Monday 21 January 2013

"Churn" in the for-profit education industry


The digital age and changing corporate strategies have produced some handoffs among the three corporations that have dominated education publishing:  McGraw-Hill, Pearson and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Apollo Global Management has bought the education publishing side of McGraw-Hill for $2.5 billion.  McGraw-Hill had dropped 11% of revenues between 2008 and 2011, according to Education Week (December 12, 2012).  The head of Apollo's version of the company says they want to put together digital content and services into a package, rather than separate development.
The other two of the big publishers revenues also dropped in that period:  Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt lost 13% and Pearson's publishing revenue dropped 3%.

Edweek says the situation is a result of several trends:  moves from print to digital, austerity in school district budgets and states deciding not to purchase new textbooks until the new US Common Curriculum is in place and textbooks reflect new content.
While McGraw-Hill sold off its education side, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt came out of bankruptcy protection after restructuring $3.1 billion in debt because of previous acquisitions of other education publishing companies.   They had expanded into a declining market.

Pearson is “acquiring technology to create platforms for its content,” according to the Edweek report. It has bought Harcourt Assessment, “America’s Choice” school improvement company, Schoolnet software, and Connections Education, a virtual school operator.  They bought Connections Education from Apollo Global management that, in turn, just bought McGraw-Hill.
For Pearson, this is a continuation of a corporate strategy of buying up other companies to develop an integrated company that offers one-stop shopping for every stage of the education process.  This was described in another digicritic post.  http://digicritic.blogspot.ca/2012/09/corporate-control-of-education-pearson.html

Apollo, the company that bought McGraw-Hill, owns Phoenix University.  Apollo is closing down more than 100 Phoenix University campuses in the US and putting the savings into expanding its already large online programs.  A US Senate committee has reported on an investigation of Phoenix University practices:
“The report outlines widespread problems in the sector, including overpriced tuition, predatory recruiting practices, high dropout rates and aggressive marketing campaigns. It calls for enhanced transparency, stronger oversight and meaningful protections. The report suggested that the education department create an online student complaint clearinghouse and require all higher education institutions to provide a link on their websites.”  [From the Phoenix, Arizona, Business Journal.]



 

 

Sunday 20 January 2013

The Age of the Electronic Mob


Against the machine:  Being human in the age of the electronic mob


By Lee Siegel

Spiegel & Grau  (2008)

We are all under attack from the “electronic mob,” according to Lee Siegel.

Lots has been written about the democratic potential of the internet.  For example, Howard Rheingold’s book on the topic is called Smart Mobs: the next social revolution.

 Author Lee Siegel takes aim at this idea in his book, Against the machine:  Being human in the age of the electronic mob.  Siegel characterizes Web 2.0 as a “crude caricature of egalitarianism.”

 Siegel’s challenge to the wisdom of crowds theory of the internet falls into three categories:  its commodification, standardization and radical individualism.

 Commodification is no surprise.  In an amazingly short time, the non-commercial internet morphed into the huge profit centre that it has become.  The commodity for sale is really attention, much as has been the case for the newspaper, radio and TV.  However, in the case of the internet, ironically, what is for sale is frequently the content that has been created by the very person who is also the consumer.  Leisure time is, in effect, turned into work; private experience into a public commodity.

 Some 70 million blogs exist in the blogosphere, growing rapidly toward 100 million.  Siegel see this, rather than imperialism, as the true final phase of capitalism.  It reflects the individual learning to “retail his privacy as a public performance.”  Leisure play is fused with production and consumption.  The internet culture, Siegel claims, operates on a belief “that the market contains all values.”

While boosters of the internet talk about “demassification,” in fact it produces more standardization.  Many of the information sources on the internet provide information through algorithms based on popularity—such as Google search returns.  The New York Times online replaces “All the news that’s fit to print” with sidebars giving links to the 10 most e-mailed, blogged and searched items.

The individual gets customized information through tools like Google Reader—what Nicholas Negroponte calls “The Daily Me” and others call “crowdsourcing.”  Siegel has another word for it—the “youniverse” that only reflects back to the user what he/she wants to hear.  Mass customization is really a new form of standardization.

But it is a standardization that at the same time promotes an extreme individualism through the illusion of choice, access and increased opportunity for individual expression.  These produce the feeling of individual agency, but not the reality.  The anonymity of putting out ideas without a real name attached, as is often the case, encourages a lack of accountability and reflects an absence of the positive influence of institutional ethics.

So what does Siegel want?  Siegel sees his work as being one of unmasking “the emperor’s new modem.”  

Like Neil Postman, who laments “the surrender of culture to technology,” Siegel wants some institutions that operate on ethical principles and social responsibility.  For example, Siegel contends that the “the culture needs authoritative institutions like a powerful newspaper.”  Without that, he suggests, we are subjected to the “electronic mob.”

Yes, but….. Short of a total global ecological disaster, we are not likely to abandon the new tools and networks.  But we can try to shape them, to work at creating responsible, democratic and ethical communication systems that are not new forms of commodification and profit centres.

Ironically, Siegel himself was caught up in 2006 in a blogging situation that was not either responsible or ethical, in the view of many.  He had been a blogger at the New Republic magazine and had come under attack by others in the blogging world. 

Siegel created a pseudonym and joined in the blog wars in defense of himself and against what he called ‘blogofascism.’  Creating a pseudonym to defend your self is labeled as creating a ‘sock puppet’ and he got fired from the magazine when it was exposed. 

Despite this, Lee Siegel does us a favour by challenging the hyper-promotion of the new technologies by those who profit from them and by those who are uncritical proponents of a new world, without looking below the surface at the social dangers that lurk in the very structure of the technology.  Without challenges like his, we will never get to the task of shaping technology to fit our social values, rather than the other way around.

Sunday 6 January 2013

Education Technology--"Oversold and Underused"


A decade ago I wrote a review of Larry Cuban's book critical of the claims about bringing computers into classrooms.  Interestingly, it was the most viewed review over a period of several years on the Education Review web site. 
The Education Review is a wonderful site for giving open access to reviews of most of the books published on education--well worth subscribing to. 
Certainly, people came the review because of interest in Cuban's ideas, not because I wrote the review. He is undoubtedly  the most significant education historian who is critical of technology in education. 
I started the review by describing the ambitions of the presidents of Mexico and Cuba about how computer technology would transform teaching practice.  Looking back over the decade since the review was published, I have to say that Cuban's point in the title of his book still resonates, not just in the Cuba, Mexico and the U.S., but here in Canada as well. 
 
Cuban, Larry. (2001). Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

256 pages
$27.95 (cloth) ISBN 067400602

Reviewed by Larry Kuehn
University of British Columbia

June 6, 2002

When he was running for office in 2000, Vicente Fox—the current president of Mexico from the right-wing party PAN—included in his education platform the placing of computers in every school. In outlining new directions for education in Cuba in the new century, Fidel Castro said he wants—that's right—computers in every school. Will computers in every school transform teaching practice in Mexico or Cuba? Not likely, if the experience in already computer-rich Silicon Valley is any indicator. To find out if computers are changing education practice, Stanford historian of technology in education, Larry Cuban, took a look at the impact of computers in the community where extensive integration seems most likely. He looked into the preschools, Kindergartens and secondary schools where the people who develop the new technologies send their children. He also looked at Stanford University, an institution that feeds the developers of the high tech industries of the Silicon Valley region of California.
 
Read the full review here: