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Never ahead of my time, just ahead of the rest!

I am often asked by people who have not worked with me before to give examples of my good judgement about the market. There is one example I have used so often that it is hardly confidential anymore.

Last week, I reviewed my proposal documentation - and I was taken aback by how good the idea was! I want to share it, not just because it makes me look good, but because although much of the idea has been overtaken by services and technology, although teachers might have loved it - there is a lesson about timing and ROI, which will follow. I also want to give an example for the discussion about the role/place of publishers I and others have had with Ewan MacIntosh.

In 2002, only two years after leaving the chalkface, I was asked to research and propose a major new product/service for the primary sector. Budgets were less tight back then, and although ELCs had not yet happened, there was clearly going to be more money in the market. So, a good time to pitch. After a year at this major educational publishing department I presented something called ‘the staffroom’.

Essentially, it was content to be organised into searchable, ‘tagable’. Teachers could find the bits of their favourite schemes and published resources they were looking for. Teachers could also upload their own materials (which gave them credits), as well as rate each others.

Although mostly subscription, a considerable aspect of the site was to be free - a space for teachers to share ideas - and where experts and authors would engage with those still at the chalkface.

OK - so that was it. Not so earth-shattering now. But 5 years ago, there was also nothing doing any of this for teachers.

So, how did I get the idea together and why did it not get passed by the management?

The idea came from reading and listening to teachers online. It was teachers, not publishers and/or techies that were asking for these services.

Teachers buy into schemes because they have to! They rarely want the whole package - but recognise that there is lots of good stuff they do want - and are prepared to buy the rest to get at the good stuff. Publishers have problems getting teachers to see the value of their new material, and move from ‘old favourites’ - so a trust-worthy place for both to access and play with content was a no brainer.

Also, following conversations with Jens Bammel, ex Chief Executive of the PLA - I had come to understand the implications of DRM, authors rights and the management of permissions. Tagging and XML were clearly going to be part of the answer - and so the proposal was scaffolded to fit this technical reality.

There was no business model in our sector to use as an indicator, to work out how much to spend on the project, and what sort of Return On Invesment (ROI) there might be, let alone what the on going costs might be! There was also a huge investment needed to prepare all the content for the web.

I argued that this was going to be necessary for the whole business - so it was best to do it now!

OK - so I was right. Eventually, years after competitors had already finished, this publisher has now finished getting most of its stuff ready. There are now loads of services where teachers can share, upload and rate each others materials. Publishers are packaging up smaller chunks of their materials for teachers to personalise their teaching and learning. Funding for VLEs has provided a technical  and policy driven openess to services from publishers.

But,…. back in 2003, the management team were looking at far too many unknowns, and a market that did not know that it wanted these services! The marketing and communications that seemed necessary, on top of the other outlays made this an easy proposal to turn down.

What if they had said yes? This publisher would have spent millions preparing and maintaining this service, at least 3 years before the market was as ready as it is now! Would they be raking it in? Would they have broken a mold and the  toast of the sector (BETT awards , etc)?

Obviously, that could have happened. Equally, the project could have broken the division.

So, Ewan, you asked for publishers to be brave. I clearly wish that this publisher had been braver, and trusted my judgement. But, there are huge costs for taking risks such as these - and although I might have been right - they did what was right for their business, and was based on their understandings of where teachers were then.

The death of ode, recently, has shown that even ideas that have everything going for them can still be canned by those who job is not about vision - but about immediate business priorities.

My only gripe about this situation in my past, was my brief! I was asked to go away, be innovative and use the research to bring them something different. And when I did so … that wasn’t what they wanted!

So - it is not always enough to know ‘what time it is’  - or to be at one with the Zeitgeist. A good publisher/commissioner in a large business must be able to synthesise the innovative with the needs of the conservative. This is almost always a fudge! Ewan might counter that smaller businesses, start-ups, can move faster- but someone still has to front the money!

So - unless the state funds resources, we are stuck with a publishing sector that will always be conservative and quite a long way behind the times.

In a future post, I will share another anecdote about  truly valuable resource that was crushed by corporate lawyers - and is now lost to teachers.

DS and midnight snack

Up till now, our 3 year old had tinkered with our DS consoles , but not really ‘got it’ - the objectives of the games just beyond her.

Fueled by chocolate and a midnight feast in a tent in the garden last week, it all clicked - Super Mario made sense - and she was hooked.

What changed? How is it that by her fourth attempt, the idea of ‘playing a game’ on this machine made sense to her? What did she get that she didn’t before?

Even a casual glance over the research around games and learning gives answers about immediacy of feedback and rewards, paced and incremental challenges, and opportunities to play with consequences without personal harm!

But, what is still harder to identify is how and when the moment of ‘immersion’ happens. She was IN the game - and those of us who have been playing games all our lives ( I started with snake on a PET machine in the mid 80s) recognise this as defining aspect of gaming.

Kids are programmed to engage in imaginative play - but videogaming is different - and requires a commitment to the play space that most 3 year olds could not sustain in a ‘real’ game in our shared reality. But in a virtual space - with sometimes the most frustrating interfaces - children break through - and want to stay.

Watching this happen to my own kid has had a profound effect on me - raising all sorts of questions about how I will deal with questions about suitability and length of time spent playing games. But more than that - it has made me wonder what my brain does when in a game-space - and how it has contributed to my cognitive abilities and character. Do I learn, think, create better because of my immersion in games?

I think so - but what will it do my daughter? Time will tell.

evolve or die - oh, and watch out when going downhill

I found a very interesting article about extinctions, which offers at least one useful lesson for the educational publishing sector (encapsulated in the headline above!):

“Fitness landscapes are often conceived of as ranges of mountains. There exist local peaks (points from which all paths are downhill, i.e. to lower fitness) and valleys (regions from which most paths lead uphill). A fitness landscape with many local peaks surrounded by deep valleys is called rugged.” (Wikipedia)
Effectively, rugged fitness landscapes have many local fitness optima (peaks), and the higher you are on one, the less likely “mutations,” whether real or metaphorical, will enable you to climb to a taller one. The reason is that the organism or system must decrease in fitness as it walks down one hill in order to start the adaptive climb up another. In general, the more connections (edges) between nodes in a complex system, the more rugged its fitness landscape”

S, what is the lesson here. That, with the complexity of the sector, caused by constant curriculum review and change, shifting teaching practice, and new technologies - let alone economic slowdown and political instability) change is necessarily hard (lots of edges) and there will be losses on the way to the next peak.

But, without the bravery to get past these - and keep moving/adapting/learning with terrain - extinction is all but guaranteed!

This model feels very common sense - yet it challenged some long-held views in evolutionary biology - but has recently become a dominant theory. I hope that this model shows that the very complexity of our sector demonstrates that evolutionary fitness equals being at one with mutation!

Free Stuff Available Here!

Or at least, isn’t that what we are all looking for?

As Nick Kind rightly says, ‘free’ is a myth.

An apology to Ewan - but am I about to make it worse???

In March, Ewan MacIntosh took the time to comment on my post What is the perceived value of content?

As I have been pretty much full time at Oxfam Education for the past 6 months, I have only recently got round to reviewing my own site, and fired up for blogging again - only to find that I have missed being engaged in a discussion with Ewan over something I care about. So I am sorry to Ewan, and for my own loss. : (

So what was all this about. Ewan made some excellent points, and a few factual corrections to my statements. Overall, though, the tensions I talked about remain and his perspective, while no doubt one of the most important in the discourse - is necessarily slightly blinkered - because he wants to force the pace of change- which is what we all want him to do!

As anyone who has worked with me will attest - I share many traits with Ewan (except as a blogger!). I am impatient with the pace of change and believe that there are models that would benefit teachers and children that we must move towards.

I guess where Ewan and I part company is the breadth of the gap between ideal and reality. I wish that more teachers did what Ewan suggests, and were as smart consumers of educational materials as most of us are now with entertainment media. That is not to say that there are not smart teachers out there - doing exactly what he suggests. It is just that most are not. Most look to someone to make their lives easier - and will pay for materials to do this for them - the ‘ready meal’ effect.

SO - here is the strained analogy - apologies to Ewan for this:

Ewan is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstal - pointing out that it is perfectly possible to grow and cook all your own food - without paying either producers or middlemen. And he rightly berates the supermarket ready meal - full of salt and fat (ie the published materials) which are over priced and rarely fit for purpose!

I do not disagree with him - (or Hugh F-W) - and applaud his call to change the way we consume educational materials - and agree that we should work with neighbours/people we trust to find and make more.

However, I think that while this aspiration is necessary, it seems too big a change for most teachers (as Hugh F-W found with his free range chicken project).

I do not think that small steps are a bad thing to bring teachers forward, and only wish the the rest of the UK had the enlightened leadership that Scotland has had in this area. Glow, is helping to model and make accessible materials in a way that could change the profession in Scotland.

But - is Glow anymore than a Delia ‘Cheats’ project? Promoting specific resources - giving teachers the illusion that they are taking control over their learning materials.

There is nothing wrong with this - and it is a big step better that the English schools system is being offered - in vouchers for ready meals (eLCs).

Curriculum change and access to the right ingredients for transformation in education is surely part of the revolution. But, teachers have no incentive to radically change the way they work and learn. Until they are required to professionally update and provide evidence of such, as almost all health care professionals are (eg OTs, physios, and GPs) - there can be no reason for them to engage with the production and development of resources.

So - publishers are part of the problem - but, they are only responding to market needs (and teachers really do ask for some of the awful schemes that are produced - and buy them in droves!). It is familiar, it is safe, it is not asking them to extend their practice.

And when something innovative is put in front of them -  very few take the opportunity to take it on - learn, get involved in a community - and progress the learning.

OF COURSE  - there are lots of pockets of excellence - and inspirational stories.

But, to expect a whole profession to transform from within, without help, incentives and guides, is to be too harsh on hard working teachers who are often managing many other imposed initiatives, etc.

SO, in the mean time, please don’t berate the publishers (not for profit as well as  commercial) too hard. They are learning that they have to change the hard way (and lots of people are losing jobs!) and seeing the success of alternative models in other sectors - and slowly adapting.  See my other posts to see my views of the pace of this change - but it is happening.

It took British cuisine a relatively short time to turn from Fanny Craddock to where we are now - where even veggies like me can find a decent meal almost anywhere.

So - have hope - and stretch out to those in publishing - cos they have lots to offer and a market who trust them.

New Tag Line

I think I might have cracked the Maven problem (see last post).

The new tag line I am thinking of unleashing is … wait for it…

Educational Publishing 2.0

It sums up so much more about what I bring to organisations - about helping to manage the change from thinking as of print first to thinking of content in context first.

There is the danger that ‘2.0′ as a phrase could become old hat fast - and it already means too many things to be a helpful analytical term. But it still has currency, so I am going to have some faith in my instincts.

This will mean the end of ‘Blended Learning - Root and Branch’ as the main tagline - but noone really seemed to like it that much - or got the reference to my name (Eylan means tree in hebrew), so no real loss there.

What have I learned from this? That while “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet” - it doesn’t hurt to have a helpful name, so that people can have a sniff for themselves!

Maven or Maverick

I have been trying to write a small ad to sum up what I do a little better. Some people I have worked with have called me a maven. But, this is a term that few people are aware of, except those who have read Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point, where he talks about mavens as a factor in one the three ‘agents of change’ involved in the tipping point, where culture, science etc - shifts from one paradigm to another.

SO, do I think I am a maven? Well, I know alot about my chosen area of expertise, and read and involve myself deeply in the broader discourse around digital technology and learning.

More than that, I have become valuable to my clients because I am able to clearly interpret this information and communicate it to them - either through practical implementation (ie - walking the walk) or through the strategic planning and evaluation process.

Check against the defintion…

Mavens are “information specialists”, or “people we rely upon to connect us with new information.”They accumulate knowledge, especially about the marketplace, and know how to share it with others.

So,… YES I am a MAVEN!!!!

So - here is my dilemma, I have a term that succintly sums up what I do - but most of my clients will not know what it is!

Do I use it and try to educate my potential clients - or avoid it in case it puts people off??

Well - I have added it to my website - but I am still nervous of using it in my ‘elevator pitch’ .

Am I being too nervous? Just because I love learning new things - should I expect the same of my busy potential clients? Anecdotes and thoughts welcome.

An ode to ode

ode is dead.

The proposition had been an ‘iTunes’ service for educational materials.

Pearson Education have decided to fundamentally change the proposition that the ode team worked so hard to build. Although some of the technology will probably be turned to support the Pearson list, the idea of an agnostic one-stop-shop for pay as you go learning objects has been removed, along with the business model.

It is a shame that Pearson did not have the vision to find a way to incorporate ode in to the wider Pearson family, not just for the ode team, but for the wider market.

Teachers are not buying from publishers the way they used to. The market is flagging, the wider economy is unstable, and government is tightening the purse strings on initiatives. At a time like this, the traditional publishers are guilty of two mistakes:

1 - Fear of change. Teachers are a traditional audience, but they are never allowed to stay still, and are always looking for services to help them adapt to change. Publishers are afraid to engage with ideas, like ode, and are losing relevance to their market.

2 - A fundamental misunderstanding of the capabilities of the technology. By analogising business models, processes and commissioning processes from print to digital, many traditional publishers oversimplified a fundamental shift in the culture of education in the use of media.

ode was not an answer to all these faults. However, it provided a potential path for teachers to help traditional publishers make a successful business model using the power of Web2.0.

So - thanks to Ed, Chris, Dick, James, Maria and the  rest of the gang for all the good times. And good luck!

On Optimism

Optimism is often dismissed as willful ignorance in the face of reality / and obstacles to action.

In the many projects I have been involved with, there have been team members who raise problems, any one of which could derail the project permanently; In one or two, I have been that person, stating that unless the project team face the enormity of an issue in the eye, that issue will cause huge issues.

But – overall, I manage to stay positive and because the glass stays half full, I stick at it!

In my current work, two situations have made me realise the power and value of my optimism.

One relates to a stop/start project whose ‘life’ dependent on the client and their bureaucracy. It is currently in ‘stop’ – but we are trying to get it moving again.

For another client, I am about to handover to a new permanent post holder, whose job I helped create and who I helped recruit. This role will require the support and management of a significant amount of change – and will not be easy!

In both cases, I have had to manage my own disappointments, frustrations, and cynicism.

Of course, there are three reasons to get this right:
1 – To help the client and complete my contractual obligations…
2 – and thus keep the money coming!
3- But most importantly, to stay sane and keep learning.

As time has gone by, I have learned one or two important lessons about Optimism.

The first of these is to be a Rational Pessimist.

Does this chime with you?

Do I blush?

I use LinkedIn a great deal in my work, to extend my network, to find experts to help me and my clients.

I can also recommend people with whom I have worked. They can also do this for me!!

Although not normally embarrassed by much, I have struggled not to blush on reading some of these kind words. It is only this key feature of the LinkedIn service, the reciprocity, that makes the giving, and taking of compliments a little easier!

Read below - but also follow the links from the names below to find some truly great people to work with!

“Eylan’s insight into educational technology, knowledge of its current use in schools (as well as foresight into the future) and connections in the sector proved to be greatly valuable when he worked with us in a Business Development role. He was also highly professional, creative and reliable. I will be delighted if I get the chance to work with him again in the future.”

Ed Wong - Co-Founder of ode

“While working with Eylan I found him to be a thoughtful, enthusiastic and analytical Learning Professional. He brings his considerable expertise to situations and maintains an enthusiasm to develop his own knowledge and skills. He has good interpersonal skills, particularly networking and putting people at ease.

Eylan takes ownership where appropriate and delivers with enthusiasm and confidence paying attention to detail supported by a good questioning technique and an ability to identify the key issues. He has worked successfully in some difficult scenarios, handling some high stress situations while managing stakeholders though to positive outcomes.

Always positive and a good person to work with.”

David Dwyer - Head of Blended Learning, Capita Learning and Development

“Eylan would be a fantastic asset to any team or project. As a consultant he is an extremely creative thinker, facilitator and dynamo. His output is consummately professional and his input is always valued and considered. He is passionate and devoted to his chosen sector, education, and is someone who knows everyone - his gregarious nature means that he is invaluable as a communicator and evangelist. I would unhesitatingly work with Eylan in the future.”

Chris Bradford - Co-Founder of ode

“Eylan is a real innovator - always a step or two ahead of the rest and brilliant at spotting gaps in the market. A creative who can deliver on time and budget puts Eylan in the highest category of content providers. I look forward to working with Eylan again in the future.”

Rob Ince - General Manager, UK Schools McGraw-Hill