MediaWeek (V8, N4): Predictions, Photo Archive at Nat Geo, Medical Simulations + more

Deloitte has released some predictions about the technology media and telecommunications industries for 2014 (Youtube):



A short video story about Bob Bonner who is a photo archivist at National Geographic.

The first time I went downstairs to film Bill for this video, he was busy searching for old photos about South Africa, at the request of a magazine editor. One of the unpublished images he pulled has stuck with me. It was taken during the apartheid era at Christmas time, and it showed dozens of white men standing along a pool’s edge, tossing money into the water where black mine workers were fighting for their Christmas bonuses. It was a simple photograph, but it thrust me into the small, yet appalling moments of racism. There were no broken bones, no starving children, no corrupt cops. But there was degradation. There was merciless humor. There was struggle, strength, pride, hope, pain, entitlement, hate. That photo showed me apartheid. And Bill remembers that image, and those people, and the photographer every single day. He pays homage to their lives by keeping these moments safe in his memory, and sharing them with anyone who wants to learn.

Laerdal Medical and Wolters Kluwer Health Introduce Virtual Simulation Learning Tool for Nursing Students. (Press Release)  I spent some time looking into this opportunity a number of years ago and it is interesting to see they finally got something off the ground.

"There's a huge unmet need for improved clinical education and for interactive activities in the classroom that are focused on patient-centered care," said Susan Driscoll, President and CEO, Wolters Kluwer Health, Professional & Education.  "The new vSim for Nursing product provides an interactive learning experience that helps nursing educators promote better and safer patient care, and ensures nursing students are ready to practice.  This is the first simulation solution to provide readily available clinical practice with fully integrated learning resources that are closely tied to the nursing school curriculum."
Accessed online, vSim for Nursing simulates a patient encounter using computer-animated avatars that allow nursing students to access and practice patient care anytime and anywhere.  The "virtual" simulation environment helps build competence by introducing nursing students to realistic scenarios where they are responsible for making a variety of clinical reasoning decisions.  The simulator reacts to each patient-care decision and tracks these actions so that they can be reviewed and measured with personalized feedback after the scenario.  The post-scenario report is then stored for reflection and continued learning.  By allowing repetitive practice, students can build their confidence and competence in a safe environment.

Last week I noted problems in Canada over Access Copyright's licensing terms but this week The University of Montreal cancelled their all-in subscription to Wiley/Blackwell journals (THE):

Montreal previously subscribed to the publisher’s “big deal”, which provided electronic access to its entire journal collection for a fixed fee.
But an announcement on the university’s website, posted on 14 January, says that many years of above-inflation journal price rises, combined with recent cuts imposed by the Quebec government, had forced it to make a stand and decline to go on reducing monograph acquisition to sustain journal access.  Many libraries have threatened in recent years to cancel big deals, but few have followed through.  In 2011, Research Libraries UK refused to renew big deals with both Wiley-Blackwell and Elsevier unless they made significant real-terms price reductions. Before the stand-off was resolved a few months later, RLUK suggested that its members could restrict their subscriptions to the publishers’ journals in the highest demand from academics, accessing the others via inter-library loans.

From the twitter this week:
Interesting news from CCC: Copyright Clearance Center and IPR License Form Wide-Ranging Strategic Partnership DigitalBookWorld
YouTube reveals $1bn music payouts, but some labels still unhappy Guardian

Washington-based tech firm Flat World raises $9.5M in funding to make textbooks cheaper VCPost
 

Media Week (V7, N52): Looking forward to 2014. Round-up of predictions.

On UK newspapers, the apocalypse has been averted (Guardian)

It's exactly four years since – at a heavyweight conference in eastern Europe – I heard an expert on the communications apocalypse predict that, only five years hence, printed newspapers would be dead and digitally buried. The trends, he said, were clear. Umm… not exactly. There's an awful lot of perishing left to cram into the next 12 months, and it shows no sign of happening any time soon. Indeed, rather the reverse. Bring on Ken Doctor, a great American guru, offering us five, 10 or more 15 years to choose from. Nemesis indefinitely delayed.
And the most fascinating thing about the ABC-sanctified print circulation results (for November) involve two politically polar opposites on the newsstand: the Telegraph and the Guardian. Both belong to the national quality market. Both, over the years, have cleared out bulk sales and other devices that prop up or confuse their sales figures. Both have solid and growing online statistics to boast about: the Telegraph with 13,855,000 unique visitors and the Guardian with 12,301,000 on the latest UKOM results. They leave everything but the inevitable Mail online far behind. But what does this mean for print, for copies pushed across the newsagent's counter or dropped through a letterbox?

In Hollywood everyone knows the same nothing (Economist)

Since everybody still knows that nobody knows, studios continue to show early cuts of films to focus groups, to determine how to tweak and market them. But even after a film’s release it remains unclear why it boomed or bombed. Why was “Gravity”, starring George Clooney and Sandra Bullock in a tale about stranded astronauts, one of this year’s hits despite the misgivings of its studio, Warner Bros, whereas “The Lone Ranger” was such a flop, despite Disney’s high hopes for a film starring Johnny Depp?
“Hollywood is always in crisis,” jokes an unusually publicity-shy talent agent. Indeed, his office is in Century City, a district full of high-rises in Los Angeles that was once the backlot of 20th Century-Fox until it had to sell up because of the crippling cost of its 1963 epic, “Cleopatra”. Faced with bankruptcy 50 years ago, Fox might have been better off keeping the property and junking the film-making. The industry’s return on capital has been chronically anaemic. The media conglomerates that own the major studios grouse about the lousy economics of the business, particularly since DVD sales peaked in 2004 and then waned, with consumers shifting to lower-cost rentals and subscription services like Netflix. Technology should have helped Hollywood, by lowering the cost of distributing films, but it has also cost the industry dearly, as film-makers doll up their movies with expensive special effects, and negative social-media buzz kills films before they even open.

Will 2014 be the year of the eBook subscription model (Publishing Technology):

It’s quite likely that we’ll look back at 2013 as the year when publishing stopped talking about the ‘Netflix’ or ‘Spotify for Books’ and actually did something about it. eBook subscription services went from being something talked about in op-ed articles and conference platforms to real-life services, some of which launched with tens of thousands of titles and support from major publishers.
Most debate has focused on the fortunes of Oyster, the NYC-based start-up that launched earlier this year and Scribd, a service that has pivoted away from document sharing and publishing towards eBook subscription. Yet these are far from the only eBook subscription services in town. Another US-based service eReatah also launched earlier this year. Amazon has entered the market on its own terms, using eBook lending rather than subscription as a way of boosting membership of the Amazon Prime program. Meanwhile Europe’s fragmented ereading market is at risk of further fragmentation as country-specific subscription services emerge. 24Symbols continued to do well in its Spanish speaking home market and two Dutch publishers WPG Uitgevers B.V. and Lannoo Meulenhoff B.V. have teamed up to create a Netherlands-specific equivalent Riddo. In Denmark Riidr One addresses the relatively small domestic market with its own subscription service and in Germany the recently launched Skoobe boasts a 23,500 strong catalogue.

Ad agency Millward Brown's media predictions for 2014.

Digital BookWorld's list of 10 things to look for in 2014:

It’s been another exciting year for the publishing industry – perhaps the most dynamic in the history of the business. In 2013, all ebooks by publishers became subject to retailer price controls and ebook prices plummeted. At the same time, ebook revenue growth has tapered off even as many of the largest publishers still reported digital gains. A handful of ebook subscription businesses were launched and libraries won some key victories in their fight to bring ebooks from all publishers to their patrons.

From Book Business Magazine the future looks bright for 2014

Information Today Post on Trends for 2014

Information Today magazine asked me and some other pundits to think about what we may see in 2014:

There were plenty of newsworthy events in 2013, from acquisitions (Elsevier acquired Knovel, Swets acquired JSTOR ebooks), to ebooks (Ingram added an ebook lending model to MyiLibrary, Apple was tried for ebook price fixing), to MOOCs (institutions such as edX and Coursera offered topics including 21st Century American Foreign Policy, Introduction to Computer Science, and Embedded Systems: Shape the World). Tablet computers and apps gained in popularity, while previously favored devices such as BlackBerry found their customer bases declining.
So what’s likely to make headlines in 2014? Industry professionals John Blossom, Michael Cairns, Roy Kaufman, and Pat Sabosik offer their insights about the cloud, massive open online courses (MOOCs), Big Data, open access (OA), and the Internet of Things:

• Blossom predicts that Microsoft’s 2013 missteps will offer opportunities for Google and Apple.
• MOOCs may lead to the end of the traditional school year calendar, according to Cairns.
• Kaufman sees more OA group efforts such as CHORUS and SHARE in the coming year.
• Sabosik cites Business Insider’s prediction that 100 million wearable devices will be available in 2014.

Here is a sample from my submission:

The evolution of MOOCs will also become entwined with some broader issues of higher education effectiveness, cost, and access. More universities will see MOOCs as a means of managing some or all of these issues at a local level, whether they’re looking to reduce tuition (and/or operating expenses), provide more course offerings, or expand beyond their traditional market or catchment area. Experimentation will also include local testing of MOOCs used in combination with small in-class/in-person structures: This will provide more immediate social interactions and communication with colleagues while, at the same time, capitalizing on the “star professor” and the wide exposure to other student backgrounds that MOOCs can provide. 

My Big Book of Posts & Predictions

I have compiled all my annual predictions posts and a selection of more thoughtful posts that have appeared here since 2006 when I started PND. Here is the slideshare link to the book.

If you would like a pdf file of the book directly from me just send me a note.  Here is a link to all the other presentations I have placed on slideshare.net which have been viewed 35,000 times!

 
Personanondata Predications and Posts: 2006 - 2012 from Michael Cairns