Scrambled Egg

The media egg has been scrambled . Sectors once clearly dominant have been parsed into demographic shards.

Hundreds of cable television channels now compete with the networks, formerly seen as monolithic captors of viewers time. Magazines that once were safe repositories for advertisers who look for prominent titles to display their messages have lost their privileged perches.

Newsweek once a proud emblem of news and analysis has been sold for less than it used to make on advertising revenues every month. BusinessWeek once the standard for business Journalism and the flagship of MacGraw-Hill's magazine fleet has been sold to Bloomberg using the same humiliating calculus.
Forbes the capitalist tool, the hottest magazine in the last quarter of the20th century has completely redesigned its business plan to conform to a new digital paradigm.

Internet advertising, once considered billboards along the roadbed of the information super highway has grown its market share in a predictably upward trajectory as more and more eyeballs are attracted to a mobile communications modality. Every media construct can be captured on a cell phone or iPad. Time is now the big competitor for readership. Entertainment is now, more than ever, a cohesive factor in message delivery and retention. Embedded messages have become fashionable as edutainment is seen as the most effective delivery scenario.

This phenomenon should be a positive trend that will reshape society, providing new creative opportunities for spreading the word about available goods and services people need to fully participate in a new digital age.

Now that's a trend worth tracking.

Digital Revolution

This from the New York Times
November 7,2010

"Across the country, online education is exploding: 4.6 million students took a college-level online course during fall 2008, up 17 percent from a year earlier, according to the Sloan Survey of Online Learning. A large majority — about three million — were simultaneously enrolled in face-to-face courses, belying the popular notion that most online students live far from campuses, said Jeff Seaman, co-director of the survey. Many are in community colleges, he said. Very few attend private colleges; families paying $53,000 a year demand low student-faculty ratios.
Colleges and universities that have plunged into the online field, mostly public, cite their dual missions to serve as many students as possible while remaining affordable, as well as a desire to exploit the latest technologies.
At the University of Iowa, as many as 10 percent of 14,000 liberal arts undergraduates take an online course each semester, including Classical Mythology and Introduction to American Politics.
At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, first-year Spanish students are no longer offered a face-to-face class; the university moved all instruction online, despite internal research showing that online students do slightly less well in grammar and speaking."

Rhein Watch Trend Tracker comment.
eLearning is changing the way we teach and the trend will continue as a public demands efficiency in every aspect of human endeavor. This is particularly true as public schools keep increasing their demands on real estate taxpayers, and continue to use archaic academic structures.
Consider the amount of money that could be saved by the elimination of school buses . Think of costs that could be eliminated by redesigning schools to accommodate a more eLearning friendly platform. This trend is inevitable as we convert from an analog world to one where most almost everything is digital.
This has meaningful portent for Focus WHSN (world high school news). The Website still under development is going to make every iPad into a fountain of learning–portable and manageable and fun.
Each issue of focus will be planned as a supplement to the curriculum it every high school class and course.
Bring it on.