Pete Sharma Associates

Just bought a £2000 interactive whiteboard? Or spent £500 on the next generation iPad? Dude, like, what a waste of your hard-earned cash. Whiteboards, as we all know, are so last century. What you should be doing is popping down to Specsavers for the very latest in designer eyewear.

If you think I have totally lost the plot, I‘ve actually been looking at Project Glass, the latest concept in augmented reality from the Google skunkworks. By combining various existing technologies, Project Glass combines all the features of a smartphone with a heads-up display on custom spectacles.

The youtube demo video is (almost literally) eye-popping – the device is always on, always accessible, and responds to voice commands. It guides you round the streets, orders your gig tickets, snaps the view, plays you music, calls your friends. The first adopters will think you’re bonkers when you start talking to your glasses, but it won’t be long before everyone’s doing it. And countless irritating advertisers will be sending you messages as you walk past their outlets.

Of course, it may be a while before the technology actually takes off. And you have to wear glasses, so those of you with 20/20 vision, forget it. But of course what Google are actually doing is demonstrating how they can put together the various parts of the Google “ecosystem” – maps, social networking, Android communications, Picasa – to meet everyone’s needs. They’re saying Google really can do it all, and have the content too – and that’s another poke in the eye for Apple, of course. Bit scary, when you think about it.

As for the actual glasses – well, in certain circumstances they might catch on. Needing glasses hasn’t done 3D cinema any harm. Imagine a class full of studious, bespectacled students avidly watching your latest presentation, all heads up and alert and watching YOU at the same time. Or an individual interacting in real time with their teacher during a distance learning class. As for me, I wear glasses anyway, so the moment they’re in the shops I’m sooo getting a pair…

Just back from the joys of IATEFL. The conference itself will have been tweeted, blogged and Facebooked to death by now, so I won’t mention it again, except to say

(a) thanks to Jo, Kerry, Lucy and everyone else at Macmillan for a stonking party on Weds (so glad no one fell into the Clyde…as far as we know…)

(b) that Glasgow is a brilliant city and if you weren’t there plan your weekend away now.

So forget IATEFL until Liverpool 2013. What I want to flag up here is how to get just rewards for your creative talents.

In the world of fiction writing, the path to recognition for budding authors is not to start off with a magnum opus and send it off to three dozen publishers. That might have worked in the nineteenth century, but not now – and if J K Rowling had adopted that route she’d still be a single mum scribbling away in fast food restaurants.  What people do is find an Agent (Christopher Little, in JK’s case). The Agent has all the right contacts and so can match your work to an appropriate publisher – and, far more important, an appropriate Editor within that publisher. The Agent, being a skilled and experienced negotiator, should work out the best deal for the Author, including things like merchandising, film and digital rights.  That’s what happens in the world of fiction writing. It hasn’t happened in ELT – until now.

At the Macmillan party over a pint of cider I chatted with Nick Robinson about his Big Idea.

Nick Robinson, ELT Author Representation. Mail nick@nickrobinsonelt.com

You may know Nick – he’s a hugely talented writer and editor, commercially astute and great at networking. Nick has just launched the first (as far as I know) agency for established and new authors. He’ll assess your skills and ideas, and – as he knows publishers – will be able to link up the right person in the right publishing house with You, the writer, on a project which is ready to go. This doesn’t cost anything – except, of course, a proportion of your fees (and he’ll be able to secure a better deal than you would, anyway). If you’re a publisher, you can fast-track your requirements rather than desperately looking for a talented writer for that new ESP title on Golf you’re putting out. (Actually, English for Sport would be a pretty cool ESP series).  If you’re an established author it’s worth getting in touch too – you may think yourself as having sold your soul to OUP, but there’s nothing to stop you writing for Macmillan – or, on old titles, taking back your rights and selling the material elsewhere.

Of course it may be that you haven’t been published before, and you’re desperate to learn more about the writing and publishing process, and the personal business side (jolly stuff like VAT and Tax). Watch this space on that one…!

Very interesting news from Pearson this week. Pre-tax profits were up 72%, to $1.8 bn, chiefly due to the increase in digital revenues, which increased by 18% in headline terms to £2bn. This means that sales of digital products now account for 33% of Pearson’s sales. Students using Pearson digital learning programmes up 23% to 43m, and Penguin eBook revenues are up 106%, now accounting for 12% of total Penguin revenues.

According to the publisher’s chief executive Dame Marjorie Scardino, the proportion of sales derived from digital output and services – such as teacher training – was more than 50 per cent .

So for the first time (as far as I’m aware) a major “traditional” publisher is seeing more revenue from digital than from mainstream media.

This must leave the laggards in the digital sphere pondering about what to do next. Pearson in general – and Marjorie Scardino in particular – have always shown remarkable foresight in promoting digital products. Within their ELT publishing operations the path hasn’t always been rosy (remember Longman English Success, which singularly failed to live up to its name?) but persistence is winning out, chiefly (I think) because the market is now truly ready for the technology. The only other UK ELT publisher with a similar level of interest in new tech – though without Pearson’s super-deep pockets – has been Macmillan, with its terrific suite of digital products and services (Campus, onestopenglish, Global).

If I were neither Macmillan nor Pearson, I’d start looking at how to play catch up as quickly as possible, and getting my house in order, digital strategy-wise. There are some very interesting acquisition targets out there, maybe still at “bargain” prices – certainly compared to in-house development costs – and it’s definitely time to start scouting around.

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

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

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