Levi Strauss & Company has launched a new ad campaign for its flagship Levi’s brand, hoping to appeal to young adults with an ambitious call to arms: “Go forth.”

According to the New York Times, the campaign will include commercials on television, online and in movie theaters; print advertisements; outdoor and transit signs and posters; social media sites like Facebook; event marketing; and a contest on a section of the brand’s own Web site (levi.com/goforth).

The campaign is replete with Americana imagery, in keeping with research indicating that teenagers and 20-somethings are patriotic and optimistic about the United States. Those elements include the poetry of Walt Whitman, flags, paeans to the pioneering spirit, declarations of independence, salutes to hard work and, in the star-spangled tradition of Madison Avenue, copious amounts of nubile flesh.

Doug Sweeny, vice president for Levi’s brand marketing, said the battle cry was to determine “how do we connect this 150-year-old brand with what is happening in the youth culture today.”  The answer was to invoke the heritage of the brand, which dates to the California gold rush, by describing 501 jeans as “the uniform of common sense,” while celebrating the images and voices of contemporary youth.

The target audience for the campaign is young men ages 18 to 34, he added, with “the sweet spot the 22-year-old guys getting their first jobs out of college” - or not getting those jobs, because of the economy.

“They’re realists; they understand the challenge,” Sweeny says of young Americans now. “They’re optimistic about the future, they can project forward,” he added. “We found that really powerful and tried to evoke it in the campaign.”

And the contest that is part of the campaign is called The New Americans: A Portrait of a Country. Consumers will be invited to upload “Your words. Your pictures. Your stories of today’s America.”

This week at the National Educational Computing Conference, the Consortium for School Networking (or CoSN) and nGenera Corporation, led by Don Tapscott - chairman of its nGenera Insight thought leadership group and best-selling author - announced a partnership between their organizations, based on common interests in aligning the power of Web 2.0 with the enterprise needs of school districts and their communities. Through the partnership, CoSN and its members will participate in thought leadership webinars, join original research projects, and receive Web 2.0 and collaborative advisory services from nGenera. For its part, nGenera will participate in CoSN conferences, CTO Clinics, and Forums; join key CoSN leadership initiatives; and contribute to CoSN professional development resources such as its EdTechNext mini-reports series.

“We are thrilled to have Don Tapscott and nGenera join CoSN as a major sponsor through this partnership,” said Keith Krueger, CEO of CoSN. “Our mission is to empower K-12 school district technology leaders to use technology strategically to improve teaching and learning. Clearly, Web 2.0 technologies and tools have transformative potential in and outside of the classroom. With its deep background in collaborative initiatives and Web 2.0 working with the world’s largest enterprises, we look forward to having an organization like nGenera lending its experience and resources to our membership.”

“In my research and writing of Grown Up Digital, I spoke with educational leaders around the world,” said Tapscott. “They see the profound impact of digital technologies in the private sector, and want to be equally innovative in their schools. They want to move away from a one-size-fits-all broadcast model of education with the teacher being seen as the ’sage on the stage.’ Instead, much of the curriculum could be built around Web 2.0 technologies that would let students develop at their own pace. Teachers could then spend more one-on-one time with each student and focus on their specific needs. There is tremendous pent-up demand for such creativity. I look forward to working with the Consortium in bringing the digital classroom to life.”

Among the first collaborations between the organizations under the partnership will be joint work on “Web 2.0 Success and Failure Factors,” a research project being conducted by nGenera’s Insight group. Likewise, the organizations will collaborate on a CoSN-exclusive webinar for CIOs/CTOs led by Tapscott and sharing early research going into his next major book, for release in 2010, not yet titled.

Don was recently interviewed on BigThink.com, which is an online forum connecting people and ideas. In the short video above, Don discusses why traditional marketing strategies no longer work, and why relationship building with customers should be a company’s top goal. This is particularly true of N-Gen customers, who want to have a relationship with companies and help them co-innovate great products.

Here is some background about the BigThink.com website: “Through an ever-expanding platform of knowledge content, including in-depth interviews with the world’s leading experts, Big Think is a vital hub for important information to help you function, and succeed, in a rapidly changing world. In keeping with our belief that crucial information should be freely shared, discussed and debated, we have developed a full menu of tools to engage, disseminate, and subscribe to uniquely powerful content. Whether you use Twitter, Facebook, Digg.com, Delicious, Google Reader, Vimeo, YouTube, a personal blog, Tumblr, or any application with an RSS feed, Big Think allows you to share bright ideas with the wider Big Think audience as well as your personal cadre of lively thinkers—quickly and easily.”

An Agence France Press story reports that a German teacher who had sued to shut down a website where pupils rank their instructors according to competence and “coolness” lost her battle yesterday in the German Federal Supreme Court.

The teacher, Astrid Czubayko-Reiss, claimed that her privacy was being violated by the site spickmich.de, which loosely translates to checkmeout.de.  She had received a mediocre “D” rating from students.

“The right of students to exchange opinions and communicate freely outweighs the right of the teacher suing to determine information available about her,” the court ruled.

The website allows students to turn the tables on teachers by anonymously grading them in categories including “cool and funny”, “popular”, “motivated”, “relaxed” and “teaches well”.

The German Teachers’ Association criticised the ruling. “It is inexplicable that the [court] values the personal rights of teachers less than an anonymous assessment of teachers by students on the Internet,” Association president Josef Kraus said, referring to the federal court.

Germany is just catching up with the times.  Teacher-rating websites in other countries are well-established.  The U.S.-based RateMyTeachers.com is an increasingly popular site for students and parents to share reviews and ratings of middle and high school teachers. Online since 2000, more than 10,000,000 people visited the site in 2008.  Ratemyteachers.com currently offers over 10 million ratings of over 1 million teachers. About 60 percent of comments are positive.  Countries covered by the service include the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.

RateMyProfessors.com is the largest listing of collegiate professor ratings, with more than 6.8 million student-generated ratings of over 1 million professors. The site says that “each year, millions of college students use the site to help plan their class schedules and rate current and past professors on attributes such as helpfulness and clarity.” Online since 1999, RateMyProfessors.com currently offers ratings on college and university professors from over 6,000 schools across the United States, Canada, England, Scotland and Wales.

Some educators suggest the anonymous rating system can be unfair and simply invite retaliation if a professor gives a student a deservedly poor mark.  But in a world where virtually any web site that sells products asks its customers to rate their satisfaction with the product or purchasing process, it’s natural for students to expect they can pass judgement on their teacher or professor.  It’s equally natural for them to seek out the views of their peers.

President Obama already knows that the nation’s schools are failing a large number of young Americans. One-third of all students drop out before finishing high school. It’s a terrible record, and it’s even worse in inner city public schools, where only half of blacks and Hispanics graduate from school. This is not a legacy that would make anyone proud: More young Americans on a proportionate basis drop out of school today than at any other time in our history.

This problem is undoubtedly complicated, but one of the reasons why many American youth are unmotivated and not learning well is that they’re bored in school. They’re grown up in a fast paced, challenging digital world, with the Internet, mobile devices, video games and other gadgets. They watch less television than their parents did and TV is typically a background activity. They are a generation doesn’t like to be broadcast to and they love to interact, multi-task and collaborate. Yet, when they get into the classroom, they’re faced with stale textbooks and lectures from teachers who are still using a nineteenth century innovation, chalk and blackboard.

American classrooms need to enter the 21st century. Thousands of teachers agree. Earlier this year, several important educational groups urged the president and Congress to spend nearly $10 billion to improve technology in the classroom, and ensure teachers know how to use computers most effectively.

To show the way, I suggest the president take a look at a modest country across the Atlantic that’s turning into the world leader in rethinking education for the 21st century.

That country is Portugal. Its economy in early 2005 was sagging, and it was running out of the usual economic fixes. It also scored some of the lowest educational achievement results in western Europe.

So President Jose Socrates took a courageous step. He decided to invest heavily in a “technological shock” to jolt his country into the 21st century. This meant, among other things, that he’d make sure everyone in the workforce could handle a computer and use the Internet effectively.

This could transform Portuguese society by giving people immediate access to world. It would open up huge opportunities that could make Portugal a richer and more competitive place. But it wouldn’t happen unless people had a computer in their hands.

In 2005, only 31% of the Portuguese households had access to the Internet. To improve this penetration, the logical place to start was in school, where there was only one computer for five kids. The aim was to have one computer for every two students by 2010.

So Portugal launched the biggest program in the world to equip every child in the country with a laptop and access to the web and the world of collaborative learning. To pay for it, Portugal tapped into both government funds and money from mobile operators who were granted 3G licenses. That subsidized the sale of one million ultra-cheap laptops to teachers, school children, and adult learners.

Here’s how it works: If you’re a teacher or a student, you can buy a laptop for 150 euros (U.S. $207). You also get a discounted rate for broadband Internet access, wired or wireless. Low income students get an even bigger discount, and connected laptops are free or virtually free for the poorest kids. For the youngest students in Grades 1 to 4, the laptop/Internet access deal is even cheaper — 50 euros for those who can pay; free for those who can’t.

That’s only the start: Portugal has invested 400 million euros to makes sure each classroom has access to the Internet. Just about every classroom in the public system now has an interactive smart board, instead of the old fashioned blackboard.

This means that nearly nine out of 10 students in Grades 1 to 4 have a laptop on their desk. The impact on the classroom is tremendous, as I saw this spring when I toured a classroom of seven-year-olds in a public school in Lisbon. It was the most exciting, noisy, collaborative classroom I have seen in the world.

The teacher directed the kids to an astronomy blog with a beautiful color image of a rotating solar system on the screen. “Now,” said the teacher, “Who knows what the equinox is?”

Nobody knew.

“Alright, why don’t you find out?”

The chattering began, as the children clustered together to figure out what an equinox was. Then one group lept up and waved their hands. They found it! They then proceeded to explain the idea to their classmates.

This, I thought, was the exact opposite of everything that is wrong with the classroom system in the United States.

The children in this Portuguese classroom were loving learning about astronomy. They were collaborating. They were working at their own pace. They barely noticed the technology, the much-vaunted laptop. It was like air to them. But it changed the relationship they had with their teacher. Instead of fidgeting in their chairs while the teacher lectures and scrawls some notes on the blackboard, they were the explorers, the discoverers, and the teacher was their helpful guide.

Yet too often, in the U.S. school system, teachers still rely on an Industrial Model of education. They deliver a lecture, the same one to all students. It’s a one-way lecture. The teacher is the expert; the students are expected to absorb what the teacher says and repeat. And students are supposed to learn alone.

Teachers often feel that this is the only way to teach a large classroom of kids, and yet the classroom in Portugal shows that giving kids laptops can free the teacher to introduce a new way of learning that’s more natural for kids who have grown up digital at home.

First, it allows teachers to step off the stage and start listening and conversing instead of just lecturing. Second, the teacher can encourage students to discover for themselves, and learn a process of discovery and critical thinking instead of just memorizing the teacher’s information. Third, the teacher can encourage students to collaborate among themselves and with others outside the school. Finally, the teacher can tailor the style of education to their students’ individual learning styles.

It’s not easy to change the model of teaching. In fact, this is the hard part. It’s far easier to spend money, as Portugal did, to put Internet into the classroom and equip the kids with laptops. ( By now, half of high school students now have them, as do four in 10 middle school students.)

Yet Portugal has been careful to invest in teacher training to capitalize on the possibilities of the laptops in schools. They’re also thinking of creating a new online platform to allow teachers to work together to create new lessons and course materials that take advantage of the interactive technology. Through this collaboration, the Portuguese school system will create exciting new online materials to educate children. Lots of ideas are already making their way into Portuguese classrooms, says Mario Franco, chair of the Foundation for Mobile Communication, which is managing the e-school program. There are 50 different educational programs and games inside the laptops the youngest children use. The laptops are even equipped with a control to encourage kids to finish their homework and score high marks. If they do, they get more time to play.

It’s too early to assess the impact on learning in Portuguese schools. Studies of the impact of computers in schools elsewhere have been inconclusive, or mixed. One key problem is that simply providing computers in schools is not enough. Teachers facing a classroom of kids with laptops need to learn that they are no longer the expert in their domain; the Internet is.

Yet Portugal is on a campaign to reinvent learning for the 21st century. The technology is only one part of that campaign. The real work is creating a new model of learning.

I believe this could help the U.S. revive students’ interest in school and perhaps keep them in school long enough to graduate, and even go to college. It would be a substantial investment. It’s estimated that the total cost of giving a computer to each student, including connection to networks, training, and maintenance, is over $1,000 per year.

Yet after seeing the promise of the exciting classrooms in Portugal, I’m convinced it is worth it. Your child should be so fortunate.

Today’s university students are doing more writing in more varied forms outside of their classes than ever before.  They are texting, writing on Facebook walls, sending e-mails, posting or responding to blogs, and generally using the keyboard as the principal means of communicating online.  While it is easy to see they are the most prolific student writers ever, does this mean they are better writers?

This hotly debated question is explored by Josh Keller in the Chronicle of Higher Education in an article entitled “Studies Explore Whether the Internet Makes Students Better Writers.” “Some scholars say that this new writing is more engaged and more connected to an audience, and that colleges should encourage students to bring lessons from that writing into the classroom.  Others argue that tweets and blog posts enforce bad writing habits and have little relevance to the kind of sustained, focused argument that academic work demands,” writes Keller.

I’m firmly of the former school, and the article cites good reasons why.

Kathleen Blake Yancey, a professor of English at Florida State University and a former president of the National Council of Teachers of English, calls the current period “the age of composition” because new technologies are causing more people to compose with words and other media than ever before.

“This is a new kind of composing because it’s so variegated and because it’s so intentionally social,” says Yancey. It has a strong influence on how students learn to write.  “We ignore it at our own peril.”

Jeffrey Grabill, director of the Writing in Digital Environments Research Center at Michigan State, says college writing instruction should have two goals: to help students become better academic writers, and to help them become better writers in the outside world. The second, broader goal is often lost, he says, either because it is seen as not the college’s responsibility, or because it seems unnecessary.

“The unstated assumption there is that if you can write a good essay for your literature professor, you can write anything,” Mr. Grabill says. “That’s utter nonsense.”

The writing done outside of class is, in some ways, the opposite of a traditional academic paper, he says. Much out-of-class writing, he says, is for a broad audience instead of a single professor, tries to solve real-world problems rather than accomplish academic goals, and resembles a conversation more than an argument.

Rather than being seen as an impoverished, secondary form, online writing should be seen as “the new normal,” he says, and treated in the curriculum as such: “The writing that students do in their lives is a tremendous resource.”

Ms. Yancey, at Florida State, says out-of-class writing can be used in a classroom setting to help students draw connections among disparate types of writing. In one exercise she uses, students are asked to trace the spread of a claim from an academic journal to less prestigious forms of media, like magazines and newspapers, in order to see how arguments are diluted. In another, students are asked to pursue the answer to a research question using only blogs, and to create a map showing how they know if certain information is trustworthy or not.

The idea, she says, is to avoid creating a “fire wall” between in-class and out-of-class writing.

“If we don’t invite students to figure out the lessons they’ve learned from that writing outside of school and bring those inside of school, what will happen is only the very bright students” will do it themselves, Ms. Yancey says. “It’s the rest of the population that we’re worried about.”

If we agree that the new purpose of universities is to educate students on how to be lifelong learners, it only makes sense that we equip to do their best at all forms of communication.

I encourage readers to comment.

Liberating Learning is a sure-to-be controversial book that argues that technology will be the key to bringing quality education to students across the U.S., largely by sidestepping restrictions that the authors say teachers unions have put in place to block reform.

In a review in today’s Wall Street Journal, James Glassman says the book by Terry M. Moe and John E. Chubb picks up on an issue raised by the two authors in their 1990 book, “Politics, Markets and America’s Schools.” In the first book, the authors argued that the poor showing of American schools compared to other industrialized countries was largely the result of special-interest groups - mainly teachers unions.

But Glassman writes that Messrs. Moe and Chubb believe that technology can be the magic bullet.

Teachers unions, of course, are appalled. They know that “the new computer-based approaches to learning simply require far fewer teachers per student — perhaps half as many, and possibly fewer than that,” Messrs. Moe and Chubb write. Online charter schools employ two or three teachers per 100 students; the average public school employs 6.8 per 100. Technology also disperses teachers geographically (making them elusive for union organizers); lets in private-sector players who aren’t members of the guild; and enables outsourcing to foreign countries. For unions, technology is poison…

The authors also believe that, by allowing the door to be cracked open with online schools, the unions won’t be able to shut it. With the encouragement of students’ parents, millions of children will rush in, overcoming current union-imposed enrollment caps. Since labor costs keep rising, school districts, hard-pressed for funds, will naturally turn to technology as a way to get more for less. Mostly, though, Messrs. Moe and Chubb are determinists who believe that the political problem will be solved because it has to be. They make a good case, but hardly an air-tight one. “Technology,” they write, “is transforming nearly every aspect of American social life, and will keep transforming it in the decades ahead.”

I’m keen to hear readers’ responses to their argument.

Events in Iran continue to unfold at a breakneck pace.  There are calls for a nation-wide strike tomorrow. I believe this is another example of the Net Generation striving for the type of government it wants:  As open and as democratic as possible.  Iran’s teenagers and young adults make up a higher percentage of the country’s population than any other country.  (see graphic)  These young people are connected to the world courtesy of the Internet, and they like what they see in countries that have greater freedom and democratic structures.  It’s time for other governments to lend their weight to the protests calling for an election that isn’t rigged.  The Web is alive with text, photos and videos from the streets of Tehran.  See some gripping material here. These are a people crying for assistance, and it’s time to show them we hear them.

At the recent E3 conference in Las Vegas, Microsoft unveiled technology it called Project Natal.  Watch the embedded video on this post for a demonstration.  Microsoft has eliminated the controller for interacting with video games.  Want to play a game of soccer?  Then stand up, start moving your feet, and score a goal.  It’s WII on steroids.  The system uses a video camera, microphone, and a scanner.  You can talk, walk, sing and the computer knows what you are doing.  You no longer need a game controller, or as Don Mattrick, the senior VP of Xbox, puts it, “We’re using the best controller ever invented: you.”

At the end of the video you’re given a link to another video which presents Milo. Be sure to watch it. He’s a young animated character that can interact with a human.  You can speak with Milo and he answers your questions responds to your movements.

At the conference Microsoft positioned Project Natal as the next very-large step in video games.  It doesn’t take much imagination to see what an extraordinary tool could be in classrooms.  The virtual reality can replicate any environment, such as sitting in a spacecraft or walking through Roman ruins.  Milo can accompany you wherever you are, answering questions and posing questions of his own.  Imagine Milo teaching biology or math to a grade six student.  You would have a personal cyber teacher dedicated to helping you acquire knowledge. The potential is remarkable.

Last week I wrote a substantial essay for the Edge arguing that the universities are entering a period of crisis.

I argued that is a widening gap between the model of learning offered by many big universities and the natural way that young people who have grown up digital best learn. The reaction on Twitter, mainly from students has been enormously positive. So far two academics have written critiques of my views at the Edge.

However because the Edge does not enable readers to comment, I’d like to know what you think. Please read a summary below and then check out the Edge article and let the world know what you think here on GrownUpDigital.com.

The old-style lecture, with the professor standing at the podium in front of a large group of students, is still common. It’s part of a model that is teacher-focused, one-way, one-size-fits-all and the student is isolated in the learning process. Yet the students, who have grown up in an interactive digital world, learn differently. Schooled on Google and Wikipedia, they want to inquire, not rely on the professor for a detailed roadmap. They want an animated conversation, not a lecture. They want an interactive education.

Students are making new demands of universities, and if the universities are to remain relevant, they will have to change.

Professors will have to abandon the traditional lecture, and start listening and conversing with the students — shifting from a broadcast style and adopting an interactive one. They should be encouraging students to discover for themselves, and learn a process of discovery and critical thinking instead of just memorizing the professor’s store of information. They need to encourage students to collaborate among themselves and with others outside the university. Finally, they need to tailor the style of education to their students’ individual learning styles.

Some leading educators are calling for this kind of massive change; one of these is Richard Sweeney, university librarian at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He says students are smart but impatient. They like to collaborate and they reject one-way lectures. While some educators view this as pandering to a generation, Sweeney is firm: “They want to learn, but they want to learn only from what they have to learn, and they want to learn it in a style that is best for them.”

This is not fundamentally about technology per se. Rather it represents a change in the relationship between students and teachers in the learning process.

In the old model, teachers taught and students were expected to absorb vast quantities of content. Education was about absorbing content and being able to recall it on exams. You graduated and you were set for life - just “keeping” up in your chosen field. Today when you graduate you’re set for say, 15 minutes. If you took a technical course half of what you learned in the first year may be obsolete by the 4th year. What counts is your capacity to learn lifelong, to think, research, find information, analyze, synthesize, contextualize, critically evaluate it; to apply research to solving problems; to collaborate and communicate.
This challenge to the existing order raises a deeper issue — the purpose of the university

“The time has come for some far reaching changes to the university, our model of pedagogy, how we operate, and our relationship to the rest of the world,” says Luis M. Proenza, president of the University of Akron.

He asks a provocative question: Why should a university student be restricted to learning from the professors at the university he or she is attending? True, students can obviously learn from intellectuals around the world through books, or via the Internet. Yet in a digital world, why shouldn’t a student be able to take a course from a professor at another university?

Proenza thinks universities should use the Internet to create a global centre of excellence. In other words, choose the best courses you have and link them with the best at a handful of universities around the world to create an unquestionably best-in-class program for students. Students would get to learn from the world’s greatest minds in their area of interest - either in the physical classroom, or online. This global academy would be also be open to anyone online. This is a beautiful example of the collaboration I described in the book I co-authored, Wikinomics.

The digital world, which has trained young minds to inquire and collaborate, is challenging not only the lecture-driven teaching traditions of the university, but also the very notion of a walled-in institution that excludes large numbers of people. Why not allow a brilliant grade 9 student to take first-year math, without abandoning the social life of his high school? Why not deploy the interactive power of the internet to transform the university into a place of life-long learning?

Share your thoughts here.

For a couple of decades I’ve been advocating a new model of pedagogy that involves technology.  For example, I just published a piece in the Edge on the Demise of the University.
The purpose of introducing technology into schools isn’t to simply digitize existing processes and leave the basic broadcast teaching model unchanged.  Instead, technology opens the door to new techniques that focus on the student and allow students to proceed at their own pace.
In this spirit, imagine students studying American history with the same concentration and enthusiasm they display when playing their favourite video games.  After all, 97 percent of high school students are avid gamers.

That’s the goal of Conspiracy Code, an online game based course released this week by Florida Virtual School (FLVS), and 360Ed, Inc. an education game development company.  Students play fictional characters in an espionage-themed adventure game set in the metropolis of Coverton City. Students must build their knowledge and understanding of American history in order to stop a vast conspiracy that threatens to erase and change the course of history. You can see a short video overview of the game here.

In the rich multi-media environment, students connect with characters, course plot, and content and absorb historical facts at a higher level of thinking. Students test their knowledge during in-game challenges, engage in student-to-student collaborations and discussions, exchange information with peers (similar to group projects), and eventually use their knowledge to complete culminating mission assessments, each step eliciting a better understanding of the material.  By the time they complete the game, they’ve learned a full course of high-school history.
“Conspiracy Code is everything I would have liked to do in my brick and mortar classroom but didn’t have the time or resources to accomplish. It engages kids through game play, but challenges them to interact with history in the most creative, research based methods available,” said David Wilson, FLVS American History teacher. “There is higher level critical thinking involved, project based learning, student collaboration, authentic assessments, and plenty of reading and writing. At the end of the day, I know my students are becoming excited about history and I know that this course will inspire many students.”

As students collect clues, they are given many opportunities to process what they are learning at increasingly-higher levels. They strengthen higher-order thinking, written communication, problem-solving, and collaborative skills through:

* Playing engaging concept practice games
* Responding to a variety of question types
* Writing assignments and essays
* Completing authentic game-based assessments
* Participating in discussion-based assessments

The company says the game-based technique provides a student-centered approach that increases retention of content, concepts, lessons, and skills.  The flexible environment allows students to select pace of play, and qualitative and quantitative research shows this helps students perform better. It offers a sequential learning path to challenge students to master content or concepts before advancing in the course. Constant and immediate positive feedback from teachers boosts confidence, reinforces lessons, and strengthens content acquisition.  Tracking and evaluation tools help teachers work with a larger number of students, each operating at their own pace.
The company says that its beta testing in the lab and field has been “promising and exciting.”  I look forward to hearing the results after a year of actual use.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s plan to save “hundreds of millions” of dollars by having schools switch to free digital textbooks won’t work, say education officials in the state.

Schwarzenegger cited digital textbooks as just one many opportunities that the financially strapped state could seize upon to save money.

“It’s the right goal, but (a goal) to help the students utilize technology and learning,” said state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. “To do this for cost savings is a pipe dream.”

It’s not the first time the idea of free digital textbooks has been tried in California.  In 2002 the California Open Source Textbook Project tried to produce a digital K-12 history textbook under an open license in partnership with Wikibooks. The project failed to gain momentum and produce a final product.

Schwarzenegger’s proposal does not rely on a wiki-style textbook being written.  Instead, he is asking the textbook publishers to offer their content for free downloading, and the state will spend the money it saves on other products produced by the publishing companies.

A better question might be:  Are one-size-fits-all textbooks still appropriate, especially at $100 a pop with slightly altered new editions coming out every year?  The burden should be on the publishers to show that their treeware material is the only option, particularly when there could be groups of teachers using online tools to gather freely available information that is and making it student friendly.

Textbook publishers today are where the music record labels were 15 years ago.  They foisted overpriced CDs on to the public and made it impossible to buy just one song.  Eventually consumers rebelled, and the industry paid a heavy price for its obstinacy.  If they want to stay in business, textbook publishers should break up their weighty printed tomes into digestible digital bits and collaborate with schools to make the best information available for a particular student at the right time and at the right price.

On Thursday of this week I’ll be hosting the book launch for Yes We Did - Rahaf Harfoush’s story of the role of the new media in the Barack Obama campaign and its implications for business.

The deft use of digital technologies by Obama’s team during the primaries and the election itself is already the stuff of political legend.  Obama strategists promised that a President Obama would continue to use the Internet and social media to open up the government to greater scrutiny and give Americans a stronger voice in how the government is managed.

Recently, Macon Phillips, the Director of New Media at the White House, released a video [see above] on the White House blog that highlights the new media channels that the Administration has created to help fulfill its campaign pledge of more open government.

As the video shows, a lot has been done in drawing back the curtains, but much remains to do.  To be fair to the White House, opening up the government’s entrails to scrutiny and comment hasn’t been easy.  Yesterday the Center for American Progress published an essay by Peter P. Swire, who served during the Obama-Biden transition as an attorney for the New Media team that operated the transition website change.gov and developing whitehouse.gov.

The Obama campaign broke new ground in its use of new media and social networking technologies such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter to spread information and engage supporters. It also sparked imagination about how these Web 2.0 technologies could usher in a new era of government transparency and citizen participation.

Some observers, however, have been disappointed with the Obama administration’s apparent caution in deploying a wide range of these same technologies on WhiteHouse.gov. In an April poll by Nationaljournal.com, “new media experts from across the political spectrum gave WhiteHouse.gov an average grade of C+. Although they mostly saw the site as an improvement from the previous administration’s, many noted that it remained a one-way forum.”

Swire discusses why life is different when running for office than after the election when you become head of state.

The ideal model for citizen participation would utilize Web 2.0 technologies to enable valuable citizen input that can make a difference in government policy and actions while also fostering a sense of participation, so that those outside of the government feel that they are a meaningful part of the process.

The trick is how to accomplish these goals given the White House’s real world constraints. The Web 2.0 approaches used to date have addressed the problem of scale, when the sheer number of participants can overwhelm the handful of employees on the New Media team. They have recognized the burdens of “clearing” answers across the federal government, with the result that only a small subset of questions and comments receive an official answer. And they have avoided any features where a binding decision is made on behalf of those participating-the public does not get to decide outcomes or anoint anyone to speak on behalf of the government.

These constraints could be a source of frustration, leading to the conclusion that the White House cannot effectively promote citizen participation. A better outlook, I suggest, is to see this as an historic opportunity for software developers and participation theorists alike-now that we know the constraints-to figure out how can we build the best, most participatory White House 2.0 over the coming years.

I share Swire’s optimism.  We are a long way from the transparent and inclusive government spoken about so frequently during the election campaign.  But it is also clear that the Administration views this issue as a priority and has the political will to make progress.