May 18, 2013

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Apple, Textbooks, and Education

June 11, 2012 By Leave a Comment

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As we all know, Apple recently announced, with the release of the new iTunes U, iBooks 2, and apps to create textbooks, that they will re-invent the textbook market. I have three kids in college, and that’s a big deal. Here’s the larger picture.

Sure, taking on the textbook monopoly is a big deal. Those publishers are quaking in their old-print-paradigm boots, because their 500-year old industry is now dead. DEAD!

Seriously, here’s the big picture of this phenomena at the moment: In 1450, Gutenberg invented movable type and printed his first Bible. The printed-book paradigm has not fundamentally changed until Apple announced apps for the common man to create electronic texts and instantly publish them to the world. That is a BIG deal. The emergence of the Internet and e-text was the opening bell in this world-changing shift, and all the recent developments in self-publishing, e-readers, e-books, and the accelerating transformation of the entire media industry are all part of this mega-trend, but until now and Apple’s announcement, we didn’t have the means to take full advantage of that potential.

Apple is poised to go after education next. There’s another centuries-old model screaming for transformation. Apple has already established a beachhead with this move into textbooks. Oh, by the way, they also have a market capitalization of $500 BILLION, and they make a BILLION more dollars each week. They have half a TRILLION dollars in the bank, which is absolutely unprecedented in the history of business. The have the platform, the ecosystem, the innovative chops, the market share, the beachheads, and the CASH to do this.

And the competition will not sit idly on the sidelines. Especially Amazon and Google, who have both staked their strategies on e-content. There will be furious competition here. This equals further opportunity for us consumers and developers – as long as we stay reasonably platform agnostic.

Filed Under: e-Learning and Online Education, Featured, Human, Personal, Professional Development, Interactive Onboarding Tagged With: , , , , ,

Bringing Excellence Online, Part 3 of 3: Deploy it to the World

May 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Here’s the third stage of building bridges for excellent material to find its way into the world successfully and effectively.
3. Deploy it to the world: now that you’ve created the content – or adapted it, linked to it, or otherwise got your virtual hands on it – and you’re convinced that it’s relevant, effective, and provides meaningful value for a specific target audience; and you’ve brought that content online with a winning user experience and creative approaches to automating it, now it’s time to make it available to the world. And that’s the magic and power of the Internet: to take what was once unknown and local and instantly make it accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. Of course, “instant” still requires considerable work.

* User and access management: this content or program that you’ve now automated will require some careful decisions about how real people will access it and interact with it. Is it free? Will users pay? Will they give up something in return, but not necessarily cash, like their email address or some feedback? You can provide open access and let any and all visitors have at it. You’ll be admired for your trust and generosity. But chances are, you have some objectives of your own here, and you’re not doing this for entirely altruistic reasons. Do you want to build a community? Make money? Get exposure or build traffic? Get people to engage with you, for a variety of reasons? Depending on your answers to those questions, you’ll need to set up individual accounts, e-commerce, registration mechanisms, and the right means of giving visitors access and tracking them. Do some research here, learn what others have done – you’ll find many creative solutions.

* Set up and run your business operations: what business entity will be responsible for publishing and supporting this content? In addition to the core content, you’ll be managing a larger context for this endeavor. This starts with the web site where people will find and learn about you and the business. How will they find it? The business and the interactive product must be presented with the right use of branding, positioning, messaging, and marketing — of course, all these business and operational fundamentals follow from the early work done to establish clear value and effective learning outcomes.

Much online content is now free – partly driven by large institutions willing to open their existing learning assets, and partly to invest in the development of new assets. Plus, a massive volume of learning materials – ebooks, articles, how-to’s, courses, webinars, presentations, video, podcasts, and many other forms – are produced for marketing purposes, to get people to sign up for a blog or website, to promote a product or service, to establish a brand, or to keep users coming back for the next installment. The volumes and types of free stuff are ever increasing, but the quality is too often marginal, or outright plagiarized. Don’t fall in that trap.

In the end, this is all about adoption: getting your target users to find you, learn what you offer, become interested, and decide to engage. Since the earliest publicly available e-learning – not the old “computer based training” mandated by our jobs and bosses – the challenge of adoption has been the key to distance learning success. And it includes all the aspects described in this article and the two previous ones:

Bringing Excellence Online, Part 1 of 3: Knowledge Transfer

Bringing Excellence Online, Part 2 of 3: Rendering and Automation

Filed Under: e-Learning and Online Education, Featured, Interactive Onboarding, Small Biz, User Experience Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Bringing Excellence Online, Part 2 of 3: Rendering and Automation

May 15, 2012 By Leave a Comment

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Here’s the second of the three stages of bridge-building from flat land to the interactive, internetworked world.

Step 2 of 3 – Bring it online: if all the research and soul searching above on Who, Why, and How doesn’t knock you out of the game, now you must roll up your sleeves and do the real work of creating and deploying the thing. If this interactive thing you’re creating is only an idea, or a rough version only selectively prototyped, you have considerable work to do. If you’ve implemented a more complete interactive system, you’re much further down the path, but you may still have much labor in front of you.

* Rendering and automation: look at and use almost any interactive system or software or web site or learning tools – at some point, before they were interactive, they existed in some other form. Artists, illustrators, graphic designers, programmers, and user interface experts took printed materials or flowcharts or technical descriptions and from those, authored a new and more dynamic version of what existed before. There are so many brilliant examples: from old board games like Yahtzee and Scrabble and chess, to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and thousands of other examples in business, education, recreation, government, research, science — any human endeavor now benefits from automation and rendering interactive what used to be flat and static. Any intellectual property – including YOURS – has many opportunities to become more engaging, easier to use, more accessible, crunch data, help users interact, and much more.

* Integration and context: okay, you’ve hired the best user interface designers and your interactive thing is now slick and smooth and intuitive, or you’ve tested it a hundred ways to Toledo and fixed it every time a user got stuck or pissed and now it’s much better, thank you – well, good job. All that is essential, and not sufficient. You’re not done: no interactive program or system or tool or resource is used in isolation. Those happy users touch a hundred different systems every day, and randomly bounce between them. What environment do they work in? What platform and operating system and computer device and Internet pipe do they prefer, or are forced into? How will they get data and personal bits into and out of this system of yours?

* User experience: the most clever ideas, the best solutions for real problems, and well-conceived interactive systems that could be truly useful end up being none of these if they’re not usable. If the path to the treasure winds through endless dark catacombs that circle back on themselves with no discernible landmarks, and important looking doors are locked or unmarked, or if hallways reach dead ends, users and paying customers will go elsewhere. Our attention spans become shorter and shorter, at the same time that alternatives to any crappy user interface are a single, silent, invisible click way. Those are called “abandons” and the vast majority of ALL visits to ALL web sites end that way – unless you turn up the lights, create landmarks, make hallways straight, and follow real users around to be sure you got it right.

Next: Deploying, product-izing, monetizing, conversions, and adoption in the real world

Filed Under: e-Learning and Online Education, Featured, Interactive Onboarding, Small Biz, User Experience Tagged With: , , , , ,

Bringing Excellence Online, Part 1 of 3: Knowledge Transfer

May 5, 2012 By Leave a Comment

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We build bridges – from ideas, sketches, rough content, personally-held knowledge, organizational intellectual property to tangible, usable, accessible online systems. Here’s the first of three stages of that process…

Step 1 of 3 – Create the content, transfer the knowledge: in many cases, the content already exists in some form, possibly as a program developed and used within a company or school or even a home. It’s created to fill a need by a motivated person, and it may never see use or exposure beyond the quiet, local, remote usage it was intended for. But occasionally, the author recognizes it has value, or others reflect that through their success with it or simply seeing it in action. Now, the author is faced with a decision: how to package, or re-package it, how to document and ensure that it works, and who “out there” will likely benefit from it?

In some cases, the content may not exist in a tangible form, it may be embedded in an organization or process or someone’s head. Now, it’s time to facilitate a process to model it, articulate it, and create an information architecture. This includes the target user or audience, the goals or objectives of the content, media types needed, and a comprehensive approach to get it written down so we can work with it.

* Effectiveness: unfortunately, there’s a lot of crap out there. The trend towards evidence-based development, more rigorous research, development of educational standards, and enlisting independent, qualified third parties to evaluate materials, systems, tools, methods, and applications is gradually weeding out the ineffective and unproven, and placing higher standards on what gets to market. Any author or content owner looking for a wider audience or new market must ask: does the content or material produce the intended outcome, and how do I test and demonstrate that?

* Relevance: a product or program or content can be effective and produce the outcomes it claims, but does anyone care? What need or pain does the thing address, and is that pain acute and widespread? Is this a solution looking for a problem, a product looking for a customer, or does it answer burning questions that don’t have answers now? This, of course, is a fundamental business question, but authors or educators or artists not familiar with market basics can become too enamored of their baby, and be too close to their project to be able to objectively assess its relevance – or simply not have the skills, experience, or tools to research it sufficiently.

* Target audience: intricately interwoven with the two challenges above – and all three of these are inseparably interdependent – is the essential question of, “who is this for?” The answer to that must include a number of factors, including their technical environment, education level, access to funds (depending on price), and most importantly, exacting what problem will they solve with this, and how will that happen exactly? As with all definitions in this realm, complete answers must include an accurate assessment of scale (how many people will need and use it?), and what’s the trend (is that group growing or shrinking, or might they vanish overnight due to some temporary condition in the world today)?

Next: Part 2 of 3, Bring It Online

Filed Under: e-Learning and Online Education, Featured, Interactive Onboarding, Small Biz, User Experience Tagged With: , , , , ,

Super Bowls and Gold Mining

February 5, 2012 By Leave a Comment

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Today is the Super Bowl, and I watch as much for the commercials as the gridiron action — and I love football! I remember with some fondness and more than a little mirth the crazy commercials and amounts spent on those ads back in the heady dot-com days of the late 90′s.

Has it really been 13 or 14 years? Wow…

Now that I’m immersed in the virtual world of blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, numerous online communities and groups, and the online activities of a few select professional associations, I’m getting a good view of the landscape and the goings-on in this latest online craziness.

Surprise! A significant percentage of blogs are about… blogging. A large portion of social media content is about… social media. And social media about blogs, and blogs about social media.

I’m reminded of the gold rush days of the 19th century. Most of the fortunes made were not from the precious metals extracted from the hillsides. The vast portion of the revenue was selling stuff to those hopeful miners – picks, shovels, explosives, lumber, clothing, liquor, food, and all the other necessities of working miners and mining communities.

Gold rushes are often like that: the revenue from services, experts, gadgets, equipment, and hype far exceeds actual income realized from the “gold”. Has anyone ever quantified the ratio of what the dot-coms of the 90′s actually earned in real sales, vs. what they spent (or flushed)? Given the staggering volume of waste and silliness (including all those ridiculous Super Bowl ads), business plans and business models that were pure vapor, and the number of the companies that remain today, that ratio seriously favors the expense side.

But let’s not discount the value of Super Bowl exposure. Turns out, the big musical acts that entertain us at halftime are paid exactly ZERO for the privilege of one of the largest television and PR audiences in the world. Visit Newser’s article on Madonna’s Payment for Halftime Show? $0 to hear the rest.

Filed Under: Art of Writing, Featured, Interactive Onboarding, What I'm working on now Tagged With: , , , , ,