional publishers are struggling with appropriate responses to digital transformation and aping the casual style of Silicon Valley seems to be popular. Interesting fact – if you wear a suit without a tie you still look like a Book Rep.

This sartorial mis-match of rhetoric and reality summed up a lot of what I observed. Publishers are saying all the right things, but they haven’t quite figured out how to do them.

Educational Publishing Leaders

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fail-owned-out-of-business-hiring-employment-failThe tribe gathered, bad coffee was drunk, stale muffins were eaten, and we shared insights and guesses about where education technology and publishing are headed in era of tight budgets and ARRA munificence. It was a typical first week of December in New York.

Here is the first of my overviews of what happened during the week. Subsequently I’ll dig into the AEP CEO Roundtable, the MDR Christmas Party, and the AEP Hall of Fame Breakfast.

SIIA Education Technology Business Forum – Tuesday Dec. 1

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1029083_reaching_1The education publishing tribe’s annual gathering is in New York this week. Today kicks off with the SIIA Ed Tech Business Forum (sold out) at the Princeton Club followed by the AEP CEO Roundtable (2 seats left) and the MDR/Peter Li Christmas Party tomorrow (by invitation), and the AEP Hall of Fame Breakfast on Thursday.

This annual trek is an important part of the culture of our industry and if you have not participated I encourage you to make time next year. I love me some social media – but there is no replacement for looking people in the eye, handshakes, and hugs for old friends. 95% of communication is non-verbal after all.

Over the next few days I’ll be putting up a few posts about the events this week. My intention is not to provide general reporting, but to drill in on a few things I find interesting. We’ll see how that goes.

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rocket school busEducation is high on the list for the economic stimulus package being proposed by the Obama Administration. Congress also supports turbo charging education so the likelihood of significant aid to schools is very high. But where oh where will the money actually go?

  • Construction?
  • Maintenance?
  • Teachers?
  • Instructional Materials?

As a nation we have some clear choices to make. We should be fighting for the right things amidst all the logrolling and back slapping that go on in DC. If you are part of the education publishing industry you should be engaged with the government relations work at AEP, SIIA, or AAP. These folks are working hard to make sure our voices are heard and they need your support and engagement. All of them welcome members who get involved in this effort.

As experts in this area and as citizens we have a responsibility to speak up. This doesn’t mean pulling strings for our particular companies, it means making sure all of our money is spent wisely with the long term in view.

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The Obama and McCain campaigns squared off at the Great American Education Forum sponsored by the Association of Education Publishers (AEP)* in Washington DC today. Educational policy experts from the campaigns addressed a wide range of positions the candidates are staking out from vouchers to the federal role in education.

Jeanne Century, Director of Science Education, University of Chicago represented the Obama campaign and Lisa Keegan, former Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction represented Senator McCain. A panel of publishing industry experts** posed questions followed by a press conference. This is the first head to head discussion of education priorities between the two campaigns.

Great-Education-Forum-Aep

Given that Education is consistently rated as one of the top 2-3 issues (Pew May 29th) it is surprising that it hasn’t been more visible in the campaign trail so far. The forum was valuable because differences in approach, philosophy, and policy emerged during the discussion.

On most of the issues the differences between the candidates positions are more matters of emphasis. Generally speaking the McCain position is that we already know what works, we just need to let the states sort that out and help them do more of it. Obama wants to take a more pro-active and comprehensive approach to addressing not just K12 but lifelong learning. Both camps support helping teachers be more professional and helping them follow best practices that help kids prepare for the 21st Century.

Follow below the fold for a detailed look at the positions of the campaigns. RSS readers click through for the full article.

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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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Information Overload and Education Publishing Marketing penned (keyed?) by yours truly was published today on the AEP blog. This is a summary of the longer series I did last year on information overload. If you want a quick introduction or need a refresher hop over and take a look.

While you are there bookmark the blog or better yet drop it into your RSS reader – on a regular basis senior people from the publishing industry will be writing about the business.

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