This has been a big topic in our learning and teaching community here at Carolina Day over the past few weeks:

Students Need An Audience If We Expect Them To Learn How To Write: “Good writing requires attention to form and conventions, but it also requires an awareness of the audience at the other end. Whether you want to inform, inspire, or amuse, writing is about communicating. Yet we fail to impart this essential concept in school. Too much of the written work in our English classrooms (and history, science, and even math classrooms, for that matter) exists in a bubble that doesn’t extend past the school’s walls. And we’re not just talking about the dreaded book report: even complex, thoughtful assignments are divorced from any notion of audience. They’re written for the eyes of the teacher alone, making them feel inauthentic and irrelevant to students.”

The changing (evolving?) roles of essays, blogging, editing, reviewing and organization of thoughts is a conversation that all schools need to engage in this year.

To compliment our class blog called StudiesLab, I’ve created TeachersLab for the other part of our learning community…

TeachersLab: “Teaching and Learning at Carolina Day School: TeachersLab is curated by Sam Harrelson, a Middle School Teacher at Carolina Day School in Asheville, NC.”

I’ve intentionally built this on Posterous in hopes of other collaborators from CDS (and maybe elsewhere) joining in, since Posterous is so dead easy to use in a group blog situation.

This is the best post I’ve read on the Apple education announcement this week:

Apps in Education: My E-Textbook Manifesto: “This announcement needs to be tempered with an evaluation of what we want and what we need as teachers. After all, we are the ones that are at the coalface, we are the risk takers, the experimenters, the alchemists. What do we want for our students? What do our students need from e-texts?”

Go read the entire post.

I can only add that the idea of teachers and students working together in a lab-like environment to create their custom educational experience is insanely appealing to me. This paradigm is especially exciting when thinking of the iBooks Author tool that easily allows for teachers and students to work on and construct their own texts.

However, the bigger revolution (that Apple can’t create by industry disruption) is the recognition by teachers and students that learning means more than content consumption out of a set of agreed upon texts set forth by a corporation or board of education hundreds of miles and dozens of years away from any particular classroom.

Teachers have to remake themselves and our profession into one that recognizes and encourages (responsible) risk taking, alchemy and experimentation with tools, tech and curriculum all the while ensuring that it is relevant and beneficial for student development while actually encouraging students to actively participate in this process as co-learners.

Successful schools will do this and thrive in the coming years and decades. Schools that insist on momentum as the prime mover of curriculum, faculty development, student learning and content engagement will wither on the vine as a whole.

This is the real revolution in education that has teachers, students, parents and learning communities who care about quality education so excited about the shiny new objects coming out of Cupertino (er Shenzhen).

Here’s to the crazy ones.

Many critics have pointed to their disappointment in Apple for not adopting the ePub 3 format as a standard in iBooks Author.

There’s a great discussion on the latest Hypercritical that approaches this concern on a higher level (fast forward to about 30 minutes in):

5by5 | Hypercritical #51: Unjustified Confidence: “John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin briefly recap the iPhone ringer/silent switch controversy, then discuss the new iBooks Author application, Apple’s ebook ambitions and prospects, and the role of technology in education.”

I’m still betting on the realization that Apple never shows all of its cards, especially with the initial launch into an area that they want to “revolutionize.”

In my hopes, as ePub 3 becomes more standardized and catches up to what Apple is pushing users to do in iBooks Author, Apple will slowly incorporate the more open ePub standards as output mechanisms. In a way, I think Apple is helping to push the adoption and flexibility of open standards by pushing users farther ahead than they would have been pushed otherwise.

Hopefully Amazon will join this standardization evolution as well.

I love the idea of examining this idea of a “philosophy of cosmology”…

What Happened Before the Big Bang? The New Philosophy of Cosmology by The Atlantic: “This question of accounting for what we call the “big bang state” — the search for a physical explanation of it — is probably the most important question within the philosophy of cosmology, and there are a couple different lines of thought about it.”

Go read the entire piece. Beautiful, relevant and haunting.

Good thing Apple didn’t partner with the music industry to revolutionize the way we consume, create and share music.

Oh wait…

Why Apple Won’t Disrupt the Textbook Industry Anytime Soon: “Today, the company set their sights on textbooks, an industry Steve Jobs himself described as being “ripe for digital destruction.” True as that may be, is what Apple planning to do in the space really all that disruptive?”

Lots of claim chowder being made by teachers and tech writers these last few days.

However, I keep getting this particular linked passed to me, especially from my educator friends who mostly use Windows XP.

Here’s the deal to remember with Apple products: the products that critics, bloggers and writers say are “too late” or “not feature rich enough” or “not cross platform” or “too costly” or “not aimed at the right market” or “don’t have Flash” are the products that usually end up revolutionizing things. Let’s see… iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad… pretty good track record.

So, with all of the negativity from “Why Can’t it Just Be 1960 Again??” educators and tech writers with an axe to grind, it looks like Apple’s education releases of iBooks 2 and especially iBooks Author for textbook writing by profs, teachers and students (yeah, I went there), are poised to change the way we do things as learners.

When danah boyd says something, I always listen…

Danah Boyd – Cracking Teenagers’ Online Codes – NYTimes.com: “We need to give kids the freedom to explore and experience things online that might actually help them,” she added. “What scares me is that we don’t want to look at the things that make us uncomfortable. So rather than see what teenagers are showing us online about bullying and suicide and the problems they’re dealing with and using that information to help them, we’re making ourselves blind to it.”

I chose to go into the education profession for many of the same reasons she calls herself an activist and anthropologist. In many ways, teachers are anthropologists that are tasked with constantly studying and even attempting to understand the various tribes of youth, adults and community members we encounter with the aim of curating a learning experience or process for our students and co-learners.

One of the expressions of that mindset is how teens interact on social platforms in this world of gated communities and little time/opportunity for children and teens to have real free play or socializing time that is spontaneous and not scripted or hygienically controlled. As a teacher, I view it as part of my duty to get my hands dirty and attempt to understand what is going on in communities like Twitter or Facebook or XBox Live so that the learning experiences I work to provide in our classroom is authentic and meaningful to both myself and my student co-learners.

Fascinating time to be a teacher.

Great post by Mike Elgan…

Why the Emotional Criticism of iBooks Author Is Wrong | Cult of Mac: “The iBooks Author terms are the opposite of “greedy and evil.” They’re generous to authors, and strongly encourage the creation of free books so that poor people aren’t disadvantaged by the cost of learning materials.”

Not to beat the teacher drum too much, but I have to wonder how many of these pundits and writers and bloggers who have terrible things to say about Apple’s education event and releases this past week actually think beyond the scope of their monitor and realize how these initiatives could seriously (and positively) impact education and cause dramatic change in how our students see, interact and engage with quality content written by passionate teachers, professors and perhaps other students rather than a paid staff of Pearson or Prentice Hall (the original pay-per-posters)?

That was a long sentence. Apologies.

Thanks, Scott!

Sam Harrelson Consulting Launches as Affiliate Program Management Agency: “Caterpillars to butterflies.

Congrats and Godspeed, Sam.  Here’s to making a difference.”

Lots of folks have asked why an OPM and why now considering how crowded and fairly stagnant that space has been over the last few years.

To me, it’s simple:

1) The Affiliate Outsourced Program Management space is competitive and crowded to the point that many OPM’s are engaged in a “race to the bottom” mentality of pricing. Whereas many OPM’s charged in the $2,000-5,000 a month range just 2 or 3 years ago, the price points have dropped to levels such as $250 a month or even commission based. While that seems advantageous for merchants, it’s really a lose-lose for the industry because you do get what you pay for in terms of quality management. I’m looking to reverse the trend of getting 20 or 30 clients at $500 a month and recruit a team of inexperienced managers to run the farm while I sit in the big house and take in the winnings. To quote Jerry Maguire… “Fewer Clients; Less Money.” I’m focusing on quality, not quantity. Quality interactions, quality merchants, quality affiliates, quality networks and quality results.

2) While the OPM space is crowded in many verticals and niches, there are still large areas of online commerce that are underserved, if at all, by OPM’s. For instance, my focus is on tech merchants, non-profits/charities, gadgets and gaming. Those aren’t the only prospective clients I’m speaking with, but they make up what will be the core of my business. Again, fewer clients and more quality.

3) It’s time for the OPM model to evolve. I like helping things to evolve.

So, here’s to the company I’ve been trying to build my entire career in the affiliate marketing space. I’m beyond excited about the direction of the company after speaking with prospective clients (and a few folks who might be coming on board) at Affiliate Summit last week.

I should be able to fill in some details about clients next week or by the 24th depending on when contracts get inked etc. In the end, my goal is to personally stay involved in all aspects of this management company, even if that means staying a 1 man shop (which is how I’m leaning at the moment).

However, this butterfly is ready to go.

The always brilliant Ben Edelman has a new scathing study on Google and its self-promotional ways of late and comes to this conclusion:

Google Tying Google Plus and Many More: “My takeaway: Google’s tying tactics should not be permitted. Google’s dominant position in search requires that the company hold itself to a higher level of conduct, including avoiding tying its other products to its dominant search service. Google has repeatedly crossed the line, and antitrust enforcement action is required to put a stop to these practices.”

If Ben is right (and I think he is), this will have major implications for affiliate marketing and the search industry beyond just Google’s marketshare and experience. This potential case could literally re-write much of what affiliate managers do in terms of program promotions in regards to search traffic.

Head over to Ben’s site to read the entire detailed argument. I’m excited to hear Ben’s talk at the upcoming Affiliate Management Days where we’ll both be speaking in a couple of months.