Pearson Company

Pearson has become the latest blue-chip company to increase its venture investments, committing $50m to education start-ups in Africa and Asia. The world's largest education company by revenues, which owns the Financial Times, is expanding a fund it set up in 2012 with $15m to invest in companies focused on improving low-cost private education.

Many media and telecoms groups, including Sky, the pay-television company, and publisher Reed Elsevier, are opting for venture investments in an attempt to increase innovation and growth. Bertelsmann, the family-owned German media group, has committed at least $100m to education start-ups.

Barnes & Noble Inc. (BKS), the largest U.S. bookstore chain, bought back Pearson Plc's stake in its Nook Media e-reader division for about $28 million, giving it complete ownership of the business.

Pearson's stake was purchased for $13.8 million and about 603,000 shares of common stock, New York-based Barnes & Noble said in a regulatory filing today.

The agreement gives Barnes & Noble more flexibility to rid itself of the struggling unit, a move investors have urged for years and that the company agreed to pursue in June.

British education and media group Pearson (PSON.L) posted flat underlying revenue for the nine months to end-September, a result it said showed the company was performing competitively in difficult markets. Analysts at Citi were expecting underlying revenue to fall by about 1 percent. It also said its chief financial officer, Robin Freestone, would step down by the end of next year after 10 years with the company in order to explore other interests.

Superintendent John Deasy has launched a vigorous defense of his oft-maligned initiative to give all Los Angeles Unified School District students iPads, penning a six-page letter to the L.A. school board in response to mounting criticism that the high-profile technology initiative was flawed by conflicts of interest, possible manipulation of the procurement process, and ongoing implementation woes. In the letter, Deasy defended the relationships that he and senior staff had with Apple and Pearson, the vendors who last year won a $30 million contract to provide

A massive expansion of classroom technology has come to a grinding halt in Los Angeles.

The LA Unified School District had planned to buy some 700,000 iPads for its students and teachers. The Apple tablets would include learning software built by publishing giant Pearson. But Superintendent John Deasy announced earlier this week he is canceling the contract and restarting the bidding process.

The decision comes on the heels of an investigation by NPR member station KPCC, which obtained emails between Deasy and tech executives

For the fourth consecutive year, a highly regarded studies just released from BISG tracks and analyzes the key trends in how students and faculty members acquire, assign, teach, and consume educational content in multiple media formats. Student Attitudes Toward Content in Higher Education, Volume 4, is now available as a digital report alongside a complementary study, Faculty Attitudes Toward Content in Higher Education Volume 3.

Don't look now, but textbook publishers are trying to become software companies. And tech startups are trying to outmaneuver these giants to win the future of educational content and tools. It's one of the big trends in edtech and digital media.

Indeed, digital publishing has "fundamentally changed every aspect of what we are doing with our content," says Michael Hansen, the CEO of Cengage Learning, an education publisher that recently moved headquarters from Connecticut to Boston, while also opening a new office in techie-rich San Francisco.

I'm pleased to share some exciting news. On Friday, August 1st, O'Reilly purchased Pearson Education's 50% ownership share of our Safari Books Online joint venture, and Safari is now a wholly owned subsidiary of O'Reilly Media, Inc.

O'Reilly believes strongly in the direction Safari is heading, and we came to believe that there are substantial opportunities for both organizations working much more closely together. O'Reilly is primarily a media company (books, events, online in-person and video training, expert network),

Pearson Plc (PSON), the publisher of the Financial Times, said today it will have cut a total of about 4,000 jobs in the two years through 2014 and reported a sales decline of 6.5 percent for the first half.

The cuts are equivalent to about 10 percent of the global workforce, Chief Executive Officer John Fallon said on a conference call today. About 3,300 of that total were removed in 2013, Pearson said in February. The cuts will be partly offset by the creation of 1,800 jobs in the two-year period

The state purchasing office in New Mexico has rejected a closely watched protest of a potentially enormous contract for common-core testing to Pearson, ruling that the bidding process was structured in a "careful and thoughtful" way, despite a rival organization's claims.

The decision by New Mexico State Purchasing Agent Lawrence O. Maxwell is a defeat for the American Institutes for Research, a Washington-based organization that argued that the bidding process was skewed to favor Pearson.