Online 2011 - Current and Future E-Book Business Models

The central point of Agor Eiskop’s talk was that piracy is going to be a big problem for e-book publishers.

He suggested three possible paths that they might take to get round that:
1. Selling advertising space in e-books. People would get less advertising in their book if they paid.
2. Product placement. Yes really.
3. Digital Rights Management – The same kind of copyright protection measures that the music industry tried without much success.

He then suggested some business models that are likely to be used by e-book publishers.

• Subscription based models.
• Patron driven e-book acquisition for libraries.
• Crowd driven acquisition for publishers. This involves publishers offering people a range of authors on their website. If an author gets enough support their book gets published. Supporters usually get personal messages or a mention in the book or similar.
• Freebies i.e. the first half is free but then you have to pay to finish it.

He concluded with some predictions for the future.

• The publishing industry will be less centralised and there will be more independent players.
• There will be new ways of reading including collaborative reading.
• New roles for libraries and others – He said that he thought libraries would focus on preservation which was odd because it didn’t seem to follow from his other points.

Reading between the lines the message seems to be that nobody has a solution to the problem of e-book piracy so the publishing industry is likely to fragment and try lots of different solutions.

Online 2011 - Curate, Create, Innovate: Creating value through content creation

Andy Malonis from Cengage Learning talked about adding value to collections that you curate by creating new resources from existing content.

As he admitted this is much easier for organisations like Cengage who own vast amounts of content. As a result they don’t have to worry about the copyright problems usually involved in playing around with content.

Creative curation is partly inspired by a shift in the way people use the word ‘curate’. People in various creative industries are increasingly using it to imply that they have a ‘discerning eye and great taste’ in whatever their field happens to be. So someone who sees themselves as an expert might claim to curate albums or trainers.

He pointed to DVDs as an example of creative curation. Each DVD is usually a collection that includes the film itself and various extras. The film companies are adding value to content that they own by putting it together in new ways.

Andy’s example from his own work was a new mobile app which visitors to the Arlington National Cemetery can use to look up biographical information about the people who are buried there. Cengage’s huge database of biographies is a core part of their business. This app just applies that content in a new context. Creative curation often involves adding new meta-data to the existing information. In this case they added geospatial information so the biographical information was linked to the location of the right grave.

We are likely to find that suppliers are increasingly repackaging and adapting their existing content for new contexts particularly for use on mobile devices. Some of the resulting products might be useful in the future. However the real hope must be that librarians can play that game too.

Online 2011 - Gamification and E-Learning 2.0

Gamification was defined by our speaker Jonathon Bishop as ‘using elements of game play typically seen in video games to encourage participation in websites such as online communities’. The game elements are things like completing tasks, moving through levels and collecting points.

He has done a lot of research into using this idea for educational purposes and moving it beyond its roots in online communities. His latest work is all about using gamification to rehabilitate young offenders. This mostly seemed to involve relabeling existing methods to make the process seem more like a game but maybe I missed some of the subtleties.

The idea is to change young people’s perceptions of what’s happening so they engage with and perhaps even enjoy the process. This can also be a challenge in education so if gamification works for young offenders maybe it will be coming to a college near you.

Online 2011 - The Challenge of Mobile Literacy in Schools

I heard Sarah Pavey talk at a COFHE Information Literacy / Teach Meet training day earlier this year. She is the School Librarian at Box Hill School and one of the things that she touched upon in that earlier talk was her use of mobiles as learning tools. I remembered her as an enthusiastic speaker with some good ideas so I was looking forward to this session.

The idea that mobiles can be useful in education isn’t universally accepted. In fact at Box Hill School they are officially banned. The relationship between child protection, network security and teaching mobile literacy is a difficult one. Opportunities lead to risk so it is hard to find the right balance.

As you can guess from the title Sarah thinks current approaches are too focussed on avoiding risk at all costs. She also made the point that blanket bans are commonly ignored and argued that clear guidelines might actually be more effective.

She highlighted the advantages of mobile phone apps over letting students search on the open web. We can check where an app comes from and point students towards reliable ones from respected sources. Obviously we try to point students towards reliable websites but the temptation to just google it isn’t there with apps. They are arguably less wild and wooly than the web.

Before I go onto the possible uses I should include the disclaimer that the following assumes high levels of smart phone ownership. Box Hill is an independent school but Sarah provides training on mobile literacy at a variety of schools. She thinks that levels of smart phone ownership are very high among young people from all backgrounds. That said there are obvious ethical and practical issues around assuming that students have access to particular technology.

Educational uses for mobiles

1. Using phones to record information

Filming - Students can record lectures, drama performances etc.

Speaking - Students can use mobiles as Dictaphones to record their thoughts. The Vlingo app even turns speech into text.

Collating – Onenote and Evernote both help students to organise and reference their research.
Easybib lets you scan book barcodes to get the correct reference citation.

2. Using the phone to find information

At Box Hill they signed all of the students up to the local Public Library service. This meant that they all had access to e-books through Overdrive which is apparently particularly good at supplying fiction for young adults.

Various apps exist which supply students with information. The one that jumped out at me (I'm sorry) was Moonjump. If you jump with it turned on it tells you how high you would have jumped if you had been on the moon. She did mention more practical examples.

Sarah puts relevant apps on her subject resources guides. This is a simple thing that we could all do with a little research.

3. Using the phone to revise.

Bitesize and i-revise both exist in mobile app form.

Cramberry- Creating revision flash cards.

Inquizitor – Creating revision quizzes.

Epic win – A to do list but each time you tick off a task you progress through a game. I will come back to gamification in a future blog post on Online 2011.

4. Creativity

QR reading links - Putting a QR code on a book that takes you to further information ie reviews, the author's site etc.

QR codes on brochures and posters.

Interactive storytelling - These sound like great fun. My favourite was a school wide event where students used their phones as ghost detectors and had to complete various tasks.

Challenges

Sarah acknowledged that her ideas rely on changing perceptions of mobile phones among educators and parents. She wants people to move away from the idea that mobiles are a threat, a source of disorder, a distraction or worse. She wants everyone to see them as an asset. Tools for discovering and organising knowledge. Tools for revision and creativity.

Sarah is advocating a significant cultural shift in schools and colleges. She has some solutions to this challenge. Training sessions for teachers and parents apparently have a big impact. Also parents often drop their initial hostility (which can be intense) once they've seen how the phones are being used for education.

While many good quality apps are free there isn't a mechanism for buying them in bulk. Mobile learning shifts the burden for providing hardware (the smart phones) and much of the software (the apps)onto the students. That might sound tempting in the current climate but if mobile learning is going to be big we will have to be careful to ensure that students who don't have smart phone don't feel excluded. Hunting down good free apps sidesteps the software half of the problem.

In terms of smart phones the point is that a lot of students do have these potentially very powerful tools and they enjoy using them. We risk wasting an opportunity if we ignore the idea that mobiles can be used to engage students and advance their learning.

Online 2011 - Unlocking Archival Magazine Content for Academic Research

Matt Kibble from Proquest gave a talk about their project to make archives of magazines available to libraries. Obviously this was essentially a promotional talk but it was quite interesting.

They are launching two archives. The first one includes every copy of the American edition of Vogue from its launch in 1892 (I had no idea it was that old) to the present day. The second features a range of different magazines on the popular entertainment industry. These range from the big names like NME or Variety to less well-known titles which researchers might have previously overlooked entirely. The popular entertainment collection spans from 1880 to 2000.

From the magazine publishers’ point of view this is a great project because it creates value from previously unexploited resources which they’ve just been sitting on.

The archives will be useful for students and researchers from a range of different academic disciplines. Vogue is most obviously valuable for the study of fashion but it is also a great resource for historians and others. The popular entertainment archive also has historical value. It will help film studies and music students to trace developments in their fields.

There was a lot of work involved in preparing the archives. The Vogue archive alone includes over 400,000 pages. They needed to carry out specialist indexing both in terms of subject matter and the format. Proquest are used to indexing academic journals which have fairly straightforward metadata and very well-established practices. Items like images and adverts needed non-standard metadata and a bit more thought. They also cross-referenced related information and created a controlled vocabulary for fashion.

All kinds of previously largely untapped primary sources are increasingly available for study and research. These archives are an interesting example of that and I appreciated the chance to take a behind the scenes look at all the work that goes into making them available.

Online 2011 - Introduction and Beating Google into Submission

Yesterday I attended the Online Information 2011 exhibition. Described by itself as “the largest event dedicated to the information industry” and by colleagues as an excellent source of boiled sweets and other freebies. The trade fair element of the event did seem to feature a lot of people trying to lure customers with free pens (and very occasionally sweets). RSC Publishing offered free coffee though which was quite clever of them.

The event also features a programme of free seminars on various topics. These were my main motivation for going. To prove I didn’t spend the whole day wondering around picking up sweets and pens I'm going to blog my notes on the talks I attended.

Beating Google into Submission

This presentation and further information is available at http://www.rba.co.uk/as/

Karen Blakeman’s talk was all about making Google do what you want it to. This is easier said then done because Google is increasingly trying to second guess what you ‘really’ mean. She gave some great examples. Most dramatically trying to find out what two birds in her garden were up to led to confusion between ‘coots’ and ‘lions’. ‘Coots mating behaviour’ turned into ‘Lions mating behaviour’. She assumes that Google decided ‘coots’ was meant to be ‘cats’ but we can’t be sure and that’s part of her point. It’s hard to know exactly what Google is doing with your search terms.

Apparently Google insiders have told her that the search engine is second guessing us more because more people are using it via mobile devices and it’s hard to type correctly on those.

There is a ‘verbatim’ option but you have to run a normal search first and then select ‘verbatim’ from the menu on the left hand side of the results page.

Alternatively you could try repeating a search term i.e. ‘coot coot mating behaviour’ or playing with the order of your search terms. These approaches are a bit hit and miss though.

You’ve probably heard that the + sign no longer works. Apparently the reasoning was that they want to use it to search for Google+ profiles.

In theory you can still use quote marks but in practice if Google doesn’t think it’s found enough results it will panic and throw in stuff that doesn’t quite fit your search.

Second guessing isn’t the only problem. Google has also started to include results from your social media contacts and their contacts. All very well if everyone in your networks (and all their friends) are experts but how likely is that?

Naturally she ran through the Advanced Search features and the essential commands. See her presentation for details. It also includes useful blogs and websites for staying up to date with Google and internet searching generally.

From a librarian perspective perhaps the main problem with all this is that when we are trying to teach people how to search effectively they won’t necessarily be getting the same results as us. That is something we should think about.

Watch this space for notes on the other talks that I attended.

The New Blended Learning

Blended learning is often used as a euphemism for e-learning but that is a vast oversimplification.

Obviously. Who would make a foolish mistake like that? OK to be honest when I signed up for this training event at the BCS I thought it was going to be about e-learning. In my defence it was a British Computer Society event and e-learning is an important part of the blend.

The speaker was Clive Shepherd a learning consultant and an expert on the use of e-learning in training.

The presentation itself is available here.

So if blended learning isn't e-learning what is it exactly? What's being blended and why does it matter?

There are two overarching factors that are blended.
1. The social context - Individual, face to face, group.
2. Strategies - Exposition, instruction, guided discovery, exploration.

These two then shape the mix of the other factors that you have to blend. As the name suggests a blended learning programme should include a wide mixture of different learning experiences. Part of the idea is that traditional training / education doesn't include a wide enough range of experiences. So for example a degree programme shaped by the blended philosophy might include some work based learning and online collaborative projects as well as the more traditional methods.

Education is more varied than it used to be and to some extent this model seems to be about projecting that trend forward and imagining the possibilities. On the other hand Clive pointed out that education hasn't changed anywhere near as quickly as he thought it was going to when he entered the field.

Once you've decided on your mix of social contexts and strategies you use that to shape your blend of methods and media. So if you want to use exploration as part of your blend and you want the students to learn as a group you might set up a collaborative research project. That could then be organised online or in real world classes.

When we try to decide on the right media we should think about timing. Do you want the training to be synchronous (in real time) or asynchronous (not in real time). So a lecture or a seminar would be synchronous. A training video or a recording of a webinar would be asynchronous.

We also covered the pressures that training organisations face. The main pressure unsurprisingly is the need to cut costs in the current difficult economic climate. But training departments also face an increasing demand for just-in-time training. People want to know how to perform a particular task and they need to know now. In the long-term environmental pressures are likely to become increasingly important. All of these pressures mean that organisations are rethinking the way that they train their staff.

OK, stick with me here because this bit sounds counter-intuitive at first particularly if like me you work in education rather than workplace training. At the moment the default for training is face to face and synchronous. Other approaches have to be argued for. Clive thinks that we should shift to a new default. The starting position for training should be online and asynchronous.

It's important to note that he's not saying all training should be online and not in real time. You start there when you're planning the training but then you decide if you need to move on. Some kinds of training will be more effective in real time. So the second option is online but synchronous. In some situations face to face sessions will be the best way to engage people so in that case you move on again. That third and final step is the current default: face to face and in real time.

The implication is that face to face training should only be used when we think it will have a particularly powerful impact. Interestingly he used the analogy of music and drama. Be honest what percentage of the music you heard this year and the drama you watched was live? On the other hand those live events that you did attend were probably far more intense experiences than the recordings or the broadcasts.

Is the conclusion for training providers that face to face sessions should be special occasions to inspire people but online learning should be the default? Given current economic pressures this might well quickly become the reality of training in most workplaces.

Where does that leave education? What are the implications for librarians in the educational sector and elsewhere? It's definitely something that we need to think about.

It's easy to see university education moving in this direction. It has already done so to some extent. Schools will always have a greater emphasis on face to face in their blend, for educational reasons and for practical ones. FE colleges will probably be somewhere in the middle. But at all levels online learning is going to become more important. This is generally accepted but it might accelerate if we find ourselves preparing students for workplaces where almost all training is online.

The growth of virtual learning environments at all levels of education gives us the infrastructure to move towards a far greater use of e-learning in our educational blend. In theory this should be a development that benefits librarians. Within educational institutions we are often at the cutting edge in terms of VLEs, online resources and related learning technologies.

Clive also advocated a shift in the balance between resources and courses. At the moment training provision focuses on providing courses. Resources are provided to help people to complete their courses. A training department that's thinking in terms of blended learning would reverse the focus. Courses would inspire people and give them the understanding and intellectual tools to explore the topic / skill set. After the course the training department would give trainees the resources they need to explore on their own. The resources would be at least as important if not more important than the courses.

Again Clive's focus is workplace training so even assuming he's got the trends right we need to think about how this will translate into education. If it does make the jump then it definitely sounds like an opportunity for academic librarians. Even if it remains in the world of workplace training this vision of the future needs our skills.

Education and training do benefit from using a wide range of different social contexts, media and methods. E-learning is going to be an increasingly important part of the mix but that shift gives us the opportunity to think about each element of the mix.

Thank you to Clive Shepherd for a thought provoking evening. You can find out more about his ideas on his blog or on the onlignment website.

Thank you to the British Computer Society as well. I recommend looking at their events calender if you are looking for CPD opportunities. Like many of their sessions this was free to everyone including non-members. They also supplied free wine and cheese during the break which was very nice of them. I will be looking out for future events (not just for the wine and cheese).

So that's blended learning. Not just a euphamism for e-learning after all.