JABET

At the end of this post are some quotes from a very interesting article by MATT RICHTEL called “Once a Booming Market, Educational Software for the PC Takes a Nose Dive”. It was published by the NYTimes on August 22, 2005 – the original is here.

In summary, the article shows that the retail sales of educational software for home computers had dropped from $498 million in 2000 to $152 million in 2004. Similarly, overall spending on software by K-12 schools was $2.3 billion in 2004, up 2 percent from a year earlier but down from $3.4 billion in 2001. So it may be understandable that companies do not want to get involved in a contracting market. But the article also proposes some reasons why this market is contracting. Below is a list mixed with our own observations:

• A lot of educational software was ‘bucketware’ – focusing on quantity vs. quality which discouraged buyers, and created unfortunate stigmas. “People used to buy educational technology for technology’s sake…now there needs to be returns, or results for the purchase”.
• Many websites began offering free reference, educational and entertainment content that ‘bucketware’ could not compete with.
• Increase of broadband which increased convenient access to these free online alternatives.
• Online alternatives are even more attractive to parents who can show “frustration at installing new programs”.
• A move in preschools and elementary schools towards portable electronic gadgets vs. educational software.
• Increase in computer availability in schools leading to less computer use at home and less educational software purchases at home. “Kids come home and they don’t want to get on the computer.”
• The statistics support this somewhat – companies making educational software for schools have experienced a less drastic drop of about 33% since 2001, but that is still a significant drop, so some of the other factors in this list are likely to be impacting the school market too.
• The pass-along effect – one purchase being handed down to siblings, which is possible because “titles and curriculums do not change much over the years”.
• Children are having more of a say on buying decisions, and choosing entertainment over education, especially given the stigma of education being not fun, only reinforced by unappealing ‘buckware’.
• Retailers reducing shelf space available for educational software, perpetuating a downward spiral.

However, it does note that overall spending on teaching tools and toys had increased (up to $4 billion on tutors alone). Therefore there is an opportunity for educational software to make a comeback if it adapts to market needs (e.g. points of difference over free internet content and parent’s interest in measuring their children’s academic progress) and perceptions (e.g. making it engaging and entertaining) and takes advantage of new technological opportunities (e.g. using the internet to streamline content delivery and permit the delivery of richer content). “It’s like a forest fire has burned through, making the scorched earth ready for future growth.

Below are a few quotes from the article:

Edward Vazquez Jr., 6, has numerous educational tools at his disposal. He learns math from flashcards and the alphabet from a popular electronic gadget called the LeapPad. But when it comes to instruction, the family’s personal computer sits dormant.

“He has a lot of toys for learning – not the computer,” said his father, Edward Vazquez, 28, a waiter in San Francisco. One reason, Mr. Vazquez said, is “you don’t see a lot of that software.”

That statement would have been unthinkable a few years ago. In 2000, sales of educational software for home computers reached $498 million, and it was conventional wisdom among investors and educators that learning programs for PC’s would be a booming growth market.

Yet in less than five years, that entire market has come undone. By 2004, sales of educational software – a category that includes programs teaching math, reading and other subjects as well as reference works like encyclopedias – had plummeted to $152 million, according to the NPD Group, a market research concern.

“Nobody would have thought those were the golden days,” Warren Buckleitner, editor of Children’s Technology Review, said of the late 1990’s. “Now we’re looking back and we’re saying, ‘Wow, what happened?’ ”

…

The result in business terms has been a downward spiral. Only 222 educational programs for PC’s sold more than 10,000 copies in 2004, down from 447 in 2001, according to NPD. As sales began to decrease, retailers devoted less and less shelf space to these titles, making recovery for the industry more difficult.

To regain their footing, some companies are starting to create programs that can connect to the Internet and cater to parents’ interest in measuring their children’s academic progress.

One reason for hope is that parents are spending more on educational tools and services than ever. Kirsten Edwards, an education software industry analyst with ThinkEquity Partners, a research firm, noted that overall spending on teaching tools and toys had increased. Spending on tutors, she said, rose to $4 billion in 2004, from $3.4 billion a year earlier.

Yet educational software is getting an ever smaller share of that consumer dollar. It is among the lowest-priced of any software category; in 2004 the average price for an educational program was $18, compared with $23 for the average computer game, according to NPD.

…

Educational software makers in the consumer market are not alone in their struggles. Those making software for schools have suffered too, executives and analysts said, from cutbacks in school budgets. Overall spending on software by K-12 schools was $2.3 billion in 2004, up 2 percent from a year earlier but down from $3.4 billion in 2001, according to ThinkEquity Partners.

Nonetheless, some say that children’s software can make a comeback. Mr. Buckleitner, an occasional contributor to the Circuits section of The New York Times, says there is still a future for teaching tools for the PC, especially as high-speed Internet access permits the delivery of richer content.

As for the drop in sales, he said, “it’s like a forest fire has burned through,” making the scorched earth ready for future growth.

I listened to a great podcast at www.ITConversations.com called “Lessons Learned from Game Design” by Will Wright (the inventor of Sim City, The Sims, The Movies etc.) during the SD Forum Distinguished Speaker Series (2005). You can listen to it here. It was a very interesting talk in general, but also covered Will’s views on education in gaming. Will talked about how he built lots of models as a kid, and how he sees the irony that he helped replace that hobby, but that he sees gaming as just building different types of models. There were two main points that hit home with me. I have made a clip of this part of the speech available at the end of this post.

How Montessori Can Impact Gaming and Vice Versa. (paraphrasing from the speech)

• Will was educated at a Montessori school till about 6th Grade and up until then, “did not realise there even was another way”.
• The Montessori teaching movement was started by Maria Montessori. It essentially says that Children are very good at educating themselves – it’s more about the teacher giving them the right tools and getting out of their way.
• Maria designed these amazing little things to teach maths, science and geography, e.g. amazing little block sets for teaching polynomial maths and little interactive maps you can piece together to learn geography.
• Will always thought that computers were ideal for that – children could learn at their own pace, in their own order of what they are interested in.
• He also saw it related to ‘learning styles’. Every kid can take their own path into it or through it. Bound to end up with a more effective educational medium.
• It was a big surprise to Will that computers haven’t been used more for this. It seemed to Will that computers are exactly what Maria Montessori would have wanted to use to teach.

It is easy to see how Will was inspired by this in Sim City, and the other games he has created. Keep an eye out for his latest work ‘Spore’, where you start off as a single celled organism and direct its evolution to a sentient species that develops space travel. Info and teasers are available on Spore, but the game is not due for release until 2007. I also totally agree with all these points, including ‘Why have computers not been used more for this?’. Hopefully the Imaginality work I am doing will address a lot of this…

Educational Gaming – Failures and Potentials. (again, paraphrasing from the speech)

• It has gotten to the point where if it says it is educational, it is the kiss of death in the games industry.
• Often because kids are now making their own purchasing decisions. That Age is moving down from 12 to 8 to 5. “You don’t sell software to a five year old by saying it is educational”.
• And also because educational software is traditionally stigmatised as not being fun.
• Will’s solution is to make it/market it on entertainment value, with education as a side effect. “I think that education and entertainment, when done the right way, become the same thing”.
• So these market forces have somewhat eliminated ’shovelware’ educational software (badly designed educational software, focusing on quantity vs. quality).
• Will would love to see gaming etc influences return educational software to a more mass-market medium.

Hmmm, I guess I had better stop calling Imaginality ‘educational’ . But with any luck, it will be fun and engaging enough to break down this barrier. I’ve noticed that Sony Playstation has pretty much gone out of its way on a number of occasions to avoid being associated with education. I think this is a sad, sad state of affairs indeed, especially if it had the opportunity to do public good like this and turned it down for commercial gain.

My next post actually develops this idea further, with more statistics and opinions from educational software developers.

My last comment is that www.ITConversations.com rocks! This is where I found and listened to this seminar, but they also have audio recordings of a large number of (mostly tech oriented) conferences available for free. Thanks to www.ITConversations.com I have been able to ‘attend’ at least three conferences from the other side of the world, without taking a single day off work, for free. Incredible stuff.

 

 Clip from ITConversations-195 - Will Wright - Montessori and Education in Gaming [4:33m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

In addition to this blog on Technology in Education, I have started a blog/podcast hybrid on my website www.MindSpaceArt.com on Technology in Art. It has the very original name of the MindSpace Art Blog/Podcast. Occasionally there will be some crossover, and this post is one of those times.

On the MindSpace Art Blog/Podcast I recently posted my perspectives on the O’Reily ‘Web 2.0 Conference’ StyleMark protection issue. In addition to sharing my two cents worth, I mention how it is actually quite damaging for this issue to remain largely unresolved (even though O’Reilly has backed down) and I propose an interesting solution. I have cited this below:

Unfortunately I tuned into this podcast a couple of weeks after the fact, but even so, I’d like to share an interesting perspective. It was one of many discussions that flared up around this blog post by Tom Raftery from IT@CORK (in Ireland) who received a cease and desist letter from the legal team of O’Reilly publishers. Apparently O’Reilly StyleMarked (similar to TradeMarked) the term “Web 2.0 Conference” and after many opportunities, took this opportunity to start enforcing it on a small 1/2 day conference on the other side of the world. Follow either of the above links for more info.

Firstly, I should mention that I am not against companies protecting their ideas and their names, but I think O’Reilly has stepped way out of line for many reasons. Firstly, having known about it for 9 months and waited till the last 2 weeks was just rude. Secondly, not bothering to have a polite discussion and jump straight into legal threats is not only very rude, but very inefficient (unless you like feeding legal piranhas). Thirdly, when I was taught about trademarks, I was told that you had to be careful, because if your trademark becomes a generic term, you loose control of it, so I think O’Reilly has lost their dubious control anyway.

It is almost an anti-climax that O’Reilly have no jurisdiction in Ireland to be trying to enforce anyway – while it is extremely shameful to O’Reilly, it kind of leaves the core issue unresolved. And as I learn from Lawrence Lessig, unresolved issues are a lawyer’s playground, and ‘chill’ the environment. In this case, people in America will still be scared of receiving a letter from O’Reilly, so many will confirm, whether they really need to or not.

So I propose an interesting solution to this issue. I think from now on, everyone should refuse to refer to the term “Web 2.0″ and instead use the term “Web 2.1″. Not only does this give O’Reilly no leg to stand on, it also sends a clear message that the social web will not stand for corporate intimidation. So in this way, it is describing a new version of the web, which justifies an incremental version increase. And with an almost self prophetic irony, it is creating a new version of the web that the term itself ushers in. Web 2.0 has been around long enough for it to look significantly different now compared to when it first emerged, so I think it is high time to evolve to Web 2.1. Web 2.1 can also represent the related fights for Internet Neutrality (www.savetheinternet.com and www.itsournet.org) and Free Culture (www.lessig.org and www.eff.org).

To pre-empt any future issues, I’ll state that not only Web 2.1, but Web X.X can now be considered a generic term, so no one can own trademark control over it in the future.

Of course, the only way for the term Web 2.1 to become completely generic and for people to be free of unacceptable corporate restrictions and intimidation is for this idea to be spread and used. Ok, sure, it is a long shot, but if it was to happen, ideally, it should not be used blindly, but should be used with knowledge of what it represents and why it became necessary.

I’ve now dug a little deeper, and found that quite a few people have proposed that incrementing Web 2.0 is a good idea, which is great – it might just catch on yet. Liam Breck mentions that Web 2.5 is already coined for “the fusion of web 2.0 tools with mobile tech” so its probably a good thing we steered clear of that. However, none of the posts that I read went into the same detail I’ve covered above:

• Web 2.0 Deprecated
• Web 2.1: Taking Back the Revolution from Big Money
• Proprietary Web 2.0
• O’Reilly Lays Claim to Phrase “Web 2.0″
• Web 2.1
• Upgrade to Web 2.1 – It Contains a Necssary Patch
• Time for Web 2.1?
• Web 2.0 taken, try Web 2.1
• And Others

This is another post on my views on the EdTechTalk discussion (audio here and transcript here) recently between Stephen Downes and George Seimens about (among other things) views on objective and subjective knowledge and its impact on teaching (transfer of knowledge vs. connective learning). See this post for many more details and transcripts etc.

This discussion also asked the question: “What is the role/goal of education”? I agree that this is fundamentally important question, because we cannot hope to achieve this goal if we are not clear what the goal is. While I will not comment on what the role/goal of education is now, I would like to ‘remind’ people what the role of education was in the past – in the industrial age.

I have heard it said that the two goals of education in the industrial age were essentially:

1. to get children away from their parents so that the parents could be productive factory workers, and
2. to make the children ready to be effective factory workers.

This is particularly important because the current education system as we know it was actually instigated during the industrial age, supposedly to achieve the two goals outlined above. As we are still bound by this industrial age educational system, we should be aware of this, and aware of the goals it had in mind. We should seriously ask ourselves if they are the same goals that we have today, and if not, can the current educational system achieve our new goals?

The alternative is not a pretty picture. If we continue to use an education system designed to make human robots, what happens when these human robots become obsolete in favour of Chinese human robots and eventually, true blue robot robots?

This is another post on my views on the EdTechTalk discussion (audio here and transcript here) recently between Stephen Downes and George Seimens about (among other things) views on objective and subjective knowledge and its impact on teaching (transfer of knowledge vs. connective learning). See this post for many more details and transcripts etc.

To continue my critique of Stephen’s view that there is no objective knowledge, I believe that objective knowledge does exist in some situations, but that often the domain of what is considered objective knowledge is extended too widely and encompasses too many things. It can, like many things, be misused and abused. For example, it is easier for a teacher to portray something as objective and not have to research or explain caveats or varying opinions. And of course, many politicians who care more about themselves than the good of their constituency would far prefer their views to be regarded as objective facts.

I believe it is an inescapable fact that 1+1=2 is objective and that sure, later on, students can learn about other perspectives like base 2, base 8 and non-Euclidian geometry etc, but these perspectives do not make 1+1 subjective, they are simply more detailed levels of knowledge that the student will be taught later, after they have grasped the fundamentals. Initially, there is a lot of value in a student understanding, becoming proficient with, and building upon simple, reliable concepts. There is value in them being easy to understand, easier to become proficient, and possibly most importantly, increased confidence in their knowledge and abilities.

This is essentially the foundation of Direct Instruction (DI) – a structured transmission, clarification, verification and practice of knowledge. The aim is to make students very proficient at the fundamentals so that their confidence is boosted, they stay excited about learning and that when they can focus on new, complex concepts, without getting distracted by slow, unsure fundamentals. A relative of mine has studied DI in great depth and compared it to a wide variety of other techniques. He has found that many solid studies show that students using DI far outperform students for pretty much any other technique and can help struggling students advance 2 to 3 year levels in a single year. What I found most interesting was that this technique does not continue exclusively – eventually the student proceeds to open, inquiry based learning, where a healthy view on subjectivism becomes important.

So it would seem that a healthy combination of structured transfer of knowledge (related to objective knowledge) and demonstration/interaction/inquiry (related to subjective knowledge) is not only possible, but highly effective. So while Stephen makes a simple, elegant case that objective knowledge does not exist, and that considering any knowledge to be objective creates bad teaching practices, I would suggest that objective knowledge does exist, and that if handled responsibly, it can have powerful positive impacts, and possibly even contribute to connective learning.