The recent announcment from Notre Dame regarding a new class offering is just one of many "e" things happening in colleges and schools across the country. In fact, the rate at which this type of announcement is being made is beginning to cause me to lose interest.

I'm not losing interest in the topic of using 21st tools to reach 21st century studens. I'm losing interest in this sort of thing being reported as news. The media might as well report on the changing of the seasons or another bad year for the Cubs.

Instead of being excited about another set of educators awaking from their coma and integrating technology into the instructional process, I'm shifting some of my focus to what all this will mean when these students hit the workforce.

How will your business cope with incoming workers who aren't very interested in using email since it is "so slow"? Are you ready to have all your policies and procedures delivered as reflowable text so that your new crop of workers can read them how they want, when they want, on the device they want?

Forget about cross-department meetings. What are you doing about having cross-continent meetings using something like Skype?

With each upcoming year millions of students will be entering the workforce with an expectation that your business will communicate with them like they want you to. This is true of your employees. It is also, and perhaps more dangerously so, for your customers.

So, what are doing with your internal communications and your external messaging that will allow you to survive this shift in the needs and demands of this new generation?

As I sat down to write this posting I couldn’t decide whether to point towards the promise of the future with a posting about all the exciting news around the interactive Higher_Ed textbooks being delivered by a start up called Inkling or to point towards the same old same old from the past and present about how today’s teachers are so underprepared to integrate technology in the classroom.

The Inkling story has hit my desk from a variety of sources, some of which have been sent and resent to me a number of times. The technology is perfect for the iPad and they have built what appears to be a solid relationship with McGraw-Hill on the content side. Deals with Wiley and Gengage are also in place and titles are on the way.

The unprepared teacher story was sent to me by a guy I know well and respect even more who has a tremendous grasp on the problems facing America’s classroom. The story itself is not really news since we have long been committing the double-foul of 1) mindlessly spending on technology in schools just for the sake of having some and 2) not doing anything to help the teacher understand the implications of the technology or even how to effectively use technology in an educational setting. The item that was sent is a posting from over the summer by Geoff Fletcher that is a lament on the TWENTY YEARS that have gone by, with very little progress, on this problem.

Those of you that know me realize that I would typically go for the positive Inkling story and all the hope and promise that it holds. Those of you that know me well realize that with school starting (already started in many states) soon, I just couldn’t let the unprepared teacher story go by without comment.

So to paraphrase the words of Dickens, these are the best of times and the worst of times.

Never before in human history have there been so much talent and so much technology available to truly create unique and compelling learning products and learning environments. A week does not go by without a new and interesting piece of content usage hitting my inbox. It is truly amazing and rewarding to spend time each week working with the people who are making all these things happen.

Never before in American educational history have there been so many challenges and so little real support for the front lines of the classroom.  Our schools and our teachers are dramatically underfunded and underappreciated. They are asked to perform under tremendous pressure without any clear guidance for what a good job looks like and even less professional development on how to go about accomplishing the tasks at hand.

This is not a ringing endorsement of all things technical and new. Nor is this a condemnation of our schools and school boards.

This is a call to action for anyone and everyone to start doing something about these conflicting story lines. If you are on the technology side, spend some serious time with regular teachers trying to understand how education actually happens. A good buddy of mine says “Curriculum is what happens when you close the classroom door”. Use your imagination, your creativity, and some of that funding to make a real and meaningful difference in how a child learns. Making products and money is important. I get that. We all have to eat. Making a positive impact on the lives of children is way more important. I think we could all eat a little less to make that kind of difference in the world. Profits might suffer a little. Shareholders might get angry. The children have to matter more.

If you are a member of the educational side of the equation, spend some more time learning about how to connect with your students through the technologies that matter in the rest of their lives when they are not in your school. You already work hard for your money. I get that. You are already doing lesson plans and grading papers at home. I get that too. Unfortunately, the children still need more from you. Pick a tool, learn it well, and integrate it into your instruction. Share what you are doing with others. This year’s students can’t wait until you have more time or until the district will give you an in-service day.

All of you please take a few minutes and think about this and then do what your heart tells you to do.

A qiuck Google search returns over a quarter of a million hits on the phrase "textbook rental". Media reports are covering this different business model from every angle. Renting textbooks on campus went from "What?" to "Can we do that?" to "We are going to do it" to "We are doing it" in record time. The major players Follett and Barnes & Noble are making headlines with their programs. Newer players like Chegg are also making a big push.

The practice has become so commonplace at colleges and universitites that the The National Association of College Stores declared 2010 the "Year of Rental"

Of course how all this acitivity will actually benefit any of the students, booksellers, or publishers is stil a big unknown. Even with millions of dollars each being spent each week as students return for the fall term, the long range impacts are still unknown. However, it will probably be very hard to put "the toothpaste back in the tube" if publishers find out they don't like what they find when they look closely at the numbers.

Regardless of what happens on campus, one does have to wonder if the rental idea will happen in any meaningful way in k-12. Will the typical barriers to new thinking prevent such a thing? Will the adoption-granting states and the publishers who win those adoptions snuff out this model before it even has a chance to get started? With more and more parents of public school children being asked to pay higher fees and/or actually buy their student's textbooks, would rental present a good option?

It is very early in the drama, but this is one movie I am certainly going to watch very closely.

Buying textbooks? Renting textbooks? Selling textbooks?

If you have a thought, please share it.

This link takes you to a story that explains the painfully obvious situation where students who don't study well are not aided by technology. The outcome of the study is not really that surprising since it is self-evident to anyone who ever went to school or tried to teach.

To me the amazing element is that somebody even bothered to do the study in the first place. Perhaps an even more amazing element is that somebody funded the study and somebody else decided to publish it.

What is on the horizon for these groundbreaking researchers? Discovering that humans are made up of mostly water. Perhaps they will report some other earth shattering news like Hydrogen is most common element in the universe.

Technology does not make anybody smarter or better in any way. Technology is simply a tool, like a pencil or a notepad, that when used appropriately helps people do what they do better. If your business has a mistake prone process, automating that same process will only help you make the mistakes faster.

Likewise with students and teachers. A good teacher is already a good teacher. A good teacher with better tools will be a better teacher. A bad teacher with better tools will still be a bad teacher. A good student with better tools will be a better student. A bad student with better tools will still be a bad student.

It is hard to say there are good and bad teachers and students. However, it is one of those ugly secrets of edcuation that we typically don't discuss. While it is possible (ask me and I'll share examples) to use technology to help WILLING teachers and students grow from bad to good, it is not because of the technology.

The situation turns on the intent of the humans involved, not on the pieces of hardware or software. For a quarter of a century I have tried to make a difference in this equation by delivering the best possible technology into the education environment. Trust me when I say the technology is never the answer. In fact, it can often have the opposite effect. People can often say "we'll just use the internet, the laptop, Wikipedia, an iPad" and everything will be OK.

If, and only if, the PEOPLE involved in the process of selecting, deploying, and using the technology understand that the driver to success is the PEOPLE involved in the actual teaching/learning process does an Ed_Tech project have a chance to truly make a difference.

Any teachers out there have a comment? Any students? Any tech providers?

Jump on it and share your thoughts.

There has been a digital ton of news flying around the past week or so regarding devices, content, law suits, and new reader software. There have also been some very interesting stories about some major partnerships being struck between firms such as Follett and Blackboard.

Most of those individual stories could have led to a posting here on my blog. However, I'm taking a different path this week.

I want to take a few minutes and talk about how to properly serve a marketplace. A very wise man once told me that the business of staying in business is very simple. I will not attempt to recreate his exact words as I would surely embarrass myself. However, I'm confident I can retell the main steps:

Get to know the market you want to serve. 

Provide that market with an exceptional level of service at a reasonable price.

Listen for the things that are so important to your market that they will pay for them.

Remember that profit is the desired result of this relationship, not the point of the relationship.

If you does these things, the market will provide you with enough funding to continue to serve them.

Ok, now I'm going to call out The Barnes & Noble Library Services Program. It appears that these folks have never heard, or at least don't follow, the words mentioned above. I encountered the B&N LSP at ALA in June of this year. Based on the literature available and on various conversations with booth staff, it appears B&N LSP doesn't actually provide any LSP. 

They do not provide MARC records.

They do not provide shelf-ready processing.

They do not provide collection development consultation.

They do not provide age and reading levels.

I'll just stop there and rest on the fact that this program has not, in any way, been designed with libraries, librarians, or library patrons in mind.

It is very rare for me to comment on a specific firm or a specific set of services. However, this disconnect between what libraries want and need and what B&N is providing is so large that I had to say something. OK, I feel better.

If you are with B&N, jump in and let me know what's what.

Whoever you are and whatever market you are serving, please make sure that your focus is on SERVING and not on anything else. As I tried to indicate above, if your focus is on serving the money will take care of itself.