I have been reading MediaActive (Dan Gillmor) which offers a vision for more participatory journalism (more on the book in another post). Gillmor cites a 1999 presentation by Andrew Grove (Intel) to newspaper editors. Grove draws on his own experiences with Intel in an effort to help editors counter the decline in their industry. Gillmor returns to the Grove comments to explain why even with warning established industries find it so difficult to innovate when innovation is demanded for survival.
Grove and Gillmor offer a couple of interesting insights. First, Gillmor argues it is difficult for industries that are essentially a monoculture to break out of the shared perspective of the industry. Second, Grove argues that the tendency to cut back in the face of a decline dooms an industry to decline. What Grove contends is the necessity to spend on innovation.
The monoculture thing may be a foreign concept. I am familiar with the term in reference to agriculture and the concern that standardizes on a common strain (say a type of wheat) puts the entire industry in jeopardy should some threat (a disease) be particularly well suited to destroy that strain. I suppose with newspapers the concern was that all papers were fairly similar.
I tend to translate (or perhaps transfer a lot when I read). I am less interested in journalism than I am in the generation of instructional materials. The participatory position Gillmor takes with journalism is related to one opportunity I see for the future of textbooks. Once seeing this connection, the similarities in Grove’s comments regarding newspapers and my observations regarding textbooks were an easy extension. Twenty some years ago, I remember reading a criticism of physics textbook that argued all books tended to approach the topic in a similar fashion (sorry there is no reference, 20 years is beyond my memories capacity for physics). The argument at that time was not related to the future of the book, but the notion that physicists were being trained from a similar perspective and innovation would be more likely given greater diversity in how professionals were trained to think about the content of the field. This is not the concern I have. In my field, educational technology, there are still books focused on standard tools (say Microsoft products) and there are others that take a broader perspective. Some take a “how to do it” approach and others attempt to offer a broader context including the justification for different proposed activities. Hence, the monoculture concern does not apply to the content of the books. It does, however, apply to the format the books take. The publishers seem reluctant to move away from full length books. I have long suggested that this is not appropriate to the topic – learning with technology is not modeled well using a book, nor is it appropriate to a field that advances very quickly.
Grove’s other concern is also obvious in the textbook industry. There is little innovation – little of what I would label R&D. This deficiency relates to the need to break out of the monoculture.
Like Gillmore, the transitions an industry faces are an opportunity for those with vision. The need for instructional content has not diminished.
