e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • Why Ed Tech Innovation Is Speeding Up

    I have a lot to write about, coming off of BbWorld and Desire2Learn FUSION. But before I get into all of that, I just have to publish this brief “Amen” post to Phil’s last one. It’s hard to overestimate the impact that lower cost of development is going to have on educational technology in the years ahead. Instagram had only 13 employees—only eight of which were actually software developers—when it sold to Facebook for $1 billion. The new owners of Digg have announced that they expect to rebuild the entire platform from the ground up in six months. It is literally an order of magnitude cheaper to build a platform today than it was ten years ago, when concrete foundations of the current-generation LMS architectures were being poured.

    The change in cost can be attributed to several factors:

    • Proliferation of open source: The vast majority of software being built today, regardless of the license it is sold under, makes extensive use of open source frameworks that simply did not exist a decade ago. These commodity components mean that startups today don’t have to pay expensive license fees (for a database, for example) and don’t have to re-invent the wheel building plumbing. They can focus their time and money on the new parts.
    • Growth of cloud technologies: Software isn’t the only thing that has commoditized. One useful way of thinking about the cloud is as the commoditization of hardware. (Importantly for ed tech, this is definitely not the only useful way of thinking about it, but that’s another post for another time.) It’s now easy for companies to get very cheap access to computing power and storage, and to scale that access—and its cost—just-in-time in response to demand.
    • Advances in engineering craft: The development of Agile and Learn approaches to software development and design, when properly applied, can very substantially reduce the number and size of costly mistakes. These mistakes are arguably the most dangerous and costly expenses of digital product creation because they are unpredictable and can cause lasting and cumulative damage that is hard to undo.
    The degree to which existing market entrants can beat back new entrants will depend, in part, on their ability to embrace these innovations. It is simply a lot cheaper and quicker for a new market entrant to build a competitive, full-featured product than it used to be. That isn’t necessarily going to be easy for them. 

  • Going to be at BbWorld and D2L Fusion Conferences

    This is just a quick note to let you know that I will be at BbWorld next week (my first!) and D2L Fusion the week after. (I am determined to make it to InstructureCon next year; it’s the last one I will not have been to yet.) If anybody wants to track me down, tweet or email me.

  • Going Meta on Khan

    The wonderful Dan Meyers points to this delightful Mystery Science Theater 3000 homage by John Golden and David Coffey as they critique one of Sal Khan’s math videos. Here’s the video:

    Everybody enjoys a good snarkfest, and these guys are particularly good at it. But those who are taking delight in seeing Sal Khan get “taken down a peg” are completely missing the value and innovation here. To me, the important thing is that these guys have adopted one of Khan’s signature moves—short, low-production-value, personal web videos—to critique pedagogical technique. This has great value for math teachers who may miss some of the finer points of math instruction (e.g., consistency in terminology) that Golden and Coffey point out in their review. It’s basically a Khan Academy-style lesson for teachers, and it should be able to scale in production just as Khan Academy itself has. I would love to see many, many more video reviews of instructional materials on the web.

    To their credit, Khan Academy has taken down the video in question, presumably to improve the video based on the critique. One of the premises of OER is that people will improve the quality of materials. The assumption is generally that they will do so themselves by editing, but this is a demonstration that just having the content out in the open where the author can get feedback is of great value too.

  • Post Ratings

    I’m always interested in finding out which posts people find the most useful and surfacing those posts so that they are discoverable even after they scroll off the front page. There are indirect ways of doing that—seeing which posts are most viewed, have the most comments, are most tweeted, etc.—but those methods all have their limitations. So I’m adding a direct “rate up/rate down” feature for each post. Top-rated posts will appear in a list in the sidebar. It’s one click. Please do rate up the posts you like (and rate down the ones you don’t, I suppose).

  • Please Welcome Featured Blogger Michael Staton

    I have been working on this one for a while. Michael Staton has become the senior statesman (relatively speaking) of the up-and-coming generation of ed tech entrepreneurs. When he’s not working on Inigral, he’s out trying to raise awareness and support for bringing more young innovators to the educational technology space. Michael has agreed to blog from time to time here at e-Literate.

  • Keynoting at the Sakai/Jasig Conference Next Week

    Next week is the joint conference of the Sakai and Jasig foundations in Atlanta. It should be a good time; come on down if you can. I’ll be giving the keynote this year.

  • Please Welcome Beth Harris and Steven Zucker

    I am delighted to announce that my friends Beth Harris and Steven Zucker will be joining e-Literate as featured bloggers. Beth and Steven are the creators of smARThistory and the first faculty hired by Khan Academy. I have learned a lot from them over the years and am looking forward to learning a lot more from them as they blog here about their adventures as Deans of Art and History at Khan.