If you want to understand the future of education-- consider this!

James Fallows has written a fascinating article in the Atlantic How to Save the News that describes the ways in which Google has been working with news organizations and experimenting with ways to continue to have high quality news reporting.

As I read this, I keep substituting the word "education" or "university" for newspapers and keep asking myself how can be take advantage of these ideas.

Here is a quote about newspapers that has application to education and universities.

"Burdened as they are with these 'legacy' print costs, newspapers typically spend about 15 percent of their revenue on what, to the Internet world, are their only valuable assets: the people who report, analyze, and edit the news."

Fallows goes on to note that most of the cost of newspapers in for paper, printing and distribution, not the core aspect of reporting the news.

Now substitute these legacy costs for education-- classrooms, books and you begin to see where we are going.

Fallows describes the conceptual shift that newspapers are going to have to make. He says,

[in the past] "'publishing' meant printing information on sheets of paper; eventually, it will mean distributing information on a Web site or mobile device."

The conceptual shift is from viewing the work as "distributing information." In a similar way most educators have defined "education" as face-to-face lectures with some form of testing. We are going to need to begin to see our job "engaging people in learning activities" without reference to the form or location of those activities.

Education will also have to think about its business model in the online world. Fallows suggests that the the new business model for the news business is as follows:

"The three pillars of the new online business model, as I heard them invariably described, are distribution, engagement, and monetization. That is: getting news to more people, and more people to news-oriented sites; making the presentation of news more interesting, varied, and involving; and converting these larger and more strongly committed audiences into revenue, through both subscription fees and ads."

This may seem obvious, but Fallows goes on to describe tools that Google has been inventing such as "living stories," "fast flip" and "youtube direct" which seem to have interesting applications to teaching. More importantly, these innovations remind us that teachers need to be asking technologist for the tools that will help us with distribution, engagement and monetization. There are undoubtedly some betters ways to do instruction online that are currently available.

Example of Helpful Structure for Teaching and Learning

This example may seem obvious to some, but it doesn't seem that common.

One of the great solutions to "information overload" in scientific communication was the perfection of the "abstract" or a summary of a more extensive amount of information. The "text" abstract of a longer text-based communication is a good idea, but what do you do when the world is text, audio, video, etc. We have the "advertising" version of this solution which is to give us "teasers" of the material that is supposed to make us want more, but we still need the "abstract" version which supplies us with a good overall sense of the message so that we can decide if we want to see, hear or read more. This isn't a teaser. It isn't designed to give us almost enough. It is designed to give us a good dose of the more extensive version.

In this example on the ReadWriteWeb, the authors provide a good example of how to provide an abstract of an interview with Eric Schmidt of Google. We get a sampling of some major points in the video (six minutes of the 45 minutes), a bullet point summary of the major ideas in the six minutes, links to the longer versions and links to more contextual information on the general points discussed in this interview.

It seems to me that over the long run, this is a good model for how to create valuable instructional and learning situations for people.

What Would Google Do?

This is the title of a new book by Jeff Jarvis that provides a good overview of how the web has changed the ways in which companies and organizations operate. If you have ignored all the hype about the Web 2.0 and are just curious about how people are thinking about developments in search, social networking, sharing free content, engaging with the public and so forth, this would be a good book to get a thoughtful summary of this thinking.

Here are Jarvis' basic themes that define the ways in which Google and other web savvy companies and institutions will succeed in the years to come:

Customers are now in charge. He suggests that organizations will need to organize the delivery of products and information in ways that meet customer needs. Obviously, this basic idea has always been true, Jarvis asserts that the we are going to have to be even more quick to be responsive to customer demands.

People can find each other anywhere and coalesce around you-- or against you. Organizations that are good at engaging the public around their ideas, products and people are going to be more successful than those who fail at this. He provides important examples of how customers also can organize against companies that fail to respond to problems. It is no longer an idle threat to say, "I am going to tell a few million of my closest friends about how horrible your product or service is?"

The mass market is dead, replaced by the market of mass niches. Alot of commentators have made this point in the last several years (see Chris Anderson, The Long Tail). Some good examples of this idea are Amazon (lots of small book sellers and lots of obscure books) and the Huffington Post (lots of excellent writers/commentators in one place.)

Markets are conversations. This idea was first offered in The Cluetrain Manifesto and extended in Naked Conversations. There are good examples of this idea in this book, but this is still a fuzzy idea. Ok, so I get the idea of talking to customers. What do I really need to talk about? What are the important conversations? And who is really the "customer?" There are lots of customers and lots of topics. How do you find the right conversation? This is much easier said than done.

We have shifted from an economy based on scarcity to one based on abundance. This idea has a variety of implications. How do you manage too much information? How do help people manage and organize lots of ideas and options? Another question related to this situation is what value do you add when everyone can find any product, service or idea a click away?

Enabling customers to collaborate with you-- in creating, distributing, marketing and supporting products-- is what is creates a premium in today's market. This idea is an elaboration of the marketing as conversation and customers are now in charge.

The most successful enterprises today are networks and the platforms on which those networks are built. Today this means Facebook.... tomorrow this means....?

Owning pipelines, people, products, or even intellectual property is no longer the key to success. Openness is. This may be both the most important idea and the most troublesome. Note that Jarvis does not say that pipelines, products or people are "valueless," only that "openness" is the key to success. He notes however that Google does not practice this value in much of its operation. This is a complicated idea. What needs to be open? In what ways is it valuable to be open?

This book provides a good basis for an extended discussion of many important ideas that will shape business, education, media, government and much more. We are only at the beginning of understanding how to think, work and act in this world.