Showing posts with label trends. Show all posts
Showing posts with label trends. Show all posts

Friday, July 27, 2007

SPORE: "toys can change the world!"

Will Wright previews his new and exiting game, 'Spore'. Maybe the name doesn't ring a bell but sure 'SimCity' and 'the Sims' does. The creator of these sims is working on his new baby. Last year within Saganet we were already talking about this new concept.

Few interesting things:

  1. this is a new example of participatory learning, you create your own universe;
  2. Wright starts talking about his Montessori education;
  3. he sees this as a learning toy;
  4. the game holds some nice and easy object authoring tools;
  5. Wright sees his new game as a way to educate young people about long-term effects of your actions;
  6. nice saying: "Toys can change the world".


See this great TED-video:

Saturday, December 16, 2006

Book PricewaterhouseCoopers

PwC released a report about the ways entertainment and media are going to be developed in The Netherlands. It is a research report which presents annual historical data for the 2001-2005 period and provides annual forcast for 2006-2010. It has a lot of numbers and some in-depth interviews as well. It shows us the trends of the use of things like tv, filmed entertainment, radio advertising, book publishing and video games.

Do you know for example that the Netherlands has the highest internet and broadband penetration in Western Europe (77.8% household internet penetration/54.9% broadband penetration).

In the section about educational books it also give some relevant insights. PwC expects that the spending of educational books will expand at a 1.8% compound annual rate, rising to 378 million euro in 2010.

What happened to electronic books? What happened with the complaints about youngsters with too heavy backpacks full with books (their poor backs!)?

PwC don not anticipate e-books to play a significant role in the consumer market. Only a 2.6% of the print sales in 2010. Also an interview with Joachim Driessen from Malmberg (one of the important educational publishers) shows that e-Learning is only one of the channels and methods. He stated that school want to have both traditional and digital resources. He estimates that it will take about 5 years before some of the printed resources become redundant.

Pfff....the future is arriving at a slow pace... ;-)

To get (download or send for free with snailmail) you can visit the website of PwC. The Trends report is in English.