Farewell to the Xplanation
August 25, 2011
I just read that Rob Reynolds has retired his fantastic blog, the Xplanation.
I’ve never met Rob, so I only know him through his work (and through his colleagues at Xplana). Rob has been THE thought leader on topics such as the future of textbooks and learning management systems. My friends in edtech pass around his blog posts all the time. This is a real loss, and I hope he pops up somewhere else soon. And Rob, if you happen to read this, you’re always welcome to do a Guest Lecture post here!
A few months back, Rob made a video in which he laid out the future of the textbook industry far more clearly than I ever could. If you’re in tl;dr mode, the part about Eleven Learning starts 53 seconds in.
A textbook by any other name…would be an improvement
August 22, 2011
When I was growing up, my friend’s dad told him that the best part of having kids was naming them: it was all downhill from there.
I didn’t take many parenting lessons from that guy, but I’ll give him credit on this one. Naming stuff is a blast. If you’re not having fun, you’re doing it wrong.
How We Named Eleven Learning
We get asked this all the time. To everyone’s surprise, we spent much more time worrying about the second word than the first. We like ‘Learning’ a lot more than ‘Publishing’, ‘Education’, and the other words that legacy publishers use to brand themselves. Learning is something you do, not something that happens to you.
As for ‘Eleven’, that was easy. It’s one louder:
The new name for our short-form textbooks is…
When announced our intention to publish shorter, focused textbooks, we knew we’d need a quick way to describe them. That led us to set up a poll, and the feedback you gave us was fantastic. One educator pointed out that ‘razorbook’ was a very masculine name that might alienate half the planet’s population. That hadn’t crossed my mind: we were thinking of Occam’s Razor. ‘Razorbook’, for what it’s worth, came in dead last.
The winner-by-a-landslide is Picobooks. In the SI scale, the prefix pico- means something that’s 10-12 of a whole. (This is either one billionth or one trillionth, depending on whether or not you’re a native English speaker.) We’re saving ‘zeptobook’ and ‘yoctobook’ for our next project.
The prefix pico- is derived from piccolo, the Italian word for small
One thing we haven’t finalized is how to pronounce the name: is it “pie-ko” or “pea-ko”? (Off-topic: to my surprise, orange pekoe tea is pronounced “peck-o”.) This is a subject of much internal debate on our team—it’s me against everyone else—and the internet does not speak with one voice on this matter, either.
The Latest Naming Project
A few days ago I was speaking with someone who loved what we were doing but questioned why were still calling them ‘textbooks’. To her, textbooks are giant, static, linear, and print-only. And that’s not what picobooks are about at all. We just haven’t thought of something better: “Contextualized curriculum-driven learning objects” doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Anybody have any suggestions?
