More about broken Textbooks and Newspapers. It's about space/time.

Textbooks (and newspapers) evolved in a value chain economy. Real life happens in a user network economy. Learning happens when just the right content in just the right form is inserted into just the right space/time. The right space/time for learning is defined by the yellow circles in the second illustration.

Print is the best artifact for learning in a specific space/time.

Thanks to ed4wb the illustrations.

Learning in a value chain economy


Learning in a facilitated user network economy



To see more about how I think this plays out for the value of Print in general, check out my post at Digital Nirvana. The title is Print is better than the web. Discuss.

Broken textbooks. . . Part 1

from ed4wb

Introducing Plearn
In their book, Disrupting Class, authors Christensen, Johnson and Horn state that innovation and change often happen when individual actors work outside of the regulated sectors, offering goods and services through independent commercial channels, eventually getting noticed by the regulatory systems once enough people, through their own choice, opt out of the dominant offering. The authors mention that change rarely happens from within institutions, being that those institutions are more likely to hammer down the sharp edges of innovation to fit their current way of thinking, in the process, sustaining the approach it has always used.

Stimulus Package Will Not Change the Laws of Physics
"It’s less likely they are learning about cutting edge thinkers like Amory Lovins, who’ve yet to be fossilized into a textbook. With a little probing, and with education based on tackling real issues, it’s not hard to find brilliant thinking."

Participatory learning.net
Are textbooks good vehicles for the promotion of diverse thought, or are their business ties and testing objectives too limiting for this type of task? What do you do to provide yourself with a richly diverse mental ecology?

MPS: New money in Education. Here's how to get some of it.

New money
Education Department Releases Guidance Specifics on Impact Aid Stimulus Funds
from New America Blogs: "Impact Aid funds cannot be collected and saved - they must be obligated by September 30, 2011. Preference is given to projects that can be started quickly and will result in job creation. In cases where Impact Aid funds are not enough to fund a project completely, the funds can be combined with other sources including State Fiscal Stabilization Funds."

How to get it
Help your favorite school district write the grant proposal to the Dept of Education.

Here's the outline:
Project
Wikinewspapers and wikibooks to replace one-size-fits-all instructional material with a print based intervention tool that has implicit process metrics.

Path to scale
The project will be implemented on a classroom teacher by classroom teacher basis. This will manage the buy-in problem by using the proven process of early adopters to demonstrate effectiveness.

The Teacher Experience
Teams will be formed consisting of a teacher, a journalist from a local newspaper, a local graphic design firm and a local digital print provider.

The teacher will explain to the journalist the plan of study for the year. The journalist will work with the teacher to gather content at a ning site. Using a design theory approach, the designer will create machinable print products. Depending on the teacher's plan of study and time requirements, the print product will be produced on the desktop, at the CRD, or at the local print provider.

All the necessary hardware and software to insure a seamless customer experience will be supplied by the MPS.

The Process Metrics
Given the communication abilities of the hardware/software combination, the project will be able to keep real time data for when different print products were distributed in class.

As appropriate, print pieces will include machine readable tests to supply in-process feedback. The quizzes on the print pieces will be scanned and the information uploaded to a secure web site. That data will be used for real time feedback for each student in a form that can inform appropriate interventions. It can also be used to share with parents, co teachers, curriculum supervisors to build a 360 degree of each student.

In addition, at the beginning of each unit, each student will receive a 64 page paperback that includes the ideas to be learned. The paperback has blank outside columns on each page for notes. The students will use a highlighter and pen to write their comments in the margin and highlight either interesting or to-be-better-understood paragraphs or sentences. On Thursday of every week, the teacher will collect the books to get an idea of each student's diligence.

At the end of each unit, students will be required to "solve a mystery" posed by the teacher. Students will write their answer in the form of a non fiction essay at the ning site. The teacher will comment as appropriate. If the writing reaches the appropriate standard within the time allowed, some selections will be published as a book and presented at a book publishing party.

The ning site and the finished books will supply the portfolio that will be combined with high stakes test results to measure student progress as appropriate.

Job Creation
Since the MPS, print provider and newspaper are all community based, dollars spent will have the multiplier effect that is missing when a global takes the money out of a local community. An added benefit is that high school students can practice a new career path as journalists, designers, print providers or teachers.

One driver to replace textbooks is going to come from Washington. On Wednesday the games continue. . .

Since politics drive education policy and education policy is what reveals new opportunities for the Education Printernet, I've added a news feed about politics and education right here at Tough Love. It's just below the Table of Contents in the right hand column.

from Politics K-12:
House Education Committee: Don't Leave us Behind on Common Standards:
Common standards is the twitter, the Wii, and the Twilight book series of education policy right now -- the latest, hottest thing that everyone (President Obama, Arne Duncan, state leaders) can't stop talking about.

Well, next week the House Education and Labor Committee is getting in on the action. On Wednesday, they'll be holding a hearing on common (not national!) standards."

Google is not a search engine. Google is an advertiser's platform

When Print realizes that it is an information platform for learning that speeds and edits information to serve business and education the various printernets will coalesce and my IRA will be much happier.

Inside AdWords: Introducing Google Ad Planner:
"To make your life easier, we're introducing Google Ad Planner, a research and media planning tool that connects advertisers and publishers. When using Google Ad Planner, simply enter demographics and sites associated with your target audience, and the tool will return information about sites (both on and off the Google content network) that your audience is likely to visit. You can drill down further to get more detail like demographics and related searches for a particular site, or you can get aggregate statistics for the sites you've added to your media plan."

Xerox Q1 Earnings Call

It's actually a very interesting call, if you eliminate the profit forecasts. Profits depend on revenue depends on the size of the addressable market. Addressable market size depends on effective market size. No one can predict the size of effective markets in a Black Swan world. Everyone can make educated guesses. I assume our management team can make pretty good educated guesses.

If you can predict effective markets, then you can predict revenue streams. That works in value chain economies. It does not work in user network economies. It you imply that you can predict the future, you're either Bernie Madoff or kidding yourself.

If you believe, as I do, that Print is in process of going through a tipping point, future effective market size is much too pessimistic. On the other hand, I've been saying this I read about the docutech in the WSJ in the 1990's. When a friend decided that I was a "thought leader," instead of just another creative, I did a series of columns at What They Think.com. But consider, even a stopped clock tells the right time, at least twice a day.

Anyway, you can read the full transcript of the earnings call at Seeking Alpha. There were some smart questions and good answers.

If I were in the room, I would have tried to drill down on at least two issues:

Issue Number 1

Q snippet: . . . "You also talked last quarter about going back and renegotiating some of your supply agreements with Fuji Xerox and hoping to get a little bit of benefit there."

A snippet: ". . . but also we have an agreement with Fuji Xerox and within that agreement, like any agreement, within an agreement there is room for negotiations around it. We are constantly revisiting that where we try to limit the amount of exposure we have."

Issue Number 2

A snippet: . . . IGen4, both our populations on machines in the field and our installs grew in iGen4. So, clearly there are some upgrades or paths forged from iGen3 to iGen4, but we have a significant amount of new placements as well. So, MIPs grew and installs grew.

An important data point for digital newspapers and reinventing textbooks.

Of course, it's noticed in the UK. But I'm getting used to that by now. In snippet two is the reason the window for good margins is going to close in about a year. Snippet three is one path to reinvent textbooks. It's most definitely worth the click to read the whole article.

Digital print steps up to the plate
by Adam Hooker, PrintWeek, 24 April 2009

"It recently transpired that when newspaper giant News International was in the planning stages of what would eventually lead to a £600m web press investment at its UK sites, it seriously considered including digital presses in the spend.
The plan centred on placing machines to produce The Sun and The Times in commercial print firms in some of the more remote areas of the UK. The rationale was simple: rather than spend time and money shipping products from one of its main production centres, it could simply produce the papers locally, reducing costs, cutting CO2 emissions and, importantly in the internet age, saving time.

When News International were pondering this flirtation, digitally produced newspapers were in their formative years and there were still concerns about the quality, availability of colour and cost per unit (newspaper). But that was three years ago and, since then, the interest in digitally produced newspapers has grown dramatically.

For example, the Daily Mail is now being digitally printed in New York using a Screen Truepress Jet520 on the same day it's printed in London. This is just one of many examples, with a raft of other titles now being produced in locations faraway from their home markets"

The Screen Trupress Jet 520 lives at AlphaGraphics. (another UK owned company." Consider if more AlphaGraphics found the local markets for the Truepress.

Snippet two

Companies such as Océ, Xerox, Kodak, Agfa and Screen have all developed presses with the ability to produce on-demand newspapers.

However, as is so often the case, on the finishing front there are fewer options. Most experts will tell you that there is only one route available for finishing digitally printed newspapers: Hunkeler.

. . .Currently, the UK has one prominent digital newspaper printer, Stroma in west London, which is part of Océ's Digital Newspaper Network. It began producing newspapers around eight years ago and currently handles 400 titles using its Océ kit and one of Hunkeler's original newspaper finishing lines.

According to Stroma managing director Steve Brown, one of the reasons for the lack of options available in finishing is down to the perceived lack of interest in digitally printed newspapers. He believes the only likely rival to Hunkeler comes from hand finishing.

"The main problem is that there are too few people printing newspapers digitally right now," he says. "There is no real incentive for anyone else to follow Hunkeler. It has never really interested another finishing manufacturer. I think Hunkeler spent a lot of money on their R&D and they now have a solution that really works.
. . .
Newsworld chief executive David Renouf . . .(says that) . . . the issue he has is not whether or not they will do it, but how much it will cost and how long it will take.

When the issue becomes "how much it will cost and how long it will take", the game is on in earnest.

Snippet three

This could also be used for more than just newspapers and that is the key for the line, it won't just be handling newspapers."

Once the education opportunity gets on the radar, that is the "it won't just be handling newspapers" piece. And textbooks, as we've known them, wither away.

Nice one for Kodak

Combining offset and digital workflows should be Kodak's sweet spot. If they get it right for newspapers, it could turn out to be a very big deal. Snippet two is about machines talking back. That's the secret sauce of the printernet.

KODAK PRINERGY Digital Workflow Streamlines Digital Print with Improved Automation and Connectivity: "Innovative digital workflow system now available

ROCHESTER, N.Y. -- Designed specifically for the needs and requirements of digital printing workflows, such as higher job volumes and shorter runs than conventional environments, the KODAK PRINERGY Digital Workflow announced at drupa is now available. Providing a central production hub for digital print service providers, the KODAK PRINERGY Digital Workflow enables full job control with zero-touch automation and connectivity to a wide range of digital presses."

Snippet two:

Via integrated JDF/JMF bidirectional connectivity options for digital presses, PRINERGY Digital Workflow can provide instant live device status feedback, report on job status, and log and track all production history. . . .Integrated support for KODAK Digital Presses, as well as digital presses from other suppliers, makes the PRINERGY Digital Workflow a robust backbone for any digital production environment,” added Judi Hess, General Manager, Enterprise Solutions, and VP, Kodak

Another data point for versioned newspapers

In the snippet below, it's the "feet on the street" in snippet one and all of snippet two, that points to the opportunity for versioned newspapers.

from Terry Heaton’s PoMo Blog
Local web revenue begins to favor local media: "Perhaps even more importantly, this discovery could also encourage pureplays like Google, Yahoo, Local.com, Reach Local, Yodle and others to reach out and form partnerships with local media companies instead of competing for local dollars.

“The pureplays need feet on the street, which is too costly for them to obtain,” according to Gordon Borrell. “In the end, they’ll probably fall back on being platform and product suppliers, leaving the local media guys as the promoters, content providers, and sales force.”"

Snippet two:

Through time,” he told me, “local media companies were the ones who seized any ‘new medium’ — whether it was newspapers starting radio stations or the radio and newspaper guys starting TV stations, or the newspaper and TV guys getting into cable back in the 1970s.”

“It’s probably a bit early to declare newspaper and TV companies the probable winners in the ‘local online’ space, but I’m seeing a lot of the right moves being made. And history causes me to believe it’s actually going to happen.”

"Platform and product suppliers is the strategy for global OEM/VARs. MPS is like local media.

Big score for Xerox. Profit in Q1 !

Congratulations! see snippet below.

But why do a forecast and get "but cuts outlook" in the headline at Reuters?

In a world of Black Swans forecasting a year ahead is almost impossible. What happens if the Obama administration continues to get it right? Consider that the 'great financial meltdown" has been pretty much stabilized in less than a 100 days. LIBOR rates are reasonable. The wild swings in the market have slowed down. The necessary elimination of funny money is being managed without a major breakdown.

If healthcare is passed, my bet is that there will be a rush to exits from every global to small business, both start ups and going concerns. The real economy is driven by small business, not globals. Balance sheets without health care costs are going to be much better. Education is about to reorganize. Health is about to reorganize.

Of course, getting the timing just right is almost impossible. If you can't predict timing, all you can do is project from the past. But old economic models clearly don't work. Their predictive abilities have never been more discredited.

In the face of these realities, forecasts of revenue is a game played for Wall Street "analysts."
The game is "beat analysts' expectations" stock is supposed to go up. "Disappointed analyst's expectations" stock is supposed to go down. But stock price is supposed to be about the future, not the past. The only way to win is not to play the game.

Consider that when we announced new profit projections in March, the "analysts" changed their "analysis." Please, give me a break! Independent analysis is useful. Rewriting press releases is not. If we had a printernet, we could cut out the middleman.

Wall Street analysts had expected a profit of 4 cents a share, on revenue of $3.55 billion, but it was not immediately clear if results were comparable. Before Xerox late in March slashed its outlook, citing the effects of the weak economy, analysts had expected a profit of 17 cents a share.

One possibility might be to give forecasts in the form of "If - Then." It would be great if a real analyst would do the work. "If X happens, then we see a revenue of Y. If A happens, then we see a revenue of B."

"If - then" is the appropriate format for forward looking strategy. Forward looking strategy is a set of of "if - then" decision rules. Responsive strategy on the other hand, when you live in an environment of imperfect information, is a strong ethic of customer service and continuous product improvement. As in "if this decision violates these ethics, then probably don't do it.

In any case analysis, like science, is a set of clear "if, then" rules. If the analysts are too busy and overworked, then we should do it our selves.Until then we should say "We don't release revenue projections. That's proprietary information. Our core competitive advantage is that our predications are better than anyone else's. So, dear analysts, make your own best guess, just like you have to do for Google."

UPDATE 2-Xerox flips to quarterly profit, but cuts outlook from Reuters: "
* Q1 EPS 5 cts vs loss 27 cents
* year-ago quarter included big one-time charge
* Revenue fell 18 percent, equipment sales down 30 percent
* cuts 2009 EPS view to 50-55 cents from $1.00-$1.25

NEW YORK, April 24 (Reuters) - Xerox Corp (XRX.N) flipped to a profit in the first quarter, but the leading provider of digital printers and document management services forecast a second-quarter profit weaker than analysts' views and cut its full year earnings outlook nearly in half."