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Category: education
November 2nd, 2009
Blackboard embraces and extends into open source movement
Anyone seeking a case study of how a proprietary software company can “embrace and extend” itself into the open source world should stop thinking Microsoft and start thinking Blackboard.
(Picture from the University of Alaska. Bonus points if you find a link to Russia from the site.)
Blackboard has a long-running feud with open source, ably chronicled by our own Christopher Dawson. Open source Learning Management Systems (LMSs) like Moodle, Sakai and OLAT have been seeking its market share for five years now.
Part of the solution was to open source tools for use with its proprietary suite. Blackboard may have been overly-aggressive in pushing this as a true open source solution but it wasn’t finished yet.
Phase Two involves signing alliances with educators and lining up scaled resources from within the open source ecosystem.
Today’s news brings an example.
It’s a deal with Northwestern University (Go Wildcats) to integrate its Blackboard Learn platform within Google Apps as a single sign-on. The Building Block itself is open source, Google Apps is based on open source, but here’s the imprimatur of a major University (and big customer) linking a proprietary LMS into it.
Earlier this year Blackboard signed a deal with Flat World Knowledge, the open source textbook publisher we’ve written of here, to integrate Flat World textbooks with Blackboard Learn.
Given Blackboard’s position as a market leader, and its open source Building Blocks for handling the integration, the move by Flat World is logical and justifiable.
The result, however, is that despite open source a proprietary LMS is more entrenched than ever within its marketplace.
November 2nd, 2009
Wordpress picks up college newspapers with CoPress
Drupal may be grabbing headlines by becoming the CMS of the White House, but WordPress is bound to be the CMS of a future President thanks to a deal it signed with CoPress.
CoPress, the brainchild of former University of Oregon editor Daniel Bachhuber, aims to build a vertical of college papers within the CMS market, with managed hosting and training.
(The original Oregon Duck mascot image was trademarked by The Walt Disney Co. Can you kids guess who it is?)
Bachhuber told Poynter Online that 21 colleges have already signed up, including the papers of Central Michigan, Michigan State, and Cal State Fullerton.
Papers now have a choice between rolling their own solution, joining CoPress, or working with the College Media Network, whose College Publisher is given away free in exchange for banner ad space.
This means free is battling open source directly within the college paper market. In addition to comparing features, CoPress is also arguing against CMN’s latest upgrade, and pointing out that it is building a community around contemporaries rather than delivering a top-down solution.
My own career in college journalism seems a world away from all this. During my freshman year at Rice the paper was actually set with hot type from a Linotype. They later switched to a photo-typesetting solution in which formatted type was printed and then glued to a piece of cardboard with pink plastic cut-outs showing where photos would go.
Before that, I broke away from my high school newspaper to create an opinion-based start-up, which leads to the real challenge facing college journalists in today’s online world, namely competing in their markets with every entrepreneur on campus.
If your start-up costs are nearly nothing what is the benefit of being the “official” college paper Web site?
September 24th, 2009
HP supporting Oregon State Linux portal
Hewlett-Packard is quietly lending its support to a new Oregon State support portal for Linux, Communitylinux.org.
The site is hosted by Oregon State’s Open Source Lab and, while its content is HP-centric, it is pointedly not part of the HP domain.
(This happy little penguin is supporting the Linux Foundation’s annual membership drive. Are you?)
The idea is that non-commercial Linux distributions running on HP hardware can find support, even though it’s not officially coming from HP. We’re talking about server versions of Asianux, CentOS, Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE and Ubuntu.
All these programs can now be run on HP servers without violating their hardware warrantees.
Bdale Garbee, HP’s Linux head, indicated at LinuxCon that HP’s support over time will include loading tests and certifications it has done with Linux onto the site so the community can use the data.
It’s a small announcement, but LinuxCon is a small show.
September 10th, 2009
Could One Laptop Per Child be a bad thing?
You know the old saw about helping people rise from poverty? Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime — or until the fish run out.
The idea of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is to teach a child to fish. But is it really more like giving a child a fishing pole?
It’s true the man who offered this criticism, Tom Pastorius of Projects Abroad, is selling something. Volunteering. He is the exclusive agent of the UK-based volunteering group for the U.S. and Canada.
He says volunteers should be there to help kids who get laptops, ideally at a community computer cluster rather than leaving each child to their own devices. This reduces the child’s frustration, without hindering the learning process.
Fair enough. One volunteer per child sounds better than one laptop. But it’s not going to happen. So that means we go back to the idea of computer labs, with the hardware locked away at night to keep it safe?
Pastorius’ concept also flies in the face of recent trends in Australia, where as we noted earlier students in New South Wales all got laptops to start the year. Windows laptops.
How long do you think those will last, with their hard drives and optical drives and what are the odds the kid’s going to update their antiviral each day? How about one computer repairman per child?
Which leads to my own modest proposal. Client hardware is not the problem. OLPC has proven that hardware can be super-cheap. Taiwanese Netbook makers have taken that idea and run with it.
The real problem is connectivity. Would our aid money, and the work of volunteers, be better spent upgrading the bandwidth available to villages in the developing world? One WiFi per child.
Or perhaps one pigeon?
August 28th, 2009
Aussies give open source golden crumbs from Microsoft table
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has begun fulfilling a promise to give every high school student a laptop, offering Lenovo machines with Windows 7 and some open source applications.
Most reporters covering the story down under are focused on the fact that at least 70,000 kids will get Windows 7 before the rest of us. But I would rather focus on those open source applications, which are not what you would call the usual suspects:
- GeoGebra is a package for teaching high school math. It starts with geometry but also branches into algebra and calculus. Created by Marcus Hohenwarter for a master’s thesis at the University of Salzburg, he now runs the project out of Florida State University.
- Audacity is a sound editor also available under Linux. It was launched at Carnegie-Mellon 10 years ago by by Dominic Mazzoni and Roger Dannenberg (Mazzoni is still on the team) and now makes its home on Sourceforge.
- FreeMind is a mind mapping program written in Java. Mind maps are a great way to outline and brainstorm, especially for those of us with ADD. It is not yet at Version 1.0, and it also lives at Sourceforge.
- MuseScore is a music composition and notation program, which has also yet to reach Version 1.0. It recently delivered its first stable release for the Macintosh, and its developers have just begun working on a branding program.
We are often obsessed in technology by control of the operating system, and in the business press by questions of money. But these fine programs are the tip of a very large iceberg, based in academia, that is slowly transforming education and the education process.
The reason you probably don’t hear more of this is because it is subject to what I call Moore’s Law of Training. There is no Moore’s Law of Training. People learn at the rate they learn, and knowledge is spread at a similar rate.
Any teacher interested in any of these Windows programs has to learn to use them, and has to develop coherent lesson plans for them. Both take time. Given how open source eliminates marketing budgets, it also takes time for news of such programs to spread.
But news does spread. News of these programs has spread all the way to Australia, and apparently to the highest realms of the New South Wales government.
With tens of thousands of Australian kids going to class this week carrying these programs they will spread even more quickly. So will curricula based on them. And, unlike 1990s’ multimedia curricula, these will be fairly stable, so long as the programs retain backwards compatibility, as most do.
These may be crumbs from the Microsoft table, but they are important crumbs. Get enough crumbs and you have the whole loaf. That is why I call these golden crumbs.
Almost makes me wish my kids were babies again. Note that I said almost.
August 20th, 2009
Some 40,000 college students studying on a Flat World
Remember Flat World Knowledge?
I interviewed CEO Eric Frank a year ago about his plan to deliver e-book textbooks free to college kids, and about the business model he claimed would still spin money for the textbooks’ authors.
In March Flat World got $8 million in funding, and the news is they now claim 40,000 kids are using their stuff.
This is the tip of the iceberg, David Weir of BNET writes. The number could grow five-fold in a year and the total market is 17 million students.
So far the company has focused solely on business and economics textbooks. But it now has 32 titles in development covering basic subjects like psychology, sociology and genetics.
Instead of paying $100 for the textbooks you need in a class, Flat World claims its customers pay an average of $18. In addition to the free download students can buy a PDF version, a printed version (black and white or color), even an audio version. (My eldest is dyslexic — this is big news.)
Flat World is being followed into the market by a host of competitors, like Chegg and BookRenter. This may be the best news of all.
While the material is subject to copyright, it’s called open source because it’s freely available for download on the Internet.
When I spoke to Frank last year he mentioned several other ways to monetize the content, from testing guides to online chats with book authors. So you might think of this as more of a Priceline model. Students can name their own price for textbooks, actually spending more than they do now if they want ancillary services, or spending nothing at all.
July 31st, 2009
Educators climb open source Operation Matterhorn
The University of California is using $500,000 in grants to build an open webcasting platform dubbed Operation Matterhorn, designed to automate the production and distribution of courseware.
The project wiki lists almost 40 people actively involved, with six being from UC-Berkeley but five active developers from the University of Osnabruck in Germany.
The goal is a simple, open source podcast creation platform with a great user experience. Meanwhile, an early version of a system called REPLAY is being made available through ETH Zurich in Switzerland, which is a participant in the main project.
In addition to the Wiki the project’s members are trying to communicate in a variety of ways, including newsletters, mailing lists, videoconferences, even a Twitter group.
At the shared blog, Olaf Schulte described some of his own difficulties in publishing the above video on YouTube, expressing the hope that Matterhorn will make this process easier. “Video is certainly not an easy object to work with yet and open video probably even less so,” he writes.
It is one thing to deliver a project, and this one is due for early delivery within a year. It is another thing entirely for professors to use it. And it is yet-another thing for colleges to accept the use of such technology as providing credit for real courses.
But given the recent explosion in online colleges, big-name schools realize that their big names won’t be enough forever. So this is a start. Has it started in time?
It’s true that schools like Walden University, the University of Phoenix and Capella University may have no status, but with real schools like Troy State and Central Michigan now actively engaged in the business, the clock is ticking.
How long will it be before graduates of online colleges start claiming that their coursework is as good as that offered by “real” schools like those in Project Matterhorn? How long before such graduates attain status in the real world? How long before their coursework really is just as good as what “real” schools offer?
Major universities claim they offer a “true” liberal arts curriculum, that on-campus living has real value, and that the friendships you make at college last a lifetime. But many of these online schools have offices in major cities, and their cost to produce a product is much, much less.
With many U.S. colleges in the last lap of preparing for a new college year, something to think about. Should your alma mater be worried?
May 12th, 2009
The problem for open source textbooks
Authority.
Every textbook, regardless of grade level or subject matter, is the final authority in the classroom.
Every textbook is a political document. This is its strength and its weakness. Authority gives textbooks power, but it’s also why most read more like software manuals than real books.
This is the barrier faced by California and any other state seeking to create “open” textbooks. It’s not a question of what license content comes in under, or what license the textbook has when it’s done. It’s the fact that authority is dispersed as more people are allowed in on the process.
Texas has long understood the relationship of textbooks to political power. That’s what its hullaballoo over evolution was about. Control the textbook’s content and you not only control what your state’s children will learn, but what every state’s children will learn, if your state is big enough.
The idea of a single, central, controlling authority is anathema to open source. It’s the process of Texas, not just its result, that I find objectionable. It’s so very 19th century.
But it’s also the Pandora’s Box that California’s move opens. Who will be the authority on what our children will learn, on the content of an elementary or secondary education? Will there be an authority?
Near the end of The Illusionist, writer Neil Burger gives Rufus Sewell’s Prince Leopold (above) a desperate speech, in which he defends his efforts to centralize authority and complains that, without him, there will be “a thousand different voices screaming to be heard and nothing will be done. Nothing!”
History shows that is just what happened. Austria’s empire collapsed. The center could not hold.
The task before California is to create some form of moderation so that the authority of the final product is respected. A new form of political process needs to be built from the ground-up for the new technology of textbooks to take hold.
What form should it take?
May 11th, 2009
Education lessons for open source
One of my favorite ZDNet blog posts from last week was Christopher Dawson’s “How much does open source cost schools.”
The post riffs off a Tech & Learning piece by Randy Orwin, an open source advocate in Washington state, who concluded that “free is not free” and large-scale open soruce implementations are difficult.
I have been working on the question of technology in education for 21 years, since my first child was born. I have concluded that education offers great lessons for all enterprises, especially as it has begun using open source.
I found enterprise technology in education was a dead loss before the game became Internet access. Client technology changes too fast, I learned. The moment teachers were trained on “multimedia” their tools and skills were obsolete. Only by moving to online resources that upgrade themselves could the investment begin to make sense.
Education, in other words, is an enterprise buyer.
What enterprise buyers want are desktops and applications offering workforce productivity and plenty of back-end Internet capacity. Schools and offices aren’t that different.
So the lessons Dawson offers can be applied generally.
- Open source is a make-or-buy decision. If you go with open source make certain you have the expertise on-staff to make things work.
- Centralize operations and automate the pushing and updating of applications.
- Before choosing an open source solution make certain you’re prepared to be part of an open source community.
I would add that the solution you choose may also drive your best-and-brightest. In a conventional enterprise this is your IT shop. In a school setting this is your computer club geeks. If your system is running Linux, that’s what they will learn.
The difference between a school and a conventional enterprise is what happens to that expertise. In most businesses it sticks around. In school it graduates.
So what do you want your smartest kids to become, users or doers? That should offset some of the implied “costs” of open source.
April 14th, 2009
Open source and the mythical man month
The Mythical Man-Month, by Frederick Brooks, is a software development classic.
There’s very little code here. Just straight talk on managing software projects, from an old hand.
Many of Brooks’ examples from from the System/360 project in the 1960s, which he managed for IBM. Some are older.
Much of the book is a lesson in how completely software development has changed since you were a kid. Even if you’re still in your 20s.
The book is most famous for Brooks Law, the idea that adding people to a project just makes it run slower, as communication costs add up.
What got the attention of my programmer-wife were two chapters he added to later editions, titled No Silver Bullet and No Silver Bullet Refined. In it Brooks argues for what I call Moore’s Law of Software, namely that there is no Moore’s Law of Software.
Software is as much art as science, and remains a hand-made product, despite all the many advances Brooks names and discusses with such simplicity and grace.
In the two Silver Bullet chapters Brooks looks at many contemporary subjects, at object-oriented programming, at artificial intelligence, even at the impact of the mass market.
What he does not discuss is open source.
He does touch on some trends open source makes possible, such as incremental development and code re-use. But even in this decade most breakthroughs remain the work of individuals or small teams — think iPhone and Twitter. Big projects can be overwhelming.
It’s this that makes open source, and the open source process, so powerful. Open source does not repeal Moore’s Law of Software, but it enables a lot of re-use, it provides a management structure for really vast projects, and it creates a virtual market of code that anyone can participate in.
I need to note here that shrink-wrapped products and the creation of software mass markets are important productivity drivrers in Brooks’ book. Both can be delivered through a completely proprietary model, as we’ve seen for instance at the Apple App Store.
But it’s the Internet, and the open source business models which emerged from the Internet, that are the closest thing to a revolution we have ever had in software development. Brooks reminds me just how new that revolution is and just how further it has yet to go.
The Mythical Man Month reads like history, but like any great book its lessons speak to our time and beyond. If you have a student graduating this month who hasn’t read Brooks’ book, it makes a great present.
March 25th, 2009
It's a Flat World after all
Flat World Knowledge, whom we profiled last November, has closed an $8 million round of venture funding.
Hooks Johnston, General Partner at Valhalla Partners, compared Flat World’s potential to that of the MP3, but its real innovation is the same one powering this blog, a business model that works for publishers, authors, and readers.
As co-founder Eric Frank (above)Â explained it to me then, authors get a 20% royalty on everything students buy, but the students can download a Web version of the book text free.
It’s ancillary products that make the model go — iPod versions, Kindle versions, print-outs, study guides, and tutoring businesses built around the text and the class where it’s taught.
Current contracts offer lower royalty rates on lower-cost products, and no cut on tutoring, which is considered an independent revenue stream. Flat World offers 20% on the whole education process created by the book. Frank claims his authors actually do better than with traditional contracts.
That is vital in the college market, where total sales may be small and the authors are often professors.
It might not work in high schools, where a single state contract can be worth millions. But there are other possible solutions there, from the private sector as well as the public.
March 19th, 2009
Foster plan for open source education
Bill Foster (right), the physicist and Democrat who succeeded former Speaker Dennis Hastert in Congress, has what you might call a cunning open source plan.
Any federal agency spending over $10 million on scientific education should put 2% of that money into creating open source materials, posting them on the Web for students, and updating them.
The bill, H.R. 1164, is now before the House Education and Labor Committee, chaired by California Democrat George Miller. Its full name is The Learning Opportunities with Creation of Open Source Textbooks Act of 2009.
Foster figures that most agencies spend well over 2% of their budgets communicating what they are about to the public, especially students, and moving some of that money into this effort would create a rich vein of funding for online texts.
I have written about this subject several times, as there are several public and private efforts currently aimed in this direction.
There is danger here, chief among them a lack of coordination. The Department of Education has an Office of Educational Technology that could be charged with coordination. That office is buried within the present department’s structure.
But that effort might be championed by new Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who previously led the effort to replace textbooks with Web-based materials in Chicago.
I have to believe there will be substantial pushback from existing textbook publishers, not to mention the professors writing those textbooks, whose ox is also being gored here.
So this is a bill the open source community should be watching very, very closely.
March 6th, 2009
An open source textbook is more than a book
The release of an “open source” physics textbook by the state of Virginia is a serious milestone.
I put the words “open source” in quotes because, while the work has a Creative Commons attribution license and was built using open source tools, its chapters are all bylined and it was done with strict peer review.
The technology platform comes from CK-12, Palo Alto, Calif., built using open source projects like Apache, Django, mySQL, PHP and Google Tools. Progress was tracked on a Wiki.
What may be most remarkable here is the timeframe.
Coordinator Jim Batterson announced the project in October, and his 13 authors had their work done by February 27. They included active researchers, high school teachers, and college professors, as well as some retirees.
Naturally, the new text is based on current technology. No talk of cathode ray tubes. And the resulting book can be updated, rewritten, on a regular schedule so it’s new with each school year. The FlexBook can be viewed online with a CK-12 Flexbook reader or printed.
The contrast with current K-12 textbook acquisition methods is night-and-day. No multi-year lead times. No publisher control. And the approval process is also flexible.
CK-12 is a non-profit organization run by serial entrepreneur Murugan Pal and educator Neeru Khosla. The group has several dozen active authors, and a board of advisors heavy on the Sun exes.
Think about how texts are developed now, think of how much faster this process is, consider the costs of each, and I think you’ll admit that what we have coming is a revolution. The fact CK-12 is far from alone here may be the best news of all.
March 5th, 2009
Selling a book with open source shark jumping
There are days when I fear open source is becoming nothing but a buzzword, like e-commerce was a decade ago.
It happens when authors claim to be open source projects in order to sell themselves.
I have nothing against Rick Maurer, or his views on corporate change, which he has been working on for over a decade. He’s also good at naming books – Beyond the Wall of Resistance and Change Without Migraines being among his titles.
It’s just that giving away an e-book and sending out a press release does not make you an open source project. That’s not change we can believe in. That’s marketing. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
My fear is that, with “projects” like this, open source has reached its own “jump the shark” moment.
February 5th, 2009
How Motorola can win with Android
Raymond Loewy, American Industrial Designer
One word — design.
Motorola has one chance to become relevant in handsets again, and most analysts give it no chance of making a comeback.
Weren’t they saying that about Nintendo before the Wii?
Motorola’s fourth quarter was almost Madoff-esque, at least on the handset side. Our own Larry Dignan suggested the handset division might be closed if it can’t be turned-around and sold soon.
So how can that one word help? Raymond Loewy is dead. True, but there are other American design firms — Smart Design, Whipsaw, NewDealDesign, Astro Design, and Stuart Karten among them. Many of our top architecture schools also teach industrial design.
The talent is there. Activate it.
I would concentrate on Android because it’s flexible. Any added features a designer decides they need can be built quickly. Offer a big check and let the top dogs go after it.
Then do something else. A contest.
Offer a $1 million prize, or a design contract, for the top Android design from anywhere in America. Deadline March 31. Plaster it in every design school. Make some Web ads on it. Wake the PR people up with it.
You’re looking for a Wii. You won’t find it in Schaumburg. You can find it in America. If you’re open to it.
January 30th, 2009
What OLPC has accomplished
I have been known to dump on One Laptop Per Child.
MIT Media Lab founder Nick Negroponte’s (right) non-profit start-up has been sanctimonious, self-righteous, financially unsuccessful, a satire of 1960s-era earnestness people find easy to put down.
Yet he keeps soldiering on. Despite recent layoffs, they still have big plans. This includes a new touchscreen interface that may be pure vapor. And news that their next box, XO-2, will use open source hardware.
Now might be a good time to tote up some of OLPC’s real achievements, things Nick Negroponte has a right to be proud of no matter what happens going forward:
- OLPC pioneered what has become the Netbook market. Real Netbooks have more memory and cost more, but the basic idea of no moving parts originated with OLPC.
- OLPC has pushed competition toward the lowest ends of the price curve. Consider this announcement from India of a $10 laptop.
- OLPC has refocused attention on the education market. One of the great frustrations of my parenting career is that my son, whose handwriting is as bad as mine, never had a light typewriter with which he could overcome the problem. Laptops cost too much to bring to school. Now, as he graduates high school, his requirements are being taken seriously.
I don’t think Negroponte ever understood the pushback he has gotten. Some of it is political, some of it is anti-Americanism, some of it is business contempt for an academic trying to play at CEO, and some is down to his non-profit business model.
Nevertheless he has kept moving forward, which is what entrepreneurs do. OLPC-1 did a lot of good for a lot of people, although not that much for OLPC. It tried to pioneer in design like Apple. Now it says it will use the open source process like Google.
My guess is that, again, a lot of people will benefit. OLPC may not be among them. But I’m also beginning to think that Negroponte doesn’t care so much about that, and is more concerned with pushing technology history forward just a little bit.
That was always his main goal anyway.
December 22nd, 2008
Getting personal a source of blog success
I once thought it was just me, but it’s becoming a more general rule.
The best blog posts are personal.
I have found over time that whenever I brought my own life into the virtual pages of my ZDNet open source blogs, I’ve gotten solid base hits, sometimes home runs.
This is illustrated by the 17th most-popular post here in 2008, which I dubbed The Kids are Alright with Linux.
The title was a pun, referencing a 1979 documentary on The Who. The who in this case was a what, namely the Linux network I found when I brought my son to school for his senior year.
What inspired me to write this as soon as I got back were the users I found. These were not my son’s contemporaries but some elementary-age kids, children of one of his teachers.
They were quietly playing learning games while mom did her business. They were enjoying themselves, the older ones helping the younger ones, the human interaction based on how close the terminals were to one another.
Computing is often a solitary pursuit. What I found this day was that it does not have to be. This was a revelation both in terms of computing and in terms of education.
And it was the little children who lead led me.
November 24th, 2008
Microsoft releases Singularity under unapproved license
Microsoft has released some important code under an open source license — psych.
As with the image of blind justice to the right, you can look but you better not touch.
Singularity is the name of the project, a microkernel in which the kernel, drivers and applications are all under managed code. But the Microsoft Research License (MSR-LA) under which it is offered is not approved by the OSI.
The license allows only academic twiggling and any improvements go back to Redmond. Businesses can neither use it nor incorporate it in what they do under the license.
Had Microsoft wanted to make an open source release it has pushed two such licenses through the OSI process — the Microsoft Public License and the Microsoft Reciprocal License. It chose not to do this.
Instead it’s using MSR-LA, which as Palamida’s GPL3 blog notes is “free as in beer, not free speech.”
It is certainly intended to keep all creative work produced under it within the scope of the Singularity research project and also within Microsoft itself. The restriction on the code being “subjected” to the various terms of other licenses effectively isolates the code from being used with seemingly anything outside of this particular project. If the goal is to experiment and do research to develop new techniques and tools, the possibilities here seem unusually limited.
It is true that some academics who like to play with Microsoft code, and support Microsoft technologies like .Net, will find value here.
But everyone else needs to be wary. Lawyers bite. And Microsoft’s are hungry.
November 11th, 2008
Author royalties the test for Flat World
After spending a pleasant hour with Flat World co-founder Eric Frank it seems obvious that the key to making “open source” textbooks work lies in the author’s bottom line.
Frank is telling textbook authors that if they offer students their work for free online they can make it up on the back-end, through reprints, study guides and ancillary products.
“We are using free and open as a market entry strategy. We may not have everything right, and we may not know what additional sources of revenue we can generate,” he said.
The present college textbook market is broken, Frank said. Some 20% of students avoid full price even in the first semester, and by the fourth semester of use 80% of potential revenues may be lost to used books, opt-out and piracy.
“The professors capitalize on fewer than half the students. They feel they are no longer being compensated.”
The response by publishers has been short-sighted. They raise prices, bundle other products, speed revision cycles, even create separate ISBNs for different schools to foil the used book market.
Flat World’s model, now being tested at 20 universities, moving toward a full market roll-out next year, is to offer the HTML version of the textbook free, then offer print and other electronic versions at reasonable prices.
For just $30 students will be able to buy a one-color print version, $80 for color. There will be iPod versions by book and chapter, versions for the Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle, and print-outs available at just $2/chapter.
“Professors still pick the book, but students decide how to consume it,” Frank said. Professors get a 20% royalty on everything.
When compared with traditional publishing, “Their revenues are 15% higher than ours, but we pay a 20% royalty on all sales, so at the end of the day our authors walk away with more money than in a traditional space.
“We wind up with less revenue but higher profits, with automation and cost of sales savings.”
That’s what the models say. The proof of any pudding is in the eating, and by next semester Flat World will be publishing at almost three dozen pilot sites — a good mix of public, private and junior college campuses.
Then there are those additional revenue streams, building communities through the online books.
“We might do a peer to peer tutoring network, students using our network to get tutoring revenue. Or a homework service, where we partner with software providers and populate a grade book at a subscription fee.” It’s wide open.
“Our model is a core, then we plug in other revenue streams, testing those which work. And whenever we generate any revenue the authors get the 20% royalty, so they’re invested in it. We want them to feel it’s the right relationship for them.”
November 10th, 2008
End the open source obsession with Microsoft
Whenever I write the word Microsoft on this blog I can be pretty certain of big traffic and big talkbacks.
It’s a measure of just how much open source advocates loathe and fear Microsoft, and perhaps how Microsoft advocates return the compliment.
The latest is Matt Asay’s report of Microsoft refusing to sponsor a conference unless tiny Zimbra was denied a big booth.
My guess is that this is not a decision which goes up to the top of Redmond’s chain of command.
“Mr. Ballmer, sir, we are being asked to sponsor Conference X but Lilliputian Open Source has a big booth there.”
“Thumbs down unless the Lilliputians are turned away.”
That scene did not happen. More likely some mid-level bureaucrat dealing with this particular show decided to show off his (or her) power.
It’s silly. Not just because it won’t make a single deal happen or not-happen. But because word will inevitably get out, and both sides — Microsoft and open source — will go back to their old obsessions with one another.
It reminds me of how our politics worked until last Tuesday. Republicans bullied Democrats, Democrats complained, and nothing got done because both sides were locked in an abusive relationship.
Which means there is a warning here for both open source and for Democrats. When bottom rail is on top it’s petty to return the abuse. Tit for tat is childish, it accomplishes nothing.
When Microsoft acts abusively toward you, in other words, do what Marc Benioff John Roberts of SugarCRM did when Salesforce did it to him. Wear it as a badge of honor. Don’t advertise it, but be the bigger man (or woman).
Don’t be like Microsoft, in other words. Be better. That’s how progress happens.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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