Pearson acquisitions — from FutureLearn.org by George Siemens

Excerpt:

Education is on a path to globalization, roughly where businesses were in the 1970s. No clear leader exists, conglomerates haven’t made a huge impact yet, technology is marginally used for conducting business, and acquisitions to expand market capacity are rare. That’s changing. Pearson is rapidly pursuing acquisitions. The education sector, from the stance of corporations, is ripe for innovation. For startups this is a great opportunity. The Silicon Valley effect (create a startup with the intention of being purchased by Google, Microsoft, Facebook) is starting to gain traction in the education sector.

EDUCAUSE Review Latest Issue Cover

EDUCAUSE Review
Volume 46, Number 2 | March/April 2011

Getting a Handle on Mobile: Perspectives

 

Features

On teaching
Mobile Literacy
David Parry
“The future our students will inherit is one that will be mediated and stitched together by the mobile web, and I think that ethically, we are called on as teachers to teach them how to use these technologies effectively.”
David McCarthy
“The current optimal e-reading solution for higher education is a robust laptop home base with an ecosystem that interacts with tablets and e-readers for mobile consumption.”
On iPads
Why Mobile?
Mary Ann Gawelek, Mary Spataro, and Phil Komarny
“With their students, faculty have become co-learners and pioneers in the classroom. With no models to work from, they had to explore, practice, and discover the iPad’s potential for expanding learning.”
Susan T. Evans
“Mobile is the future for content delivery. Colleges and universities need to establish a strategy now and make the decisions necessary to take advantage of this communication opportunity.”
Jim Davis and Rosemary A. Rocchio
“This device-agnostic framework and approach has huge practical advantages in that we can reach the vast majority of our mobile community regardless of what device they are using and we can readily accommodate ever-changing devices.”
“The best I can hope to do is keep an eye on the high level industry trends and directions, and then once we’ve identified those trends, ride them as best we can to where we think they’ll take the market.”

Pearson & McGraw-Hill make multi-million dollar investment in Inkling — from Kirsten Winkler

It seems as if the latest study from Xplana in which they predict that the tipping point for digital textbooks is as near as 2015 has opened up the wallets of two major publishers for an undisclosed “multi million Dollar” investment.

Inkling, the maker of the iPad application and platform which delivers enhanced and engaging textbooks, leaving the “flat, PDF-based digital textbooks” behind is the beneficiary and it could give the startup a competitive edge over the well funded competitor the Kno.

But as money is not everything Inkling, Pearson and McGraw-Hill also made some significant content commitments, boosting the number of titles available on the Inkling platform…

 

Also see:

Bootstrapped Publishing – DIY FTW — from thinktiv.com

 

Tagged with:  

7 things you should know about open textbook publishing — from Educause, March 2011, by Judy Baker (Foothill College) and Jacky Hood (Foothill College)

MindTap from Cengage

 

 

Textbook publisher announces ‘app’ approach to learning materials — from The Chronicle by Jeff Young

Long Beach—The phrase “there’s an app for that” may be coming to textbooks.

Today a major textbook company, Cengage Learning, announced a new e-textbook publishing platform that lets professors plug in apps, some made by other software companies, to add to traditional textbook content features like tutoring services or the ability to trade margin notes with other students.

The system is called MindTap, and it is scheduled to be announced at the annual TED conference here. When Chris Vento, Cengage’s executive vice president for technology and development, explained the system to a reporter, he felt the need to put the word “textbook” in air quotes, since traditional textbook content is a small part of the new product. These digital textbooks essentially bundle together several products sold by Cengage and its subsidiaries, including their electronic test-bank system, called Aplia, as well as videos and other materials that the company owns the rights to, including the archives of Newsweek.  And MindTap allows professors to customize the presentation of the material, by adding their own slides, video lectures, articles, or free online content from elsewhere.

Tagged with:  

The Future of Media — by Chris Brogan

Also see:

What trends really matter? Rob Reynolds presentation -- 2-9-11

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This is a presentation prepared for the “What College Students Think: Making Information Pay for Higher Ed Publishing” conference sponsored by the Book Industry Study Group on February 9.

Better than free: How value is generated in a free copy world

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Brief summary/notes from DSC:
Per Kevin Kelly (Feb 2011), the future is about 6 verbs:

  1. Screening — we are moving from being “people of the book” to “people of the screen”
  2. Interacting
  3. Sharing
  4. Accessing — not owning
  5. Flowing — streams/flows of data and information, tags, clouds, not pages, real time, always on (24x7x3765), everywhere, no sense of being completed, feeds, flows of data, books will operate in this same environment
  6. Generating — not copying; pressure on things to become free; value is in things that cannot be copied (easily or cheaply). We want “easy to pay for but hard to copy”; things such as:
  • immediacy
  • personalization
  • authentication
  • findability
  • embodiment
  • interpretation
  • accessibility
  • attention

Originally from — and see:

  • Gerd Leonhard at the Futures Agency.com
  • …and with thanks to O’Reilly for publishing this!
© 2024 | Daniel Christian