Intrinsic Strategy

It seems everywhere you look in U.S. education, the tablet story is an iPad story, from college to kindergarten. (Yes. Kindergarten. In Maine.)

But perhaps it’s time to look beyond the United States’ borders.

Over at the NPR/KQED education blog MindShift, I analyze the latest trends in the global tablet market for education. And across various ponds, the emphasis seems to be on Android — especially for a growing number of lower-cost, under $200 tablet computing devices aimed at schools and a consumer education market.

Read, “Which device will win the tablet battle?” on MindShift.

Okay, I have to admit: this one was a lot more fun than usual. I mean, how often do I get a chance to interview six well-known science fiction writers for a tech analysis?

But that’s exactly what I did for my GeekWire column, following up on Seattle-area asteroid mining startup Planetary Resources’ launch by getting the take of a half-dozen established writers — who, it turns out, were as inspired by the news as the company says it was inspired by science fiction.

Read what Greg Bear, Vonda N. McIntyre, Kay Kenyon, William C. Dietz, Louise Marley and Brenda Cooper have to say in my latest GeekWire column, “Science fiction writers inspired as asteroid miners make fiction fact.”

And please, great SFWA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America), forgive me for using the once-abhorred abbreviation “sci-fi” in this blog headline. It was the only way to make it fit — and the term, even though now common, still makes me cringe.

What happens when the traditional technology evaluation and adoption cycle in education is upended? What you get is what’s happening today with the iPad — but it’s only the most visible of effects.

Over at NPR/KQED’s MindShift blog, I examine how consumer, K-12 and higher education technology is rapidly converging. What used to take a decade to make its way from consumers to K-12 classrooms, passing through higher ed, now takes two-to-three years. Or less. And this isn’t just my observation — execs I know at various education companies have noticed it, too, and the impact it has on their product planning.

Part of it might be accelerants recently poured onto edtech such as venture capital, startup incubators and foundation grants. But a major portion is the reality that “digital natives” now include teachers, administrators and policy makers.

The result? A true mashup, maybe the edtech equivalent of Dr. Doolittle’s hybrid Pushmi-Pullyu.

This is my first piece written specifically for MindShift, and I’m hoping to do several more focused on analysis of what’s happening in education with technology. (For those who want even more of an overview, here’s a PDF of my keynote presentation in a similar vein for the Blackboard World Transact 2012 conference in March).

Read, “When Technologies Collide: Consumer, K-12 and Higher Ed” at MindShift.

There’s been a fair amount of speculation (some informed) about when or whether Google will enter the tablet fray directly. The latest rumors have Google introducing an Android tablet mid-year at a $199 price point — leading to additional speculation that this is supposed to quash the growth of Amazon’s Kindle Fire (also at that price and Android).

I think Google’s potential entry may have the opposite effect: it may legitimize a second pricing tier for tablets in the U.S.

Why do I say “in the U.S.?” Because globally, the $199 price point has already been broken, mostly by education efforts such as those in India, and may be further propelled by huge government-driven tablet adoptions for schools in Thailand, Australia and South Korea.  We’re iPad-obsessed and, perhaps as a result, behind due to the cost of devices.

I delve into this further in my latest column at GeekWire. Coincidentally, it was written when I was immersed in the nerd news flow of that tech site, diving into a newsroom environment to help out for the first time in a decade, and writing 20 stories in a roughly 20-hour week of afternoons. Plus this column.

Read “Will a $199 Google tablet hurt or help the Kindle Fire?” over at GeekWire.

Occasionally I move from Practical Nerd to personal nerd in my columns for GeekWire. And “7 steps to raise a geek child” is my most personal yet. 

Yet it’s also practical, in that “geek” has gone from being a negative epithet to a kind of laudatory epaulet in a generation. The seven steps are all about balance and, I suppose, would work equally well for giving a jock child a more complete upbringing. Though I clearly didn’t have that direct athletic experience while growing up, my son — who suggested an alternate heading for tip number three, “Mindmeld with your child. (Or use the Force, if you must.)” — easily could have.

Decide for yourself by reading “7 steps to raise a geek child” at GeekWire.

A few years back, I had the honor of being asked to serve a two-year term on Alaska Airlines’ MVP Gold Advisory Board. It’s a group of twelve very frequent fliers who sign NDAs and get to see how the, uh, fuselage is made, and come to realize the airline industry is anything but glamorous. But it is cool, and there is much tech in play.

So when I was asked if I would mind giving up a whole day to see a really cool advance in airline cabin interiors, I said yes. And I focused on the technology — and psychology — being applied.

The result is chronicled in my latest column for GeekWire.

There’s a lot I didn’t elaborate upon (the champagne toast, the remarkable view on a clear day at somewhere around 10,000 feet from Everett to Seattle Tacoma International Airport via the Olympic mountains). But for what I didn’t write about, I posted a public photo album with captions.

Read “Inside Alaska Airlines’ new Boeing Sky Interior” at GeekWire.

Remember how the web was going to increase transparency in pricing for everything? Well, now those who have been made transparent are learning how to fight back.

Over at GeekWire, I compare two car buying experiences: one from 2000, one from last month. In the intervening dozen years, it’s clear some dealerships have found the weak points in the process for car purchases that originate on the web and are exploiting them.

Read “How car dealers embrace, and erode, the web” at GeekWire.

If Microsoft has a leadership strategy for K-12, now would be a a great time for it to educate us.

Over at GeekWire, I wonder what Microsoft’s role in K-12 education (and likely higher education) is: to lead, or simply to support what others are doing? This thinking came to a head when I was asked to speak at a general session of  SIIA’s Ed Tech Business Forum in New York City late last month with Microsoft’s U.S. Education CTO, Cameron Evans.

Evans is a good, thoughtful presenter of parts of a vision for technology in education. But that vision isn’t obviously Microsoft’s strategy, or necessarily reflects what it considers its role. And at a time when there’s a lot of digital reform apparently converging on schools, having Microsoft’s strategic leadership perspective might help everyone. After all, the Gates Foundation clearly has one.

For more musings (and a few suggestions I have for Redmond), read “Microsoft and education: lead or cheerlead?” at GeekWire.

The Kindle Fire is this holiday season’s bright shiny object. But while the gadget blogs egg on a Fire-iPad death match, less noticed is what recent price cuts for the most basic, E Ink-reliant Kindle — and Barnes and Noble’s Nook — have done to mass market paperbacks.

They are about to deliver the finishing move.

Over at GeekWire, I look at the impending death of the mass market paperback book occuring in the shadows of the brightly lit tablet wars in my column, “When eBooks attack, mass paperbacks die.”

It has a bit of a personal impact, too, as my book collection is full of autographed mass market paperbacks from writers I admire, from a time when paperback was frequently the only first edition to which a genre fiction author could aspire.

And astute GeekWire readers will note my column has retired the “Practical Nerd” title. Though it’s safe to say the practical, nerdy approach remains.

In my work as an industry consultant and analyst in education technology and digital learning, I read. A lot. And there are some invaluable web resources on which I rely so much that I’d like to nominate them for the Edublog Awards — and share them with you.

• EdSurge is a relative newcomer:  a smart, sassy (is that even said anymore?), yet serious e-newsletter and site that covers all things transformative edtech with an emphasis on startup and non-profit activity and resources. If you aren’t reading co-founder Betsy Corcoran’s weekly dispatch, you’re not living on the edu-edge. For the Edublog Awards I nominate EdSurge (www.edsurge.com) for best ed tech / resource sharing blog.
• Hack Education is a labor of  love and journalism by independent edtech journalist Audrey Watters, who also writes for several sites. Watters follows a journalism tradition I admire — no cows are sacred, and no prisoners are taken. She’s also one of the few edtech journalists who thinks beyond straight reporting.  For the Edublog Awards I nominate Hack Education (www.hackeducation.com) for best individual blog.
• MindShift focuses on a critically important part of edtech — the impact of change on parents and the educational community as a whole. Hosted by San Francisco public broadcaster KQED and ably and actively guided by Tina Barseghian, MindShift features a broad array of thoughtful voices on the future of learning. For the Edublog Awards, I nominate MindShift (mindshift.kqed.org) for best group blog.

If you’re so inspired, please feel free to echo these nominations by following the process on the Edublog, er, blog.  And even if you aren’t, I hope you’ll enjoy the good work of those I chose to nominate.

Does an acknowledged U.S. tech leader like Seattle have any real advantage in use of tech for public spaces and purposes compared to European cities like Amsterdam?

I didn’t find much evidence of that for my latest GeekWire column. Public transit (bicycles and buses), grocery stores, WiFi hotspots, even parking meters — Amsterdam was either ahead when it came to using tech to enhance the everyday experience, or at least scored no worse than a draw.

About the only area in which Seattle had an advantage was in tech’s ability to cocoon an individual for social isolation in public spaces.

Admittedly, this informal evaluation was done on vacation. But it’s interesting how different the approach to general tech for public use can be across two cities that appear to have much else in common.

Read the Practical Nerd column, “Seattle vs. Amsterdam, a tale of two cities and their technology,” at GeekWire.

A week ago, Microsoft launched its “playful learning” initiative with great fanfare, promising to tie Kinect and the Xbox 360 to, among other things, Sesame Street. It was, Microsoft claimed, a first in making kids’ educational television interactive.

Well, sort of. It had been done before. Nearly fifteen years ago. By Microsoft.

Over at GeekWire, my latest Practical Nerd column recalls the steps and stumbles of the Microsoft ActiMates interactive “early learning system,” a combo plush toy-wireless transmitter tied to broadcasts of the PBS shows Barney & Friends, Arthur and Teletubbies. Toys were discontinued. Lessons were learned.

Read the Practical Nerd column on GeekWire, “Microsoft toys with itself, again.”

I’m used to thinking like an entrepreneur — I own my own business, I’ve advised or been part of tech startups and even as a teen I published a bi-weekly science-fiction newsletter that was sold through local retailers.

So I was excited to take part as a newbie mentor at Startup Weekend Seattle EDU recently, one of the very first Startup Weekend events to be focused on education technology. Which, of course, is a large part of my day job.

I’ve chronicled my observation-based tips for budding edtech entrepreneurs in a column for GeekWire, “Survival tips for Startup Weekend EDU.”

While the 54-hour marathon — from pitching to building to presenting a startup — is the heart of the Startup Weekend experience, the brain is partly provided by the speakers. And Seattle EDU organizer TeachStreet assembled a stellar bunch: venture capital’s Vinod Khosla, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, Maveron’s Jason Stoffer and tech industry luminary and Lotus founder Mitch Kapor. A few pithy quotes that didn’t make it into my GeekWire essay: Read the rest of this entry »

Last weekend, I had the honor of speaking at the biennial conference of the Northwest Independent Editors Guild, Red Pencil in the Woods. Honored in that I’m not an editor. I’m a marketer. I’m a writer. I’m a speaker and broadcaster.

However, I’ve always maintained that every good writer needs an editor. Writers can get distance from work they’ve drafted by putting it aside overnight, or for a few days, and then doing something completely different before going back to edit. But even that distance in time doesn’t provide distance from self. Granting that outside-of-self perspective is why I value good editors, including mine at GeekWire, and encourage them to push back if something doesn’t communicate what I had intended to the audience for which I’m writing.

Read the rest of this entry »

There’s something to be said for paying attention to the little things. Such as, if you’re Amazon.com, shipping customers the right little things.

My latest Practical Nerd column tempers my lust for all things Amazon with a cold shower of reality: Amazon is maddeningly inconsistent in delivering OEM-branded accessories even when it’s obvious that’s what the customer ordered, and Amazon itself fulfills that order. Instead, in my own and others’ experience, what can show up is either clearly, or cleverly disguised, aftermarket and off-brand accessories.

Amazon is great about taking these back. But that doesn’t make the practice customer-friendly. Read more in my Practical Nerd essay, “When Amazon can’t be trusted,” on GeekWire.

There is a lot of tech startup activity in education technology and digital learning — the most I can recall in a decade. There are new incubators, new newsletters and new events.

The latest, just in time for back-to-school (ah, that charming agrarian K-12 calendar), is Startup Weekend Seattle EDU. As the second education-focused Startup Weekend — and the first in Seattle — it gave me a lens through which to view the current education startup emphasis. It’s taking place at all levels of education, including higher education, continuing education and lifelong learning.

But to me, the most interesting is in the also-included, and difficult-to-address, K-12 market. As the Cooney Center’s Carly Shuler recently blogged in her post about education incubator Imagine K12, “Education is often the last to benefit from innovation because it is so hard to sell to.”

Read my resulting Practical Nerd column at GeekWire, “Irresistible startups, immovable education.”

When something is free, there’s frequently a catch. Sometimes it’s a requirement for your personal information, sometimes it’s a constant pitch for a paid version, sometimes it’s exposure to ads. But I have a serious problem with faux “free” when the real price isn’t clearly disclosed.

That’s the issue I take up in my latest Practical Nerd column for GeekWire, “The hidden price of ‘free’,” and free products — the Spotify music service and the AnchorFree Hotspot Shield personal VPN service — that have hidden or frustrating true costs. As state attorneys general are fond of saying: if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Even someone like me, who tends to research any tech product or service before using it on my primary computer, can get distracted by the alluring claim of “free.” Consider it a cautionary tale, and read the essay on GeekWire.

On a slightly unrelated note, I had the opportunity to fill-in as co-host of the weekly GeekWire podcast and radio show (airing in Seattle on KIRO 97.3 FM) with GeekWire’s Todd Bishop. Catch the podcast — and a rare photo of me and show guest Chris Pirillo — as we discuss Steve Jobs’ resignation, Facebook privacy and the future of Pirillo’s Gnomedex conference, also on GeekWire.

When I penned “Three Drivers of the Digital Classroom,” I did so to give those outside of education visibility into trends changing K-12 education. More specifically, I did so at the invitation of Mark Anderson, publisher of the long-running Strategic News Service newsletter, which provides primarily Mark’s keen and thoughtful insights for executives and financial analysts in the computing and communications industries. (I’m a long-time subscriber.)

But the in-depth essay also serves a second purpose: to highlight developments in digital learning and education technology at three recent, key industry conferences. For those outside of edtech, they are the Software and Information Industry Association’s Ed Tech Industry Summit, the Association of Educational Publishers’ Content in Context Conference and the International Society for Technology in Education’s ISTE 2011 conference and exposition.

So I’ve made the essay easier to keep as a reference by making it available as a PDF which you can download here. It now also includes Mark’s kind introduction and close from the Strategic News Service newsletter in which it originally appeared. Feel free to share (but please don’t re-publish or re-post without permission). And check out Mark’s SNS site as well.

Digital K-12 education is finally coming into its own.

This simple statement may evoke disbelieving cries of “What – again?” Those of us who have been around the Lego block a few times recall similar statements during the boom-bust cycles of packaged personal-computer software, multimedia CD-ROM, and dot-com, bringing to mind pioneering names like Oregon Trail, Number Munchers, and Knowledge Adventure.

The assumption during each cycle was that consumer trends in personal computing were so compelling that they would force their way into K-12 classrooms. The reality was that consumer tech was a much less irresistible force than the classroom was an immovable object – immovable, in that it had been largely unchanged since the ’50s. And I don’t mean the 1950s.

Two developments may make this decade the charm: consumer-level expectations about technology among educators and their influencers, which set the stage; and three rapidly evolving digital trends that are unique to education. Read the rest of this entry »

Nowadays, it’s cool to be a nerd. But in the nerds’ rush to mass acceptance (somewhat of a contradiction in terms), I find something’s been lost. And that’s honesty and a sense of perspective about digital technology, too often replaced by bright-shiny cheer leading.

In my latest GeekWire column, I take on what it means to be a Practical Nerd. My definition, my statement — indeed, my manifesto — consists of five core principles.

Anything else, and the term “nerd” is watered down. For Nerds of a Certain Age, it’s equivalent to confusing an Urban Cowboy wannabe with a real cowboy.

Read “The Practical Nerd manifesto” at GeekWire.