Technology

Making Sense of the Turmoil at HMH
December 7, 2016 at 2:05 pm

The headlines announcing Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s disappointing third-quarter results were the kind that readers of the business press are used to seeing: “Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Sales Declined 7% in Q3 2016,” read one. “Houghton Slashes Expectations Again After Poor Quarter; Stock Falls Sharply,” read another. Was HMH’s stumble just another sign of how hard it…

Press Release: Semantico Partners with TrendMD to Improve Discoverability of Academic & Professional Content
December 1, 2016 at 2:01 pm

Brighton, U.K. -- December 1, 2016 -- Semantico have announced a partnership to provide the native integration of TrendMD within their Scolaris digital publishing solution. The partnership will deliver to publishers an enhanced research experience for their end-users and increased content discoverability, but above all, the potential for increased usage. The market-leading content discoverability tool…

Machine Learning: Can a Computer Judge a Book By Its Cover?
November 14, 2016 at 11:34 am

At MIT Technology Review, an article from Emerging Technology from the ArXiv looks at work being done by Brian Kenji Iwana and Seiichi Uchida at Kyushu University in Japan. According to the report, they’ve trained a deep neural network to study book covers—to see if the network can identify genre.

Listening for Wider Adoption: ReadSpeaker Talks Up Text-to-Speech
November 1, 2016 at 12:03 pm

Roy Lindemann co-founded text-to-speech company ReadSpeaker in 1999. Today, a technology that 18 years ago may have seemed liked science fiction is used by some of the biggest names in educational publishing. Discovery Education and Cengage Learning use ReadSpeaker to increase students’ understanding and recall of their digital content, whether they’re dyslexic, prone to learn better and recall…

Why Hasn’t Scientific Publishing Been Disrupted Already?
October 27, 2016 at 10:53 am

Looking back on 2009, there was one particular note that seemed to sound repeatedly, resonating through the professional discourse at conferences and in posts throughout the blogosphere: the likelihood of disruptive change afoot in the scientific publishing industry. Here in the digital pages of the Scholarly Kitchen, for example, we covered John Wilbanks’ presentation at SSP IN and Michael Nielsen’s…

Press Release: Cengage Learning Launches Competency-Based Learning Platform
October 25, 2016 at 12:29 pm

WASHINGTON — October 25, 2016 — Learning Objects, a Cengage company, today announced the full release and availability of its Competency-Based Learning (CBL) Platform. Streamlining the development of competency-based programs, the platform is an end-to-end experience including competency dashboards, personalized learning activities, extended transcripts and evidence portfolios.  Designed to support programs built around learning goals…

Read It and Bleep: Is Virtual Reality the Future of Storytelling?
October 13, 2016 at 9:50 am

Two forces are sending shockwaves through the world of storytelling. The first is that digital technology now offers creative artists myriad platforms to tell their stories in new ways. “We are using code as the canvas,” says Charles Melcher, book publisher and founder of the inaugural Future of Storytelling festival. In other words, whatever you…

Should Educational Publishers Be Disruptors?
September 27, 2016 at 11:24 am

Call me old-fashioned, but I’ve never warmed to the idea that disruption is a good thing in business. I’m not a fan of companies that set out to disrupt the industries in which they operate (take that, Jeff Bezos and Elizabeth Holmes) and I am particularly skeptical about those that set out to disrupt education,…