Bring Your Own iPhone to College

It may have been the case once that you could go to school without a pencil or a textbook but the Missouri School of Journalism have taken it to new heights insisting that students who wish to be budding journalists have to bring their own iPhone or iTouch if they wish to attend. According to their web site they have insisted in students having their own wireless laptop since 2005 and obviously have strong ties with Apple and they recommend that too.

Missouri School of Journalism state that students will be able to electronically download material to either of the devices from iTunes University, a no-cost component of the iTunes Store. The school’s technology store, claims that 90% of Missouri students have iPods. Students with financial aid packages may include the cost of the iPod touch or iPhone and packages because it is mandatory required.

So we clearly have the technology companies all lining up to get a slice of the college market and now joined by Amazon with their new Kindle DX and lining up with textbook publishers. Amazon are also playing the iPhone field with their reader application designed for the iPhone and iPod touch, which is available through Apple’s App Store and the announcement yesterday of their Safari book store for the iPhone app.

So the old saying about ‘catch them young’ may be coming true as students who become very familiar with a certain device and technology may be hard to ween off it after they have finished their course and therefore we have a double wammy with the technology companies retaining them for many years. Mind some would say that the banks have done the same for years.

UK Primary Pupils to be Switched On?

They say that education should prepare you for the outside world and UK draft education curriculum plans drawn up by Sir Jim Rose, the former Ofsted chief, appointed to overhaul the primary school curriculum, certainly will shake the tree. The plans due to be published next month were leaked by the Guardian and include plans that require children to master Twitter and Wikipedia. They emphasise traditional learning such as phonics, the chronology of history and mental arithmetic, but now include modern media and web-based skills as well as a greater focus on environmental education.

The Guardian claim that the proposals would require, ‘Children to leave primary school familiar with blogging, podcasts, Wikipedia and Twitter as sources of information and forms of communication. They must gain "fluency" in handwriting and keyboard skills, and learn how to use a spellchecker alongside how to spell.’

Irrespective of what the final paper says and what gets implemented, there is a clear shift towards new media and communications skills and the obvious questions will be raised about basics and dumbing-down.

Its amazing that technologies that are under ten years old are accepted as basic building blocks for children who themselves may only be a little older than the tools they are grappling with and whose parents may not be conversant with.

The other certainty is that we will be educating a generation to express themselves creatively very differently from those before them. This is not just a shift in how people read and consume media but how they create and express themselves and this will certainly change what we know as content moving forward.

Riverdeep Mountain High

When times are good and credit is cheap some build significant empires but when winter comes and the sub prime ice storms come then that debt may become very visible and be hard to finance. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has $6.7 million of debt, which ten times its gross earnings and according to the Boston Globe is putting the iconic 180 year old publisher on shaking ground.

So what happened to a publishers whose author list includes the likes of; Roger Tory Peterson, JRR Tolkien, Philip Roth, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jnr and Rachel Carson? In 1978, Western Pacific Industries acquired a large stake in Houghton Mifflin which was defeated not by money but a group of famous Houghton authors, led by Archibald MacLeish, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. who threatened to move from the company if the sale went through.

In 2001, Vivendi International bought the company for $2.2 billion and they became part of an empire which included Universal Studios, theme parks, TV stations, and telecom companies. A year later debt brought down the empire and in 2003 Houghton Mifflin was sold at a $500 million loss to a Boston-based equity partnership. Then in 2006 Dublin based Riverdeep Group bought the company for $3.4 billion a surprising move given the company was only a $392 million educational software company.

Riverdeep had high ambitions east credit and a year later had bought Harcourt from Reed Elservier for $4 billion. Reiverdeep had grown from a $8 million sales educational publisher in 1999 to Houghton Miffen Harcourct Riverdeep in just seven years with a significant debt.

Combining two similar publishers is not as simple they bought the same kind of list. Educational publishing has in principle one curriculum so having two reading programs, two math programs, two of everything is not the answer – this is not Noah’s Ark. When you add a recession you add a big problem to any company with debt but for a company that hasn’t consolidated and shed the excess you have a problem.

So the rating has been slashed and its core educational business is cost cutting and threatening even its existing revenue levels. So some would suggest the vultures are in flight, a fire sale beckons and it’s hard to see how they can service the debt in this climate.