Project leader in Cape Town: Technology + Education + Africa
Great quote by Arthur Attwell of Electric Book Works in Applying publishing tech in Southern Africa:
There is a justified obsession with mobile in developing countries. There are far more mobile phones in the developing world than the developed, and therefore a delivery device in nearly every pocket.
At O’Reilly Publishing Tools of Change (TOC) conference in New York was the session Digital Storytelling: The Evolution of Publishing Fiction on a Mobile Device by Geoffrey Young (StopWatch Media).
Mobile phones know where you are, what time it is, are communications devices and are fully programmable.
Starting question: Given these features, what story can you tell?
The Carrier is the first transmedia graphic novel as an iPhone app. In it’s “print” form, the novel would consist of 680 panels, 35 chapters — about 120 pages if printed out. Really it’s just images on a screen. But given the transmedia way it is told — in real time over 10 days — the story is a lot more.
Because mobile phones know what time it is, stories can be revealed over time. Depending on the time of day that reading begins, readers begin the story in a different way. This puts the storyteller in control. In real time the story pushes out messages.
The authors have created a lot of fictional sites — alternate reality game-like. They also created merchandise in Cafe Press that they linked to, which readers could buy. Messages were pushed to iPhone readers using Urban Airship (first 250,000 messages sent a free!) Geoff considered using SMS for messaging, but that option was too expensive (the author pays for the messages, not the reader).
This was an interesting presentation, given the transmedia features and story extras we built into Kontax.
The last session last night at O’Reilly Publishing Tools of Change (TOC) conference in New York was A Conversation with Ray Kurzweil and Tim O’Reilly — an extremely interesting conversation between two very bright minds. “Ray Kurzweil invented the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Ray’s latest book, The Singularity is Near, was a New York Times best seller.”
Ray’s latest product is Blio — a free ereader. It has 1m free books + some paid for books in its catalogue. Blio is very interactive: audio, video, quizzes, annotations, various views, very impressive text-to-speech. For audiobooks, can sync audio with text (as word gets read it is highlighted — karaole style). Very cool! Blio books are actually online (web-based) so they can be updated by authors at any time.
I know that a major publisher in South Africa will be using the Blio to distribute its content (when the Blio becomes available).
At O’Reilly Publishing Tools of Change (TOC) conference: Consumers in the Cloud: Google and Digital Books presented by Abe Murray, Product Manager at Google Books.
There are millions (billions?) more browsers than ebook readers, so why not use the browser as an ereader? (This is the approach we took with our m-novel Kontax.) You can walk into a bookstore and buy any book. Not so with ebooks, e.g. Kindle locks you into ebooks from Amazon. Google no like … Google Books mantra: buy anywhere, read anywhere. So Google moves into the ereader market with Google Editions — it’s browser-based and in the cloud (of course)!
How it works: Users preview book on Google.com. They can buy the book directly from Google.com or through retailer site. User then owns a Google Edition ebook. All users books will then be online and accessible anywhere, anytime in the cloud in their Google Books library. Further:
Abe: “This is a great year for ebooks and Google’s gonna be part of that.”
OK, so this is all very interesting. Yes, Google will still be a controlling party in the value chain (let’s not forget that they make money … they don’t just love freeing information for the love of it). But their control will be less restrictive than current publishers. Definitely a space to watch.
Day one at O’Reilly’s Publishing Tools of Change (TOC) conference in New York kicked off with a few great keynotes. Some snippets and thoughts:
Enhancing the ebook
Peter Collingridge, Enhanced Editions
One of his previous projects is www.bookseer.com — a book recommendation service.
Law is not a business solution
William Patry, Google Inc.
Are ebooks dead?
David Skip Prichard, CEO of Ingram Content Group
Publishing is dead: Long live publishing!
Ariana Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post
How does this apply to the m4Lit project?
The next workshop that I attended at the O’Reilly’s Publishing Tools of Change (TOC) conference in New York was Twitter Scorecard for Publishers by Mike Hendrickson. It was an in-depth and quite technical look at using Twitter for amplification, engagement and other purposes. A few useful points:
Are there multiple twitterers in your organisation? Should they be rolled into one account? Do they say the same thing all the time? Or, ideally, do they NOT share the same followers/following, in which case they reach distinct audiences and so should be kept as separate, independent accounts? Use InterTwitter to find out.
What kind of a Tweeter are you: casual, connector, climber or persona? Who influences you? How much Twitter clout do you have? Klout.com will tell you.
See who you’re following but who aren’t following you back with Friend of Follow.
I’m at the O’Reilly’s Publishing Tools of Change (TOC) conference in New York. Twitter hashtag is #toccon. Everything I learn here I’ll be applying to the m4Lit (mobile phones for literacy) project that I head up in South Africa.
Day one is workshops day, and first up is Selling in Mobile Markets, presented by Rana Sobhany, author of Marketing iPhone Apps.
The big question: How can publishers stay relevant in a digital world?
Great content. Curation. Quality. Subscription?
What’s special about mobile content:
Questions we need to ask ourselves:
Constraints:
Opportunities:
PLATFORMS for mobile apps …
iPhone/iPad platform:
Android platform:
BlackBerry platform:
Palm platform:
Windows Mobile platform:
Symbian platform:
STRATEGY: Pitfalls of each platform …
In her opinion, there are 4 primary mobile development platform.
iPhone/iPad:
Android:
Windows Mobile:
DISTRIBUTION of apps …
MEASURING success …
10 Global Trends in ICT and Education is a post by Robert Hawkins on EduTech, the World Bank’s blog on ICT use in Education. It’s a great list, an “aggregation of projections from leading forecasters such as the Horizon Report, personal observations and a good dose of guesswork.”
While I feel that the trends apply mostly to well-resourced, developed-country educational institutions, I’m happy to report that in South Africa (SA) we are seriously exploring:
Trend 1) Mobile Learning — although we’re not focusing on smart phones but rather on feature phones with GPRS-capability, e.g. in the m4Lit (mobiles for literacy) project.
Trend 
Teacher-generated open content — the Siyavula project from the Shuttleworth Foundation is building a community of teachers and a platform for this very thing.
I think the trends least likely to take hold in SA are 2) Cloud computing (bandwidth is just too expensive and the infrastructure for it not well enough established) and 10) Teacher managers/mentors (in-service teachers don’t want to relinquish the role of font-of-knowledge and “head” of the classroom. A number of factors, such as poor learner discipline and low teacher content knowledge (making the teacher only just a font-of-knowledge, more like a trickling stream of knowledge) make this a complex issue … it is not simply a case of teachers being resistant to change).
Last year was a good one for me on Slideshare. In 2009, I uploaded 13 presentations and got:
That sets the goal for 2010!
The HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition will soon be accepting applications. There’s good money to be secured for your projects and it’s open to South Africans. I was a judge for the competition last year and can confirm that they look for innovation from developing countries — so we should go for it!
2010 HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition
We are pleased to announce that all information regarding the 2010 international HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition—including detailed category explanations and guidelines, critical deadlines, application materials, etc.—is now available at www.dmlcompetition.net.
The theme of this year’s Competition is Reimagining Learning and there are two types of awards: 21st Century Learning Lab Designers and Game Changers.
Aligned with National Lab Day as part of the White House’s Educate to Innovate Initiative, the 21st Century Learning Lab Designer awards will range from $30,000-$200,000. Awards will be made for learning environments and digital media-based experiences that allow young people to grapple with social challenges through activities based on the social nature, contexts, and ideas of science, technology, engineering and math.
The Game Changers category—undertaken in cooperation with Sony Computer Entertainment of America (SCEA) and Electronic Arts (EA), Entertainment Software Assocation, and the Information Technology Industry Council—will award amounts ranging from $5,000-$50,000 for creative levels designed with either LittleBigPlanet™ or Spore™ Galactic Adventures that offer young people engaging game play experiences and that incorporate and leverage principles of science, technology, engineering and math for learning.
Each category will include several Best in Class awards selected by expert judges, as well as a People’s Choice Award selected by the general public. The online application system will open on January 7 and will include three rounds of submissions, with public comment at each stage.
Please see www.dmlcompetition.net for all details.
