Pete Sharma Associates

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As Facebook goes public with an estimated valuation of $100bn, and I was wondering whether to buy stock (I’m not), I thought I’d bone up on how Facebook came to pass, and where their seed money came from. The trail led me, rather surprisingly, to Bono. The uber-cool U2 frontman is a hugely astute businessperson, and in his spare time is managing director of Elevation Partners.

Elevation Partners is a private equity firm which invests unfeasibly large sums in media, entertainment and technology industries. But not just anything shiny will do. Bono and his mates are looking for technology disruption.

Basically, technology disruption is some new thing that will set the world out of joint. To paraphrase Steve Jobs, something which changes everything.

As Elevation Partners point out in their mission statement, four technology disruptions are currently changing the way we interact with the world.

Network – smartphones and tablets are exponentially expanding the number of net-connected devices. Expanding wifi and 3/4G networks means that being always online is edging closer to everyday reality for an ever-growing number of people.

Internet Technology – new operating systems and HTML5 are emerging as new software platforms, enabling (for example) more engaging content and behavioural advertising.

Navigation – users are discovering the world in different ways and consuming content differently, via mobile apps, touch screens, social networking

Architecture – out with the vast inbuilt memories on your private PC, in with the Cloud – the godlike system which will mean everything is available everywhere, all the time.

So what has this got to do with me, you may ask. Well, everything, actually. A little Friday fantasy scenario. Imagine you’re a university student learning English. Over your cornflakes your tablet beeps at you, alerting you to your online group lesson in five minutes time, delivered to you and your classmates through GooglELT. You settle into an armchair and join your class, quite relaxed; you were puzzled by the first conditional while slaving over an interactive worksheet yesterday, but the programme automatically identified the problem and upsold you an extra activity – via a micropayment off your credit card – which gave you additional practice and a clear video explanation of conditional sentences. Your teacher has already been informed and so doesn’t have to go over that point of grammar yet again.

You’ve never met your teacher face to face, and you have never been in an ELT classroom in your life. You can learn in your local cafe, in a train, at home. You don’t know what a text book is. You buy your learning in chunks, as and when you need it and when it’s identified by your learning behaviour as being relevant to your learning needs.

So if you’re a publisher, consider that perhaps most of what you’re doing right now will be as useful as a bike to a fish in ten years’ time. The future drivers of English Language Teaching may be Google, or 2K Games, or Facebook, if they perceive the value opportunity in ELT. In this brave new world, the winners will be those who have the foresight to research, identify and then encompass disruptive technologies creatively, not those who continue to do stuff in the way they have always done stuff. Or – even worse – think they are doing new stuff when in fact they are just doing old stuff on new platforms.

Will we all learn to love it? Well, that’s another issue. Steve Jobs seldom listened to music on his iPod – he preferred vinyl. I’m off to have a coffee, and stick “Rattle and Hum” on the record deck.

Byron

Tweeting: it’s not just for birds

This blog post looks at the Internet phenomenon of Twitter. We’ve all heard of Twitter. But do you tweet? And why would you?

For the rest of this blog entry, please visit the Linguarama blog. http://blog.linguarama.com/

Last week I was down at Olympia yet again, this time visiting what is claimed to be “Europe’s leading showcase of technology supported workplace learning” -  the Learning Technologies exhibition.

Aimed primarily at the corporate training market, language learning was much in evidence with the usual suspects such as EF and Rosetta Stone exhibiting. A slick stand showcased speexx, the latest corporate language training offering from Germany’s Digital Publishing group. Speexx offers the kind of holistic solution that companies – and increasingly universities – are looking for; content, an LMS and real teachers, all neatly packaged together as a complete solution, and beautifully marketed.

It’s a show that’s definitely worth a visit if you intend to do anything at all in the business / corporate sector. Learning Technologies happens again in 2013 on January 29-30 at Olympia 2, London.

Next year it will combine the Learning and Skills exhibition and the  Learning Without Frontiers 13: Future of Learning show. The organisers promise that this will offer “the biggest show in the entire learning sector… also the best attended and fastest growing”. I wouldn’t argue with the latter, and they had over 5,000 visitors and 230 visitors this year.

A nice freebie for all interested parties is Inside Learning Technologies and Skills magazine, which is available free electronically. It’s a tad heavy on the ads., but offers some interesting industry insights and useful articles – worth a read over a coffee.

Byron

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PSA Newsletter

It’s been a good day on the IWB front, for three reasons.

1. I was chatting (through the keyboard) with a colleague with a brief to buy an IWB and I was interested in learning what his choice would be. SMART? Promethean? Hitachi? He went with a Panabord (from Panasonic), mostly for the local support offered (Kalyan works in India) and looking at the info, I think he made a good choice.

Wanna check it out? Click here:

http://panasonic.com.au/Products/Electronic+whiteboards/Interactive+whiteboard/UB-T880/Overview

2 I managed (all on my ownsome) to download Promethean’s ActivInspire software onto my new Mac in advance of the English UK Training day on IWBs. The Wimbledon school of English, the host school, has Promethean boards. First impressions: the interface actually looks much easier than the older version (Active Studio)

3  I even found time to watch half of Barbara Garner’s recent webinar – Cool ideas for IWBs. Isn’t that a great thing about recorded webinars – you can watch them as and when you wish to. Second half tomorrow, yeah. If you are a member of the IATEFL LT SIG, you can watch the webinar for free. If you aren’t, join.

http://ltsig.org.uk/

How are you going with your IWB? Are you in full flow, or is it gathering dust? If it’s the second scenario, there are still places on English UK’s Training Day 11th February in London. For more info, visit: http://www.psa.eu.com/event/getting-the-most-out-your-interactive-whiteboard-approaches-and-pedagogies

I’d love to see you there!

Last Saturday saw the QLS conference, held in Athens. It was great to go back to Greece after so many years – I was  a tourist on the mainland over 20 years ago.

I was startled at the title: ‘Hi Tech, bye teacher?” Luckily, the next line was reassuring: “Any teacher that can be replaced by a computer deserves to be”, so I felt much better.

It was good to meet George Drivas who had kindly sent me a copy of his book: Education, Learning, Training in a Digital Society. George opened the conference with a talk based on his book; it was a good start to the day.

My own session provided 40 practical ideas for using technology in the classroom, although I actually only managed 36! For a graphics-lite version of my talk, please click here:

practical_ideas2

I enjoyed the whole day, including the talk by Anne Leventeris, from Burlington Books. She was showing us activities based on published digital materials, using a SMART board, and it was greta to see the IWB used confidently and competently.

The most spectacular moment of the day was actually realising where I was. We went up to the 8th floor for a wonderful view across Athens, taking in the Acropolis crowned by Parthenon.

We sped up to Patras to arrive at carnival time!

It was good to be in the streets and see everyone enjoying themselves despite the challenging economic climate. TESOL Greece sure know how to provide a fab meal.

Sunday saw TESOL Greece, Patras. The event was live streamed. It was a wonderful day, with great presentations on Art and language teaching, psychology and being popular with students, and materials from Heinle National Geographic (I hope I got that right!).

For a graphics-lite PPT version of my talk on technology, please click here:

plenary-lite-1

For a Handout with some key references, please click here:

References

A great trip. Thanks to everyone. I do hope to return to Greece again.

One of the big problems with studying English, especially for professionals, is the amount of time it takes. Not just the study itself, but the logistics of actually getting to the school. The journey time can easily double the amount of time spent in the classroom.

But what if the language school came to you?

Online learning is experiencing rapid growth, thanks to the rapid expansion of high-speed internet access and VOIP programmes like skype. Schools like Navitas, Kaplan and Berlitz are aggressively marketing their online solutions – see Language Travel Magazine for an article on this . Not that you need to be the size of Kaplan to go into online tuition – by any simply using VOIP – even, yes, skype – and an LMS like English360 or Macmillan English Campus, it’s relatively straightforward to set up an online teaching operation.

It’s in the professional and corporate arena that online learning can help make immeasurable time and cost savings. All you need to make the learning experience complete is to replicate the professional environment, whether it’s a boardroom or – in the case of the latest venture from Languagelab – the cockpit of an airliner.

Languagelab's realistic virtual cockpit

Languagelab is fast become adept in building very realistic 3D environments which can be populated by teachers and students – or rather, by their virtual selves.  This adds a very interesting dimension (literally) to corporate training, and paves the way for other realistic environments in which to safely learn English. An amazing virtual hospital and an oil rig have already been built for workers in the oil/gas and medical professions.

Of course online courses need real teachers. As professional schools like Languagelab begin to expand and proliferate, the demand will grow for teachers who have the skills to work in an exclusively online environment – a different challenge to working face to face.

Byron

Steve Jobs believed that textbook publishing was an ”$8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction” and with the ever-growing distribution of tablets – particularly, of course, the iPad – into state schools, the time could be fast approaching when the swinging ball of digital content delivery smacks good and hard into the traditional textbook publishing establishment. On January 19th Apple announced a series of related initiatives designed to “modernise learning” (their words) based around the iPad tablet. Apple is hoping to “reinvent textbooks” and change the way we teach and learn with an updated iBooks 2 app. This works with interactive textbooks built with the iBooks Author desktop app, and an expansion of iTunes U that offers course materials and K-12 access. Effectively they are launching the equivalent of iTunes for textbooks with the kit to publish your own.

Like iTunes and the App Store, Apple appear to have no interest in creating the content themselves – simply in getting others to do the creative stuff, and then taking a slice of the pie for themselves as “resellers” of content. iTunes U hasn’t really taken off until now, but this could change everything (where have I heard that before?).

What is really significant is that potentially this opens the door for any number of indie publishers to create their own materials, and Apple is providing just to tools to do this. For relatively little investment, a school, an education ministry or even a group of teachers could become their own publisher, by-passing the major ELT publishers altogether – and on the way making a massive dent in publishing revenues. Couldn’t happen? No doubt Kodak executives were saying the same thing a dozen years ago when digital cameras started to first make real inroads into the film market. And all of a sudden Kodak is filing for bankruptcy, and new players like Panasonic and Sony are dominating the photography business.

So what can publishers do about this? An obvious place to head is down the digital road, and of course major publishers are now investing heavily in new digital divisions – though someone I was talking to today suggested that around 70% of editors working in publishing houses knew relatively little about digital publishing (we have a course for that!!!)

But I think publishers will also have to change the way they do business, offering not just content but services – such as teacher-training, course design, maybe editorial and design support. They may also want to consider offering language teaching themselves, as Pearson has already done with Live Mocha and its acquisition of Wall Street. After all, no need to set up a bricks-and mortar school – as is a growing trend in the US, a call centre would do the job. Interesting times indeed.

Byron

This week I spent several days at the massive BETT show in Olympia; always a good start to the year. Some of the stands were truly awesome in size – and cost. One primary software company I spoke to, with a smaller stand in the Grand Hall, had spent £35,000 on the space; Google must have spent well into six figures – eat your heart out, IATEFL. In 2011 over 29,000 people attended, a 17% increase on 2010, with 30% from overseas; initial indications are that this year was even bigger, with a similar UK / overseas split – yet EFL was still in meagre evidence. The big four ELT publishers had stands (though CUP’s was predominantly books – sure you’re at the right show, guys?) and there were a couple of interesting players in the primary sector.

The event was opened by a keynote speech by UK Education Minister Michael Gove, who heavily criticised ICT training in schools and stressed how much more needed to be done in the field of teacher training. Couldn’t agree more, Mike…You can read the full text of the speech here .

Of course, most of what he said was directed at the UK state educational system, but his comment that “technology is going to bring profound changes to how and what we teach. But it’s equally clear that we have not yet managed to make the most of it” applies to every market and every sphere of digital endeavour.  Costly interactive whiteboards languishing in unopened boxes; digital learning resources that are little more than pdfs on screen; learning management systems that teachers can’t be bothered to engage with; apps that vanish into the black hole of the app store through inadequate marketing; the list of missed opportunities goes on and on. The risks, from the publisher’s point of view, are huge. But the riskiest policy of all is not to engage fully in the brave new world of digital education, and in not providing a full service solution to teachers and clients – including training packages, even at the most basic level.

Byron