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.

]]> http://intrinsicstrategy.com/2012/02/inside-alaska-airlines-new-boeing-sky-interior/feed/ 0 http://intrinsicstrategy.com/2012/01/how-car-dealers-embrace-and-erode-the-web/ http://intrinsicstrategy.com/2012/01/how-car-dealers-embrace-and-erode-the-web/#comments Mon, 16 Jan 2012 21:47:19 +0000 Frank Catalano http://intrinsicstrategy.com/?p=1394

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.

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.

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.

• 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.

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.

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.”

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:

• “If you have passion for your vision, you keep banging your head against the wall until you crash through it,” Vinod Khosla on what drives entrepreneurs.
• “At the end of the day, you really want to LIKE the person you’re backing,” Maveron’s Jason Stoffer in describing the investor-entrepreneur dynamic as a ten or eleven year relationship.
• “IT already has been a false messiah twice … when it comes to education,” Mitch Kapor on the failure of early floppy disk, and later multimedia CD-ROM, information technology in transforming the classroom because of underlying, low-tech changes that were needed first.
• “Hardware startups are hard. It’s right in the name,” Kapor on why it’s better for entrepreneurs to stick to software for a greater chance of success in edtech.

Read more about what might help a motivated education technology entrepreneur become even better in my Practical Nerd column on GeekWire.

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.

So I was pleased and surprised to be asked to talk. After all, marketing for freelance editors is not unlike marketing for consultants, writers or any independent professional. I provided, I hope, a useful framework for developing a simple marketing strategy and then appropriate tactics to create awareness and demand. For years I’ve called this approach applying “just enough” strategy to do effective marketing.

I’ve posted my speaking notes (my “slides” are primarily images, though those too are included) on the Red Pencil in the Woods conference site. You can download them for your reference as a PDF directly here.

And if you’re on Twitter, search for the hash tag #RedPen11 to review the conference back channel — or simply read speaker Catherine Carr’s (a.k.a. @mamatweeta) Storify tweet recap.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

The Consumerization of Edtech

I’ve worked in both education and consumer digital technology for nearly 20 years. When I straddled the abyss, I was told that being in education technology was great. After cool new digital products were introduced in the consumer market, the education market would figure it had a decade to determine how or whether to adopt and integrate the technology. As a result (the reasoning went), only proven, winning technologies would be selected (and, uh, the LaserDisc). The downside, of course, was that education would always be a decade or more behind everything else.

Enter the digital natives. Not the students. The teachers.

If you’re under the age of 30, you probably don’t recall life without the personal computer. If you’re under the age of 20, you’ve never not known the Web. Many new teachers sit in this delta. They are used to and expect ubiquitous personal technology. So do many administrators, parents, state legislators, local school board members, and an ever-widening sphere of K-12 education influencers.

It’s a demographic sea change in expectations that has caused some of the largest and most established educational publishers to re-think how they develop products.

Consider the annual Ed Tech Industry Summit, hosted this May in San Francisco by the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA). Scholastic Education president Margery Mayer revealed in her keynote speech that to model data dashboards for new educational technology products for schools, Scholastic reviewed Mint.com, WeightWatchers.com, and NikeRunning.com – all unabashed consumer websites.

Mayer also stated that consumers would increasingly be part of education buying decisions, and education products must appeal to them – in essence, as much to the individual as to the institution.

When I asked where education companies should turn to find this kind of tech inspiration, Mayer replied, “I say, look at everything except stuff that sucks.”

This expectation of a consumer experience for education technology has resulted in time compression. Remember that decade lag? Instead of a decade behind, education is now only two to four years behind consumer technology at most, and the more optimistic would say one to three years.

This is because consumer tech is no longer being pushed into education. The education market is now pulling it in – along with consumer models of Web- and subscription- based products and services.

Edtech’s “Popular Trend” Clique

Before I introduce three digital technologies changing education about which you may never have heard, it’s important not to dismiss many more high-profile, publicly popular digital learning trends – most with equivalents in consumer- or business-information technology.

Each of these got its moment in the sun in the triumvirate of late spring–early summer, education-technology–focused national conferences, including SIIA’s Ed Tech Industry Summit, the Association of Educational Publishers’ Content in Context Conference in Washington, D.C., and the International Society for Technology in Education’s ISTE 2011 conference and exposition in Philadelphia (formerly known as NECC, the National Educational Computing Conference). It’s worth noting that each of these edtech events apparently met or exceeded the previous year’s attendance – in some cases dramatically.

Those digital education initiatives of which you inevitably have heard – and recent data points on progress (or lack thereof):

Distance learning continues to be the BMOC (Big Movement Off Campus), driven largely by a desire to increase graduation rates through credit recovery and remediation and by reduced budgets, making either fully online courses, or hybrid/blended courses with a face-to-face component, more attractive to school districts.

Policy changes are making online learning more attractive as well – or required. For example, in July the New York State Education Department’s Board of Regents eased the rules that specify how long a student has to physically be in a classroom to earn credit for courses. At almost the same time, Florida made it possible for students to enroll in the online Florida Virtual School without having to first enroll in their local district. And several states either mandate, or are considering mandating, that at least one online course be taken for graduation.

One-to-one computing initiatives continue to limp along in something of a raisin-muffin distribution, with intense pockets of activity stuck in a generally diffuse K-12 whole.

I moderated the opening keynote at the Association of Educational Publishers’ (AEP) Content in Context conference on what forward-thinking educators are doing with technology, demonstrated through a panel discussion and detailed educator videos. The session clearly illustrated the challenge facing anyone looking for consistency in implementation – “one-to-one” can mean netbooks, tablets (iPad or Android), or traditional laptops and can happen at the school or district level.

No state since Maine has implemented anything on a larger scale, and Maine approved its program in 2001 – a decade ago. As Fairfax County (VA) Public Schools technical architect Jim Siegl commented in the AEP session, when it comes to computing devices districts have to prepare for, “it’s any device, and any device that comes in through the door.”

Digital textbooks, though, are on the rise, and this digital content may be how one-to-one hardware finally gets the push to become mainstream. Some schools are doing the math and determining that the cost of a device plus digital instructional materials may be equal to, or less than, buying new paper textbooks for every student over that textbook’s lifetime.

Policy is helping here as well. Florida recently passed a law requiring that at least 50% of textbook budgets be spent on digital materials by 2015-16. Yet that’s nothing compared with South Korea, where the education ministry has called for all-digital curricula in either 2014 or 2015, depending on the grade level.

Still, many digital texts lack features that students say they expect. At the AEP conference opening session, one group taking part in a tablet pilot noted that their e-textbooks were missing electronic bookmarks, highlighting, printable pages, resizable fonts, and text-to-speech capability. There’s also anecdotal evidence that high school and college students are less willing to change their habits and activities for digital texts than are younger students – a potential behavioral barrier to overcome.

Game-based learning is currently in a popular phase, continuing its cyclical revival every roughly five or six years, apparently returning each time a new delivery platform is introduced (floppy disk, CD-ROM, Web, social media) and memories of the last failure have faded. That isn’t to say that this won’t be the time game-based learning is widely accepted; and there are some remarkable new efforts.

BrainPOP, for example, at ISTE introduced BrainPOP GameUp, which integrates simulation games from partners such as Filament Games and iCivics (of retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor fame) with BrainPOP’s whimsical instructional animations and lesson plans to create full classroom units. Sokikom, a startup in the Phoenix area, also launched at ISTE what it calls a “massively multiplayer online social learning game” for math, for grades 1-6, in which teams of students can compete with one another in real time. And at SIIA’s Summit, Genevieve Shore, Pearson plc CIO and director of Digital Strategy, stated flatly, “Games will be vitally important over the next few years.”

But one-to-one, online, digital textbook, and game-based learning initiatives are well-known and extensively covered outside of the education industry. That’s not the case with three other trends in what you might call “mass niche” technologies – technologies and applications that will be huge factors in classrooms this decade, but may never be discussed over a Genius Bar.

Three of These Trends Belong Together

Let me slightly qualify the next three trends. None of these will, nor should they, be a surprise to anyone working in schools or the education industry. But each is a real trend, long in the making, that simply hasn’t bubbled up to the popular culture surface. They are: interactive whiteboards, Open Educational Resources, and adaptive instruction. All are changing the form education takes – and, in the right hands, have the potential to improve it.

I) Interactive Whiteboards

Interactive whiteboards (IWBs, as they’re abbreviated in schools), as chalkboard replacements or dry-erase whiteboard enhancements, are not new. They display what’s projected onto them from a computer, allow interaction with the projection through touch or special styli on the surface, and capture that whiteboard activity to the computer. I reviewed an early Mimio model on-air when I was doing regular technology commentary and analysis for a Seattle television station in June 2000 (complete with suction cups to attach the device to the whiteboard, and a serial port adapter to connect the desktop computer). But the focus of this particular IWB tech then was the corporate meeting room, which gave it a lukewarm response at the time.

Schools, however, embraced interactive whiteboards, partly because they allowed combining projected Web and computer content with touchscreen-like student interaction on the board, and partly because they didn’t scare teachers comfortable with “sage on a stage” classroom control. Education’s embrace was so firm that a 2011 Education Market Research study notes IWBs from various manufacturers, including market leaders SMART and Promethean, are in the hands of 63% of U.S. K-12 teachers. While other studies tout varying statistics and penetration rates, it’s clear that interactive whiteboards are a rapidly increasing presence, heading toward ubiquity.

But interactive whiteboards themselves aren’t the news. The real change on the horizon – and the first digital trend applying primarily to education  – comes now that IWBs are in a large proportion of classrooms. They provide enough of an installed base to become a platform and focal point for tying other proprietary and non-proprietary classroom hardware together (such as “clickers” – officially known as “classroom response devices” – and consumer-grade iPads, Android tablets, and smartphones).

The IWB is evolving into more than a chalkboard replacement. It is turning into a delivery system for high-quality, interactive, multimedia instructional content, reflecting an emphasis that is starting to shift from the interactive whiteboard itself to an interactive classroom.

That’s the apparent reason DYMO/Mimio (formerly just Mimio) recently bought Seattle educational software company Headsprout, and why Promethean earlier bought Seattle’s Synaptic Mash. At ISTE, Mimio officially announced its MimioLearn product line, leveraging Headsprout’s Web-based reading instruction software to provide full classroom reading instruction on the whiteboard and individual adaptive practice on student computing devices online, at school or at home. Promethean, for its part, integrated Synaptic Mash’s cutting-edge assessment products into its interactive classroom hardware and branding, renaming the suite ActivProgress.

It’s not only interactive whiteboard hardware companies that see the richer platform potential of IWBs. ISTE also was the launching pad for McGraw-Hill Studio Space: ArtTalk, which puts masterpieces by Van Gogh and others artists on a “class wall” side-by-side with uploaded high school art portfolios for full class whiteboard and online critique. Britannica Pathways: Science takes middle school students through the scientific process in 10 subject areas, introducing the subject to the entire class on the IWB, allowing each individual student to propose a hypothesis and find supporting evidence from Britannica’s digital resources, and then sharing student conclusions on the IWB and letting the class vote with clickers on each student hypothesis and conclusion.

These are only a few examples of how IWBs may go beyond a role as chalkboard replacements that display teacher-created lessons or Web content. Instead, they may be the hardware that drives the transition to a true interactive classroom, in the way one-to-one computing initiatives earlier tried. The whiteboards themselves may have increasingly less prominence as the center of instruction and become another tool of equal importance to student netbooks or tablets, smartphones or clickers, all interconnected, some with overlapping functions and use based on teacher comfort and district/school need.

Trojan whiteboards, if you will.

II) Open Educational Resources

What open source in the enterprise has done for code, Open Educational Resources in education is doing for content. As the second digital education-only trend, OER goes beyond “free” instructional content, though that certainly is a driver in tough school budget times. Better-known examples include the Khan Academy videos, professionally produced materials from NASA and the Smithsonian, and teacher-created lesson plans and supplements.

Good OER is granular down to the lesson or concept, and can be mixed-and-matched with other free and paid instructional materials seamlessly. Both the U.S Department of Education and the Gates Foundation have recently taken steps to encourage OER.

At the SIIA Summit, Karen Cator, director of the Office of Education Technology for the U.S. Department of Education (and an Apple alum), said Creative Commons would be assisting with the major issue of licensing OER content for use and reuse. Her perspective? OER is a way to leverage government resources, and that educational content being created with government dollars should be available for others to use and build upon.

For its part, the Gates Foundation announced funding in April to support development of four courses – two each in Math and English Language Arts. These will be aligned to the new multi-state–led Common Core State Standards for curriculum materials and be available to schools, online, at no charge.

Neither of these efforts is trailblazing. The Monterey Institute for Technology and Education, for one, already has a collection of OER courses available through its delightfully named HippoCampus.org website. But it puts significant weight behind OER’s momentum in K-12.

Yet, like open source code, OER is free like a puppy, not free like a beer. Schools and teachers are challenged in how to find it, sort it for quality, and integrate it into what they already do.

Nowhere were these conflicts more visible than at ISTE, where nine K-12 educators and administrators, ranging from state officials to school leaders, gathered at the behest of SIIA and CoSN (the Consortium of School Networking, an edtech leadership group for educators) in an OER feedback forum. They faced an audience of interested, and somewhat apprehensive, education industry execs.

As a group, these educators defined OER’s core components as content that is “free, or relatively free, and shareable.” That perception wasn’t surprising (and perhaps the “relatively free” part was comforting to this audience).

What probably was news was the subtle vitriol they aimed at traditional educational publishers. The educators tended to find OER resources more straightforward and less complicated than most option-studded publisher textbook programs. OER, said one speaker, is “very NOT intimidating.” Noted another: “We feel that many (publisher’s) programs insult teachers’ intelligence” by being overly prescriptive and, by implication, patronizing.

When somewhat creatively prompted by the moderator to “tell us more about ‘free’ and what you’re willing to pay for it,” the forum panel gamely offered that they’d pay for student personalization of content, aligned tests and assessment, accommodations for Special Education students, and solid instructional scope and sequence. Said one state official on the need for such curriculum direction among educators using OER, “No [teacher] is down in their basement at 2am, saying ‘I’ve got to crank out this scope and sequence.’”

For-profit education companies are, in some cases reluctantly, going along with OER’s momentum, apparently to avoid being crushed should it roll in their direction. Asked at an SIIA Summit session if their firms plan to directly compete with, integrate, or ignore OER, the company presidents who chose to respond said “Integrate.” Several have already delivered.

Learning.com is one. At ISTE, it showed off a new “Marketplace” button it has added to its Sky digital learning platform, allowing teachers who use the Sky environment to pull in and integrate free resources alongside the fee-based ones provided by Learning.com or its partners.

Pearson, which debuted its Pearson Online Learning Exchange at ISTE, is another. Initially available for Texas middle and high school science, OLE allows combining Pearson and OER digital content along with content from partners such as Getty Images.

It appears that the future for education companies, when it comes to OER, is all about glue. Or to be more precise, being the glue – for a price.

While individual educators may be able to find and assemble open educational resources, it’s an effort that one SIIA/CoSN feedback forum participant admitted was “not scalable.” And for the foreseeable future, there will be teachers who simply aren’t comfortable playing the “choose your own resource adventure” game solo. They’ll likely want and need the option of having appropriate guidance and some structure.

Expect, as the OER trend accelerates, that digital learning objects from both fee-based and free sources will co-exist and be woven together on any of a number of platforms, both open source or proprietary. Digitally savvy – or cash-strapped – educators will be in the lead.

III) Adaptive Instruction

We can probably all recall a computer-based test which bluntly adjusted the next question based on whether we answered the immediate question correctly or not. But if you fine-tune that adaptation, apply it to Web-based instructional materials, and combine it with a push to better “personalize” instruction in increasingly crowded and diverse classrooms, what you get is a third, primarily digital, trend of adaptive instruction – instruction that changes the lesson, and creates a learning plan, based on how well a student understands the digital content.

Companies in this space, such as the aforementioned Headsprout (acquired by DYMO/Mimio), are gaining in prominence. There are many others, both established and nascent. A few are drawing big-name backers. For example, Headsprout’s Seattle neighbor DreamBox Learning, which has a current focus on math instruction, was acquired last year by the nonprofit Charter School Growth Fund and Netflix co-founder and chair Reed Hastings. Hastings also now chairs DreamBox.

Adaptive instruction itself is far from new in education, but it hasn’t been fully mainstreamed, either. That appears poised to change due to shifts in the underlying technology and a broad array of new products and services that utilize adaptive engines.

Take startup Root-1. Founded by refugees from Google and the two original founders of educational device maker AlphaSmart, Root-1 introduced Word Joust, an adaptive SAT vocabulary prep iOS app, at ISTE. It might be easy to dismiss it as yet another language-drill product that uses game mechanics. Until you check under the hood.

There sits, according to the founders, a back-end “intelligent hub.” The adaptive engine for Word Joust lives in this hub, not only offering up new content based on what the student clearly does or does not understand, but also monitoring the level of engagement the player has with the program, then changing the presentation of the content to increase that engagement. By monitoring behavior as well as knowledge, Root-1 is focused on creating a system that adapts to you, and one that adapts based on not solely your pattern of response but also on how your pattern is similar to that of others who have played, anticipating where you might get stuck.

And Word Joust is just the first app Root-1 has introduced. By the end of the year, it plans to have a half-dozen apps for iOS, Android, and the Web in different subjects that all are connected to the same adaptive engine and back-end intelligent hub. Root-1 also plans to make its adaptive engine API available to other developers.

All these apps will be able to leverage the aggregated history of all the player pattern data stored in the intelligent hub to help determine – based on how you, individually, now interact – the best way to help you learn the educational content.

This is not your father’s blunt-edged adaptive instructional vehicle.

A similar attempt to differentiate newer adaptive products from, well, old school, is being undertaken by DreamBox. It emphasizes that its adaptive engine captures every mouse click to personalize learning not just on correct or incorrect answers, but also on the strategy the student appears to be using, modifying (as it claims on its website) “level of difficulty, scaffolding, sequencing, the number and type of hints given, pacing, and much more.”

Headsprout, Root-1, and DreamBox  have lots of company. In a program it calls the Innovation Incubator, the SIIA Summit made it a point to highlight products and services in which personalized learning was assumed, perhaps implicitly shifting the teacher’s role from knowledge source to knowledge guide.

The Elephants in the Classroom

What this type of instruction may not be able to adapt to is the still-lackluster, uneven uptake of computing devices for each student.

It is possible that resolution to this digital education “last mile” problem could come as the combined result of the rise of digital textbooks, distance learning, and interactive classrooms. Or it could come from a seemingly unlikely source – the wholly computer-based Common Core State Standards tests for Math and English Language Arts, set to be released in 2014, and for which almost every state is involved in creating or adopting. (Some of these assessments, coincidentally, are being designed as adaptive.)

Any one of these other trends could provide the infrastructure boost that digital adaptive instructional materials need.

What other obstacles could hamper the digital classroom’s evolution?

There are at least three other considerations the drive to digital learning is casting light upon, but not yet resolving:

1) Bandwidth. As more schools and districts move to Web-based curricula, testing/assessment, and administrative office services (such as online gradebooks and student information systems), Internet infrastructure is increasingly strained. A school full of students streaming video for a lesson can bring a Wi-Fi network to its knees.

The release of the National Broadband Map of broadband availability down to the school level (http://data.ed.gov) and an analysis of broadband needs by the State Educational Technology Directors Association (http://setda.org) taken together make it clear that many, if not most, districts simply don’t have enough bandwidth to support widespread implementation of Web-based digital learning – including the upcoming Common Core State Standards assessments. Fairfax County’s Jim Siegl also noted at the Content in Context Conference that “a day doesn’t go past” when bandwidth isn’t an issue in his district.

2) Battery life. As digital education increasingly moves to mobile devices that aren’t as convenient to keep plugged in – such as tablets and, perhaps, smartphones (unlike laptops and netbooks) – battery life becomes more of an issue. Especially when dealing with processor- or disk-intensive activities, such as streaming video.

3) Filtering software. Originally installed to keep kids away from porn and distractions online, and later to comply with federal law, Web blocking/filtering software has turned into a double-edged sword for technology-forward educators.

A survey released just prior to Content in Context – and the subject of a session at the conference – revealed that: a) the most-used social media tools by education technology organizations are Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube; and b) the most-blocked sites by schools are Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. (Even the highly touted Khan Academy videos are hosted on YouTube – and sites like HippoCampus.org have to mirror them so schools can get to them.) The issue of filtering/blocking software came up so often during the opening session of Content in Context that all the panelists could do was nod knowingly. And, it seemed, sadly.

Solutions to all three obstacles vary. A fix for the first is boxed in by district budgets, ISP capacity, and bandwidth-hogging applications that don’t allow intelligent caching. For the second, the fix is technology. And for the third, it’s law and policy. Yet all need to be addressed for these three primarily digital education trends to be fully realized.

The Future Interactive Classroom – Or Not

It is the three digital trends not necessarily well known to those who aren’t edugeeks – interactive whiteboards, Open Educational Resources, and adaptive instruction – that will increasingly touch students and teachers directly. And force their way through the semi-permeable K-12 membrane into the rest of society, much like two of the more public digital education trends – digital textbooks and distance learning – worked their way down into K-12 from higher education.

Aside from the barriers mentioned here, more barriers remain, including: federal, state, and local/district policy; budgets; technology interoperability; inertia; and – perhaps the largest and most common – fear of the unfamiliar. After all, we’re all experts in what’s best for education because we’ve all been to school. As Adrian Fenty, former mayor of Washington, D.C., wryly noted during his AEP Content in Context speech: “If you’re trying to figure out how you’ll get re-elected, you’ll never change the school system.”

But if these trends come together, it may demonstrate that the best way to innovate digitally in K-12 isn’t to force outside solutions into the classroom, but to leverage the increasingly digital expectations of those responsible for education – and then let them fashion a new solution out of the same raw pixels and bits.

About the author: Frank Catalano is an industry consultant, author, and veteran analyst of digital education and consumer technologies. As principal of Intrinsic Strategy, he works with companies large and small on marketing and product strategy. He is a former senior vice president of marketing for Pearson’s U.S. K-12 assessment and education businesses.

Frank serves on the SIIA Education Division Board, maintains his edugeek cred by tracking — and advising on — industry trends as a consulting senior analyst to the EdNET Insight market research service, and recently gave the opening keynote speech at the Education Industry Association’s EDVentures conference. His more consumer-focused and cranky “Practical Nerd” commentary columns appear regularly on the tech news site GeekWire. He lives in Seattle and tweets, mostly about edtech and digital learning, at @FrankCatalano.

Essay originally published August 4, 2011, by Strategic News Service (SNS) in the Strategic News Service Newsletter as “SNS Special Letter: Three Drivers of the Digital Classroom.” Copyright © 2011 Strategic News Service and Frank Catalano. Redistribution prohibited without written permission. To learn about SNS membership or to subscribe to the SNS newsletter, visit www.stratnews.com.

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.

Over at EdNET Insight, I’ve detailed a lively session I moderated at the Association of Educational Publishers’ 2011 Content in Context Conference, “What Schools Want and Where You Fit In.” Videos, combined with a panel of administrative and policy leaders, clearly demonstrated that even high-profile tech implementations are all over the place: “one-to-one” now raises questions of “one-to-one what?” and teachers are cobbling together whatever digital tech fits their needs and budgets.

Read “Tech Ideal vs. the Real Classroom” at EdNET Insight.

Yet the latter appears to be the category Hewlett-Packard has put itself in with its handling of a proprietary — and required — accessory for HP Mini owners. “Required” in that if you want to connect an HP Mini 1000 series netbook to any external VGA monitor or projector, a common task, you have to own it.

And yes. I’m one of those owners, having purchased an HP Mini 1151NR through Verizon Wireless (and still under a two-year contract with Verizon as a result). Yet I can’t use my Mini for my upcoming keynote presentation at the EDVentures conference. HP apparently only sporadically made available, and now no longer sells or acknowledges at all, the needed and very proprietary adapter cable.

My experience spawned an email to HP’s CEO and turned into an open letter, as it illustrates a larger issue with computing technology industry practices. Read “A plea for independence from bad accessory support” on GeekWire.

My case in point: Classical KING-FM Seattle, a station with the dual challenge of an old medium combined with old content. Yet KING-FM is a radio station that has aggressively reinvented itself in the digital age while moving from advertiser to listener support.

As someone who spent part of his career in broadcasting, I think there are lessons to be learned by many in mass media. And by many who keep trumpeting its demise. It’s all a matter of perspective, and perception of what “old” media are: At a recent Social Media Club Seattle event, someone asked the panel if they now get all their news from Facebook and Twitter, or from old media … like blogs.

Read “When content is KING-FM” at GeekWire.

As one of several people live-tweeting Summit sessions, I developed a set of notes covering highlights of the Innovation Incubator Program, three keynote talks and five panels. In addition, I offer brief thoughts on why there’s increased interest in the field, industry concerns about Open Educational Resources and the influence of consumer digital preferences on education.

Download the SIIA 2011 Ed Tech Industry Summit notes in PDF, or visit the complete Intrinsic Strategy Conference Notes archive.

Because these three trends differ from what is happening in digital consumer and business markets. Yet they can be very important, due to the number of people K-12 education touches.

As someone who’s on the Education Division Board of the SIIA, it’s easy for me (and others in the industry) to assume a level of understanding about digital changes and drivers in schools among the general public that doesn’t necessarily exist, unless, of course, that member of the public also happens to work in an education institution or company. This essay attempts to bridge that gap.

Read “Three ‘secrets’ of the digital classroom” at Geekwire.

Update 8/5/11: The three trends have been expanded upon, with newer information from the Association of Educational Publishers’ Content in Context Conference and ISTE 2011, in the in-depth essay “Three drivers of the digital classroom” published in the Strategic News Service newsletter and archived here.