Since grade school, I remember being told ‘This Year, we will be learning the metric system, as this is The Year, America will be switching over to the metric system.’ Then, for the 15 year I lived with the metric system, in China, do you think I could every I get my mind wrapped around the how many cm were in a meter or how cold minus 3 degrees C would feel? Um, what year is this now? 2010 and still America hasn’t switched over to the metric system?
Now there’s talk of digitizing the print world and for those nah sayers, who don’t think the printed world is headed into the digital world, check out what the New York Times is saying: Conde Nast Is Preparing iPad Versions of Its Top Magazines Seems GQ will have it’s iPad version ready for the April issue [along with the launch of the iPad]. The other titles will have digital versions, by this summer. Heck, GQ, already has a GQ iPhone app.
What’s a bit more interesting is, by selling magazine apps via iTunes [and other non-iTune formats] Conde Nast will not have access to traditional means of tracking consumer data for marketing purposes. Damn the metrics! Not to worry, Conde Nast will have you ‘signing-up or registering’ to access….say to the fashion tips.
GQ iPhone App
President of Conde Nast Digital added, “As an example, if you’re a fashion retailer or a fashion advertiser who also has an e-commerce store, how can we make the simple fact that you can click through to an item and buy it kind of great? How do you romance it a little bit more?” Seems Conde Nast is going to use GQ as a trial, see how they can work out their ad revenue metrics, then move on to digitizing other magazines. They want to take a leadership role in this process.
All this leadership stuff got me wondering; how we instructional designers might set up our evaluations so our learners had to click through to sign-up or register? How could we make our evaluation process a bit more romantic? Snazz-up the evaluation in order to learn the metrics?
Would our learners click through an evaluation, if say their favorite retailer were involved in the process? Maybe Target or iTunes could offer a $10 coupon bonus, to the educational system for students scoring on particular tests or CVS offers a $10 coupon to health care workers who reach and ace the learning of a new electronic patient tracking system?
And I think you can pretty much bet an increasing amount of that learning and evaluation will be occurring on the iPad or similar mobile digital device. It’s just gonna take figuring out the metrics.
These days, I don’t worry too much about the metric system invading America. I think we’ll get health care reform before we will start measuring in centimeters. Besides, to convert my measurements to metric–well, there’s an app for that.
