What is the newest innovation in online learning?

December 13, 2011 in Uncategorized with 1 Comment

I answered this question, What is the newest innovation in online learning? on Quora.

The actual biggest innovation in online learning isn’t an innovation, it’s the ACCEPTANCE of online learning.  Any numbers of studies have been published that show online learning can be as effective as in the classroom, and hybrid classroom/online models can be more powerful than just the classroom.  The unimpressive reality is that much of what is called “online learning” is just a course delivered online through a relatively mundane Learning Management System (ala Blackboard, eCollege.)  It’s taken so long for this to be accepted, that this acceptance is the primary driver in the market of innovation right now.

There’s one other preface – the INTERNET is the innovation that matters, no matter the product or content. It gets information and capabilities into the hands of people.  We’re all just waiting around for the right products to come along to make it easier than reading the entire Internet.

So, let’s take for granted an ACCEPTANCE of online learning, and that with the Internet nearly anything is possible. There’s a number of really amazing things that are happening:

Scaling School
There are a handful of companies, the most hyped being 2tor, that are taking schools online and doing all the marketing and program development, providing the software and the human resources, and taking an enormous margin off the top.  The biggest online k12 school is Florida Virtual, but it’s a state run school.

Social Learning

  1. Networks of peer-to-peer learning.  My favorite example is the kids on YouTube teaching each other music and songs, and the little cooking shows on YouTube have helped me bigtime. In terms of products, Skillshare just jumped in and is making some noise (on top of EduFire and TeachStreet having moderate success on a similar concept.)
  2. Supplementary materials and tools, some of them crowd-sourced.  Having trouble learning something, don’t worry!  There’s help in abundance.  From on demand tutors (TutorCloud), to resources provided by students for free (Quizlet), to paid notes and answers taken by the smarter kids in the class (Cramster and Notehall are being integrated into Chegg.)  Having trouble knowing which college to go to? Acceptly to the rescue, or need help choosing courses? MyEDU is there for you. There are so many of these it’s impossible to keep up.
  3. Products that emphasize relationships and sharing.  Our Schools App (by Inigral) is an example of a product exclusively focused on this aspect (we avoid learning altogether now), but Instructure and GoingOn are just rethought LMS type things.  MentorMob and StudentMentor are just tools to meet people to help you, they’re not trying to teach you anything.

It’s not just about the content, it’s about the relationships.

Adaptive Learning
Adaptive learning engines are intelligent programs that start to understand what you know and don’t know, what types of content and modalities (look it up) you respond to. They serve content that’s more and more specific to you, building on what you know and repeating what you have trouble with.  I honestly have yet to see a really good one, but it’s in the zeitgeist and all the publishers are taking their shot building one.  Hearsay puts Grockit and Knewton in the battle royale, with my preference for Grockit for their approach to Massively Multiplayer Online Social Learning Games or whatever they call it.  Our investor, Founders Fund, backed Knewton, suggesting there’s something there that’s about to blow up.

Interactive Content and Textbooks
Kno and Inkling have the early lead, but the idea of the textbook is dead already, even though there’s still $14 Billion in textbook purchases.  Textbooks will not be textbooks, videos will not be videos, lectures will not be lectures.  It will all be learning content (or objects), and it will all be interactive and multimedia. It will blow your mind and make you wonder how the hell you ever sat down and read a course reader and think your kids are getting spoonfed learning fruity pebbles instead of the dull pine bark we had to chew when we were growing up.

Optimized Learning
Some learning platforms now actually try to optimize for the way your brain learns.  It’s not just content adapting to your style, it’s actually chunked and formatted to increase the probability of understanding and retention.  My favorites here are Memrise and LiveMocha, with LiveMocha being focused on foreign language learning (and really just iterating off the work of RosettaStone).

Gamification
All education technology products are increasingly being gamified a little to a lot.  uBoost is a company that gamifies the process of school altogether, and Creative Commons just released open source badges.  Expect more silly points and badges and contests, everywhere.

Massively Open Online Courses
Superprofessors are the way of the future, and so are their big, hairy, online courses.  The intro to Artificial Intelligence course at Stanford has been put online, and over a hundred thousand people registered and over 30 thousand turned in the first assignment.  Ummm… What?  No one knows what to do with this, but there’s a there there.  A big there.

Supporting Schools and Teachers
There are all sorts of tools emerging that support school as we know it. MasteryConnect, ClassDojo, Goalbook, Engrade, and Learnboost are all doing great things in K12. Coursekit and Piazzza just launched for HigherEd. Logrado helps college counselors and academic advisors communicate with their constituents. There are so many of these your head will spin.

Alternatives to the idea of School as we know it.  
Things like Western Governors University and UniversityNow! are popping up as degree granting online programs, and they are presenting the idea that you don’t need to go to school at all.  As a matter of fact, all those silly buildings and professors and courses are just things that have inflated the price.   University of the People and P2P University are pushing here, but not to the success we would hope.  And the idea of UnCollege, catching on like an Occupy movement, is that you don’t even need to be enrolled into a degree program, you can just do everything DIY.  If everyone has a degree than the degree itself becomes meaningless, and there aren’t any jobs waiting for you anyway so you might as well go make your future yourself (with all these cool online learning tools) instead of sit back and party for $25K a year.

Standard Online Degree Programs
(Note, I purposefully avoided big online brands of school.  It’s because other than circumventing the cost model of going to school, I don’t think they do anything all that innovative except for process financial aid.  They still underpay adjunct professors and have classes with small class numbers, on technology that’s generally not proprietary or cool.  I have yet to see anything I would call “innovative” from a product or technology perspective from these big players.  If they have a problem with me saying that, they can call me and I’ll tell them where they can innovate and do better.)

College Readiness and Completion: My Perspective

July 24, 2011 in educational technology, educational technology marketplace with 0 Comments

I made this presentation auditioning for TEDxSFED.  Hope you like it.

In Defense of the Sabbatical

February 3, 2011 in higher-ed with 0 Comments

I’ve heard a few stories in the wake of all the budget shortfalls questioning the economic productivity of the sabbatical.

While I agree with that question at colleges focused on teaching and the liberal arts, for those research universities and high caliber programs who attract the brightest scientists and technologists in their field, Sabbatical is an important generator of economic growth by spurring innovation.

There’s plenty of evidence that a really good way to create transformative technology which creates rapid economic growth is to give really smart people lots of free time.  You can look to the ministry of the English church in the 18th century, R&D teams sponsored by companies like Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, etc.

I’ll liken it to what Barak Obama said in the State of the Union: What you don’t want to do in an airplane to gain altitude is to remove your engines to eliminate extra weight.

This is cross-posted on my company blog about Facebook and Higher Ed.

How Would I Spend $100 Million to Save Education?

February 2, 2011 in educational technology, higher-ed, K12 with 0 Comments

I have three different paths I would pursue: one to increase the distribution of new technology to institutions, one to open up data to enable great services, and one to subsidize investment into web services that improve teacher collaboration and best-practice sharing.  Given my experience as as a secondary teacher and as CEO of Inigral, this would be my contribution to the dialog.

1. Technology can’t successfully enter a market dominated by institutions that have trouble evaluating, deciding and purchasing.  To address this, I would first create a well-branded call for early adopter institutions to participate in a special league of institutions who try out new technologies.  This would also lead to organizing and plotting institutions in Higher Education and K12 onto a technology adoption curve, so that new companies and technologies know which customers to partner with while they are still early.

2.  A second major problem is the stranglehold on data and information that could be used by web services to provide great technology.  My personal pain has always been with plugging in to courses and schedules, which are nowhere with that can be read and process by computers.  I suggest that institutions receiving state funding or accreditation participate in the Open Data movement (tastefully, while still respecting privacy), and the laws around privacy be revised to provide consistency with Open Data.

3.  Good best-practices and supporting materials to are not getting to teachers and practitioners in ways that are easy to use and adopt.  One way to address this would not require innovation at all, just a real focus on selecting “Master Teachers” and giving them the time to coach and train upcoming teachers.  Beyond that, I would incentivize investment from private investors in web applications that support best-practice sharing and peer-evaluation and feedback.

More Detailed Explanations for the Interested:

1. High profile Foundations should make an official call for Visionary and Early Adopter institutions modeled on Race to The Top, with new technology grants to the strongest applicants.  In order to qualify, these institutions would need to set up a fast track way to make decisions about technology adoption in order to have the privilege of being part of this community.  Institutions that sign up for the Visionary program would make themselves available to entrepreneurs who are literally nothing more than an idea and talented people in a garage. They would work with these entrepreneurs to come up with a Minimum Viable Product and get to a working prototype.  These institutions would not pay anything or would pay a very small amount.  Early Adopter institutions would be willing to pay for products after a working prototype has been iterated upon until it successfully solves problems and gets used.  They must be willing to pay more for a competitive advantage and to have early access to any efficiencies or solutions provided by the innovative product or service.

2. I suggest a national repository as part of the Open Data movement, and require or incentivize schools, post-secondary and K12, submit their planned course offerings to a central repository that can be read by computers (i.e. in XML).  I personally would also create levels of access with secure keys to access more specific data about teachers and enrollments.  Companies could then gain various levels of access, monitored and permitted by institutions themselves.  There are all sorts of online tools, gradebooks, communication tools, etc, and one of their major barriers to entry is that teachers aren’t spending the time to set them up effectively, virtually locking in old vendors who aren’t innovating and preventing new products from getting utilized.

3. I used to teach K12, and its amazing what an isolating experience walls are.  It’s also outlandish how poor teacher training is, even the best teacher training.  It’s presented as all art and strategy, even though good teaching is entirely proven tactics that need to be practiced to the point of perfection.  Nearly half of teachers spend two years getting their bearings and then quit.  It has little to do with salary, and mostly to do with a lack of support, a lack of respect, and a lack of recognition.  Many of these related problems can be addressed through the internet.  These kinds of services need “patient capital.”  Bootstrapping a company requires instant revenue streams, of which there are few in education.  Venture Capital is looking for billion dollar exits within seven years of their investment.  As a result, there are a lot of people that would do something in this space, but just can’t get off the ground

I’ve heard a couple of great ideas in this regard, and I know some of them are being worked on by various folks. For instance:

A.  A K12 teacher-driven web platform that shares best-practices, model teaching, and tactical advice as well as resources.  I’ve seen a million lesson sharing sites, and BetterLesson stands out as a quality product, HotChalk stands out in terms of quantity and breadth, my understanding is TFA has a start on this internally, but they don’t share and they need better product design.  But lessons themselves don’t really do anything.  They’re not chunked enough, they’re not contextualized enough, and a lot of the time its not the lesson itself that makes good teaching, it’s the good teaching around the lesson that new teachers need.

B.  A Yelp-like review system for education vendors.  You’d be amazed the absolutely terrible, unworkable products that get into our schools.  Why?  There’s a budget, and the sales process masks all the terribleness, the buyers are almost never the users.  Technology companies in higher education tend to over-invest in sales (because selling is so difficult) and under-invest in product development.  I’ve heard of scenarios where highly paid sales teams outnumber software engineers 6 to 1.

C.  A $100 dollar stipend for each teacher that they must spend on web applications.  This way, the user is the buyer.

Reaction to “Waiting for Superman”

October 19, 2010 in Accountability Movement, K12, school improvement with 0 Comments

Waiting for Superman is a great call-to-action regarding the state of our nation’s public schools.  

I agree with many of the arguments within the movie.  For instance, it points out that good policies to improve education include: 

  1. focusing on good teaching with merit-based systems – incentivizing good teaching and good teachers, and maintaining an ability to fire poor teachers.
  2. allowing innovation “outside” the existing systems – promoting independent charter schools with innovative practices.
  3. building strong feeder programs that start really early and carry the relationship through the development of the child.


However, the film does not acknowledge that successful charter schools are actually rare, and many charter schools fail at either creating superior outcomes or building an organization that is functional and sustainable.  That’s a messy reality that the film totally omits.  I’m not suggesting that charter schools are bad, on the contrary I’m an enthusiastic supporter of the movement for charter schools.  I’m suggesting that the conversation about charter schools will have to get deeper than policy and strategy, it will have to get tactical and technological.  

“Waiting for Superman” also does not go any deeper than these aforementioned broad best practices in policy.  There are many innovations and improvements buried in strategies and tactics that can be implemented at schools, departments, within classrooms, or for individuals that create better outcomes.  The film doesn’t seem to acknowledge that these exist – it’s as if the only path for improvement are in these big policy shifts and school improvement cannot be addressed in smaller details.  

The film, in pursuit of building a set of heroes, presumes that their heroes have “found what works,” as if these truths have not been “known” for long.  This is not true.  Setting high expectations, focusing on children and great teaching, and innovating outside the system have long been discussed within education – long before KIPP and the Harlem Children’s Zone were ever dreamed up.  

KIPP and the Harlem Children’s Zone are so successful because these are organizations with good execution and strong leadership, and they have been successful because they did so much more than just talk good talk.   There are a million things they did right, a lot of it buried in technocratic details.  But, we have to acknowledge, that these million details were right only in an environment where visionary leadership is possible – in charter schools.  It’s harder to be a visionary leader in public institutions, it’s too political.  It’s possible, but wherever politics is involved, building a culture of achievement is extremely difficult.  

So, while I support the film and it’s recommendations, it’s not a good prescription necessarily.  To add my own agenda, it’s not really focused on tactical innovation – the pursuit of my life.  But then again, the film-markers objective is to influence voters and donors, and in that regard I think this film is going to achieve more in engendering and focusing our national conversation on education more than anything we’ve seen in our recent history.

Strategies for Adoption in Higher Education

June 29, 2010 in educational technology, higher-ed with 2 Comments

This is one of my responses to the call by the Gates Foundation for Next Generation Learning.  The question was “WHICH INTERACTIVE TECHNOLOGIES HAVE THE POTENTIAL TO BE MOST WIDELY ADOPTED AND WHY?”

To answer the question specifically: technologies that show the potential to be most widely adopted will have a combination of network effects, a sticky user experience, and a low-resistance path-to-market that focuses on users and circumvents institutional decision making.
Student-centered web services like Chegg, CourseHero, Cramster, Notehall, Zinch, Unigo, GulliverGo, ULoop, and others have the chance to get the widest distribution.
We can also assume that any innovative product will have highly social elements that tap into network effects.
Monetization does not necessarily follow distribution, (though Chegg is killing it).  The easiest way to monetize is to sell a product to the user or get in the lead gen game (like myedu.com did), but it’s also the easiest way to lose focus on bringing innovation to education.  In order to fully monetize the user base the service will need to offer products to the institution, using the extensive student distribution as a lever.  Zinch has this model, though it also plays the lead gen game.  The most high-profile company to pull this path-to-market off in the commercial world is Yammer.
When it comes to the thesis of Next Generation Learning, NextGen seems to skip the fact that consumer-focused products with sticky and simple user experiences will win big and be able to translate that into a new learning platform.  In particular, Watermelon Express has executed well on their product development. Grockit is also making a bold play with a similar test-prep like point of entry, but with a clear platform for a “DIY” Adaptive Learning Environment with gaming mechanics.
When it comes to course management products, either a disruptive model will have to back it’s way in or the new new thing will have to have an open-source distribution model with a value-added services business supporting it.  There’s simply not a real economy around EduPunks for the forseeable future, institutional adoption processes are slow and painful enough to kill any start up, and Blackboard is out to push out or scoop up anybody that gets traction.  In particular, I have hopes that someone will hone in on an opportunity around real-time classroom participation through the form of backchannelling here.  Drew Harry at MIT has open sourced his backchan.nl.  HotSeat came out of Purdue but I’m not sure how they plan to spin it off.  The good part about education is that there are lots of people willing to collaborate all across the world.

To answer the question specifically: technologies that show the potential to be most widely adopted will have a combination of network effects, a sticky user experience, and a low-resistance path-to-market that focuses on users and circumvents institutional decision making.

Student-centered web services like Chegg, CourseHero, Cramster, Notehall, Zinch, Unigo, GulliverGo, ULoop, and others have the chance to get the widest distribution.

We can also assume that any innovative product will have highly social elements that tap into network effects.

Monetization does not necessarily follow distribution, (though Chegg is killing it).  The easiest way to monetize is to sell a product to the user or get in the lead gen game (like myedu.com did), but it’s also the easiest way to lose focus on bringing innovation to education.  In order to fully monetize the user base the service will need to offer products to the institution, using the extensive student distribution as a lever.  Zinch has this model, though it also plays the lead gen game.  The most high-profile company to pull this path-to-market off in the commercial world is Yammer.

When it comes to the thesis of Next Generation Learning, NextGen seems to skip the fact that consumer-focused products with sticky and simple user experiences will win big and be able to translate that into a new learning platform.  In particular, Watermelon Express has executed well on their product development. Grockit is also making a bold play with a similar test-prep like point of entry, but with a clear platform for a “DIY” Adaptive Learning Environment with gaming mechanics.

When it comes to course management products, either a disruptive model will have to back it’s way in or the new new thing will have to have an open-source distribution model with a value-added services business supporting it.  There’s simply not a real economy around EduPunks for the forseeable future, institutional adoption processes are slow and painful enough to kill any start up, and Blackboard is out to push out or scoop up anybody that gets traction.  In particular, I have hopes that someone will hone in on an opportunity around real-time classroom participation through the form of backchannelling here.  Drew Harry at MIT has open sourced his backchan.nl.  HotSeat came out of Purdue but I’m not sure how they plan to spin it off.  The good part about education is that there are lots of people willing to collaborate all across the world.

Why Smartboards are a Dumb Initiative

May 10, 2010 in educational technology, K12 with 4 Comments

When you get called to post by “The Innovative Educator,” you post.

I roll my eyes every time I hear people talk about putting Smartboards in the classroom. Ugh….

Don’t get me wrong, Smartboards are cool.  They are just the least cost-effective way to improve learning I’ve ever seen.  (Except for building new physical plant, that’s worse.)  We need to acknowledge that all a Smartboard does is 1) instead of using the mouse at the keyboard to interact with content, the presenter can stand at the board (and there’s some wow factor there that might amuse students for an hour), 2) and it makes saving content on the whiteboard a little more efficient.  (You can essentially use Microsoft OneNote and press “Save” with a projector and get the same love.  Or, you could use an Overhead Projector, a transparency, and a scanner.  Or, you could take a picture of the whiteboard with a camera and save it to Evernote.  The “save the brainstorm” possibilities are endless on a much smaller budget.)

Anyways…

Here are my two arguments:

1) Smartboards don’t change the model that’s broken. They just make that model way more expensive.
2) Smartboards are an administrative cop out. Administrators like Smartboards because when they spend money on technology they need to spend a lot of it and it needs to be on things they can point to and count.

1) With a Smartboard, the teacher still controls the content, stands in front of a classroom, and has to manage a bunch of kids through a lesson plan they’d rather not be managed through. It doesn’t give kids an adaptive learning environment, doesn’t differentiate instruction (though it does make it a little more media savvy), doesn’t enable social feedback, doesn’t reduce teacher workload, doesn’t make lesson planning more efficient, yada yada.  It just makes the whiteboard a little more attractive.  2) Smartboards are an administrative cop out; instead of re-imagining what school/classrooms/learning looks like/the student-teacher relationship, they write proposals with line-items, they spend money and buy things.  Administrators get evaluated on test outcomes, true, (not learning outcomes), but they also get evaluated on anything else that can fit into spreadsheets and reports.  A senior administrator can ask: “Why do you need more money?” and a junior administrator can say “Because we want to buy Smartboards.”  This is convenient, because if you want to ask for additional resources, you need to specify how you are going to spend the money.   Saying “I would like an extra 200K to experiment with ways to improve learning outcomes” just doesn’t cut the cheese.  It’s also doubly convenient because an administrator can look moderately successful just by spending that money on what they said they would spend it on.  ”Test scores are up 1%!  And, we bought as many as 30 Smartboards!!!!”  It’s less risky to buy objects you can count than spend money on more ambitious initiatives – like, let’s say, reading and math remediate for students supposedly at grade level.

Having said those two things, if I was teaching I would be thankful for a Smartboard only because I’m a gadget geek.  Personally, though, I’d rather everyone in our education system start working towards re-imagining what’s possible.

Engage Learners with A “Do Something” Curriculum

March 30, 2010 in school reform, talent with 0 Comments

This is cross posted at “The Innovative Educator”

The Innovative Educator’s popular post “Fix Boring Schools, Not Kids Who Are Bored” struck a cord with many readers. Add me to the list of bored, restless, and misbehaved children that fit in the educational system like a square peg in a round hole. In second grade, my school tried to hold me back for not being “developed” enough after consistent misbehavior.  As a result my mom took me to get some tests done and I tested into fourth grade. Weary of putting a scrawny ADHD dork into rooms full of boys three years larger my mom opted not to go this route.  By High School, I set a school record, but not the kind that makes a mother proud. By that time I wasn’t buying the whole scene. I got into punk rock and my record was for the most detentions served.  I was never engaged in school. My success as an adult, occurred despite, rather than because of my education. If not for reckless ambition following the onset of testosterone and political activism involved in the positive side of the punk rock subculture, I might have never reapplied myself.

The most irritating aspect about school for me was the focus on remembering fleeting knowledge.  The curriculum was content driven, and though there were some skills that came along the way – writing, mathematical, and analytical, – the daily practice of schools was in the  “do homework/take the test,” kind of vein.  I wanted dramatically to learn TO DO SOMETHING.

Even then, when the internet was still in its infancy, it was clear to me that content knowledge was almost always something you could look up and master quickly when needed, but that to learn to “do something” – to learn to produce good work, from scratch and of economic and social value – was what would be relevant in the world.

Today, I run an education focused start-up called Inigral in San Francisco.  Being an entrepreneur means having to immediately learn (and hire and support others in learning) a range of skills and procedures. I need people on board that can do things and/or throw themselves into something and learn full competency quickly.  Contract law, finance, design, product development, engineering, etc.  The world of work makes it painfully obvious that the school curriculum is not aligned to the world outside school.

Some people are fortunate to find programs where they can pick up these kind of skills in college, and there’s some validity that the core curriculum in part sets the basic platform for later economic contribution.  But, mainly, I see that people figure this out how to “do something” DESPITE the schooling system rather than because of it.  For example, in my own company our Chief Technology Officer taught himself software engineering in high school, and an intern I hired taught himself video production.

School can effectively prepare students if they don’t focus on “procedural knowledge” – the act of mastering and employing a skill to attain value.  School must start teaching that life is a series of new processes and skills you will have to master, therefore the operation of acquiring new skills is perhaps the most important skill of all.

Just as important is the ability to anticipate what kind of skills will be relevant, to adapt, and to proactively learn from them.  After all, the necessary skill set in the workforce transforms rapidly.

This is not a new idea.  We have seen trade-based courses and non-core electives that focus on skills.  We have also seen the rise of Project-Based Learning and other models of instruction.  However, I have yet to see a “do something” curriculum or school design. Somehow the American conversation on education actually devalues approaches without a singular focus on core content.  It’s that strange obsession that, I feel, has us barking up the wrong tree altogether.

The Class Size Debate Continues

March 10, 2010 in class size with 0 Comments

Many people have put forward data on the fact that reducing class size will create better learning outcomes.

There is data that smaller classrooms can lead to more de facto “tracking:”

This may be true, but in the words of an internet entrepreneur: it won’t scale.

With lecture capture, video, and interactive content, content delivery can scale.  With computer delivered assessments, assessment can scale.  This means that teachers are now liberated from the workload related to content delivery and writing and delivering assessments, which used to take up much of their job.

If you scale content delivery and assessment, as in making functional classes for content and assessment BIGGER, you can liberate teachers to focus on other matters – like the process of learning that happens in between.

Show me that new school design.

Facebook for Incoming Classes: While Admissions’ Back was Turned.

December 19, 2008 in admissions marketing, facebook, facebook and admissions marketing, higher-ed with 26 Comments

Brad J. Ward recently discovered that marketers from a company interested in reaching incoming freshman was out disingenuously making hundreds of X University Class of 2013 groups on Facebook. The perspectives from both Ward and his commenters are worthy of some deep consideration.

While backs were turned snubbing social media and Facebook, people with interests were proactive and hosted conversations they wanted to be visible in and a part of.  This should not be surprising; it is natural.  There are instances all across the web where marketers who have the interest and the budget “host” conversations, groups, and networks.  Some seem authentic, some seem like posers.

Here’s my thing: would Nike get accosted for creating “Atlanta Runners and Athletes” with a map of Atlanta?  I know I know, you’re going to say its not the same thing.  And, it’s not.  The city of Atlanta isn’t actively trying to manage its brand and doesn’t have a trademark on its aerial image.  However, it is the same in the sense that this is a reasonable thing for Nike to do because Nike wants to be there when people in Atlanta coordinate athletic activities.

CollegeProwler shouldn’t have to apologize for creating groups. (Universities could send them a cease and desist for hijacking the branding, which was in poor taste.)   Now that admissions offices want into those groups, I bet if they asked CollegeProwler to kindly turn over administrative rights in exchange for a link to the CollegeProwler site in the group posts, CollegeProwler would be more than happy to hand them over.

Facebook is a free for all, and no group is the “official” group of anything just as @student points out. You could, right now, go and create a group called “The OFFICIAL Brittany Spears Fan Club.”  Then, you could dramatically portray Ms. Spears all wrong.  Her fans would in no way be duped by this; they just go wherever there’s claim to support her and they will ultimately gravitate to the best community and the most authentic communication channel.

So, admissions offices could be like the record industry – they could make a lot of enemies by waging war on all of the people taking advantage of their own slowness.  Or they could do what would work: go host the best community and create the most authentic communication channel about their college or university.  The could try it through an off-facebook community that will just add another barrier to particpation.   Or, they could figure out how to tame the beast.  Talk about your strategies here in this Facebook group.

I, of course, hope they do it by watching our intros on Facebook for Universities and Colleges and ultimately choosing to use Schools on Facebook.  After all, though I think I am authentic. a secondary motive for this discussion is that Inigral, Inc is present in these types of conversations.

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