The new ToyTool: Apple’s iPad tablet

January 27, 2010

Heck, maybe even I can afford one

More details: AppleMashable.comtheiphoneblog.com, i.gizmodo.com

Images courtesy of www.gdgt.com


Notes from “No Reader Left Behind”

January 21, 2010

My Notes on the Brookings Institute report
“No reader left behind: Improving media coverage of education”

Read the report

In December 2009 the Brookings Institution issued a report called “Invisible: 1.4 percent coverage for education is not enough.” The report concludes that during the first 9 months of 2009 education coverage constituted only 1.4 percent of national news reporting. To launch the report a panel was convened to discuss education in the media, in terms of quantity of coverage and quality of reporting.

Russ Whitehurst, former head of the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Dept. of Education: Within education reporting, school finances and budget got the most coverage. Politics in education and swine flu followed.  Technology in the schools, charter schools, and education research all received less than 2 percent of education coverage. “Much of the educational coverage has to do with things that aren’t about the core business of schools. It would be like reading reviews of restaurants that talk about the economics of the restaurant business and how you get to be trained to be a chef, but never talk about food itself.”

E. J. Dionne, syndicated columnist for the Washington Post:  One of the central and, in some ways, positive findings of the study: “Local [news] outlets are more likely to cover the substance of school policy than national media . . .  At one level, it’s not surprising that local education is more complete than national coverage. Education is dealt with in principle as a national issue and a national problem, but most of the power to affect it exists at the state and local levels. So much of the coverage is necessarily about the state and local level, and much of it is necessarily balkanized. We don’t do enough, I think, to link the problems faced by our local elementary schools or high schools or middle schools or community colleges or universities to national policy. The journalistic systems we have, or at least have had up to this point, tends to make doing so difficult.

“There is also a great bias toward covering ideological and partisan issues that often have only a marginal impact on what teachers do in the classroom day after day, and what students learn in those classrooms day after day.

Darrell West, Governance Studies, Brookings Institution: Community colleges educate 6.7 million students compared to 11.2 million who are educated through colleges and universities. But when you look at the national news coverage, community colleges only get one-tenth the national news coverage of colleges and universities. . . . Relatively little media coverage of education relates to the actual school policy, school reform, education research, or ways to improve the curriculum or learning processes.

Richard Colvin, Hechinger Institute, Teachers College, Columbia University:  The coin of the realm here is stories, compelling stories that people are going to read just because they’re good stories.

Andrew Rotherham, The Education Sector: I get frustrated when certain issues are completed, settled, in the social science literature, for instance, or settled in the research literature, and instead we have these raging debates about them in education. … Someone will say that the Earth or the moon is made of rock, and someone else will put out a study and say, no, the Earth is made of green cheese. You can count on a lot of reporters, unfortunately, to write the story that the debate over the lunar surface continues with two new studies. We have to get past that as a field, and that comes to this issue of training.

Dale Mezzacappa, Education Writers Association: Training reporters is very important .. the other thing is just the time. I mean you can get reporters who have developed a pretty good expertise of how to observe a classroom, and know good research from bad research and everything. But the way newspapers are structured today, reporters don’t get to spend the time to really do in-depth stories that advance the issues and inform the public. They get pulled off for the daily stories, which are not unimportant, but which prevent the longer-term projects.

Russ Whitehurst: We did a survey of superintendents to figure out what they thought of media coverage, and they said, Well, it’s marginally okay. Then we asked them, How much time do you spend explaining education issues to reporters when they call? And they said, Oh, you know, 15 minutes a week.  I’ve said this to many superintendents over the years: You’re an educator. You have to educate the press the same way you educate your parents directly, your students, about what’s going on. You can’t say, on one hand, The coverage isn’t all that helpful, and then not help improve that coverage by making yourself available and by reaching out to journalists when you have time.

The coverage of colleges, whether they be community colleges or four-year schools, has little to do with the pressing policy issues that the nation is facing in higher education. For example, escalating costs, specialization issues, whether there’s going to be a digital revolution and whether the current industry is going to be substantially changed. We spend more per student than any other nation in the world and generally produce mediocre results in terms of graduation rates. Those stories, which are pressing stories for the nation’s interest, are hardly covered.

Mezzacappa: [Even] the people who do know what charter schools are don’t know a good charter school from a bad charter school. I think one of the things that reporters should do is help them figure that out, so that they can make informed choices.


Notes from the Horizon Report 2010

January 15, 2010

horizon report 2010

The Horizon Report, 2010 Edition.
Published by the New Media Consortium. 38 pages, PDF
Available here

The 2010 Horizon Report identifies these trends as key drivers of technology adoptions for the period 2010-2015:

In a world in which information is available everywhere, educational institutions must consider the unique value that each adds. In such a world, sense-making and the ability to assess the credibility of information are paramount.

People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to be.  … The implications for informal learning are profound, as are the notions of “just-in-time” learning and “found” learning.

It does not matter where our work is stored; what matters is that our information is accessible no matter where we are or what device we choose to use.

Students and their professors see the challenges facing the world as multidisciplinary, and the need for collaboration great.

The Report identifies challenges that face learning organizations.

The role of the academy is changing. It must adapt teaching and learning practices to meet the needs of today’s learners, emphasize critical inquiry and mental flexibility, and provide students with necessary tools for those tasks.

New scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and researching continue to emerge, but appropriate metrics for evaluating them increasingly and far too often lag behind. Citation-based metrics, to pick one example, are hard to apply to research based in social media.

Digital media literacy is becoming a key skill in every discipline and profession. Yet training in digital literacy skills  and techniques is rare, especially so in teacher education programs. … We are far from seeing digital media literacy as a norm… As technology continues to evolve, digital literacy must necessarily be less about tools and more about ways of thinking and seeing, and of crafting narrative.

The report identifies six technologies to watch.

Mobile computing: an increasing number of faculty and instructional technology staff are experimenting with the possibilities for collaboration and communication offered by mobile computing.

Open content: is expected to reach mainstream use in the next 12 months. The open content movement is far more than a collection of free online course materials. It is a response to the rising costs of education, and the desire for access to learning in areas where such access is difficult.

Electronic books and readers: already in the mainstream of consumer use and are appearing on campuses with increasing frequency.

Augmented reality: is now accessible via laptops and smart phones, no longer requiring specialized equipment.

Gesture-based computing: uses devices that are controlled by natural movements of the finger, hand, arm, and body. Our understanding of what it means to interact with computers is changing.

Visual data analysis: models can be manipulated in real time and researchers are able to navigate and explore data in ways not previously possible.


The Backchannel: The elephant in the room

December 28, 2009

Book review
The backchannel: How audiences are using Twitter and social media and changing presentations forever.
Cliff Atkinson.
New Riders, 2010.  222 pages.

You’re comfortable presenting to audiences and you’re well prepared for this conference.  But . . . . A minute into your presentation you notice that many people are busy texting on their mobile phones.  Are they checking email?

They’re certainly preoccupied. They laugh at the wrong time.

Chances are they’re using Twitter to message each other about you and about your presentation. They may love you, or they may be encouraging each other to leave and check out another presentation.

Welcome to the world of the backchannel, where your presentation is only one of the many interesting things going on in the room. In fact, this virtual conversation is not limited to the room. Because Twitter is public and open, anyone can follow or join in the conversation about your presentation, even when they’re in another state or on another continent.

The backchannel is a recent phenomenon. In fact, it’s impressive that a book has been written about it so soon.

A seasoned presenter, Cliff Atkinson provides anecdotes, case studies, a bit of communication theory, and how-to examples, to help you feel more comfortable as a presenter facing this new elephant in the room.

Atkinson’s book Beyond Bullet Points (which I reviewed here) remains an important book on the subject of effective presentations. (It was named a Best Book of 2007 by the editors at Amazon.com.) Now, in The Backchannel, Atkinson describes how to how to prepare for the backchannel, how to make your ideas Twitter-friendly, and how to manage this virtual conversation.

This is an important skill for presenters to learn. At its worst, the backchannel can get out of hand and degenerate into harsh criticism of your presentation in real time. Atkinson provides examples of speakers falling prey to negative comments and how they have succeeded, or failed, in defraying the tension.

On the other hand, speakers can learn how to use the backchannel conversation as a rich source of information that can engage the audience and improve the presentation.


How to innovate in education

November 10, 2009

disrupting class

Book review
Disrupting class: How disruptive innovation will change the way the world learns.
Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn, Curtis W. Johnson.
McGraw-Hill, 2008. 238 p.

Last month a group of educators, government leaders, and corporate and foundation representatives huddled to brainstorm about how technology might drive innovation in the nation’s schools. Kathleen Kennedy Manzo reported on the educational technology forum held at Google Inc’s headquarters, where many “acknowledged the challenges of equipping schools and teachers with new equipment and instructional strategies, gauging the progress of new teaching approaches, and scaling up proven strategies” (Education Week, 4 Nov.).

Clayton Christensen and colleagues addressed these concerns in their 2008 book Disrupting Class. The authors reached their conclusions not by studying schools, but rather by studying innovation in business. They stood outside the public education industry to examine its problems from a different perspective.

The five major messages in this book:
1. Few education reforms have addressed the root cause of students’ inability to learn. Most attempts have not been guided by an understanding of the root reasons for why the system functions as it does, or how to predictably introduce innovation into it.
2. School reformers have repeatedly tried to confront the status quo head-on. The authors’ previous studies of innovation showed that direct attacks on existing systems do not lead to effective disruptive innovation. Instead, innovation must go around and underneath the system.
3. We know that all children learn differently, but the way schooling is currently arranged discourages educating children in customized ways. We need a modular system.
4. Emerging online user networks offer a model for circumventing the education system and creating a new, modular system that facilitates customization. Decentralized user networks democratize development and purchase decisions to the end users in the system—in this case students, parents, and teachers.
5. To facilitate innovation administrators will have to use the tools of power and separation. Using these tools is easiest in the chartered and private school sectors.

Online courses offer the kind of customized, student-centric instruction that students most need, Christensen and colleagues argue. They propose that each school designate one person whose sole job is to implement online courses. He or she should not be the chief information officer or info technologies officer. She or he should report directly to the principal or district superintendent. She or he should not have responsibilities for the rest of instruction in the school, but instead should be free to take any steps necessary to import online courses to meet students’ needs.

Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, calls for philanthropies and foundations to fund the kind of research that helps us learn how different people learn, how to identify those differences, and how different students can best educate themselves and each other.

Teacher training colleges take note: Future teachers will need skills to work one-on-one with different types of learners as they study in a student-centric way. Graduate schools of education must train researchers to go beyond doing descriptive research that seeks average tendencies. Instead, they should study the anomalies and outliers, where the richest insight often is found.

Teachers and parents: When your school does not offer a course students need, seek them online and demand that their schools accept them for credit.

“Schooling can and should be an intrinsically motivating experience,” Christensen says. Why has this often not been the case? How to resolve these problems? Explaining why and how is the purpose of this book.


Rapacious

September 17, 2009

dollars

Attended a professional conference lately?

Had an interesting time trying to access wireless internet?

I’ve ragged on this topic before, but as I prepare to attend two conferences the issue again raises its ugly head.

It strikes me as rapacious in the extreme that many hotels deliberately restrict wireless access in meeting rooms so they can force the meeting organizer to pay for a connection and then pay for each user.

A colleague in conference planning tells me an initial wireless connection costs anywhere from $250-$1000 and the additional user fee anywhere from $25-$100 per room, depending on the venue.

It may be the case that hotels have sliding scales for for-profits and non-profits. But if the above rates are for non-profits, as is our case ….

Plenary sessions can be fantastic. But it’s in the breakout rooms where the vibrant conversations take place. With punitive fees like these, we cannot share what we’re learning with colleagues elsewhere, until later in the day, when other activities have intervened, and details begin to get fuzzy.

Hotels are in business to make money. Conference hotels are in business to make loads of money.

For associations in the non-profit sector, this practice is cost prohibitive.

Despite the awful state of the economy, it’s still the case that professional conferences bring tons of money to the hospitality industry.

I believe that high fees for wireless access generate as much ill will as they do profit.


Twitter: the most effective tool yet

September 15, 2009

twitterville

Book Review
Twitterville: How businesses can thrive in the new global neighborhoods
By Shel Israel
Portfolio Books, 2009. 306 p. 

In 2006 Shel Israel and Robert Scoble co-authored the book Naked Conversations, which argued that blogs can help repair corporate image and rebuild lost trust.

Now Israel argues that Twitter has become the most effective tool in the growing arsenal of social media tools. He shows that Twitter is neither silly nor a waste of time, but has in fact been used to improve customer service, raise funds for charitable causes, and even save lives.

A seasoned journalist, Shel Israel brings a tremendous amount of research and synthesis to the task of presenting a catalog of illustrative case studies.

Twitterville examines the inefficiency of traditional marketing and argues the case for using social media instead of advertising.

For example, Dell’s social media team uses Twitter to monitor conversations about their company and to get results faster than they could using Google Blog Alerts. They use Twitter to find useful Internet content they might have missed for days, or perhaps entirely.  Dell’s team realized they no longer needed to invest in focus groups:  Twitter provided real-time feedback from real customers who were passionate and well informed.

Hundreds of Zappos employees use Twitter to answer customers’ questions about the company while refraining from hawking their product.

H&R Block uses Twitter to build its base among younger taxpayers.

IBM employees use Twitter to talk with anyone they wish, about anything they want. Anyone who chooses can follow what is being said.  IBM says Twitter saves time, brings employees and customers closer together, and makes the company collectively smarter.

RedMonk, an open-source research firm, uses Twitter Search more often than Google searches.

Israel is not the first to claim that the Broadcast Age is dead. But what he does well is to pinpoint what distinguishes the Conversational Age we now live in: More business decisions are made faster, at the front lines of business, where a company’s representatives interact most with its customers. This reverses the old-school command-and-control system where most important decisions were made by a few senior people.

Many of the companies Israel profiles have yet to develop a clear business model for Twitter.  Be patient, he advises. When people follow their passion and find others to do the same, then communities form. And as they grow, the appropriate path to monetization becomes clear, as it did for Google, Facebook, and other companies.

Israel sees a convergence of old and new media in the short-term future. In that convergence he sees what he calls “braided journalism,” which includes traditional media, citizen journalism, and social media.  As an example, he reminds us of the story of the Airbus that landed in the Hudson River.  Janis Krums, a passenger, posted a photo on TwitPic. A few minutes later he received a call from MSNBC. He spoke live on air and TV viewers saw the photo he had shot and uploaded. The world got to see what he saw and the press got to see the value of the new breed of citizen journalists and their network of choice.

The Afterword walks the reader through the process of setting up a Twitter account and provides a dictionary of twitter terms.


People first, business later

August 28, 2009

trust agents

Book Review
Trust Agents. Using the Web to build influence, improve reputation, and earn trust.
By Chris Brogan and Julien Smith.
John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2009. 271 p.

Because I read Trust Agents from the perspective of a public relations practitioner I especially appreciate its challenge to reconsider the meaning of the term ‘public relations.’ Chris Brogan and Julien Smith emphasize that PR means listening.

PR people, successful ones at least, learn to become part of a dialogue with a number of  communities, online and off. They volunteer to help whenever possible, and keep adding to the karma bank.

Chris Brogan is an author, a cofounder of PodCamp, and an unusually influential blogger on trends in social media. I have followed him for some  time. Julien Smith is an author, trend analyst, and consultant.

They address Trust Agents to marketers in particular.  As marketing professionals themselves, they critique many common practices of the profession and propose enlightened alternatives. They offer the book as a marketer’s guide to establishing credibility, and they take cues from How to Win Friends and Influence People, the Boy Scout Manual, a Guy’s Guide to Dating.

Like a single guy scanning attractive prospects at the local pub, a Trust Agent sees sales opportunities. But rather than incessantly promoting himself (or product) he takes his time and nurtures relationships. He patiently plants seeds. Through blog posts and comments, interactions online and face-to-face, and by going the extra mile for customers, the Trust Agent eventually reaps rewards as the seeds bloom.

Trust Agents embody six qualities, and each receives its own chapter:
They make their own game (enjoy experimentation, learn from trial and error)
Are ‘one of us’ (spend time with us, are genuine)
Use the Archimedes effect (leverage one success to create another)
Act as Agent Zero (bring networks together and build relationships long before business needs transacting)
Are human artists (good at ‘people skills,’ empower others)
Build an army (work with their networks to achieve monumental tasks)

Clever Trust Agents ‘make their own game’ by sizing up the system, the status quo. They identify its underlying assumptions and then decide which rules can be broken. They jump the gate; they hack the system;  they do something unique. At the same time, and this is crucial, Trust Agents do not take advantage of people. People are real, they have feelings, and deserve respect. Trust Agents watch their own ego. They promote others more often than they promote themselves.

While they’re eager to participate in networks and groups, Trust Agents are not phony. They don’t join a community they don’t care about. There is no worse crime than being fake.

You may find yourself skimming over some of the content. Several of the observations and recommendations are so obvious and so universally accepted that one wonders why they’re repeated here:  how to conduct oneself in social settings, how to use social networking sites to build social networks.

But for this reader there are some big takeaways: Keep experimenting. Keep trying new things. If you stumble, learn from the experience. It’s part of creating your own game.


Even UW Faculty and Staff Can (and Should) Twitter

August 12, 2009

Lincoln_tweets

August 25 — 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
September 9 — 1:00 to 2:00 p.m.
Pyle Center, Room 313
702 Langdon Street

Learn all about the world of Twitter at these one-hour sessions in the Pyle Center (so everyone has room to bring laptops). WAA Web Director James Ellis will lead you through the world of Twitter, show how it can used to broaden a user’s reach and engagement and give tips to make your Twitter account thrive.

These sessions are open to all UW-Madison faculty and staff. No previous usage of Twitter is necessary, only that you are interested in broadening your reach with students, alumni, faculty and staff. Register for this free class here.


Make Bank … by Giving It Away

August 4, 2009

Free the future of a radical price

Book Review
Free: The Future of a Radical Price.
By Chris Anderson
Hyperion books, 2009.  274 pages.

NPR reported this morning that Microsoft will soon offer free web based versions of some of its software programs, including word processing and spreadsheets.

Why would Microsoft  give anything away free? After all, about 80 percent of business uses Microsoft Office.

Their decision has as much to do with mindshare as much as market share, says NPR commentator  Mario Armstrong.

More people are using Google Docs, a free online application, for collaborative word processing. The software exists not in your computer, but on the internet.

MS needs to show it can be an online presence, Armstrong says.  If people get used to free alternatives and MS does not have a complementary service, people will forget about MS:  MS could become unnecessary.

OK, but how does Google make money with online free apps?  They are still trying to figure that out.

But companies are making money with Free. Chris Anderson lists 50 ways they do that in Free: The Future of a Radical Price.

While the last century’s Free was a powerful marketing method, this century’s Free is an entirely new economic model, Anderson says.  The new form of Free is not a gimmick, not just a trick to shift money from one pocket to another. Instead, it’s driven by an extraordinary ability of bits and bytes to lower the costs of goods and services close to zero.

The most disruptive way to enter a market is to vaporize the economics of existing business models, Anderson says. Charge nothing for a product that the incumbents depend on for their profits (e.g., a web browser, photo imaging software). The world will beat a path to your door. And then you can sell them something else.

The Firefox browser continues to gain on Microsoft’s IE (it now has about 30 percent of the market). Mozilla, the nonprofit company that makes it, funds the browser’s development almost entirely with a cut of Google’s ad revenues. When people use Firefox for search, they get Google’s search results page. Mozilla’s staff is fewer than a hundred people, yet it’s running circles around Microsoft’s browser team, Anderson says. It’s another business built on Free, no tie-in to a commercial operating system required.

Free is easier for newcomers than for incumbents because the incumbents haven a revenue stream that they’re in danger of cannibalizing. They also have a lot more users, and the costs of serving millions of customers can be astronomical.

Anderson describes how Free has changed the world of advertising. The old broadcast model was: Annoy the 90 percent of your audience that’s not interested in your product to reach the 10 percent who might be.  The Google model is just the opposite: Use software to show your ad only to the people for whom it’s most relevant. Annoy just the 10 percent of the audience who isn’t interested to reach the 90 percent who might be.  Google has redefined advertising—connecting products with expressed desires.

Anderson cautions that Free is not a magic bullet. Giving away what you do will not make you rich by itself. You have to think creatively about how to convert into cash the reputation and attention you can get from Free.

But remember that people will pay to save time. People will pay to lower risk. People will pay for things the love. People will pay for status. People will pay if you make them (once they’re hooked). Free opens doors and reaches new consumers, Anderson says. With today’s economies of scale, you can make plenty of money by charging just a small fraction of them.