Frank Catalano

SXSWedu has posted the audio of my session, “From Legacy to Uncertainty: the Digital Future of the Major ‘Textbook’ Publishers,” featuring execs from Pearson North America, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and McGraw-Hill Education discussing their digital efforts (and failures), relationships with startups and future paper-to-pixel balance.

As it typical of sessions I moderate, there were no presentations, just conversation, making this audio the only record of an interesting session.

And it was interesting, with McGraw-Hill’s Jeff Livingston laying down a challenge to startups, Pearson’s Peter Cohen admitting where large publisher digital education products had failed, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Mary Cullinane, who came to HMH from Microsoft, commenting on a number of topics from her unique perspective.

Listen to “From Legacy to Uncertainty, the Digital Future of the Major ‘Textbook’ Publishers,” at Soundcloud.

For two decades, I’ve traveled overseas on vacation with lots of paper: guidebooks, journals, maps and more. But this year, I wanted to travel lighter and less obtrusively — and that meant going smartphone.

It was easier than I thought, at least in France. Over at GeekWire, I detail the five steps I took that pretty much any motivated European or other international traveler can replicate, if the country that’s being visited has the right supporting infrastructure for WiFi and recharging. And if a traveler’s comfort level isn’t too compromised by going smartphone.

Two big takeaways I discovered from ten days in France:

• Public WiFi is easier to find than I expected. From the smallest hotels (including those in the Loire Valley and on Mont-St-Michel) to the largest public spaces (such as the park behind Paris’ Notre Dame cathedral), WiFi was plentiful.
• Voice call necessity is overrated. I was initially concerned that, by putting my smartphone in Airplane Mode and only using WiFi connectivity and not cellular phone or data service, I’d have problems. Not true: I was able to do everything by email from my phone. I never used the full version of the Skype app I had downloaded (and never mind considering the crippled pre-installed “Skype mobile” version). Even the telecarte I purchased for backup use at public phones stills holds its full value.

Want more details? Read, “The Geek’s Guide to International Travel,” over at GeekWire.

A not-so-quiet giant, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is a force in education reform and education technology. So Bill Gates’ closing keynote was closely watched at the SXSWedu conference in Austin, an event focused on education and technology.

Though it had some new observations, as I write in my GeekWire column, the keynote broke no new ground. What was most interesting is that it provided a lens through which to view both Gates’ efforts and a core SXSWedu trend: the growing importance of education data.

Gates spoke as the better-known SXSW (“south-by-southwest,” for the uninitiated) conferences on the interactive, film and music industries were about to begin, with shrink wrap freshly applied to lamp posts and bus shelters to prevent damage from the coming posters, paint and — as locals matter-of-factly informed me — urine.

A couple of interesting tidbits about Gates’ talk that I didn’t capture in my GeekWire piece:

• Gates received an unusual standing ovation from sections of the packed ballroom — but it came after he was introduced by SXSWedu’s Ron Reed as “an Edison of our age” and took the stage. Three was no equivalent ovation as he left.
• Gates took no questions after the keynote. This, too, was unusual for a SXSWedu speaker. Even former Pearson CEO Marjorie Scardino, who keynoted last year, took a number of questions. And Pearson arguably is as controversial in education as the Gates Foundation.

For a more general overview of SXSWedu and the role of data in education, listen to the GeekWire Radio podcast as I co-host with GeekWire’s Todd Bishop and feature guest Chancellor Jean Floten of WGU-Washington. WGU is the fully online, accredited Western Governors University and a pioneer in web higher education. Floten provides a good perspective.

Finally, a caveat. That Reuters story about SXSWedu and data? While I’m quoted in it, my quote actually had nothing to do with the main thrust of the piece, the Gates-funded student data initiative inBloom. The reporter and I didn’t discuss inBloom but we did talk about the overheated space of technology startups in education, and my comment wound up where it did when the story was edited. Still, in a general startup context, that quote is worth repeating here:

“The hype in the tech press is that education is an engineering problem that can be fixed by technology,” said Frank Catalano of Intrinsic Strategy, a consulting firm focused on education and technology. “To my mind, that’s a very naive and destructive view.”

With that as a caution in light of the very real positive potential of education data and technology, read my column, “Bill Gates at SXSWedu: the future of education is data,” at GeekWire.

At the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting in Seattle, cool tech was largely absent — unless you were interested in the Maker Movement.

The Monday of the conference was dubbed Maker Monday, and while I’m old enough to remember metal shop and wood shop classes in junior high, and the excitement of building (and occasionally destroying) Heathkits and Estes rockets, there are two important differences between Making now and my childhood activities. Making almost always incorporates a high-tech element. And it can be on a huge scale, like a human-sized, mobile robotic cupcake with embedded LEDs. (Yes. They showed a photo of one such project at ALA.)

Over at the NPR/KQED education site MindShift, I cull together seven lessons schools and other wanna-be makerspaces can learn from the experience of libraries in Illinois, Michigan, California and Kansas which have already taken the Maker plunge. As Carla Avitabile of the Marin County Free Library observed, “It’s not that hard to pull off some of these programs.”

Read, “Want to Start a Makerspace at School? Tips to Get Started,” over at MindShift.

I love digital tech. I love physical books. It may be possible to explain this apparent cognitive dissonance by knowing that my first job was as a page at the Santa Barbara Public Library — shelving science fiction.

So it was with some excitement that I attended the American Library Association’s Midwinter Meeting in Seattle. I went in search of transformative tech, more of the kind of tech that area libraries like Seattle Public Library and the King County Library System apply so well.

What I found was not so science fictional, as I detail over at GeekWire. (Except for the lone R2 unit on the show floor, wearing an actual attendee badge.)

Let’s just say the Seattle area is very fortunate to have two forward-looking library systems. And everyone else looks like they’ll be playing catch up for some time, despite some cool tech that’s available, but largely hidden or not promoted by ALA’s most prominent exhibitors.

 Read “Paper trumps tech at national library conference.”

One of the dangers of being an entrepreneur — especially a tech entrepreneur — is making the assumption that the customer is Just Like You. Or, just as bad, assuming you alone Know What’s Best for the customer.

That’s the kind of disconnect that has hampered many education technology entrepreneurs from meeting the needs of real-world classrooms, teachers and administrators. And it’s a gap I address in my latest piece for the NPR/KQED education site MindShift.

Based on the experience of DreamBox Learning’s Jessie Woolley-Wilson, McGraw-Hill’s Randy Reina and teacher/entrepreneur Lindsey Own, the post condenses nearly two hours of lively discussion into four key points “edupreneurs” need to understand to be successful. (Hint: “technology will solve everything” is not one of them.)

The discussion took place as part of an MIT Enterprise Forum on Obstacles and Opportunities for Entrepreneurs in Education that I moderated, with both a professionally produced video of the full discussion available to watch, and a separate (and parallel) companion paper available to download.

The companion paper itself has generated a bit of controversy as the publication Education Week recently covered the paper’s concern about the inflation of a possible “edtech bubble” occurring as entrepreneurs and investors rush to fill the perceived demand for tech solutions.

 But to get the short, direct advice, read “Closing the gap between educators and entrepreneurs” at MindShift.

One hundred-forty character tweets. PowerPoint presentations masquerading as “reports.” An explosion of brief, numbered list blog posts. What are these doing to our appreciation of text complexity and nuance?

Over at GeekWire, I tackle one potential (and, I admit, largely fun and imagined) result in a tongue-in-cheek manner, but using absolutely true factoids.

It’s probably the oddest column I’ve written for GeekWire using false causation as a narrative device (similar, I later realized, to what the brilliant Tim Powers does in fiction). There are few other places you can find SMS, the space shuttle Columbia, Peter Rabbit and the average word length in the English language mentioned together to build a faux case.

But it does make one take pause at the long-term impact that the push to greater brevity and speed in all communications, driven by digital media, is having on all forms and formats. And on our brains, too.

Read, “3 ways digital media is turning us into 2nd graders,” over at GeekWire.

MIT Enterprise Forum of the Northwest has released a companion paper to its MIT Enterprise Forum on education technology: Obstacles and Opportunities for Entrepreneurs in Education.

This isn’t some four-page brochure that either intros or recaps the PowerPoint-free session. It truly is a companion paper, a 27-page document that runs in parallel to the panel.

The report is based on interviews of education industry notables in preparation for the session, new material developed by author Shirley Lunde of Bader Martin, PS, and material adapted from my writings in EdSurge, MindShift and GeekWire (but edited and nicely pulled into an overall context by Lunde).

Best of all? It’s free for download as a PDF. Edupreneurs should definitely consider reading it. And if you haven’t seen the video of the session itself, it’s been uploaded in all of its 90+ minute goodness.

As a radio ad once intoned, “People judge you by the words you use.” So it helps if the words actually mean something — which, frequently in tech, they really don’t.

Over at GeekWire, I’ve compiled a list of five terms that should be banished from the tech vocabulary for 2013. Disrupted, if you will.

These are words that are so often abused, misused or overused they’re on the bubble (another one) of losing all meaning. It’s not that they aren’t perfectly good words — most are — but they are being diluted by enthusiastic or clueless marketers and industry pundits to the point of techno-babble. Techno-babble sort of like how they used to explain advanced hyperdrive mechanics on Star Trek: The Next Generation, but without the entertainment value.

There are many more (and my colleagues in education technology quickly piled on with flip and gamify). But consider this a starter list. I’ve also had Twitter suggestions of innovative, pivot, siloed. vetted and cloud. Plus, for the un-Pinterested, pinnable.

Read, “Hey, ‘disrupt’ this! 5 tech terms to banish in 2013” at GeekWire.

As another year comes to an end, there is no shortage of pundits or promoters trotting out both thoughtful and tired “top ten” lists of what’s hot in education technology and digital learning.

So, of course, I felt I had to add my own over at the NPR/KQED education site MindShift. (But I felt no compulsion to go to ten, as I have no need to further demonstrate my counting skills.)

My take might be a little bit different as these five trends are culled from my first-hand observations at a half-dozen industry conferences this year. As a result, they include MOOCs, mobile, money, malls and … paper.

What didn’t I include?

The winner of 2012’s don’t-ask-a-question-you-don’t-want-answered award. It goes to one poor speaker at the EdNET conference.

From the lectern she asked, “What’s a two billion dollar industry that attracts millions of students a year?” There was a pause, and then a lone voice from the back of room called out, “Pornography!” The speaker, horrified, quickly said, “Oh my god! No! It’s online learning!”

For the rest, read “2012 edtech trends: insights from insiders” at MindShift.

We have the technology. We have a great need. So now it’s time to finally do something about our country’s most pressing tech challenge: the public radio pledge drive.

It’s not that I intellectually deny the fiscal need for pledge drives. What I really would like to see a technological fix for listeners who have given so they aren’t endlessly reminded to do something they have already done, destroying their giddy enjoyment of what they’re supporting.

Over at GeekWire, I tackle this incredibly important  issue with two humble suggestions. At least one is even based on reality.

And while I’m at it, I encourage readers of this blog to donate to the public radio station of their choice, be it news and jazz, news and information, or purely classical music.

Go to GeekWire and read “America’s unmet tech challenge: the public radio pledge drive.”

Does digital mean the children’s book is dead? Not if Wanderful’s revival of Living Books or RRKidz’ next phase for Reading Rainbow are any indication.

Over at the NPR/KQED education site MindShift, I share the latest examples of reading apps for real books. Even though some companies have moved to purely original interactive play apps for kids on smartphones and tablets (such as the best work of Callaway Digital Arts, based on well-known characters), there is a certain delight in a well-illustrated, well-told narrative children’s story. It was true on paper, true on CD-ROM physical media and remains true in digitally delivered apps, even when enhanced with audio, activities and educational guides.

It’s why I still give hardcover illustrated children’s books — even to adults — as gifts, and support organizations such as the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art.

 The newest crop of reading apps aim to do the static e-book one better without losing what makes a classic or contemporary kids’ story work as it brings it to a new medium. And they do so either direct to individual parents and teachers, or to an entire school building or library.

Read about, “Going retro: reading apps for real books” at MindShift.

Understanding the various forces that are buffeting (I will not use the word “disrupting”) K-12 education is challenging even for those of us who work inside the industry.

Common Core learning standards. One-to-one computing, tablet and Bring Your Own Technology initiatives. Adaptive and personalized learning enabled by tech. Open Educational Resources for digital “chunked” content that can be mixed, modified and shared. And many foundations and education reform organizations stirring the pot.

For the MIT Enterprise Forum in Seattle, I moderated the panel discussion “Obstacles and Opportunities for Entrepreneurs in Education” for its November program. It was a PowerPoint-free 90 minutes with DreamBox Learning CEO Jessie Woolley-Wilson, McGraw-Hill Education Center for Digital Innovation Senior Vice President Randy Reina, and Startup Weekend Seattle EDU organizer and the Evergreen School teacher Lindsey Own.

We considered, debated and batted about all of the above topics, with a focus on technology and what entrepreneurs both outside and within the education community need to know.

The video of the full panel has been posted on YouTube (thanks to Puget Sound Video‘s professional recording):

Among the highlights: what entrepreneurs need to minimize risk, and the role of foundations. It’s worth watching if you’re only peripherally familiar with the issues and what’s already being done — or simply want a deeper understanding.

You have to be pretty deep into wanting to know what makes digital learning work to find it fun to consider efforts with names like the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative, Learning Registry and Shared Learning Infrastructure.

But education firms and entrepreneurs stand to be blindsided if they don’t pay some attention to these multi-syllabic, multi-state and association- or foundation-driven educational technology efforts. Especially, it seems, if an organization creates digital educational content or works with student data.

At the education news site EdSurge, I dig into this potent alphabet soup to quickly summarize each cluster of edtech plumbing, how it relate to the others, and the potential benefit of — or cost of not — paying attention for education companies.

The analysis is based on the research I did for this year’s EdNET conference and the View from the Catbird Seat session in which I participated with well-known industry analysts Nelson Heller and Anne Wujcik. My part of the discussion was called, somewhat tongue in cheek, “LR, SLI & LRMI (Oh My!).”

But my slides (which you can find under the name of the session here) didn’t have any notes to go with them. As a result anyone wanting to get information to go with my slide’s images had to listen to the audio recording (which can be downloaded by clicking on the session name).

Even those who aren’t in edtech but just are fascinated by technology’s increasing role in education might find this interesting, as I’ve tried to explain it all in lay terms.

Read “Potent Alphabet Soup: How SLI, LR and LRMI will Shape Education Technology Content” over at EdSurge.

I appear to have struck either a chord or a nerve in my latest GeekWire column expressing concern about a potential entrepreneur-attention-investment “bubble” in education technology (Here comes another tech bubble — in education, GeekWire, Oct 23, 2012).

A week later, it’s been either directly referenced or redirected (but not, actually, refuted) by four other education technology or tech sites. A quick rundown, if you want to follow the evolving commentary:

Education investor and venture capitalist Fred Wilson was the first to face the “bubble” hypothesis during the massively open online course, Ed Startup 101. While he wouldn’t take a position on the bubble question, he did offer, ““Investors think there’s a lot of money to be made at the intersection of education and technology. … This will turn out to be a hyper-competitive market.” (Fred Wilson on ed tech: four takeaways for educators and entrepreneurs, GigaOM, Oct 24, 2012)

A more direct response came from Lauren Landry at BostInno which, after describing me as a “hipster” (an appellation that caused great amusement to those who know me), went on (more…)

Having lived — and worked — through the turn-of-the-century’s tech bubble, I’ve developed a keen eye for some of the core indicators.

Overheated attention and expectations. Increasing investment, with smart money followed by not-so-much. Frantic startup activity with loss of focus on the problems that need solving. And the opportunistic co-mingling with agendas that use the tech as a lever to push issues that appear superficially related.

That may — just may — be starting to happen with technology in education.

Over at GeekWire, I take at look at some of the factors that could add up to an edtech bubble. It’s not one I want to see, as there’s a lot of good that can come out of an increased understanding of, and emphasis on, how technology can support and perhaps even transform learning. But few students and teachers will benefit if it all bursts, sweeping away the cool with the crap.

Read, “Here comes another tech bubble — in education” at GeekWire. And remember that not only did I do regular broadcast commentaries during the rise and fall of the last tech bubble (including a television segment called “Dot-Bomb”), I still have my original Pets.com talking sock puppet.

The 24th annual EdNET conference — a traditional gathering place for education industry executives — wrapped in Baltimore this week with high attendance and equivalent uncertainty about all the changes underway in K-12 education.

Over at the education news site EdSurge, I provide some brief highlights and observations. Education is facing everything from the print-to-digital transition to multi-state Common Core learning standards, and not a stone went unturned (or unremarked) at EdNET. Including some cogent thoughts by educators on the true tech skills of digital natives.

Because of deadline timing, I wasn’t able to fully reflect the final day of EdNET in my notes. But a few telling additions:

• A panel of state-level education officials from Texas, Utah, South Carolina and West Virginia made it clear that they now define — and allow purchase of — “core instructional materials” in both print and digital forms;
• Despite the obvious appeal of Open Educational Resources, Utah’s Tiffany Hall noted they’re not completely free and bear a “human (capital) cost;”
• ETS’ John Oswald estimated that 37 states are “likely or very likely” to administer the new Common Core standards assessments from one of the two consortia developing them for 2014 implementation, with four or five states’ plans uncertain;
• And Dan White of Filament Games, commenting on the rise of digital learning games, made a clear distinction between consumer and educational games: “A learning game is designed to teach you something you can use outside of the game.”

Read more in “Why digital natives aren’t digitally skilled” over at EdSurge.

Over at the NPR/KQED education news site MindShift, I examine the sources schools turn to as digital learning games rise again in popularity. And this cycle, it’s not just the traditional and startup education companies, but non-profits, consumer crossovers and academic institutions themselves.

(And yes, I know: with a title like, “Where do educational games come from?,” there is a temptation to begin it with, “Well, when two fun-loving snippets of code love each other very much ….” But I restrained myself.)

There is always a danger of leaving out good examples when citing others. And there were several I had no room for, including that of some former clients like Sokikom and the innovative work being done by SMALLab, which began at Arizona State University and uses wireless tech (think Xbox Kinect controllers) to capture motion in math and physics student game play. Digital education games are definitely fertile territory for innovation, and this cycle appears based on a more solid foundation of research.

This latest MindShift explainer on digital learning games is something of a “bookend” to my previous MindShift piece, “What’s the difference between games and gamification?” Together, they should provide a good snapshot of digital games in education and perhaps a way to understand the landscape.

Read, “Where do educational games come from?” at MindShift.

Those promoting eBooks as the inevitable evolution for all books are wrong, for two simple reasons: some books are valued beyond the content, or others never were in the best format for their content in the first place.

Over at GeekWire, I take a look at three likely paths for paper books: “traditional” eBooks, digital apps or persisting in paper. At the same time, the piece cites newer statistics on the incredible growth eBooks are seeing in both dollars and units, going beyond last year’s massacre of the mass market paperback to having eBooks outsell hardcovers for the first time. And, in all likelihood, continue the march of eBooks to dominate genre fiction. That was a tipping point I explored in the earlier essay, “When eBooks attack, mass paperbacks die.“

Part of this analysis gelled as the result of a panel I spoke on this summer at Westercon 65 in Seattle, “Post-Paper Publishing.” The panelists, authors and book fans, were thoughtful about what this means both their vocation and passion.

Me, I’m just pleased that, like vinyl for music, paper for books has a good chance of being around for a while (even as my Kindle is fully loaded). Read, “Why eBooks won’t rule the Earth” over at GeekWire.

All “learning games” are not alike. While the term is often tossed around to represent a current hot area in digital education, there’s a marked difference in approach and structure to the products that get plastered with this catch-all phrase.

At the NPR/KQED education news site MindShift, I break down “learning games” into three approaches: gamification, simulation and games.

It’s probably no surprise that perhaps the least widely understood is also the bright-shiniest — gamification. And experts I spoke with in this discipline for my analysis were hard-pressed to find digital learning examples that do gamification well.

But games? Simulations? A lot of solid research has been done since the turn of the century, and it promises to make a  huge difference in what really works when digital games and education meet.

Read, “What’s the difference between games and gamification?” over at MindShift. (And one of the experts quoted, Alex Chisholm, adds his own take at the Learning Games Network site.)