Also see:
Jeff Bezos on Post purchase — from washingtonpost.com
David McNew/Getty Images – The Washington Post Co. has agreed to sell its flagship newspaper
to Amazon.com founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos for $250 million August 5, 2013.
Excerpt of comments:
The Internet is transforming almost every element of the news business: shortening news cycles, eroding long-reliable revenue sources, and enabling new kinds of competition, some of which bear little or no news-gathering costs. There is no map, and charting a path ahead will not be easy. We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment. Our touchstone will be readers, understanding what they care about – government, local leaders, restaurant openings, scout troops, businesses, charities, governors, sports – and working backwards from there. I’m excited and optimistic about the opportunity for invention.
FlixMaster changes model; becomes Rapt — from bcbr.com by Joshua Lindenstein
Excerpts:
BOULDER – Highlighting a shift toward a new model for its interactive online video platform, Boulder-based FlixMaster Inc. this week announced that it is changing its name to Rapt Media Inc.
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“When we founded FlixMaster, we set out to create the best toolset for video creators wanting to build interactive videos, and we succeeded in doing that that,” Rapt co-founder and chief executive Erika Trautman said in an email. “But as we partnered with really sophisticated companies (like HBO and Maybelline), we realized that our platform and the opportunity it posed was bigger than just interactive video. It was about improving online communication and storytelling through interactivity of all kinds, with video as the central component. Our company had already transitioned to this bigger vision, and we wanted a name that could reflect that vision.
Additional thought from DSC:
This item relates to the convergence of the television, the computer, and the telephone that I’m pulse-checking. I’m hopeful that such a convergence will provide students in the future with 24×7, highly-engaging, interactive, customized/personalized content:
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More choice. More control.
In the beginning was the Word; now the Word is on an app — from nytimes.com by Amy O’Leary
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Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
EDMOND, Okla. — More than 500 years after Gutenberg, the Bible is having its i-moment.
For millions of readers around the world, a wildly successful free Bible app, YouVersion, is changing how, where and when they read the Bible.
Built by LifeChurch.tv, one of the nation’s largest and most technologically advanced evangelical churches, YouVersion is part of what the church calls its “digital missions.” They include a platform for online church services and prepackaged worship videos that the church distributes free. A digital tithing system and an interactive children’s Bible are in the works.
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This month, the app reached 100 million downloads, placing it in the company of technology start-ups like Instagram and Dropbox.
‘Shake Up’ for Higher Ed — from insidehighered.com by Scott Jaschik
Excerpt:
President Obama vowed Wednesday that he would soon unveil a plan to promote significant reform in higher education — with an emphasis on controlling what colleges charge students and families.
“[I]n the coming months, I will lay out an aggressive strategy to shake up the system, tackle rising costs, and improve value for middle-class students and their families. It is critical that we make sure that college is affordable for every single American who’s willing to work for it,” said Obama, in a speech at Knox College.
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“Families and taxpayers can’t just keep paying more and more and more into an undisciplined system where costs just keep on going up and up and up. We’ll never have enough loan money, we’ll never have enough grant money, to keep up with costs that are going up 5, 6, 7 percent a year. We’ve got to get more out of what we pay for,” Obama said.
From DSC:
At a $175 billion per year support for postsecondary education, if the Federal Government starts redirecting this flow of $$$…I’ll bet we’ll see some change…and rather quickly I might add.
The Walmart of Education (as predicted back in December 2008) is now here, but I don’t think we’ve seen anything yet. To what will we change? At least one major piece of the answer to that question is that we will see the continued — but increasing — use of teams of specialists that will be commissioned to create low-cost, highly-engaging content. Though expensive to create originally, such teams will more than make their money back because of the massive number of students such “courses” will serve.
From the Walmart of Education page on 4/11/09:
…I wanted to offer another idea that might help fund engaging, multimedia-based, online-based learning materials:
(NOTE: The figures I use are not accurate, but rather, they are used for illustration purposes only.)Let’s reallocate funds towards course development, and then let’s leverage those learning materials throughout the world!
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For students: Bring costs waaaayyyyy down and access waaayyy up!
Plus, no more defaulted loans, students could experience richer content, students wouldn’t have to wait as much on financial aid decisions. There would be fewer financial aid headaches; and the resources devoted to figuring out & processing financial aid could be reduced. The issue will be how an institution can differentiate itself in such a new world…but that issue will have to be dealt with in the future anyway.
From DSC:
The way we interact with digital video may never be the same again. Consider the following developments/items:
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How TouchCast plans to disrupt TV watching
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TouchCast: a television studio in your iPad — from agbeat.com by Jennifer Walpole .
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Interactive video startup Interlude raises $16m from Intel, Sequoia and other big names — from thenextweb.com by Robin Wauters
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With Cinematique’s ‘touch-enabled’, shoppable videos, product placement might not be so bad — from techcrunch.com by Anthony Ha
From DSC:
I sure hope that we can use these sorts of tools, concepts, and technologies within the educational/training-related realms! More choice. More control. Participation. Interactivity. Engagement.
The Coming Crossroads in Higher Education: Remarks of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association Annual Meeting, July 9, 2013 — from distance-educator.com with thanks going out to Mr. John Shank for Scooping this item.
Excerpts (emphasis DSC):
But I would also make the case to you today that higher education is approaching a crossroads, where leaders will be asked to choose between incremental and transformational change.
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Polls show that three out of four Americans believe—and I quote—”to get ahead in life these days, it is necessary to get a college education.” At the same time, three in four Americans also believe that college today is too expensive for most people to afford. That fundamental gap—between aspirations and opportunity—is one we must close.
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I believe that higher education is at a crossroads because our current model of student and institutional aid is ultimately unsustainable. It is incapable of meeting the bipartisan goal that President Obama articulated four years ago—that America will again lead the world in college attainment by 2020.
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Speaking in broad-brush terms, I believe we will see two ideas take hold in response to these threats to higher education.
The first response is that the system of state and federal institutional grants and loans will start to shift more toward a performance-based and outcomes-based system than is the case today—and one that does more to reward innovation.
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The federal government currently provides more than $175 billion a year to postsecondary institutions and students through grants, loans, and direct school support. But together we must do a better job of defining and linking aid to satisfactory academic progress, meaningful institutional performance, and student learning outcomes.
We absolutely must continue to invest in higher education. But we must also use taxpayer dollars more wisely.
This shift in the direction of performance-based funding is already underway.
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Further evidence of the policy shift underway is that many states—including Indiana, Tennessee, Oregon, and Missouri—are moving in bipartisan fashion to incorporate elements of performance-based funding in higher education.
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Now, if the first response to the challenges of cost, completion, and accountability is likely to be more performance-based funding and new incentives for innovation, a second response is likely to be a leveraging of educational technology to increase student learning as well as institutional performance and productivity.
We still have a lot to learn and perfect about online learning, MOOCs, simulations and gaming, and other uses of educational technology. But there is no question that a digital revolution is already underway in higher education. And its vast potential has only begun to be tapped.
From DSC:
I hear a lot about resistance to change; in fact, as I come from the tech side of the academic house, I experience it on an ongoing basis.
But I do wonder if the pace of change within higher education might accelerate when more of that $175 billion a year starts flowing elsewhere…?
Change is coming at a fast pace. Public institutions will need to behave more like private ones, ensuring they can finance themselves and deliver quality programs that benefit their students. Educational technologies will need to be employed for building new models of learning, ones that marshal expensive faculty time more productively and effectively, rather than relegating the majority of instruction to those outside the core faculty. Faculty will need to step up to their role in governance and demonstrate they can support change for the greater good. For-profit corporations will need to demonstrate their utility as partners in creating academic opportunities for students. Additionally, university and faculty leadership will need to mount a convincing argument for the centrality of the liberal arts as the lynchpin of what it means to be educated and what it takes to be successful.
From DSC:
First, take a look at this interactive video from the Wall Street Journal:
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For further information on that video, you can also see:
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From DSC:
Excellent, creative use of technology! Lifelong learners of the world, let me hear some noise! Your learning futures just got much more interesting, dynamic, and interactive!
You will be given more choice and more control than you’ve ever had before. You will be able to interact with digital videos, drill down, take some rights turns and come back again, and more.
For example, during the WSJ video, you can click on the radio within the digital video in order to “drill down” and listen to more about a certain topic — while the main presentation “holds on”…
…you can jump ahead to the next marker…pause…rewind…click to get some further text-based information/details on a topic of interest:
…and more. In other words, you have more choice, more control in your learning experience. This, at minimum, is a piece of online learning’s — and digital video’s — future.
But I hear you saying, so what? Flash has been doing this for a while now. And that, my friends, is the only downside I see in this implementation from the WSJ — it was done using Flash.
As Flash won’t fly on iOS-based devices, an HTML5-based solution needs to come into the picture…and this is where Touchcast shines!
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As Paul Sawers explains, you can add interactive, browsable layers onto your video and deliver it in an HTML5-based format.
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An excerpt from Paul’s article:
Things start to get really interesting with video apps (vApps). TouchCast lets you create videos that are layered with live Web pages, video clips, maps, Twitter streams and other facets of the digital world. “We’re actually claiming that this is the future of the Web,” says Segal, TouchCasts’s CEO.
Indeed, TouchCast’s vApp library is ‘open’, so developers can create and customize their own vApps.
Bottom line:
“Digital textbooks” will never be the same again (not to mention learning modules, transmedia, ads, presentations, digital storytelling, and more)!
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