I just reread a fascinating book I originally read 15 years ago; The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. (beware major spoilers via that link) There are several main concepts going through it that have been coming up in my thinking about education the last two years.

The book takes place towards the end of this century I think, in a world where nanotechnology is practical and widespread. When people want an object, they use a device called a Matter Compiler, or MC to create it. This device starts by creating a vacuum inside it. Then it assembles the required object atom by atom. These atoms come from utility tubes called the Feed. These run to everybody’s house and provides the MC with base atoms to build things. You can get pretty much anything you want. Some things you have to pay for, but some things (like food) are free. You can see the first beginning of this idea with current 3D printing.

This future world is very different from the one we know today. First, countries have pretty much ceased to exist as we know them. People are organized into phyles (think tribes), which are created by things they have in common, not where they live. They can be organized by religion, occupation, morals, etc… All of those you will note are information based. You can already start to see the move of people today from location based phyles (nation states) to information based phyles. A drastic example of this is Al Qaeda. This terrorist organization  is organized by ideology which crosses geographic lines.

I have referred to this breaking up of current organizations as Disaggregation. Have you noticed how the last few US elections have been more and more volatile? People complain about special interests dominating the dialog but the dirty little secret is we are all part of at least one special interest. In The Diamond Age, special interests are all that’s left.

This part of the book interested me of course but that’s not why I went back and reread it. One of the main characters in the book is named Nell. She is a little girl when the book starts and comes into possession of a prototype learning device in the form of a book called the “Primer”. It works like this:

The book narrates a story for Nell where she is a princess in a magical kingdom. It animates pictures and graphics so she is watching something much more interactive than just a book. As the story unfolds, the book periodically creates tasks for Nell to overcome. The critical feature of the book is that as it tells the story, Nell can interrupt to ask questions. The book will then branch off at that point and tell her another story to answer the question. There are more tasks and challenges embedded to assess learning. Once she has mastered the new concept, the original story continues, but the book makes changes in the story to adapt to her learning style and interests.

One other really cool feature of the book is it can reach out onto the net and connect up with “ractors”. These are remote actors that can be hired to play in interactive simulations that people use for recreation. These actors then can play parts in Nell’s story, providing a human quality to the performance.

A story is one of the best ways humans learn, so I think the pedagogy here is fantastic. The Primer personalizes the story to the learner, goes at her pace and answers every question in as much detail as required.

I won’t give away the ending but The Diamond Age is a great book and has influenced my thinking on larger scale patterns. Check it out.

H/T Adage.com

Also in the report was that more people access the net now with a mobile device than a PC or laptop.

There are a few things to take away from this.

1. Right now we are seeing a migration from dumb phones to smart phones. This migration will only have a limited life span though as the market matures. In other words at some point everyone will have a smart phone who wants one.
2. At that point phone companies will have to go after new markets.
3. These new markets I think will be younger users. It helps sell more phones and will help establish brand loyalty.
4. Smart phones will plummet in cost as time goes on. Right now the limiting factor is data plan costs. Watch for that cost to drop pretty soon too.

I wonder how many students across the world this fall will have a smart phone in their pocket on the first day of class?

• Mobile Phones Overtake Number of PCs in Key Global Markets | Ad Age Stat – Advertising Age

  • The Google data also finds that more consumers in each of these markets now have an internet-capable mobile device than have a desktop or laptop computer. In the U.S. the difference is nearly 10% more (76% to 68%), although consumers still report accessing the internet on multiple types of devices.

    Tablets were seen as gaining share, hovering around 10% in each market outside the U.S. and slightly higher (17%) here. This week Pew Research Center issued some new numbers from its ongoing internet and American Life survey that show holiday sales of tablets and e-readers have doubled market share in a matter of weeks. The new Kindles and strong iPad sales helped drive that

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This article talks about how companies are developing alternate certification methods that may help capture some of this missing learning. As I look at the higher education industry, I think developments of alternate certification techniques will be the biggest drivers of change and innovation. Here’s a previous post where I expound on why.

• Beware: Alternative Certification Is Coming – Innovations – The Chronicle of Higher Education

  • The announcement of agreements between Burck Smith’s StraighterLine and the Education Testing Service (ETS) and the Council on Aid to Education (CAE) to provide competency test materials to students online is potentially very important, along with several other recent developments.
  • College graduates typically have these positive attributes more than others, so degrees serve as an important signaling device to employers, lowering the costs of learning about the traits of the applicant. Because of the lack of good substitutes, colleges face little outside competition and can raise prices more, given their quasi-monopoly status.
  • As college costs rise, however, people are asking: Aren’t there cheaper ways of certifying competence and skills to employers? Employers like the current system, because the huge (often over $100,000) cost of demonstrating competency is borne by the student, not by them.
  • Through StraighterLine, a student spending a thousand bucks or so a year could get a large hunk, if not all, of a year of college-level learning if he or she applied herself. The biggest problem, as Burck told me, is that accreditation agencies refuse to accredit courses (they only accredit degrees), even though, arguably, a degree is simply a collection of courses. But the college-dominated accrediting agencies, seem to not want new forms of competition for existing schools.
  • Enter ETS and CAE. ETS has operated the famed SAT test for the College Board and owns and operates many other iconic tests, such as the TOEFL, GRE, and Praxis. Through affiliated organizations, it is big into employee testing. Via StraighterLine, students, for a modest fee, will be able to take the iSkills test that “measures the ability of a student to navigate and critically evaluate information from digital technology.”
  • Students can tell employers, “I did very well on the CLA and iSkills test, strong predictors of future positive work performance,” and, implicitly “you can hire me for less than you pay college graduates who score less well on these tests.”

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(cc) Zed The Dragon

I am putting together a list of characteristics of how I think learning will take place in 10 years. One of items on the list is that teachers will have a higher profile than they do now. Students will pick a class because of the teacher and they will have many more choices than they do now. Basically the best teachers will be rock stars.

Here’s a teacher who is the prototype of this idea. He recently created a massive online class on AI which had over 100,000 people sign up to take it. It was so successful he’s leaving Stanford to teach at an education startup doing the same thing but on a larger scale.

Folks, he had a safe job for life at Stanford. What does he know that we don’t?

By the way, this story comes from Hack Education, which is rapidly becoming one of my favorite sources of education information. Check it out if you haven’t already.

• Stanford AI Professor Thrun Leaves University to Start Udacity, an Online Learning Startup

  Stanford prof leaving for edu startup

  tags: education startup stanford AI innovative nell

  • It’s news that shouldn’t surprise anyone that read the fine print on the registration for Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence class offered last fall: Professor Stanford Thrun has announced he is resigning from the university to launch an online learning startup.

    Unlike the Machine Learning and Database classes — the other two in the trio of Stanford’s free online engineering classes last fall — the Artificial Intelligence class was run by Know Labs in partnership with the university.

    Know Labs has now rebranded to Udacity, and this will be site where Thrun will offer his online CS courses, separate from the Stanford University umbrella.

  • The first class that’s to be offered is CS 101: Build a Search Engine. “Learn programming in seven weeks,” the website promises.
  • It also looks like a class on Programming a Robotic Car is in the works. (Thrun led the development of Google’s self-driving car.)
  • Thrun describes the popularity and success of the Stanford AI class — so successful, in fact, that the “physical class at Stanford… dwindled from 200 students to 30 students because the online course was more intimate and better at teaching than the real-world course on which it was based.”
  • Nonetheless, the move “off-campus,” if you will, raises a lot more questions about what the role of the university will be in offering (low-cost or free) lesson-in-law-in-laws and in offering certification. Those students who successfully completed the AI class received a letter of recognition from Thrun and Google’s Peter Norvig, who co-taught the class, and it appears according to language in the site’s Terms of Service as though the “credit” for the new classes at Udacity will work the same way.
  • Thrun hopes to enroll 500,000 students in this first class.

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I was just blown away by an amazing video. Here watch this. (just kidding, it’s 2 hours long)

This is a shot for shot remake of Star Wars. The way it was done is the project leaders split up the film into 15 second chunks, then let anyone film the chunk and submit it. They then spliced it all together. It’s amazing!

The amazing this about this was it was very low cost. You can’t do something like this in the government. For example, the US government setup a website called Recovery.gov to track how the stimulus money was being used. After a year of operation they wanted to redesign it. The redesign cost $18 million dollars. (source) Of course, the company that won the redesign donated $190,000 to the Democrat House Majority Leader (and didn’t donate to anyone else). I’m sure it’s a coincidence.

With all of the talk about reform of public education in the US, remember it’s a branch of the government. That’s why I think the following:

A. While technology might be added, the fundamental structure of public education which is a top down, centrally planned system won’t change.

B. Parents are going to get sick of this and find alternatives. The Internet is making this possible.

(cc) slinky2000

Imagine you have just opened a new restaurant. You have good food and a lot of great buzz. People really want to try your new restaurant out. You then tell people, they can come eat there but only if they arrive driving a BMW. In fact the purpose of the restaurant is to sell more BMWs because you also own a BMW dealership. Would that make any sense?

I think a lot of people draw the wrong conclusions about Apple’s success. I will agree that they design good hardware but they still have some failures. For example, they completely fail at any kind of social media (Ping anyone?). Apple TV hasn’t really sold like they want. Even so, a lot of educators were posting yesterday that Apple’s eTextbook announcement was a “game changer”. In my opinion those people are wrong and here’s why.

Apple’s success is not based entirely on their product designs. It has also been based on good timing and being able to foresee emerging markets. Let’s look at a few of their successes.

(cc) Abdulrahman BinSlmah

iPod – Portable music players were just becoming technologically possible so there wasn’t an established market yet. While it was technically a good device, it was the ease of use that made it dominant. Once you have iTunes, it just worked. The key things here is consumers didn’t have any previous product loyalty and the rest of the computer industry let Apple have the market for a long time. It’s easy to win a war if the other side doesn’t show up and fight.

iPhone - There were existing phones and even some smart phones but phone makers looked at their devices as phones that also could access a special “mobile” Internet. Apple looked at their device as a small portable computer that also could make calls. That basically created a new type of product. It took years before anyone else was able to challenge Apple. Again they were able to get a big headstart before anyone else could respond.

iPad - There were existing tablets out there but Apple took the iPhone model and just scaled it up. Plug it into the existing iPhone ecosystem and you have another winner. Make no mistake though, the iPad would not have been as big of a success without the iPhone coming before it. The ecosystem already existed.

What is interesting about this list is it is all hardware centric. Steve Jobs always said his company made hardware. Software existed to get you to buy the hardware. So, if you look at Apple’s eTextbook announcement in that context, they are trying to use the eTextbooks to force schools to buy iPads.  If you think about it though, Apple isn’t dominant in any software besides iTunes (and that is because it’s tied to the devices). Apple in fact has flopped on some recent software releases. Final Cut X changed many things about the way it works. It was so hated when it came out, Apple had to put their older version back for sale. Even so, many companies are switching to Avid. You can only use Keynote if you have a Mac. Same for iLife. I would buy iPhoto ’09 for the PC but you can’t get it.

Restricting their software to their own devices artificially limits their success and adoption. Companies like Amazon.com are pure software companies and have no such limitations. Apple is going to go to these schools and tell them, you can buy all these eTextbooks but you have to also buy iPads. Oh, and the eTextbooks won’t work on your existing PCs. Sorry about that. A software company like Amazon.com can come along and say they can sell you eTextbooks that will work on anything you have including iPads.

If Apple was a software company they would release a reader for their eTextbooks for any platform. They would also let eTextbooks made with iBook Author able to be published anywhere. They have a lead again, but restricting their software to their own platforms will hurt them badly. This is their Achilles Heel.

• Sell Your Book in the iBookstore and Apple Won’t Let You Sell It Anywhere Else

  • Selling a book with Apple’s iBook Author program is now a one-way ticket to Apple being the only place you can sell the book. Maybe selling your book on iBooks isn’t such a great deal after all.
  • the worst part is that you never agree to anything when you install the application. The EULA never appears when you install. Apparently, you implicitly agree to the EULA simply by using the software.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

(cc) wohnai

Enough had leaked out about the Apple Education event today that we knew a lot of what was presented. To sum up Apple unveiled three things. I had some thoughts about each.

1. iBooks 2. First impression: Meh.

Apple has revamped their bookstore again, this time to provide a market for nice eTextbooks. Apple likes to take technology and put it together in a polished way. What they did for eTextbooks is not rocket science. Making a multimedia rich book is not new. What Apple has going for it is an existing ecosystem to promote this. They way they can sell this is with Education technology packages to schools looking to go digital. They can sell them a package of iPads, iMacs or Macbooks for the teachers, and eTextbooks for the students. If the system works well, then they might have a winner here. However, what students have a PC at home?

Any strength can be exploited by a canny enemy. Apple’s biggest strength in this project is their closed ecosystem. This however can be a weakness because their textbooks are limited to Apple devices. What about the other devices? Apple isn’t the only game in town, and they are expensive. Watch for Amazon.com to move into this area soon. Kindle runs on anything… People don’t like being told their data is trapped.

2. iBooks Author. First impression: Wow!

This is what Apple does best I think. They took a process that was complicated and messy and created simple to use tools that make the process open for everyone. What this does is open the field of eTextbook authoring to anyone. This is huge! Students and teachers have been conditioned to think textbooks can only come from textbook makers. Of course this is a silly idea but it has been defacto until now. Imagine being able to chose from hundreds of multimedia textbooks on your topic. You can choose the exact right one for your teaching style or even mix and match chapters. You might even be able to have different versions of the same textbook that caters to different learning styles. The information will be constantly refreshed and very creative people will be competing against each other to try to make the most effective lessons.

The other big thing is Apple said they have capped textbook prices to $15. I wonder how that will work for college textbooks? The big textbook publishers are used to commanding much higher prices for their books. Will they sit down and accept this change? I somehow doubt it. It also kills the used textbook market but still I don’t think they will go for it. They will make some lower profit textbooks but will keep their really good ones as paper. Also, please note that as easy as Apple made it to make eTextbooks, it’s still expensive to create new assets and videos and such for existing textbooks. So, it it costs more to make, and you have to charge much less, why would big publishers go along with this?

Here’s a prediction: I think this new market place will be used way more by K-12 textbook companies than by college textbook makers. I also predict that in a year’s time, the most popular eTextbook will be written by an independent author, not by a big company.

3. iTunes U. First impression: Meh.

I have used iTunes U for a while and I’m pleased it has been upgraded. (It needed it). Still, the biggest change here is that K-12 is now allowed to start their own iTunes U sites. Again, I note that Apple seems to be creating a turn key package to offer to schools that want to go digital but don’t want to have to built it themselves.

Overall, one wow and two mehs.

• Apple announces iBooks 2, iBooks Author to “reinvent textbooks”

  • Apple announced what it’s calling “iBooks 2″ during its media event in New York on Thursday, a textbook software program that allows textbook-makers and instructors to create rich, interactive teaching media for the iPad. As we first reported earlier this week, the announcement is akin to “GarageBand for e-books,” giving authors access to easy-to-use tools on the computer in order to create multimedia content for the iPad.
  • Books created for iBooks 2 can have all manner of media attached, complete with multitouch capabilities. The company listed numerous ways in which iBooks 2 authors can create engaging content for students, including multiple-choice questions with immediate feedback within the text, the ability to make notes and highlights that can be found in a single location as note cards or sprinkled throughout the text, ways to explore embedded graphics and 3D animations, full-motion movies, and more.
  • Apple also announced a Mac application on Thursday called “iBooks Author,” which Apple Senior VP of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller described as “powerful and feature-rich.” The interface, as demoed to the audience, is similar to Apple’s iWork applications and allows authors to format books through WYSIWYG interaction and format the pages in a variety of ways.
  • The price of the books is capped at $14.99 or less (the company specifically said “high school” books, so it’s unclear as to whether the cap applies to all books), though instructors can sell individual chapters at what Schiller described as a “very aggressive price.”

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Every satire has a grain of truth in it. I wonder how many teachers get their projector and computer, then do this exact same thing!

This is a perfect example of how technology by itself won’t change education.

I do think though that this type of school would work better as a virtual school online. Physical schools are still limited to the students in the local area. I’m very interested in seeing how this school does in a few years time. Awesome!

• New York City gets a Software Engineering High School – Joel on Software

  • This fall New York City will open The Academy for Software Engineering, the city’s first public high school that will actually train kids to develop software. The project has been a long time dream of Mike Zamansky, the highly-regarded CS teacher at New York’s elite Stuyvesant public high school. It was jump started when Fred Wilson, a VC at Union Square Ventures, promised to get the tech community to help with knowledge, advice, and money.

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So here is what to watch for and what I think it means.

1. Apple wants to sell more hardware. Steve Jobs was very clear on this point. Apple is a hardware company. Everything other part of their business is to help them sell more hardware. Watch to see if what they announce is cross platform, or if it only works in the Apple ecosystem.
2. The 18-24 demographic (aka college students) is the one that matters the most to advertisers because that is the one where people tend to set lifetime preferences for products. Apple realizes it’s eBook system hasn’t been successful yet (compared to Amazon.com) so watch to see if they try to get the college student market. The thinking here is that if college students are used to buying their textbooks from Apple, maybe they will buy other books too?
3. When Apple first created iTunes, I think the music industry didn’t really understand what a disruptive innovation that was. Therefore they let Apple pretty much have it’s way as far a pricing. This taught the content industry to be much more careful with their products. I would be surprised if Apple didn’t do something with eTextbooks. The question is, will they work just with existing textbook makers or will they let anyone publish and sell a textbook? Bonus question: if they are selling existing textbooks, what price will they be? I have a hard time seeing existing textbook makers being part of a system where their products are drastically reduced in price, and competing with an open market. They won’t break up their cartel unless they are forced to.

For all the love for Apple from the fanbois keep in mind they are trying to make money. They don’t want to change or revolutionize education. Govern your expectations accordingly.

• What to Look for in Apple’s Education Announcement

  • Since Apple issued invitations to its media event on January 19, there’s been plenty of ink spilled about what the company will reveal. “Join us for an education announcement in the Big Apple” — that’s the only clue we have, well that and the Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs and rthe revelations he was working on a plan to “disrupt the textbook industry” before he died.
  • I have my own questions (doubts and excitement) about what we’ll see, as well as a wish list, of sorts, of the things I’d like to see Apple tackle
  • DEVICE MANAGEMENT:
  • VOLUME PURCHASING PROGRAM FOR iBOOKS:
  • DISCOVERABILITY:
  • APPS VERSUS E-BOOKS (iBOOKS):
  • AMAZON VERSUS APPLE:
  • AGENCY PRICING:
  • CHAPTERS AND COURSE PACKETS:
  • SELF PUBLISHING?:
  • SUPPORT FOR MULTIPLE DEVICES:
  • SOCIAL LEARNING:

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