XplanaZine

There is always a flurry of activity and renewed interest in technology as schools begin to open for a new year. Many of the topics have remained the same over the past thirty years while others, new ones, have appeared alongside new technologies or cultural evolutions. Below is a list of the hot trends at the beginning of this year. Interestingly, I think some of these will have long legs for the coming year and evolve into important topics for students, teachers, administrators, and publishers.

• Textbooks and e-books: The Internet has certainly been abuzz since the GAO published its report on textbook prices last week. This report showed that college textbook prices have increased at twice the rate of inflation and have followed close behind tuition increases. The report came on the heels of the usual volley of media articles on higher textbook prices (Boston Globe and Utne, for example) and the usual responses from the AAP, but also generated insightful responses from publications like Inside Higher Ed.

The reality is that textbook prices are a complicated issue with at least five important players involved — publishers, distributors, college bookstores, administrators/instructors, and students. Naturally, publishers lose more margin with every group that comes between them and the end user, the student. One way to solve that problem, and to address losses related to the used book market, has been to provide e-books via direct-to-student channels and at a steep discount. Until a few weeks ago it looked like the biggest losers in the overall tussle would be big textbook distributors like MBS. That is, of course, until MBS announced its pilot program with 10 university bookstores to provide e-books to students as cost-cutting alternatives to the high-priced print products.

Over the next year publishers will continue pushing e-book solutions and trying to figure out how to make money on them. Meanwhile, distributors and college bookstores will work on not getting cut out of the equation. And who’s minding the student in all of this? Well, it may be the institutions themselves. Either through digital commons initiatives or by creating e-books of their own for free use by students , colleges and universities are beginning to take concrete steps to lowering materials costs for their students.

• Web 2.0 — blogs, wikis,and podcasts (RSS): Will Richardson, one of the leading bloggers in the K-12 space on educational technology, recently wrote an article about how teachers can integrate new, “distribution” technologies into their normal teaching day. At the heart of this new vision (shared by a growing number of people in education) is RSS technology and other Web 2.0 tools such as blogs, wikis, and podcasts. The main principle behind these technologies is that information should be distributed to people wherever/whenever they are at instead of making them go to a particular place/time on the Web to see or hear information. In addition, they represent exciting new opportunities for content creation by teachers and students.

In and of themselves, these pieces of Web 2.0 are disruptive, but they get even more scary when bundled with new personal hardware that will support distributed media. Companies like Samsung, and Sony are introducing more MP3 players into the market and Nokia is launching its first MP3 phone. Soon, every student will be able to read and listen to all pertinent course content wherever her/his phone has connectivity. Are you ready?

• Open source software: Open source is nothing new in schools. It’s free, provides opportunities for collaboration among schools, and generally aligns well with the technologies in which younger programmers are interested and knowledgeable. A recent Canadian study on open source in schools provides a good look at how and when open source makes sense in education. And now, with open source LMS solutions like Sakai and Moodle garnering so much attention, the open source movement has entered a new phase in education.

But if you’re not ready to go “enterprise” with open source, you should at least take a good look at all of the free tools that are available out there. Few schools, teachers, or students have enough money to buy everything and the open source movement provides a plethora of free learning tools that work just as well or better than their commercial counterparts.

There are many other memes or threads of interest out there, but these three have enough steam to warrant everyone’s attention and planning time.