by Rob Paterson
August 16, 2010 at 1:53 pm · Filed under
Adoption, Gaping Void, Hugh McLeod, Innovation, KETC, Management Theory, Organizational Design, Public Media, Public TV, Robert Scoble, Seth Godin, University, education
Few people are as passionate about Education than BG. Here he is talking about what he has learned by a lot of experiments.
- That K-12 is best as an immersive system with long days – best 6 days a week and in the summer as well. The best charter schools know this and practice it. Having had all my school like this myself – my sample of 1 agrees with this.
- This means that for K-12 Place is key – like going to Boot Camp. But there is a real role here for online in that it expands the scope of the place
- BG feels (2.50) however that shifting the formal system to either of these ideas – more immersive and more online – can never happen – the cultural barriers are too high
- On the College and university front, he points out that here the issue is access. The main barrier to access is “Place” that drives direct cost and prohibits the student from having any flexibility.
- Here he anticipates big movement driven by the economics. Place drives costs of up to $250,000 for a BA. He thinks that the target is to reduce this not to $20,000 but to $2,000
I think this is entirely possible. But what established university will have the guts to do this? Will they all end up like the newspapers? Hanging on for dear life?
I think that most will rather die than change. As many of us are finding in the front lines of change – it is impossible to underestimate the power of the establishment.
But I think that maybe a few established universities might go the whole way. I think that those who do will win the most. There is something very important about having an establishment organization or person as part of a revolution. Martin Luther had his Prince who defended him from both the Pope and the Emperor. In newspapers it may be the Guardian. In public TV it may be KETC. (Here is KETC Immigration page where they are putting the Public Into Public TV).
I think of my university here on PEI – What if UPEI had another 25,000 online students? here is a snip of a larger idea like this that I wrote 5 years ago:
Come to PEI for the summer and meet the other students and then go onto take an online Master’s degree in the Natural Economy. The Master in the Natural Economy (MINE) is a master’s degree course that engages the learner as many of the ideas and practices of the new ways of organizing and acting as possible. It embodies the ideas of our new time. It draws on hundreds of “Gurus” that live all over the world that bring their own story and experience to bear. Students, who nearly all are employed, develop their own path of study within the context of the course intention.
The school initially emerged out of one course, Marketing as a Conversation inspired by Cluetrain and by the ongoing thinking and blogging of by people like Seth Godin, Hugh McLeod, Johnnie Moore and Jennifer Rice. Their marketing revolution was the first breach of the old system that took hold.
There are a number of paths that students can take but all the work is founded in the ideas of how real relationships and real networks work. Paul Hawken is Dean Emeritus and the current Dean of the School in Natural Economy is George Dafermos who’s early writing on the use of Open Source, as an organizational model, has been so influential. Robert Scoble is the Visiting Guru this year and will be on PEI this summer offering workshops in Voice and Culture. He replaces Dave Pollard who will be sorely missed.
Students spend a month in the summer here on PEI where their task is to get to know each other and to decide on their focus for study. They then return home and form groups that are facilitated by the gurus. The full Masters degree costs only $7,000 and has of course no other costs. There are now 17,000 students in the system that is 4 times the size of UPEI, conventional undergraduate school.
MINE Graduates are in extreme demand as organizations struggle to understand the shift that they have to undergo. The traditional business schools have had great difficulty in moving this fast because they have such an investment in the old. Similarly, the major consulting firms have all but collapsed, as they too could not reframe their costs and their competence.
In their place have emerged networks of “Gurus” like the Hughtrain Alliance that are recognized as the key talent that shook the marketing world. These networks have a very different model and become partners of the host organization. They are not report writing organizations with expensive offices and extreme hierarchies but are much more like coaches of a team. Most of the students of the Natural Economy work and most of their study is in the context of solving their real challenges.
In effect, consulting has become an extension of the education process.
As with Luther – the big change will happen on the edge where the “field” is weakest. A small undergraduate university, like UPEI or back in the day Wittenberg, is less gripped by the power of the prevailing culture and can see the gains that might accrue to them.
by Rob Paterson
March 28, 2010 at 11:48 am · Filed under
Content, Hugh McLeod, Social Contact, Social Media, Social Objects
Facebook has over 400 million members and growing. Why?
Now it is clear that people are finding that online is THE PLACE to find a mate. Average time on site 22 minutes! Average age is 48. Customer spend on average $239 a year. The industry is worth over a $1.0 billion a year. Why?
What this says to me is that:
- People are alone and cut off – they want to find safe ways of connecting
- What we want is social contact more than content
- If you have content, then you have to wrap contact around it - a Jane Austen Book Club will do it – As Hugh says make it into a Social Object
- Your content becomes a Trust builder- Is this why so many personal ads say “I am an NPR listener”? It could just as well say “I am a Tea Bagger” – still tells others who you are
Contact – real human contact is what people want. The proof is in the sex statistic – 1/3 of women have sex on the first date – why? I think because the online dating algorithms work – both feel that they are indeed a match and the barriers go down
And your online social strategy is based on what ideas?
(Via Online Schools)
by Jon Husband
February 10, 2008 at 11:18 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Blue Monster, Business Model, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Enterprise Software, Hugh McLeod, Mashups, Microsoft, SOA, Social Computing, Web 2.0, Web Services
Mashups for the business world are a promising outcome of the application of design and development principles coming from the consumer application and web services arena to the business environment.
As noted in the excerpt from the NY Times below, Microsoft has for the most part been regarded as a laggard, or essentially a reluctant participant in the Web 2.0 world to date because of its focus on operating systems (though its Blue Monster initiative was created in order to address that perception, I believe).
While it’s Popfly initiative and a team of 17 programmers does not represent a wholesale shift in strategic direction for Microsoft, it’s an interesting signal.
While most readers of this blog will no doubt be familiar with Web 2.0 and mashups, here’s a bit of context. Generally, Web 2.0 refers to a "second generation" of web sites whereon visitors / users can contribute information for purposes of sharing and collaboration. Web 2.0 applications use Web services – most commonly Flash, Ajax, Silverlight or JavaFX user interfaces, Web syndication, blogs, and wikis. There are no set standards for Web 2.0, and generally it has come into existence through the work of designers and programmers building upon existing web server architecture and adding / stitching together web services. It can be said that Web 2.0 shares some principles and characteristics with SOA.
Mashups are often thought of as Web 2.0 applications. "Enterprise mashup" describes Web applications that combine content from multiple sources into an integrated user experience. Enterprise mashups are application hybrids combining content and functions from more than one existing source to create powerful Web applications, integrated Web experiences and to expand customer value networks. They are created when different application program interfaces (APIs) are combined or ‘mashed’ such that the functions from the combined applications come together to create an entirely new application.
As noted in the NY Times article, "Microsoft has long been a software engineering culture in which huge projects like Windows Vista are developed and tested by teams of hundreds, and whose completion time is measured in a large fraction of decades.
Although it is not yet widely visible to the outside world, some people inside Microsoft are beginning to break that mold."
.
Mashups Are Breaking the Mold at Microsoft
[ Snip ... ]
Mr. Montgomery, a veteran product manager who has also worked as a computer industry writer and editor, is an example of how it just might be possible to teach dinosaurs to dance.
Last fall, his team introduced an intriguing software Web service called Popfly that is intended to make it possible for nonprogrammers to plug together Web components and data sources quickly to create useful new Web services. For example, news feeds could be added to digital images, or data lists to maps.
Introduced at the Web 2.0 conference last year by Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, Popfly was picked by PC World magazine as one of the most innovative computing and consumer electronics products of 2007. It has garnered more than 100,000 users — the company says the exact number is confidential — and now has a library of more than 50,000 “mashups”: new components or Web pages that have been created in a visual snap-together fashion, like Lego blocks.
The mashup is at the heart of a generation of Lego-style software that is emblematic of the second generation of the Internet. Both Google and Yahoo have developed tools to help Web users display apartment rentals on maps, or build complicated Web sites like
The Popfly programmers, however, have gone a step further in an effort to design a tool that is intended for a generation of Web users who are familiar with the Internet but are not skilled programmers.
A user might take Popfly and mash up his list of Amazon book recommendations with the Seattle Library book catalog on the Web, he said, and receive a notification when the waiting list for a particular book was down to zero.
“This is not just a passive experience,” Mr. Montgomery said. “You can take this stuff and use it in new ways.”
He now sees his target audience as people who are not professional developers, but who work with information.
Popfly, he said, is for “the 21- to 27-year-old crowd who grew up on the Web.”
“They have never known a world without eBay, Amazon, or Google,” he added. “They assume that when you create a piece of software it will be Internet-connected and it will have an innate sense of who your friends are.”
Microsoft is certainly not alone in seeing this kind of an opportunity. Yahoo offers a widely used tool call Yahoo Pipes that offers some of the same capabilities as Popfly, and Google has designed a “mashup editor” for more skilled programmers.
But Mr. Montgomery sees Popfly as a more ambitious and comprehensive effort. He also thinks that it could turn into a general educational tool for nonprogrammers.
[ Snip ... ]
The largest challenge facing the Microsoft team of Popfly developers will be to gain the acceptance of the broader Web world. Because the company chose to design Popfly using a Microsoft Web graphics and animation technology called Silverlight, it will be treated with suspicion by an Internet universe that is increasingly committed to open standards.
Silverlight is an alternative developed by Microsoft to compete against Adobe’s Flash and, more recently, Flex systems, that are now used ubiquitously by Web developers.
Mr. Montgomery will also have to overcome the skepticism with which many Internet veterans now view Microsoft.
“Popfly shows me that Microsoft still thinks this is all about software, rather than about accumulating data via network effects, which to me is the core of Web 2.0,” said Tim O’Reilly, the founder and chief executive of O’Reilly Media, a print and online publisher. “They are using Popfly to push Silverlight, rather than really trying to get into the mashup game.”
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I’m sure we’ll find out how serious Microsoft is …
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by Rob Paterson
January 3, 2008 at 1:18 pm · Filed under
Hugh McLeod, Netflix, Public Media, Social Media, Social Objects, TV, Video
Netflix are making a big move to a direct model.
Netflix and LG Electronics will deliver rental movies and TV series directly to TV sets, sidestepping the well-known red envelopes used by the DVD rental company.The companies announced Thursday that they will develop a set-top box that will allow users to stream movies and other content from the Internet to HDTV sets.
Netflix, which began to allow users to stream content to their PCs via the Internet last year, said the new system would bypass PCs. The companies said a networked LG player will be released to market by the second half of this year.
“Internet to the TV is a huge opportunity,” said Reed Hastings, Netflix’s founder, chairman, and CEO, in the announcement. “Netflix explored also offering its own Netflix-branded set-top boxes, but we concluded that familiar consumer electronics
devices from industry leaders like LG Electronics are a better consumer solution for getting the Internet to the TV.”
Netflix said the move reflects its larger strategy to offer customers a variety of ways to rent and view movies and television programs. Those who buy the hardware will be able to rent titles cataloged on the Internet. Netflix already offers more than 6,000 titles via the Internet, and the company said it plans to expand its online catalog. The company offers more than 90,000 titles on DVD.
“Consumers crave compelling and immediate content, and the Netflix online streaming movie feature can provide instant gratification,” Ki Kwon, president of the consumer electronics division of LG Electronics USA, said in the announcement.
LG Electronics said the partnership will improve its position in the U.S. digital television marketplace.
I have no opinion about whether this will work but it is part of a mass of innovation that will somehow bear fruit soon. One of my predictions for 2008 is that we will see a moment when it finally becomes easy to both find and access Movies and High End TV Shows without having to wait for the show to air on a schedule. We will be able to have TV and Movies when we want – We will have it our way!
There seems to be an inevitability here that most agree with. Where I differ with some friends in TV is how quickly this will occur.
I think that enough progress will take place in 2008 to make 2009 the Annus Horribilis for Traditional TV that uses the artificial scarcity of its broadcast area and schedule as its economic model. TV will suffer as Newspapers are suffering.
So in a world where there is masses of great content to be had at any time, where is the value?
I think that it is in making it easy to find what you want – Navigation. Maybe just Google – But I doubt it – Maybe a series of Hubs that house niches – The Military Channel – The Opera Channel etc
These Channels would make it easy to find the good stuff – and also have a lot more information linked to the film and reviews.
Here it would be easy to share what you like and to comments on it. John Wayne fans unite and talk to each other about the Duke -
Films and Shows become the Social Objects that Hugh Talks about.
So what then will be left for the local TV stations – both private and public? I think that their domain is to leverage the national content and to win the hyper local wars. More on this as 2008 unfolds as some of my clients do the world to solve this challenge.
