An Apple for the Living Room

By Graham Brown-Martin

Ten years ago it seemed unlikely that Apple would successfully make the transition from computer company to one of the worlds largest consumer electronic and media companies.

That today the value of its brand has eclipsed both Microsoft and Google whilst deriving most of its revenue from the sale of mobile devices and digital content stands testament to its vision and ability to cause and ride the disruptions that are alluding many. That this news coincidentally comes within a week or so of Sony’s nightmare scenario for the PlayStation Network has encouraged me to think about how far Apple could go.

The iPad 2 was never going to be as revolutionary as the iPad 1 after all the first iPad wasn’t just a new product, it was a whole new category of computer. “Magical” or not I’m pretty sure that Apple on the first outing ultimately had to take a deep breath and hope that consumers and developers figured out what the iPad was on their own.

It was an audacious gambit where had Apple positioned iPad as an ebook reader it would have been slammed for being more than twice the price of a Kindle or as a notebook replacement people would have undoubtedly pointed to the raft of cheap netbooks on the market. Indeed some did anyway and we’re about to see the appearance of “netbook 2.0” running Chrome OS for the keyboard Jesuit’s. Good luck with that.

15 million iPads later suggests that the world got the point.

But I actually wonder whether the iPad is really a “third computing category” between the smartphone and the laptop or whether it and products like it will effectively replace both whilst making a convincing play for the family living room.

It’s the latter bit, the living room, that I believe may drive sales of iPads and comparable tablet devices into the hearts and homes of the less gadgety or affluent. I’ll come back to that in a moment.

Does the iPad 2 or future versions thereof prove my oft-quoted canard that “laptops are on deathrow”?

Well given that it launched with laptop-grade video editing and music composition apps, i.e. the kind of creative tasks that mobile devices had hitherto been incapable of doing, I’m inclined to believe that the days of lugging around a laptop are indeed numbered.

But surely the iPad doesn’t challenge the smartphone?

Well I think the answer to this and to some extent the earlier question maybe related to the age of the user and the way in which we end up embedding devices like the iPad into our everyday lives.

The phone call is all but dead which in the tech industry means it’s in serious decline. Looking at my recent usage statement from my mobile telco I’m inclined to believe this.

Despite being addicted to checking my smartphone and staying in constant contact with so many friends, family and colleagues I used less than 10% of my monthly allowance of phone calls and SMS. I got hammered on international and data-roaming but that’s another issue.

The fact is that I use my smartphone mostly for apps, browsing and email whilst for actual speaking I tend to use the significantly cheaper Skype for international.

The phone call is becoming as anachronistic as the keyboard. Phone calls are invasive, they come at the most inconvenient times demanding you to interrupt whatever you’re thinking about, working on or enjoying. Phone calls are low bandwidth information carriers that force you to think or respond in real time and whilst it’s nice to hear from a loved one the etiquette of the phone call is hard to sustain in these days of information overload.

Optional musical interlude:

Of course, there are times when only a phone call or a physical meeting will do. Heaven knows how many people I’ve upset with a carelessly written email or poorly constructed tweet. But those calls are getting further apart and can easily be conducted via Skype that also allows me to share other information during a call.

Recent stats from Nielsen shows that voice usage of phones has been dropping in every age group except for those past age 54 where teens see SMS as easier and faster than a phone call whilst still fun.

This behavior is important if one considers that it takes most industries at least a generation to be completely disrupted so the mighty telco’s time could soon be up.

So assuming that I’ve ditched my laptop would I also be prepared to ditch my smartphone?

This is a tricky one given that the form factor of the pocketable digital communicator is its biggest strength but I’m increasingly performing similar tasks on both my smartphone and my iPad although this is often down to habit rather than necessity. I often take Skype calls on my iPad using a bluetooth headset.

Taking the Nielsen stats into account I wonder if younger people will form the same habits or whether they’ll settle for a single device?

I’m not ready to consign the smartphone to “deathrow” status but I do think there is some justification to believe that iPad and tablet computing devices may fragment or challenge the dominance of smartphones at some point in the not to distant future.

So back to my earlier teaser about the living room and the less affluent for whom, in theory at least, premium devices like the iPad might be regarded as an expensive luxury.

So here’s my thinking.

The seemingly obvious upgrade that appeared with iPad 2, that of screen mirroring to HDTV, would appear to give Apple access to a new market and challenge the traditional gaming console / set-top box industry. Surely it’s only a matter of time before this feature becomes wireless and multi-user?

The appearance of HD resolution video games on the iPad that work on your HDTV whilst using the iPad as a sophisticated controller represents an unexpected challenge to the likes of Sony, Nintendo and Xbox.

The iOS App ecosystem has presented a new opportunity for game developers who have taken to the format with zeal and where new champions have emerged such as Rovio, the creators of Angry Birds, who were recently valued at $200 Million and are expecting to head for an IPO in the next few years. The emergence of high quality and often inexpensive games on mobile and social media platforms has wrecked havoc with the traditional video game industry that traditionally relied on cross-subsidy marketing where the console price was subsidised by the cost of the games.

The iPad also offers many of the features of the cheaper, smaller but also iOS powered Apple TV system on sale at $99 where via iTunes it offers all the facilities of a video rental and music store as well as a simple way of displaying all of your photo’s, family movies and favourite YouTube clips on the domestic TV to share with the whole family.

Assuming that Apple doesn’t come up with an Apple TV upgrade allowing access to the AppStore with new gaming controllers (what is that micro-USB port really for?) then the iPad could be a viable living room device that also challenges the traditional set-top box provided by your satellite or cable TV provider.

It’s this possible disruption to the satellite TV, video rental and gaming console sectors that interests me.

The story of satellite and cable TV in the UK is well known. In the late 80’s when subscription based satellite TV was about to make it’s debut with the British consumer it was thought that the cost of subscription would mean that it would be a middle-class phenomenon.

Thus one of contenders for the crown, British Satellite Broadcasting, entered the market with a technically superior system that was full of high-brow arts and current affairs programming. Meanwhile Rupert Murdoch took a different route to the market believing that it would be popular entertainment and sport that would drive demand for his Sky service. Well it turned out that Murdoch was right and for a while Britain’s middle class turned their nose up to satellite TV and the “chimney woks” that started appearing on the homes and tower blocks of the great unwashed.

The UK leads the world proportionally for HDTV ownership running at nearly 60% (compared to US at 57%) yet availability to HDTV content is dwarfed by other nations. Only 13% of UK HD-ready households have access to high-definition broadcast channels via their set-top boxes with the majority accessing HD material via Blu-ray or their PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360.

So I would suggest that there is a now a new battlefront for Apple and one that could inadvertently benefit those learners from less affluent homes. Despite being a premium product the iPad and similar platforms could be seen as a viable option as a component of a home entertainment system.

Certainly it is clear that that both iOS and Android have intentions on the living room whether it’s via Apple TV or Google TV and this could be the Trojan Horse that finally integrates the web, apps and the wealth of the internet to every home.

If popular entertainment was what drove the uptake of satellite and cable TV in the UK perhaps a device that performs all of the above plus the benefits of access to knowledge and learning may find itself into the hands of the many.

Granted I’ve taken quite a leap with my “what-if’s” but 10 years ago few imagined that Apple would become the largest retailer of music to the consumer. Based on that performance would becoming the dominant provider of entertainment to the living room really be such a stretch?

Now, my thoughts on the iPad 2's (or 3's) possible assault the living room are wild speculation. A developer called FireCore has already demonstrated that it is possible to use Apple TV as a web-surfing device as well as install Apps.

Rather than milk the iPad Apple could decide to officially open their TV system up for web-browsing and App's on HDTV and literally change the game overnight by becoming the cheapest HD gaming system on the market with a potential raft of inexpensive Apps.

In addition to the revenue generated by providing family entertainment such a device could provide access to a whole new audience who want to learn as much as play.

21st century skills

By Graham Brown-Martin

What are 21st century skills?

The question hangs in the air where responses are invariably peppered with buzzwords such as “collaboration”, “creativity”, “technology”, “agility”, “citizenship” and many others. I’m confident that you’ll be able to add to this list and most of them would, in part, be correct.

I enjoy playing buzzword bingo in my head as I’ve listened to policy makers, corporate executives and other 20th century thinkers take a stab at guessing what these skills might be as they struggle to be down with the kids and their quarterly returns.

Video clip: What is she talking about?

In the UK we have an administration - the part responsible for education at least - that would like to turn the clock back to 1950 to a post-war time and a land of opportunity, prosperity and better living through chemistry, where people knew their station in life. The 80/20 rule where 80% of the population were ruled and guided by the other 20%. How comforting that must be.

But there’s an elephant wearing a day-glo pink tutu who’s been dancing in the room since even the last century.

I have a vision about what happens after we elect a new President or Prime Minister. After they’ve stood at the doorway, family in tow, to their newly won corridor of power for the press shots they enter to find Mr Sinister who closes the door behind them, locks it and takes them for a briefing about “how it really is”.

They get to meet the elephant and boy can she dance.

This elephant was touched on during Sir Ken Robinson’s recent LWF talk and it makes climate change seem like a supporting act. And it wasn’t the well-rehearsed and perfectly delivered arguments about creativity in learning but the very reason it’s essential to the survival of our species.

(Sorry iPad users the bit below needs Flash)

Poodwaddle.com

The elephant is called “population” and her supporting acts are called “resources” and “environment”. There’s also a mad man in the audience who shouts “how the hell are we going to get out of this mess!” but every body assumes he’s a drunk so ignores him.

So let’s break this down.

A recent BBC documentary fronted by David Attenborough presented some startling statistics about the Earths population and our ability to support ourselves.

Video clip: How many people can the Earth support?

It turns out that if every person on the planet consumed and left an environmental footprint at the same rate as a typical citizen of Rwanda then our lovely blue marble of a planet could support 15 billion people.

On the flipside if we consume and leave the same environmental footprint as a typical US (and many a European) citizen then the planet can support 1.7 billion people.

The rub is that we are now at 7 billion people and counting.

Which means there’s a whole bunch of people having less so that a minority can have more.

Now this is a really tricky subject because the majority of people reading this blog, myself included, aren’t too keen on the using less bit. Of course, we talk about it and separate our garbage into the right bins, take public transport when we can but this is like comfort eating in a state of denial.

Nobody knows how many people have walked this planet but some pretty clever people have taken a stab and suggested that currently 10% of all the people who have ever lived are alive today. We are quite simply the most populous generation of our species.

For those of a right wing, nationalistic or religious persuasion - depending on who’s stats you read - you should know that the average age of people in the Middle East is under 30 with a growing population and the average age in Europe is approaching 40 rising to 50+ in the next 40 years with a rapidly declining population.

Sarkozy and Berlusconi anybody?

Whilst the physical size of the planet will one day be an issue the restriction on the number of people this planet can support comes down to our natural resources. The water table in China is now precipitously low and our fossil fuels will eventually exhaust themselves exacerbated by, well, those inconvenient people that, you know, want a bit of what you got.

Optional musical interlude:

So whilst we read about the “Arab Spring” and unrest in the African continent perhaps what we’re really witnessing is that our 21st century skills aren’t too different from the ones we’ve been deploying for a few centuries now.

Regime change, intervention, espionage, bombing, sustainable somnambulism, keeping people poor / uneducated, preventing independence, shotgun diplomacy, fiscal control, looting, pillaging whilst adopting a strategy of we take you buy would seem to be the kind of 21st century skills that we’ve become good at and have perfected through our systems of cultural reproduction since even before the Victorians.

So let’s lighten up a bit and bring it back to the topic of 21st century skills and the purpose of learning.

The next few generations of kids including those in our education systems today have some formidable challenges ahead if we are to see a 4th or 5th generation of our species.

Sounds sort of “woo-woo” dramatic doesn’t it until you think about it for a while and try to answer the fundamental questions about how we will ensure sufficient water, food, energy and medicines that will support an ever-growing population.

All that science fiction stuff about city size populations living in a single tall building and deep space exploration begins to seem a little less science fiction when you consider that we will need to design incredibly efficient ways of recycling and using our naturally limited resources without entering a dystopian world.

If we’re serious about educating the global population then they are going to want what you have or at least the good bits and if this is the case we will need to plot a course for energy and environmental neutrality that will allow this to happen. The alternative is what we have at the moment. Keeping the majority of people down and hiding behind well-intentioned NGO’s to salve our conscience. Unfortunately we know how that story ends.

So the point I’m driving at is that we, as a species, have a massive challenge ahead that won’t be solved by sticking our heads in the sand and pretending it will never happen.

We need to challenge and equip our learners of today and tomorrow with the skills to solve bigger problems.

Peace-keeping and the equitable sharing of resources and culture are going to be a big part of this but we are going to need architects, engineers, scientists, designers, artists and all the other members of the team who can reengineer and reimagine almost every facet of what we know today in ways we can hardly envision. 

This will require a challenge to our societies super-structures that hardly seems possible amongst a population who already consider themselves post-modernists when in reality we still live by a feudal system.

All this at the same time as ensuring we have a society and life that’s worth living.

Perhaps the purpose of education is now not simply to reproduce culture and maintain an elite but to take that elephant dancing until she has to leave the room.

What are 21st century skills?

The ones that will ensure we survive in a world that we want to live on.

Personally I don’t think that learning Latin is one of them.

Now what do you think?

The Napsterfication of Learning

By Graham Brown-Martin

I’ve recently enjoyed the honour of being invited to present keynote talks at conferences in the UK and US. I rarely give talks at my own events so it’s great to have the opportunity to attend and speak at others.

My general topic has been “Disruption, Innovation and Learning” that being the theme for LWF during 2011 and usually why I’ve been invited. However I like to customise my talks to the audience whom I’m addressing and the general themes of the events themselves plus I don’t like giving the same talk twice.

Will you choose the red pill or the blue pill?

The events I’ve attended have been well organised and well attended with interesting and many inspiring delegates so my comments here are not intended as a critique but a general observation about the teaching profession and our existing formal establishments for learning. Each event has, by their nature, attracted progressive educational thinkers, practitioners and innovators with a keen interest in deploying the kind of technologies that many young people are already using as opposed to the kind of bone-headed technology that has been forced upon many learners by less enlightened practitioners.

However, what has become clear to me during the events I have participated in as a speaker as well as the events I have hosted is that whilst the discussions are around potentially disruptive technologies such as mobile, video games and social media the real impact of these technologies, like an elephant dancing on the table, is rarely considered.

Common themes emerge such as how we might integrate these technologies into the classroom or within existing teaching practice rather than how these technologies might genuinely change or disrupt the way we teach and learn.

So are we to go through another cycle of missed opportunity as a result of trying to fit the 21st century into the 19th?

Are we really going to carry on talking about how we might use clunky learning platforms on mobile and gaming devices? How we might integrate iPads with Interactive White Boards? How the over-priced and over-maintained LMS might integrate with gaming platforms? How we might apply gaming mechanics to tired educational software? How we might enable the teacher with admin rights or other controls on a learners personal device?

I could go on ad-nausea here but I think you get my point.

compare and contrast

There’s been an on-going industrial-institutional complex at play here for at least the past 30 years that has ensured the continued irrelevance of technology to learning in the formal setting which has been a gift to those in government who would like to opt our learners out of the 21st century and return to back to basic teaching practice. This would be fine of course if our learners where joining a back to basics, 1950’s world after they leave their formal education.

You know what I’m talking about here, technology designed to replicate and support existing teaching practices and formal learning environments which quite frankly haven’t changed a great deal since the mid-20th century. As I’ve oft said the problem with this approach is that we get the same, often mediocre, results only quicker.

What do young people say?

When I retired the Handheld Learning Conference after 5 years at the height of its growth and success (2,000 international delegates) it was because I believed that the argument had been won. I just couldn’t see the point of more navel-gazing about devices. There could no longer be a question about the value of the connected learner who had near permanent access to learning via their mobile device.

Or could there?

Naively I didn’t count on the legion of practitioners or IT job-worths who were still thinking in the context of the mobile or tablet device as a laptop replacement and set about retro-fitting these modern marvels with the same garbage that didn’t work very well even on laptops. They must have missed the memo about the shift in computing that has left the desktop PC all but dead and the laptop on death-row.

So my question is what will happen when every learner has their own iPad like device, permanently connected to the internet without filtering and other controls?

What disruption might this enable?

So the analogy or even challenge that I make is what would the Napster of learning look like?

I’m referring to the original Napster that Shawn Fanning introduced in 1999 that despite being illegal changed the music industry and the way we access music forever. I’d venture to say that without this ingenious act of piracy the iPhone and iPad that we know today would not exist. As Matt Mason opined "piracy drives innovation" and as Stephen Heppell has said “technology + people, breaks cartels”.

Napster to my mind was a text book example of this.

The enabling technology for this disruption was the Internet and affordable, readily available computing that sent shock waves through the industry paving the way for legal platforms such as iTunes.

Napster effectively disintermediated our access to music, it took out the middle men, bypassed the record labels, the record retailers and connected the listeners directly to the music. It also meant that many artists, the creators of the music, didn’t get paid and even today it is estimated that 95% of all music downloads are illegal. However the savvy artists and labels who embraced the disruption used file sharing technology to launch themselves and shifted their revenue streams to live performances.

Interestingly Napster and illegal file-sharing didn’t damage the independent record labels who were innovating as much as the majors who were largely innovation-free and relied on re-releasing proven artists and old recordings in new formats.

I think we can draw some interesting parallels here to what is already happening in the world of learning.

Understanding who the client is here is easy. But who or what are the middle-men? Who are the cartels? Who are the artists and who are the new artists that will embrace this inevitable disruption? How will they get paid?

And what of the physical school or university building?

I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Addendum added August 17th 2011 - Video of talk given at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival 2011

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Q&A with Jimmy Wales & Lord Puttnam, closing session LWF11

A unique audience question and answer session to bring the London 2011 LWF Festival to a close with Lord David Puttnam and Jimmy Wales discussing learning and technology.

Facilitated by Learning Without Frontiers founder, Graham Brown-Martin

Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia, LWF Talk, London 2011

Knowledge, collaboration, freedom & learning

Jimmy Wales is the US Internet entrepreneur and wiki pioneer best known as the founder of Wikipedia. "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge" Jimmy asks us in this talk and discusses how Wikipedia has grown, the impact it has made and the people who contribute to its creation.

Jimmy discusses future directions for Wikipedia and Wikia, Inc