Articles Tagged with education

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image020EdNet 2009 starts this Sunday in Chicago. This is one of the three most important events of the year* for networking and professional development in the education industry. I’ve been attending since the early 90’s with only a couple of absences.

Nelson Heller, EdNet’s founder, has also been a friend and mentor – as he has so graciously been to many of us across the industry. This year the conference is under MDR‘s aegis – and it will be the same top-notch opportunity to expand your consciousness it has always been

Why is this event important? In a nutshell it is all about conversational efficiency. You can talk to more people about partnerships, recruiting, selling, or just “gettin ta know ya” in a few hours at EdNet than you could in two months on the road.

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card2160Special Education appears to be the first K12 market segment seeing the education stimulus dollars flow in volume.

At PCI Education we saw our numbers start to move up towards the end of May. By August we were roaring on all cylinders. As a private company we don’t report out our details, but July was up over prior year and orders booked in August were more than double what we saw in 2008. I’ve heard through the grapevine that Cambium is in the same boat.

What is particularly stunning for us is that according to the reports on the USDOE’s site by the end of August only about 15% of wave 1 of the IDEA ARRA funds had been committed. This handy report shows all the stimulus buckets for education and how much each state has already spent – bookmark it if you don’t have it.

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iStock_000006814674LargeStudent Information Systems (SIS) and Data Warehouses (DWS) are the bedrock enterprise software systems in K12 school districts. The K12 Decision Support Systems Market Report is now available. The 118 page report is based on a survey of over 300 district level IT Directors.

ARRA Accountability Market Intelligence

Given the strong emphasis in ARRA on data-driven decision making (D3M) and accountability auditing, the information in this study will provide valuable insight into a market with an urgent and well funded need. The report is a map of territory that has been uncharted.

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Doug Stein of Memespark has some commentary to share on ARRA and innovation.

By Guest Blogger Doug Stein

s-HUMAN-WHEEL-largeI don’t know if you saw this article. It details how one district is spending the ARRA education stimulus money:

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Doug Stein of Memespark responded in comments to my last post and as usual his insights add a lot to the conversation and make the connection to education publishing more relevant and real. For that reason I’ve bumped this comment to its own post.

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let-the-stress-begin.jpgBy Doug Stein

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StoneHenge.jpgAt 35,000 feet, with a steaming Starbucks and a purring iPod I read my Grandfather’s memoirs last Wednesday. I’d already put in several hours of work when I decided to crack the sheaf of Xeroxed reflections written three years before he passed in 1964.

Ninety eight years ago in the summer of 1911 he was young Officer in Training in the English Army. Then poetry happened.

“I was on a march across Salisbury Plain in full regalia because we were going to sleep out that night. It turned out to be the hottest day on record and out of 600 more than 200 collapsed on the way. We were not a happy company, but we managed to bathe in the river when we reached out destination and that revived us. At night we lay down on the ground near the old ruins of Stone Henge, the oldest and most astonishing group of temple stones in England…The evenings are very short in England in summer and I think it was shortly after 4 in the morning when I was stamping around trying to get some circulation in my cold feet that I noticed the sun starting to rise over the old temple stones. At the same moment there was a racket and over the stones came one of the earliest aeroplanes in the world, the first I had seen and about 1,000 feet up. I was looking at a combination of the oldest and newest in the world. While I stood transfixed the motor of the plane conked out and the plane wobbled all over the place, but finally landed right side up. We rushed over and there was the pilot strapped in but shaking so hard he couldn’t do a thing. We unstrapped him and laid him on the ground to carry on his shaking because he had had a close brush with death.”

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Business Development work requires a certain suspension of disbelief to function smoothly. In the initial stages of any conversation both parties have to be open to undiscovered possibility. Often the most profitable opportunities only become clear after a false start or two.

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I’m naturally optimistic and I allow myself to be seduced to new possibilities in initial meetings with potential partners. The positive side of this is that I’ve been involved in some creative and profitable deals that wouldn’t have come off without a period of listening and exploration. The negative side is that it is very easy to send misleading signals to the other side who interpret your enthusiasm to engage as a leading indicator of a pending deal.

The Gullibility Paradox

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n619225168_161A few months ago we started a LinkedIn group for consultants who serve education and the companies in the education market. We’ve been slowly building and have 96 members as of this morning.

If you serve the market come over and join – we want to crack 100 members. We are a friendly group and are figuring out how to share ideas and practice ideas.

If you are a company that serves the market this is a great place to find consultants who can help you grow to the next level.

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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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Are you Twitter curious? For the past few months I’ve been on the fence about Twitter – lurking but minimally engaged. Like all new technologies as people play with it they are discovering what it is best for. Recently I’ve watched as my friend Charlene Blohm has begun leveraging it to help drive her business.

Twitter seems to be following a similar path to other new technologies. The enthusiasm of early adopters misrepresents what the technology is really capable of. Think LaserWriters/Postcript and flyers with 23 different fonts on them (circa 1986) or web pages cluttered with frames (circa 1998). Once the dust settled and a “grammar” of usage emerged we all benefited. But every new technology has to pass through a stage of wild and random experimentation to get there.

Twitter is passing out of this stage right now so it is a good time for the rest of us to engage with it.

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