Never mind the technology, where’s the learning?

Bill Gates back in January 1996 wrote an article entitled “Content is King” which perhaps summarised the world of Web 1.0:

Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet… If people are to be expected to put up with turning on a computer to read a screen, they must be rewarded with deep and extremely up-to-date information that they can explore at will. They need to have audio, and possibly video… For the Internet to thrive, content providers must be paid for their work. The long-term prospects are good …

One of the exciting things about the Internet is that anyone with a PC and modem can publish whatever content they can create. In a sense, the Internet is the multimedia equivalent of the photocopier. It allows material to duplicated at low cost, no matter the size of audience.

The Internet also allows information to be distributed worldwide at basically zero marginal cost to the publisher. Opportunities are remarkable, and many companies are laying plans to create for the Internet.

Gates recognised that greater availability meant you could publish at low cost, but did not necessarily see that a business model that relied on scarcity would also perish along with it. This is becoming starker and starker for educational software companies, who have seen the rise of global online, and usually free, tools and resources eat away at their reason to produce. The end of e-learning credits in August, mostly served with back-catalogue software and curriculum content will see the demise of many. Some are making valiant attempts to adapt, but in most cases they are unable to switch their business model to fit in with the globalisation of resource. Suddenly to compete you need to think “world market, long tail”, where track record is much diluted and scarcity is replaced by abundance.

In the web 2.0 world, conversation is king, content is just something to talk about, and in the classroom 2.0 world, learning is king, curriculum content is, well, “just something to talk about”, although it does tend to dominate the conversation.

Image credit: Martin Stabe