The Next Wave of EdTech: 12 Years After the Last Bubble, Have Investors Figured Out the Market As We Enter the Next One?

Over the past few weeks, the technology press has focused on a new wave of investments in online learning.  (It's interesting, those of us in the field moved from using the term online learning to e-learning in 2000; investors have remained with the term online learning.  But that's another discussion.)

For example, the Chronicle of HIgher Education has been running a series on new educational technology startups and the New York Times has run a series of similar features. Its series highlights a variety of startups, including one that helps professors manage e-mail from students.  (See Students Endlessly E-Mail Professors for Help. A New Service Hopes to Organize the Answers at http://chronicle.com/article/Students-Endlessly-E-Mail/131390/).

Many of the features in the Times focus on services providing online courses, like a feature on a series of online services that provide training on various languages for writing Internet applications (see A Surge in Learning the Language of the Internet at  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/28/technology/for-an-edge-on-the-internet-computer-code-gains-a-following.html?_r=2&ref=business&pagewanted=all).  

In today's edition, the New York Times reports on a large investment in Coursera, a company founded by some professors at Stanford and that provides university-based courses for free online (see Online Education Venture Lures Cash Infusion and Deals With 5 Top Universities at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/technology/coursera-plans-to-announce-university-partners-for-online-classes.html?ref=business).

Nestled between the enthusiastic reporting for these new ventures are some troubling details:

• The founder of the e-mail company has

"no plans to generate revenue—the service is free and does not carry advertisements. Ms. Sankar said that she didn't write a business plan for the site, because she doesn't believe in them, and that she believes that once a critical mass of students and professors are signed up, revenue models can emerges" (quote from the article from the Chronicle cited above).  

Isn't that how the tech bubble burst the last time?

• The quality of the free and low-cost courses for writing Internet applications mentioned in the New York Times article sounds pretty poor. An expert acknowledged that most students who complete these courses still cannot write applications.  One company quoted in the article admitted publicly that its courses could be improved.  

• If one reads the fine print, the free university courses offered by Coursera and its competitors don't fully compete with those from universities. If students want feedback, they only receive it from other students. Sounds like a good plan but the article never explores the participation rates of students in these students-evaluate-students programs. Avoiding teaching assistants reduces costs, but if participation rates of students in evaluating one another are low, then many students might go wanting for feedback. (This is a real concern; the courses are voluntary, after all.)

Students also do not receive university credit; they receive certificates of completion.

The courses have no measures to protect against cheating.

And, most significantly, when the article cites the impact of courses on students, they have no figures to report. They provide qualitative data.  That's fine, because it provides insights into whom and how the courses affect students.  But both of the students mentioned are working professionals, rather than degree-seeking students.

Perhaps, then, these services are not really meant to replace universities; they're the beginnings of an online system for continuing professional education.  The only problem is, it doesn't sound like the founders of these companies have figured that out yet and, even if they have, the courses might need extensive rework before they can help workers really develop the skills and knowledge they need to succeed on the job.  

Digital Content, Disappearing Archives

Transferring content to digital formats has its advantages. For example, think of thousands of songs you can store on an palm-sized iPod or the hundreds of books you can store on a single Kindle, which is thinner than a book.

But archival purposes isn’t one of those advantages. As University of Maryland Information Studies and English professor Kari Kraus reports in When Data Disappears (published in the New York Times, August 6, 2011), digital media like hard disks, thumb drives, DVDs and CDs, are “inherently unstable.” Most of these media start to degrade with time. Even if the media survives, the formats do not. (Don’t believe me? Try to open a Word 95 file with MS Word 2010.)

We may be producing more content in a week than all of civilization produced for centuries, but if we don’t find a way to preserve it so it’s accessible to future generations, all of that great content could disappear from our historical consciousness.

Learn more about the issue at
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/opinion/sunday/when-data-disappears.html?ref=opinion.

Technologies to Watch in Higher Education: 8 Years’ of Predictions

The New Media Consortium and Educause recently published their annual Horizon Report, which "describes six areas of emerging technology that will have significant impact in higher education within three adoption horizons over the next one to five years" (Johnson, Levine, Smith & Stone, 2010).

In response, I compiled the lists of technologies to watch from the eight Horizon reports that have been published to date:

Year	Time to Adoption: 1 Year or Less	Time to Adoption: 2 to 3 Years	Time to Adoption: 4 to 5 Years
2004	Learning objects Scalable vector graphics (SVG)	Rapid prototyping Multimodal interfaces	Context-aware computing Knowledge webs
2005	Extended Learning Ubiquitous wireless	Intelligent searching Educational gaming	Social Networks & Knowledge Webs Context-Aware Computing/Augmented Reality
2006	Social computing Personal broadcasting	The phones in their pockets Educational gaming	Social networks and knowledge webs Context-aware computing/augmented reality
2007	User-created content Social networking	Mobile phones Virtual worlds	The new scholarship and emerging forms of publication Massively multiplayer educational gaming
2008	Grassroots video Collaboration web	Mobile broadband Data mashups	Collective intelligence Social operating systems
2009	Mobiles Cloud computing	Geo-everything (geo-tagging of data) Personal web	Semantic-aware objects Smart objects
2010	Mobile computing Open content	Electronic books Simple augmented reality	Gesture-based computing Visual data analysis
2011	Electronic books Mobiles (mobile devices)	Augmented reality Game-based learning	Gesture-based computing Learning analytics

Food for thought: Which technologies did they call correctly? Which ones not?

References
Johnson, L., Smith, R., Willis, H., Levine, A., and Haywood, K.,  (2011). The 2011 Horizon Report. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.

Johnson, L., Levine, A., Smith, R., & Stone, S. (2010). The 2010 Horizon Report.

Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.

Tweckling

A few months ago, a colleague sent an e-mail to several people discussing the problem of people tweeting during presentations.

First, the Incident
The issue is a timely one in light of a live interview with Steve Martin at New York’s 92nd Street Y.  The interview by New York Times writer Deborah Solomon focused on Martin’s new novel, and she picked up on a number of points in the book when asking him questions.

But the audience wanted a “star” interview, asking him about his career as a comedian, not his recent work as a novelist focusing on the art world.  The increasingly frustrated audience (located not only onsite, but also through simulcast in locations around the country) tweeted up a storm and one of the events’ producers eventually informed the interviewer that the audience was losing patience with her line of questions.

The Y eventually sent an apology and a $50 gift certificate to all who attended, claiming that the interview didn’t live up to its “standard of excellence.” (For those  who aren’t familiar with it, this series of lectures is one of the best known in New York City and, simulcasts started in response to people in other cities wishing to join the experience.)

The Arts Beat blog of the New York Times reports on the incident (http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/02/readers-weigh-in-on-ys-decision-to-give-refunds-for-steve-martin-interview/?ref=design).  Some people agree with the gesture.

But others question it, pointing out that people who attend other disappointing lectures, movies, and similar performances rarely receive apologies, much less refunds.

More significantly, some people question whether the role of the audience in this situation, noting that the success of the Y lectures is that they do not pander to audience wishes.

The Bigger Picture
Edu-blogger Steve Wheeler puts this individual incident into a broader perspective in his blog entry, Weapon of Mass Detraction (http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/2009/12/weapon-of-mass-distraction.html) from December 2009.

Wheeler describes a few incidents in which impatient audiences tweet their frustration with a speaker.  In some instances, the speaker is admittedly off-the-mark in targeting the presentation.

But in other instances, the problems plaguing the speaker are beyond his or her control, such as non-functioning audio and restrictions placed on the speaker by the conference producer.

Wheeler labels this phenomenon as tweckling.

Wheeler focuses on the rudeness of the behavior. And it is.

But, more fundamentally, this seems to be a question of publicly vocalizing their conclusions before the speaker has reached his or hers.

That does not excuse speakers from the responsibility for engaging their audiences or conference producers from providing the pre-presentation guidance and on-site audiovisual support that speakers need to successfully do so.

But it would be nice if audiences were to meet speakers half way, and give them a bit of a benefit of the doubt before tweeting their dissatisfaction.

Realistically, though, as long as conference producers increasingly promote tweeting during their events, tweckling is an additional reality that all speakers need to face.

Battle of the e-Book Readers

In the past few weeks, the Toronto Star ran a pair of articles on e-readers.

Consumer columnist Ellen Roseman sings the virtues of her iPad in  “An eReader is good, but an iPad is better” (http://www.moneyville.ca/article/897311--roseman-an-ereader-is-good-but-an-ipad-is-better).

In response, Star editor Sarah Millar’s wrote “iPad vs. Kindle, which would you prefer?” (http://www.moneyville.ca/article/899858--ipad-vs-kindle-which-would-you-prefer). Despite its non-commital title, Millar decidedly chooses the single-purpose e-book reader in general, and the Kindle in particular. 

For what it’s worth, in my opinion, Millar makes the stronger case.  She points out that the Kindle costs about one-third the price of an iPad, and is lighter and its battery lasts longer.  I’m not sure that the additional features that Roseman highlights are really worth all the extra money. 

That said, I own an iPad and love it.   

Life and Death of e-Mail and e-Books: Roundup of Recent News on Media and e-Books

The next few posts take a brief pause from the account of my sabbatical over the past year to report on some of the news that caught my eye over the past few weeks about:

• Media (general)
• e-Books

Then

• Research
• Schools
• Higher education

Next, workplace learning
And

• Nonprofits
• And a different perspective

News about media (general)
The blogosphere is chockablock with predictions of various technologies.

For example, a couple of months ago, Tim Young declared the death of e-mail on the Knowledge is Social blog (http://blog.socialcast.com/social-networks-spur-the-demise-of-email-in-the-workplace/).   On the one hand, he was accurately reading surveys saying that use of e-mail was declining, especially among younger people, who prefer instant messaging, texting, and social networks for communicating.

Over time, however, we in the media tend to love hyperbole about media.  The typical story goes like this: a new medium is going to “kill” an existing one.  Television was going to replace radio and movies.  Cable would kill broadcast television.  Computers will replace the classroom.

But as sociologist Neil Selwyn observed at the recent ED-MEDIA conference in Toronto, such hyperbole can, at times, sound “ridiculous” (he was specifically referring to a comment that social media will replace schools).

Steve Lohr puts the situation into a broader perspective in a recent analysis in the New York Times, observing that—in the long-run—media adapt.  Radio lost its primacy as an entertainment medium, but found new lives—first as background music, news and talk (which has taken a primary role in shaping political debate (my addition))—and later, through satellite radio with a  wide range of music and conversation.  Lohr even identifies podcast as a reinvention of the radio show.

Similarly, rather than lose to television, movies reinvented themselves, first with gimmicks like 3D (geez—and now television is trying the same thing) and, later, with a richer viewing experience not feasible through television.

E-mail?  That’s not dead either.  It’s just morphing in use as are telephone calls.  People may be calling less, but some evidence suggests that some of all of all that increased texting is used to schedule phone conversations.  Merely calling people to say hi unannounced is increasingly seen as an intrusion.

Check out Lohr’s analysis, Now Playing: Night of the Living Tech, at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/weekinreview/22lohr.html?ref=weekinreview.

News about e-books

• Michael Wolf declares that "e-Books Won the War." I didn't realize we were at war (at least, not over books).  From my perspective, the conversion from print to e-books is part of a larger, systemic conversion from print to online information, and the conversion is very much in process and likely to continue for the foreseeable future.  But, like most industry pundits, hyperbole is intended to drum up attention and, perhaps, business.  Read his comments at http://gigaom.com/2010/08/06/how-e-books-won-the-war/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OmMalik+%28GigaOM%29&utm_content=Twitter.
• For a more fact-based account of the situation with e-books, check out the current issue of Spectrum, IEEE's magazine.  After providing a current assessment of the brutal market conditions for manufacturers of e-book readers, Spectrum's  editors report the results of their testing and ranking of all the e-readers out there, including obscure ones that no one ever hears about, like the Bookeen Cybook Opus and the Hanvon WISEreader.  Among the useful information in the reviews are the strengths and drawbacks to each reader, and a list of formats that the readers can display.  No format is universal (a problem), but the ePub and PDF formats seem extremely popular.  Read the article at http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/tools-toys/the-ipad-the-kindle-and-the-immutable-laws-of-the-marketplace/0