Mark's posterous

Reaction to Steve Hargadon's Open Letter to Marc Andreessen About Venture-Funded Ed Tech Start-Ups

Steve Hargadon had an interesting post about how many Ed-Tech start-ups miss-the-mark because they do not understand the market they are attempting to disrupt here: http://www.stevehargadon.com/2011/09/now-open-letter-to-marc-andreessen.html. However, he seemed a bit resistant to VC involvement with Educational Technology almost on principle alone. I personally believe there is a lot of upside about VC involvement.

As such, I would say I agree with Steve about the need for SMEs to be paired with developers but still contend that he is not 100% on target because Education and Healthcare should be embracing VC's not pushing them away. Both markets have multiple "software systems" that both students & instructors, as well as patients & health care professionals would agree are fundamentally inadequate.

In the educational sector, much to Steve's point, these "software systems" have been designed by people who wouldn't know _Experience and Education_ from a coaster. However, incorporating SME's into the design process of "software systems" has largely been an afterthought until recently. First to market is almost always the goal when deploying software. Microsoft constantly released a Windows Operating system that was never ready for launch and that is a purely technical product being developed by technical people, rarely outside of tech are the SME's the developers.

Furthermore, until alternatives and some volatility exists in any market, investors and even really developers are often hesitant to challenge the status quo. There are so many opportunities out there today that require fewer barriers to entry (see the new 235k jobs created by Facebook development here: http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/19/study-facebook-app-economy-adds-over-200k-jobs-contributes-more-than-15b-to-the-u-s-economy/)

It is clear that with the both education and healthcare markets are ripe for disruption among their core "software systems." Bootstrapping a business requires a certain time investment. In the "first-to-market" "software systems" environment, it will likely take the aid of VCs to jump start pairing both a sufficient depth of SMEs and developers to create a truly disruptive product. I believe we should be embracing the funding that can pair SMEs and developers and lower these barriers.

My reaction to @gsiemens blog post “Losing interest in social media: there is no there there"

George Siemens recently wrote a blog post entitled “Losing interest in social media: there is no there there” where he challenged the value of social media stating that its merely an agent of flow of two components, emotion and links to content produced elsewhere. He noted that in itself, social media does not empower a platform for genuine dialog or content creation, framed in the comments that “[s]ocial media is generally useful for real time interactions or about events that are currently happening in real time. It’s like a news broadcast. News is good for a day or so. After that, it’s not a huge reference point.”

George, I wanted to say thanks for following up and replying to everyone’s comments, this was a very thought provoking article and I've seen your sentiment about the value of creation and generating content echoed in many of your previous posts and conversations.

There was a rather large reaction from the commentators to George's article and several took exception to a couple items in this article. Personally, I have to admit I slipped a bit off my rocker over one particular line and I believe it is this particular line where he seemed to have had a disconnect with many of the other respondents:

“What has Twitter and Facebook done for me? Nothing, really. Other than perhaps attending to my emotive needs of being connected to people when I’m traveling and whining.”

At the moment my eyes finished the line they drifted off the screen into space. I lost sight of George's overall theme about creation and the actual argument of the value of social media with regard to its impact as a platform for change, capacity to resolve real-world problems, and as a resource for content and dialog. I agree that in many ways the utility or actual power of the medium is being over exaggerated and there being a perception by both more prominent users and even actual members of the media. Specifically, George made an excellent point that the value popularizing or obtaining a trending hashtag is nonexistent with respect to enticing actual and genuine change.

Still, I was momentarily bubbling from the snippet by George because I firmly believe Twitter has done a lot for people beyond emotive and flow. It has enabled others like myself to conversations we had no knowledge of, or opportunity in which to participate. For George specifically, it has directly led to some monetary residuals from me as I purchased his book.

Moreso, I believe that George and I may have a contrasting value of flow inside of this article because I believe that in those flows and connections, the reputation that George has built, exists a tangible component in the equation. Those connections in the audience do more than carry the 'flow' of any content; they challenge, question, either by mere presence or a direct effort validate and help sharpen thoughts and shape opinions. In itself, 'flow' is often thought to be unidirectional and the benefit here definitely has a bilateral component. Furthermore, I would contend that both participants, person and follower, maximize value in that bilateral relationship, even if the communication is asynchronous.

I would still concede that the value of social media transactions decrease with time. However, on a differing level, I would contend that there is still a deep and empowering component being generated as a result from social media.

As always, thanks for sharing.
Cheers.
-Mark

Injecting a Feedback Mechanism into the Learning and Knowledge Analytics '11 Course #LAK11

For the Learning and Knowledge Analytics 2011, Massively Open Online Course facilitated by George Siemens, Jon Dron, Dave Comier, Sylvia Currie, and Tanya Elias [http://www.learninganalytics.net]:

I think there is a potential to inject a feedback mechanism in this course, and any MOOC for that matter, with regard to the helpfulness of reading material in the Syllabus. I think that would especially suit the Learning & Knowledge Analytics course.

For each article in the Syllabus, have short poll:

My background on EDM at the start of this course is:
Introductory, Novice, Moderate, Advanced, Expert

My background on EDM when reading this article is:
Introductory, Novice, Moderate, Advanced, Expert

With regard to my knowledge level, I found this article:
Not Helpful, Somewhat Unhelpful, Neither Unhelpful or Helpful, Somewhat Helpful, Extremely Helpful

Thoughts on the article:
[Open ended]

I think gauging which articles are helpful from session to session, and ordering them for experience levels could be extremely beneficial to both facilitators and participants. For the purposes of LAK, the data may prove useful for research efforts.

Thank you all very much for taking your time to deliver this MOOC.

Cheers,
-Mark Gbur

School Structure, Evaluation, and Government Controls impacting Futures in Education

For an Open Course in Education Futures facilitated by Dave Cormier and George Siemens, one of the first activities is to help suggest potential trends that may impact the Futures of Education. At the beginning of April, Dave ran a compressed version of the course in a one week format in Singapore. He was kind enough to share his work and post a list of trends from a brainstorming session from his class. The list was 42 items long and heavily dominated by technology in education. An open call was made for feedback on the list, pasted below is my reply that I posted on Dave's blog for Day 2 of Futures in Education Course.

I plan to break up my post below and revise and "reuse" the material as individual threads in the Week 1 Discussion Forum: Suggested Trend. Apologies to those who find this repost redundant.

Composed 4/6/2010 here.

Dave,

You have a very interesting list of items. However, they all seem to be related to the cause/effect of technology changes. I feel that technology is the “sexy” topic in education and it is easy to get “whisked away” and leave out core elements that truly drive and limit the scope of technology implementations.

I personally feel [1] structure (standards, daily schedules, mission statements, composition of curriculum, staffing, ect), [2] evaluation (standards, testing for educational progress), [3] government controls (funding, policies, programs, expectations) play a very large role in education.

I took a quick glance at the iN2015 PDF that was linked and it also listed major categories of Trends to include: Political/Government, Economic, Social. I feel that these items also need to be addressed within the title of “Futures of Education.”

In the United States, Education K-12 as well as Higher Ed is (3) suffering huge budget cuts from the government. K-12 programs are losing licensed teachers, arts/music/sports programs are being cut, special education for children with additional needs are at risk, teaching assistants are losing positions, administration positions like vice principals are being reduced or eliminated in some schools (one example of many: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-jim-taylor/the-travesty-of-education_b_498653.html). Higher Ed is having to adjust professor salaries, cut scholarships and grants, implement department and college-level cutbacks. These funding/spending changes will drastically alter the ability of schools to make “bonus” additions of technology implementations on all different levels.

The United States also (2) poorly evaluates the success of K-12 schools and teachers teachers. They give students standardized tests to measure the performance of the school (interesting opinion: http://lilysblackboard.org/2010/03/nclb-science-of-making-up-stuff/). Then, they turn around and use the same results to evaluate the performance of teachers. In reality, they put the hardest students with the highest needs into the classrooms with the best teachers. Students with the best test scores are in classrooms with the worst teachers. The results of these “standardized” outcomes is terribly misleading. Unfairly evaluating instructors cripples makes Education an unattractive field and only stands to hurt the student in the long run.

The structure of a school and a school system (1) has actually shown to have some of the largest affects on outcomes in K-12 schools. Class sizes, parental involvement, community involvement are all structural factors that play into performance. Some schools have even altered and restructured the traditional model to yield interesting results. The KIPP programs (http://www.kipp.org/) which have been known to extend the amount of time kids spend in school, and extending schooling into the summer (American students typically take 3 full months off in the summer before advancing to the next grade level) have shown to increase student performance (http://www.givewell.net/united-states/education/top-charities/KIPP). Also, Magnet Schools (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet_school) are becoming an interesting trend. Locally in Indianapolis, IN – USA, one township is converting all of their elementary schools to charter Magnets where students will get to attend a themed school after arts or environmental science (http://www.indy.com/posts/an-all-magnet-approach).

While technology can change the way we interact, I believe that the largest changes in education will be felt from modifications to structure, evaluation models, and government funding.

Best of luck with your class and thanks for sharing your work publicly. I hope everyone has a positive experience!
-Mark

Increased dependency on the growth and availability of the Internet bandwidth

For an Open Course in Education Futures facilitated by Dave Cormier and George Siemens, one of the first activities is to help suggest potential trends that may impact the Futures of Education. Below is my post on the Week 1 Forum.

Composed 4/19/2010.

As a whole, it seems like societies are expecting more and more access to the Internet while consuming significantly higher volumes of bandwidth. Accordingly, we are building expectations and dependencies that these resources, the Internet and new tools afforded by ample bandwidth access on the Internet, will continue to be overly available to us, perhaps even beyond a progressive and scalable rate of development.

Macroscopically, on a Global level, we are having to change fundamental principles in how are networks link together. We are running out of IPv4 addresses ("internet telephone numbers"), and we will have to make a cut over to a new protocol, IPv6. "The limited IPv4 addresses will not allow us enough resources to achieve the ambitions we all hold for global internet access" [http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-385195.html - 1/19/2010]. Some countries are already deploying IPv6 such as Japan [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/3076933/Internet-will-run-out-of-IP-addresses-by-2010-warns-Vint-Cerf.html - 10/25/2008]. These issues have been recognized and will likely be successfully addressed. However, smaller and more local issues grow at a faster pace and are significantly more difficult to promptly address.

On a Micro level, increased demand for bandwidth has changed how Internet Service Providers (ISPs) monitor and distribute bandwidth. Naturally, a price scaling system was implemented to tier different levels of service. However, with the advent of file sharing, many networks have been crippled by extremely slow service and forced to implement service restrictions and banning users abusing volume limits.

On the Mobile front, when many power users demanding 3G service [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3g] in the States are brought to one area with an even distributed service level, the system performance moves to a crawl or becomes nonexistent creating an uproar among users. Sure, service providers can anticipate these events and temporarily increase bandwidth accordingly, but in the future, will that be enough? Last year, 2009, at the SXSW conference in Austin Texas, USA, a Metropolitan population of approximately 1.8 million people [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin,_Texas] suffered service performance issues on ATT (a Mobile Service provider who has an exclusive contract in the States for the iPhone), with the influx of approximately 15,000 "techy" SXSW conference attendees managed to cripple the system, which is less than a 1%, though focused, increase to the local population. This year, 2010, ATT successfully implemented temporary measures to handle that small volume, [http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-20000406-52.html - 3/13/2010]) but it still stands that large aggregations of iPhone and 3G users cause service disruptions. Accordingly, the increase of users expecting and demanding 3G and 4G service, given the quickly rising group of smartphone users, [http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/23/smartphone-iphone-sales-2009-gartner/ - 2/23/2010], we can expect our networks to incur some serious scaling issues where demand is far reaching over supply.

More recently, the iPad has been met with some network resistance. One country has banned the iPad outright, "Israel has banned imports of Apple Inc.'s hottest new product, the iPad, citing concerns the powerful gadget's wireless signals could disrupt other devices" [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/14/israel-blocks-ipad-import_n_537841.html - 4/15/2010]. Some Universities in the States have also started to temporarily ban the iPad including George Washington University and Princeton University [http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20100416-712117.html - 4/16/2010]. Princeton has found that the iPad has a DHCP malfunction where the device has been leasing an IP address on the wireless network and failing to renew the lease at the prompted interval, thus creating network issues [http://www.net.princeton.edu/announcements/ipad-iphoneos32-stops-renewing-lease-keeps-using-IP-address.html - 4/19/2010]. These network issues will continue to appear as companies continue to release products at a pace that testing and network scalability will not be able to match.

In sum, with the rapid growth of Internet users and the increasing demand for bandwidth, we are going to continue to incur network availability and scalability issues. With the increase of use and demand in streaming music, streaming videos, video conferencing, file sharing and downloads, distribution of news-blogs-Twitter-ect, growth of personal networks and social media, and the Global rise of VOIP [voice over IP, Skype, ect.], we are going to continue to increasingly tax the amount of bandwidth available on the network. As this growth begins and expands into countries with no or new networks, they too are going to face similar issues. These implications of not scaling the demand for growth could be far reaching and the result could be intermittent or prolonged downtime and decreased performance for the expected use of our networks. As a society, if we continue the pattern of increased integration of new tools afforded by the availability of the Internet, we should be prepared for outages and decreased network performance as the service scales in capability to meet this steadily increasing demand.

Cheers,
-Mark

First Impressions of MOG

I have to admit I am pretty impressed with MOG right off the bat. The quality (320 kbps stream) and the discovery mechanisms are fantastic. There is quite a bit of potential in this system. The "Web 2.0″ features immediately make this an attractive system. Music is fueled by the culture of expression, sharing, suggesting, listing, and discovering not just alone but with others and your friends.

However, in the first 10 minutes, I have no idea how to search for my friends on here at all. That is one of the first things I'd like to do is start to network my existing relationships. I had to dig through the help section only to find that: my user name tab > my profile > find similar moggers > moggers like me - is broke. And there is no "browse" feature as indicated on the help page.

The next thing I want to do is listen to some of the lesser mainstream music on the web. If I am going to pay for a service, I truly want access to content that I can try before I buy for my personal collection. I noticed quite a few holes in the MOG catalog from my personal tastes and I want to submit them for addition. However, I have no idea how or where to request additions to the catalog.

The pause button, if hit for about 10 minutes, often resumes with peculiar results (not at all or restarts at the beginning of the track).

I setup my profile page and that was a fairly rich experience. However, I have no idea how to share it with other people. I have friends on here and I would like to publish the information both internally within MOG and externally. Those linking/searching features are not there quite yet. However, the widgets are EXTREMELY cool. I wish more services would incorporate user customization. I'd like to extend the viewable area of the blog, and I'd also like to roll up my status feed on my profile (ultimately hoping it could be something I could share).

The radio feature is very well done. I like being able to preview which tracks are next and see the affects of using the slidebar between artist and similar is extremely useful.

With some enhanced feedback mechanisms and tailoring, you could have quite the impressive product here. The price isn't too exorbitant and it certainly delivers on the focal point, streaming music.

Cheers.

Reponse to "Can learning networks (partly) replace the teacher?"

George Siemens posted the prompt "Can learning networks (partly) replace the teacher?" on 10/27/09 on a forum for the 2010 Networked Learning Conference in Aalborg, Denmark @ http://www.networkedlearningconference.org.uk/index.php/forum/topic?id=15

For me, the value of an instructor when learning a new topic has always been clarification via the experience of the instructor. I can immerse myself in the network and learn the terminology from a list of objectives and start to piece different components and their interactions together. However, I will inevitably reach an indecisive moment where there is not enough documentation in the network to articulate an outcome of an experience. It may be that steps were skipped or that a topic was oversimplified in the network. What I then seek is the experience for clarification to tangibilize the minutiae. Such connections help paint the bigger picture and create more profound building blocks for progressing deeper into the discipline.

Computerized networks have historically been very inorganic. They are excellent sources of documentation and even great ways to elicit responses. However, I find that it still requires deep engagement in networks to get personalized responses. Initial messages frequently prompt very generic responses from people who do not understand “how to explain the concept” but rather “how to over simplify their own experience.”

The prompt for this question, “Can learning networks (partly) replace the teacher?” — partly stems from the idea that instructor will never be able to be a SME on every individual component of a topic. Much of that information for a discipline can be gained from the network. However, an instructor is an immediate, and hopefully engaging and passionate resource for personalized responses. When instructors care, they have the ability to facilitate and foster faster connections that are simply not likely to manifest in “impersonal networks.”

That being said, just because “one is an instructor” does not mean they have the qualification of an “engaging and passionate resource.” Resourceful instructors are rare, which is why often times, I feel like many knowledgeable participants in the network can obtain an equal experience with enough persistence and digging. The instructor can be a very valuable participant in the exploration of a discipline, but they are better coined as catalysts than “necessary components.”

Can learning networks (partly) replace the teacher? Networks have long replaced the teacher; it is only becoming more prevalently noticed due to the amount of instantly and abundantly available resources, society no longer portrays the instructor as the "beholder of knowledge."

Hidden and Nominal Values in Twitter

One of the hardest things to do in your personal and professional life is to meet and interact with people outside of your confined region and or discipline. Twitter puts you in an arms reach within everyone on the platform. The immediate public perception aligns Twitter with lists of celebrities and coverage as an internet fad. While Twitter may not be for everyone, do not underestimate the inherent benefits.

Twitter enables the opportunity to interact with people who you would otherwise have no platform of communication to reach. Traditional news broadcasts, printed literature, and advertising are often singular and one-way communications. However, Twitter permits a public rebroadcast of the original message.

Rebroadcasts ripple through sets of demographics that traditional mediums and networks never reach. The initial broadcast via twitter might be in the thousands to a specific demographic for a technology product. Yet, the rebroadcast from second hand, third hand, forth hand, etc. can easily be over the hundred-thousand to million unique views from individuals who fall outside of the source demographic. The potential result of a Tweet is a publication onto a fast tracked medium for word-of-mouth communication. The delivery is fueled by users with large audiences and information parsers that can republish and break information to the general population faster than media networks; insurrection in Iran, a helicopter and plan crash in Manhattan - a plane crashing into the Hudson River - and plane sliding off the runway in Denver, an earthquake in China, and terrorism in India.

Twitter is a public forum which also offers the broadcaster of a Tweet a medium for receiving feedback. Feedback can be a public reply to the message, a private reply to the message, a rebroadcast (the ever evolving ReTweet), or a general remark on the public stream. The ability for an individual or company to instantly receive and monitor feedback of their messages has an ever growing list of third-party tools for management and consumption.

Where I presently perceive Twitter to be failing is that to actually interact with the more popular users on Twitter, these power users would also have to be an information power consumers. There is so much public communication inside Twitter that it becomes very difficult to continually consume the messages. Imagine swimming upstream in a river. The more popular you get, the faster the river flows. It is only a matter of time before you are swept away in the volume of information. It has been my experience that when attempting to reach a power user, you have to hope that they are monitoring their feed within moments of your communication. It easy to find a barrel floating down a river while someone is are watching the flow. Otherwise, that message will be so far downstream by user's next login, the information may be washed out to sea or no longer relevant.

Many have found that Twitter does not fully delivered efficient methods to monitor streams of information. Twitter offers three native streams, users following you, users you follow, and the public stream. Twitter offers the ability to shut off streams of individuals following you, which can help reduce spam and may eliminate unwanted content. Most users frequent the stream of individuals in which they follow. However, large numbers are hard to digest and it led Robert Scoble to unfollow over 100,000 users to keep his stream manageable.

It is possible to search the public forum on Twitter, however it is extremely difficult to filter the information to make it relevant. Erick Schonfeld provided a summation on monitoring the public stream and concluded that "Twitter needs to figure out how to extract the common sentiments from the noise." The information in the Tweets from the public stream exist in a raw and uncategorized form that further needs analysis and processing in order obtain any metrics or value from the parameters.

Once Twitter releases tools to enable the consumption and analysis of information, and effectively "twittersenses" the market, (Google's extremely profitable method of selling advertising by search rankings, filtering, and ad placements on web pages), Twitter's cash flow for both the company and consumers (businesses and personal), will skyrocket. Just set your countdown clock, because these tools are in development and have started being deployed on the back end.

Many enthusiasts remain impatient for increased tools to monitor and filter streams since Facebook has already implemented friend filtering on a much more relative and confined scale. It is important to be cognizant that Twitter is a new and relatively undefined market. It will take developers some time to tweak an efficient, scalable, and monetizable implementation.

There has certainly been a lot of speculation about the nominal value of Twitter. During 2008, Twitter was a target acqusition of Facebook and published rumors by TechCrunch cited the offer to be $500 million dollars. After the acquisition attempt failed, Facebook shifted focus to FriendFeed, a microblogging competitor. In the summer of 2009, The Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook bought FriendFeed for nearly $50 million dollars. While the nominal value of Twitter will continue to receive constant speculation, there is still plenty of inherent value in the networking opportunities on the platform.

You should follow me on twitter here.

Above is an edited response to @scobleizer 's post on a nominal estimated value of Twitter seen at: http://scobleizer.posterous.com/why-twitter-is-underhyped-and-is-probably-wor