An Open Twitter Experiment connecting Print to the Web to radically lower the cost of Professional Education in K-12.

The Hypothesis:
There is a way to combine anywhere/time video with a simple printed document to deliver Professional Development at a zero cost.

The method:
This morning I sent out the following tweet.

A Thought Model for $0 Science PD. Please help with your thoughts and comments. I think this can work. http://bit.ly/HI29V #education

The "Document" Properties

1. It can be easily printed on a MFP in the schools.

2. Color would be nice, but not all necessary.

3. if TinyPurls were used as the human readable urlsit would emit the information exchange data that would make them transparent and thus build accountability into the system.

4. If CodeZ QR were included, it could allow a "Click on the Print. Watch on the Flat Screen in the front of the classroom or the living room and emit the appropriate data stream.

5. If PDFs were assembled into a newspaper output, it would allow a new media for learning in schools and communities.

The use case
Teachers receive a printed flyer in their mailboxes on Friday morning.

It might read:

Sometime before our discussion on Tuesday.

1. Please watch A Taste for Insects

2. Please review the California Standards for Biology/Life Science.

3. On Tuesday, be ready to share two ideas about how this might work for your class in the coming two weeks."

A Taste for Insects
How did the passion for collecting and collections of Darwin, Wallace and others of their period force them to understand and explain biodiversity? What is the legacy of this period of adventure and species discovery and how is it a vital part of current and future evolutionary research? Join Kipling Will, Associate Director of the Essig Museum of Entomology, UC Berkeley for this exploration. (#16071)

You can watch the Video at http://bit.ly/VpbXS

You can review K-12 Educational Standards/ Standards for Grade(s): 6-12/ Biology/Life Sciences /Evolution http://bit.ly/1CO84D

The Context: in tweets.

1. RT @complexdays Angela Davis: How Does Change Happen ? http://ff.im/-7GYF6 me: UCTV+ #clickableprint = free PD in HS #education?

2. If Professional Development were free, it would pay for many tchrs/art/science kits in #education. Find a local printer or #MPS who gets it.

The evidence:
Check back here or on twitter @ToughLoveforX . As data comes in I will share what is interesting-to-me.

Now it's seems it's a sleezy Independent. Copier bills bankrupt a school. This is getting serious. New game. New rules.

Governor French caught in copy machine dispute -Belleville News-Democrat, Illinois:

"BELLEVILLE -- Governor French Academy may have to file for bankruptcy to protect itself financially from a dispute involving copy machines, the school's headmaster said Thursday.

'We started to receive bills out of the blue for copiers we don't have,' said Governor French founder Phillip Paeltz.

Paeltz said the school has done business with Kevin Welch, of Okawville, for nine years, leasing copying machines from various companies the school staff thought Welch represented. The school staff was under the impression the leases were terminated when they returned the copiers to Welch but discovered later that some of the machines were never returned to the companies, according to Paeltz.
. . .
Paeltz said he knows of at least two similar incidents occurring in Illinois, one at a church in Madison County and one at a senior citizens center in Okawville

Our friend at Xippa.net says,

Contract structure and insuring the customer gets what they bargained for is at the root of the Academy’s problem. Xippa is in business to protect the customer from having situations like this happen. It does not matter what is said by the salesperson, when the last line of the contract says only the terms and conditions contained apply. www.Xippa.net is here to help”.

I don't have any relationship or financial interest in Xippa. Except to keep our schools, churches or senior centers from finding themselves in the same situation.

"Printernet" was coined at PacPrint 09 in Australia

I started a conversation about the printernet over at Digital Nirvana. Turns out I did not coin the word. Some marketing professional at PacPrint 09 did. From the comments:

1. Andy McCourt Says:
   March 25th, 2009 at 8:34 pm edit

   Michael,
   See: http://www.pacprint.com.au/
   Printernet is one of the themes of this upcoming show, although more in a marketing sense than the apps you describe.
   I am one who believes that the contextualisation - on both personal and interest group levels - of information in a bound printed product is set to be one of the next big things. If that’s Printernet then yes, it’s useful.

2. mjosefowicz Says:
   March 26th, 2009 at 4:36 am edit

   Andy-
   And I thought I coined the term. lol. Just goes to show that there are no new ideas, just different implementations in different places! If someone in Australia thought it was a good word, and I thought it was a good word here in New York. It might actually be a good word.

   At any rate, my sense is that if the term is used not merely for marketing, but as a guide for strategy it works. It means that local printers become eager to make connections, instead of trying to go it alone. It means that the vendors see that they are part of much greater media ecosystem that implies they can’t go it alone.

   With the coming to market of mass customization technology, it means the beginning of the end of one size fits all Print. The under appreciated opportunity is the ability of Print to communicate with groups of people, with micro versioning, instead of focusing on 1 to 1 in the service of direct mail on steroids.

   I’m seeing:

   Relevant content printed and distributed by local PSP’s as bi monthly “stay in front of the customer” newsletter? newspaper? poster? And every once in a while a book?

   It could be:
   Corporate communication to stockholders directly that by passes the “busyness press.”. Or the latest print stories from Australia, India or Europe. Or industry specific content - marketing? advertising? education? etc etc

   Or the good news about people on the ground with innovative solutions, as one finds in the Christian Science Monitor.
   http://features.csmonitor.com/innovation/

I didn't say there what I think is the most interesting opportunity of all, replacing textbooks and supplementals with WikiBooks, WikiNewspapers, and posters that are the right information in the right form at the right time for bottom of the pyramid high school students, either in school, drop outs from school or incarcerated.

If the question is peace and sustainability, the answer is education.

What I'm learning at Twitter this morning. Some of it might be useful to printers.

The coolest thing was

Spent a couple of minutes @RT @Ruth_Z - http://twitteranalyzer.com It's way, way, way cool. Good luck! Hope there is a great biz model.

This is a highly recommended link. The short story is that it's real time information on usage patterns on twitterstreams. The potential applications for Print + twitter are mind blowing. Read more at Benoit Trembly's blog

The next coolest things were:

RT@Cibereconomy Google ..To Bring Movie Rentals To YouTube http://bit.ly/2XI8Pa MJ: Nice.Anywhere/time video needs AWT Print. Go printernet!

Todays anywhere/time TV at http://Fora.tv "Daschle Optimistic about Health Reform in 2009". I'll watch it after the market opens. #education

Teaching science? #HW="watch video. http://bit.ly/BaBeK. Pause if smthng is cool-to-U or dsn't make sense-to-U. Ask me about it in class"

My issue is managing my IRA and trying to help fix bottom of the pyramid high school education. The problem with high school education is not curriculum or even management. The problem is

dcarliRT @ToughLoveforX: "The research is clear: when families are engaged in chldrn's ed, chldrn do better " via @ElaineOng (DC: We're ALL family)

I have to take a break now. Market opening in about 1 1/2 hour.

Today at Twitter. It's about Print 09 and Tending Gardens.

For those of our visitors who have to work for a living and can't take a couple of minutes every hour or so here's what I think I learned today.

Amazon and Google are going to court around ebooks. Oce has CodeZ QR in their booths. Kodak is moving right ahead with the Prosper Web press add on. The buzz about anywhere/time TV continues at MediaPost. Hachette whines that Amazon's $9.99 ebooks will kill hardcover books. Some scientists have developed Augmented Reality that can fit into contact lens. Other scientists have figure out how to photograph one atom. And Kodak has a really neat advertising widget over at PrintCeo.com.

And my personal favorite.
The best model for understanding social media, selling and communication ecology may turn out to be tending a garden and watching exactly how plants grow.

The tweet and video about the plant stuff is below. If you are interested in the other stuff. It's ToughLoveforX at twitter.

Here's what I'm trying to say about plants +social media and the ecology of communication.#biomimicry YouTube Video. http://bit.ly/175hHV



And this one:

BIg Win for Kodak! Color, Schmolor, Digital Shmigital and Black only and 4.16" is Good Enough

Notice what's happening to the price of EK for the last couple of weeks?

Anyway:

The KODAK PROSPER S10 Imprinting System, with its 4.16 inch (10.56 cm) printing swath, features resolutions of 600 x 600 dpi at speeds up to 1,000 fpm (305 mpm). The KODAK PROSPER S10 Imprinting System is an extremely flexible, variable data imprinting solution for high volume direct mail applications

Then

Kodak Announces First North American Sale of PROSPER S10 Imprinting System to Wilen Direct:

Wilen Direct, one of the first U.S. adopters of the KODAK PROSPER S10 Imprinting System, has recently completed the formal purchase process following several months of intense beta testing in which the KODAK System delivered outstanding results in quality and productivity. This announcement closely follows the news of Kodak’s first sale of a PROSPER S10 Imprinting System to Instant Data Forms in Hong Kong, in July.

Wilen Direct is running its PROSPER S10 Imprinting Systems three shifts a day, seven days a week.

Operating at 1,000 fpm (305 mpm) with a resolution of 600 dpi, the PROSPER S10 Imprinting System allows users to print variable data inline, saving time and money over a traditional, two-step process that combines offset pre-printed forms and offline laser imprinting.

QR Codes Are a Purls Best Friend, Yes, and a quibble. TransInfo?

I got my email from OutputLinks this morning. Then followed the links to Joe Barber's post at the QR blog and found the following. My only quibble is with "increased response rates are a CMO’s best friend."

Actually actionable information is what helps CMOs not get fired every 18 months. Response rates are just a snapshot of activity. It's similar to the way that a high stakes test is only a snapshot of a learning process. But real life is not a snapshot. It's a movie.

Actionable information is needed for a sustainable brand over the long term. Actionable intelligence helps one figure out what to do next. Every CMO needs to know what to do next. The under appreciated power of both QRPurlZ and human readable QRs in the form of TinyPurls is as a perfect tool for TransInfo. TransInfo can generate actionable intelligence.

High School education at the bottom of the pyramid
For Print, education and health are the under appreciated high value markets for the next couple of years. As a brand becomes a trusted conversation, the lessons earned in marketing can be applied in education.

Consider reinvented textbooks that lets the teacher know if and when a student clicked on a website, looked at a video and then created their response on a wiki, blog or at twitter.

The teacher/student user experience
Print out a "clickable" A4 at the MFP.
Hand out it out to the class.
"Please click on the link and watch the video on your smartphone or computer.
Write your questions or comments in your notebook or tweet them to the class."

Time and date stamped real time information exchange data created with no investment of teacher time. The teacher can monitor when time permits. It can be printed out to share with moma on open school night. If the questions and comments lead to an online stored conversation, it becomes a measure of learning that supplements the snapshot produced by standardized tests.

The real challenge in education is to change behavior. "Clickable" print is a new metric to monitor the behavior of information exchange. Information exchange is the observable behavior of learning. As the data emitted can be searched and analyzed, it will be possible to see what works and what doesn't with enough time to eliminate what doesn't.

QR Codes Are a Purls Best Friend:
We recently introduced a new brand called QRPurlZ which encode PURLS (personalized URLs) into a CodeZ QR. I am often asked, "Will QRPurlZ replace PURLs?" The answer is a resounding NO!

In fact QRPurlZ only serve to enhance the value PURLs bring campaigns and the continued deployment of PURLs will increase the demand for CodeZ QR.

Why do I say this?

PURLs allow the marketer to engage the customer in a one on one dialogue. Through this dialogue the marketer learns more about that customer which aids in even more relevant future communications.

The problem with PURLs has been that they require the recipient to be near an internet connected computer to fat-finger key a long character string.

QRPurlZ eliminate the cumbersome keying required by PURLS and can even be read by most cell phones. The cell phone - often called today's computer - is always on, always ready and always available which creates a perfect device to read QRPurlZ when the recipient is at their peak stage of interest. No more typing or waiting to get to the computer.

With QRPurlZ marketers can now encode their PURLS into a CodeZ QR.

Now a user can simply scan the code with their mobile phone or web cam and they are instantly connected to their personalized landing page.

So CodeZ QR really is a PURLs best friend by helping lower the barriers to immediate recipient response to dramatically increase campaign response rates.

And, increased response rates are a CMO’s best friend.

The Ace Group gets QR. But then they have been leading the parade for years.

This time it's Ikon. 'Copier contracts will cost taxpayers ' It's a new day with a new game.

When public institutions start running out of money and all the budgets are on line, my bet is that we are going to hear about lots more of these. This time the villain of the piece is Ikon. It probably would have made more sense, if Ikon notified the city of the overpayments, instead of keeping quiet and collecting the checks.

Next time it could be any global or independent. If it were me, I would find companies similar to Xippa.net that get paid by the buyer instead of the seller. But I'm not in the game so it's easy to say, hard to do.

Unauthorized copier lease costs big:
DocuCrunch.com
"Unauthorized copier lease costs big
July 8, 2009 by Steve Hannaford
Posted in: Dealers & Channel, In this week's e-newsletter, Latest News & Views

From Jacksonville, Florida comes the story of how an unauthorized city employee signed 48 copier leases and cost the city over $3 million to clean up the mess.

According to a story in the Florida Times-Union (“Copier contracts will cost taxpayers”, 10/29/07), the CFO of Jacksonville’s library system signed a series of 48 contracts with IKON Office Solutions to lease copiers for the library system. That’s particularly troubling since Jacksonville only has 21 library branches.
. . .
According to the article, the problem was compounded due to lazy oversight in the accounts payable stage: “The city didn’t detect the problem with IKON in part because it had other contracts with the Ohio-based company. The library was authorized to make some purchases from IKON off a state contract and a city contract. So when McDowell [the employee in question] did turn invoices over to the city’s finance officials for payments, the checks were authorized under the existing contracts.”

My Twitter Radar before Print '09. The printer to-do part is at the end of the post.

I turn on the radar for real about 3 hours before the market opens in NY. The real reason is that I learned how to wake up at 5:00 am when I was running a printing business. Estimates to do, production follow up, stress about making payroll and what "did that customer mean when they said blablabla.

The good news is that's over but the sleep cycle remains. In NY we are learning to "Say something, when you see something." So, here's what I said @ToughLoveforX this am.

Twitter is zipless communication. See Fear of Flying, 1973 Erica Jong. http://bit.ly/Hz7DY

Print is also zipless communication. That's why print is so cool.

"Isn't it a shame that pasng laws justified by the noblest of intentns dsn't guarntee results?"via @agentapopolis http://tinyurl.com/mmyun9

@Cibereconomy Stocks set for selloff http://bit.ly/qcPhT Me; My instinct is no. Japan is nervous with a new sheriff. Let's see what happens.

This podcast at Bloomberg really is a MUST LISTEN.

RT @Bsurveillance Moffett, Wolff Discuss Media, Newspaper Industries http://bit.ly/jIcAi ME: Must hear if you follow #twitterprint.

Anywhere/time TV means anywhere/time Print.

John Lipsky on anywhere/time Fora.TV http://bit.ly/DIjdU #SURV

As twitter moves into the enterprise and as a small business tool, it will speed up the formation of printernet publishing and #clickablePrint.

RT@coolcatteacher #education . . @ivread - the new way to track books you've read on Twitter http://bit.ly/E8YEw : ME: Most def' way cool!

The action post

Someone should talk to http://www.examiner.com about #printernet publishing and #clickableprint (or is it #smartprint ?)

Go HP Labs! "HP Labs has made good progress creating paper-thin plastic displays"

So maybe PARC+FXPAL + HP Labs + all the other R&D labs that are getting much too expensive to maintain by globals, could all play nicely together and fix the communication ecology in public education. If they sell certificates with face to face + online education delivery they could be MIT+Stanford+ Pixar University and be self-sustaining.

I'm not waiting. But I am hoping.

Anyway here's what the engineers are doing at HP. I love engineers.

From Deals & More:
blogger is being a little silly this am. So search on "Phicot" and you'll get there.
The money sentence:

In the next 18 months, HP plans to start delivering displays as part of Dick Tracy-style watches it is creating for U.S. Army infantry soldiers. Commercial applications are also planned in part through an HP spinoff,Phicot. It’s easy to envision the displays being used in everything from electronic magazines to wearable displays.
. . .
But the HP plastic displays could be made in relatively simple factories with new processing equipment. Taussig says that HP isn’t planning to manufacture the displays itself, but it could still benefit via the spinoff or other ways.

Twitter as a communication research tool

For the last few weeks, I've been playing with twitter and finding interesting-to-me tweets. The observable behavior that indicates "interesting-to-me" is if I bother to tweet about it. To manage learning observable behavior is more reliable than speech acts, either in the form of standardized tests or traditional surveys.

From time to time, it's also interesting-to-me to look over my tweets. 140 characters might turn out to be a set of useful "dots." I would call them memes. What I'm thinking is that demography + genetics + mimetics may be just the right lens to reveal the mechanisms of a communication ecology.

The hypothesis being tested:
Twitterstreams published in print with Smart QR are a useful tool for learning.

So far, it's working for me. But that doesn't mean it's going to work for anyone else. Until some real testing is done in the field it's only an educated guess based on my experience and reading. It's Nothing more.

At any rate, here's some "dots" -memes- in the world of Print.

"Sony seems like the bst hope for a strong Amazon altrntv (Plastic Logic is a fairly prmsng dark horse)" via @raduboncea http://bit.ly/RStuY

The point is that the ereader market is now really heating up. My opinion is that it will drive print on demand versions of those same books. Real readers have always been a small market. As that market grows, the demand of printed books will grow. It's confusing because we always had the reader/textbook market to ourselves. But a smaller piece of a growing market is ok.

"When you do something by heart, it bypasses some of the common sense processing" Seth's Blog http://bit.ly/4ejJGa

This is another view on the "too busy, being busy" problem. When you are too busy, being busy you tend to make decisions from the heart without engaging the brain.

1.
ToughLoveforX RT @risoprinter RISO blog: Leveraging Twitter for your printing business http://ow.ly/15LFIj
2.
from Risoprinter @ToughLoveforX Thanks for the blog post and thanks for the Follow. Looking forward to saying hello at Print '09 (RISO booth #1263)
3.
ToughLoveforX @risoprinter no thx necessary. If it's intrstng-2-me, I blog it. Riso is now quite intrstng-2-me. Won't be in Chicago. I'll follow @WTT.com

I did a post about Riso here yesterday. The exchanges above happened within a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon. What I think I'm seeing from Riso is a level of responsiveness and creativity that I think is going to give the other globals a real run for their money. The video at their YouTube channel was very impressive-to-me.

To be clear, I an NOT fishing for responses. Nor do I really care about building a "following" or creating a "brand." I care about fixing high school education at the bottom of the pyramid. To all my friends in the industry who have known me for many years, no fooling around, my day job is now managing my IRA.

In the service of trying to figure out when interesting-to-me, is interesting-to-someone else, here are the items that caught someone's attention and were "good enough" interesting to RT. If other people thought they were interesting, an unexpected pattern might emerge from these.

The RTs since August 23, 2009

BrentKPohlmanRT @ToughLoveforX: RT @BrentKPohlman @theindependent http://bit.ly/TOe86 Very cool Newspaper using Twitter! " #clickableprint Thanks 4 RT

dcarliRT @ToughLoveforX NatGeo's Responsible Brand www.bit.ly/F0J9R NatGeo+#CGX+#HP doing personalized #printernet publishing www.bit.ly/136L07

good_educationRT @ToughLoveforX RT@DPendletonSC "I am trying to look at recommendd educational lnks frm TweetDeck, but EVERYTHING is blocked fro ...

AugmentedAdvertRT: RT @ToughLoveforX #Clickableprint = connecting Print to anywhere, anytime video using Smart #QR codes. Sm.. http://bit.ly/10tVzf

qrpowerRT @ToughLoveforX #Clickableprint = connecting Print to anywhere, anytime video using Smart #QR codes. Smart #QR.. http://bit.ly/3iBNNo

twittor_groupsRT @ToughLoveforX "Doctors, health care groups use Twitter to reach public http://bit.ly/pMJFy (via @Twittor_Groups) Me: twitterstr ...

qrpowerRT @ToughLoveforX Note: "A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture." = read free/pay for print. Imagine if.. http://bit.ly/xYQvO

s_dunnGreat Teacher Resource RT @ToughLoveforX: "These Twitter feeds come from classroom teachers offering great advice .." http://bit.ly/CU7KP

qrpowerRT @ToughLoveforX New blog post: The Economist does an article on 2D. It's not just #QR. It's Data Matrix + Ezco.. http://bit.ly/18jwmq

katagana@ToughLoveforX great isn't it? Biomimicry is the way of the future!