brave new world

Robin Good: Daniel W. Rasmus has an interesting article on his blog entitled: "The Future of Campus Stores: Good-Bye Books, Hello Learning". In it he analyzes the key elements that will help such campus stores maintain their relevancy while traditional textbooks are rapidly loosing thir foothold inside academic campuses.

He writes: "College bookstores face an existential crisis with the looming demise of physical book sales as digital technology rapidly becomes an option for learners.

At the same time free content, via websites like the Kahn Academy, or through more proprietary means, like Apple’s iTunes University (now iTunes U).

And then there is the rise of open sourced content available places like the Open Education Resources Commons (OER).

So what should college stores consider as the elements that will help make them relevant as their core mission apparently shifts?"

And one of the key elements that he sees potentially providing new

meaning and relevance to campus bookstores, as a knowledge service, is content curation.

"One specific instance of high-quality, knowledge-based service is content curation.

As the content world becomes more complex, the college store can offer value added resources to faculty and students to help them understand the options they have, and the relative value of different sources of information and approaches to the delivery of that information.

Think about content now as software. The educator can write a specification or requirements document and the store team, like programmers, can assemble a solution for the educator that meets his or her specification. Like programmers, the language or technique doesn’t matter to the solution recipient, what matters is that the software meets the requirements and delivers its expected value."

Insightful. Forward-looking. 8/10

Full article: http://danielwrasmus.com/the-future-of-campus-stores-good-bye-books-hello-learning/