Chapter 15 - Just do it!

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Just do it!	499

from the Internet, and by early 1999 that was up to $18 million a day.
  "Virtual book companies" such as Amazon, in the United States, and the Internet Book Shop and Blackwells, in England, now offer millions of titles for ordering on line. We predict this model will be one of the most successful commercial applications of the learning revolution.

The business-teacher-multimedia model
 
  The barriers between business and education are rapidly coming down, and that, too, is an essential part of the breakthrough.
  Again several initiatives in innovative New Zealand show the models:
      Publisher Wendy Pye has become one of New Zealand's wealthiest business women. Dismissed by New Zealand News Ltd. when it was taken over by an investment company, she formed Sunshine books. Its philosophy: teaching children to read. Its theoretical base: New Zealand's whole-language reading research. Its authors: some of the world's best, starting with Joy Cowley and June Melser. Its big breakthrough, apart from Wendy Pye's entrepreneurial brilliance: setting up a television production partnership between her, Brian Cutting - a reading expert and former teachers' training college lecturer - and television network pioneer Tom Parkinson.
  That led to the production of The Magic Box television series which now screens Monday to Friday on the United States Learning Channel to an audience of 15 million, promoting sales of the books it features. Sales to date of Sunshine books: 85 million units.5 Sunshine is also a leader in learning on the Internet. The company has seven-year-olds in countries and states as diverse as South Africa, Alaska, New Zealand, Singapore, Poland, Canada and America designing their own books on line.
      Also from Auckland, Jerome and Sophie Hartigan are turning their Jumping Beans physical brain-development programs for infants into a franchised network, and developing Beanie as a book and television cartoon character to cover the main principles of learning.
      Barbara Prashnig's Creative Learning Company, with its physical base in Auckland, New Zealand, is typical of the coming links between good educational research, an innovative interactive multimedia product, and the Internet. Her new Working Styles Analysis6 is readily available on the Web. To check your own style, you can download a questionnaire, fill it in and order an inexpensive computerized printout.
      Another New Zealand entrepreneur, David Perry, has taken his

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