Archive - December, 2008

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.

Technology Implementation in Higher Ed: What do GRCC and Carnegie Mellon Have in Common?

December 18, 2008 in Uncategorized with 5 Comments

On Friday I got a chance to pick the minds of two great individuals: Eric Kunnen of Grand Rapids Community College and Jay Brown of Carnegie Mellon.  The two might seem like they wouldn’t share too much in common, Kunnen is Coordinator of Instructional Technologies at an outstanding community college, and Brown is a Director of Marketing for Web Communications at a top research university.  However, both share a passion for the social web and edge technology… and aren’t afraid to pursue it.

You might know Kunnen for his well circulated GRCC blog, his visible involvement is edge uses of Blackboard, and his early and loud adoption of Coursefeed on Facebook (full disclosure, they are theoretically a competitor of ours).  Carnegie Mellon recently pulled off effectively riding an authentic instance of “viral content” – that rare combination of keeping the content ( “The Last Lecture” by Randy Pausch) authentic, genuine, and “free” while integrating the phenomenon into their overall communications strategy.  CMU’s presentation at the AMA Symposium on Higher Education was, IMHO, the best example of rubber meets the road at the conference.

Equally as important to their passion is that their institutions and the leadership at them actively encourage them to experiment with utilizing new technology.  Brown described Carnegie Mellon as an “Entrepreneurial Atmosphere” that bled into institutional practices.  He had mentioned in his AMA presentation that the best angle in edge marketing is to just put stuff out there – if there’s no kickback, move on and get even more courageous. All campuses that get great attention for their use of technology, like our founding partner ACU, seem to have this sort of culture – a culture that’s shorter on conversation and longer on execution, and by nature experimental in its analysis of all things new.  As Kunnen put it: “We don’t want to sit around and talk about it meeting after meeting.  We just do it.”

This reputation for technological gusto rubs off as a “Je ne sais qua” factor.  However, the method is always the same: the institutions hire good people, give them or embrace an existing sense of mission, and let them do their job.

As someone who thinks about overcoming barriers to innovation in education, I commend Kunnen and Brown and their institutions for living on the edge.

Video Platforms in Education, Facebook Video in Education, Facebook Video Now Embedable.

December 18, 2008 in facebook, facebook and education, video platforms, web 2.0 with 22 Comments

Well, I’m going to take a cheap shot at getting street cred here: I was hanging out the other Saturday with Chris Putnam, a 22 year old GSU drop-out that is responsible for Facebook’s video offering. (Many of Facebook’s early hires were either graduating Harvard and Stanford CS students or young, hungry, overly talented hackers getting stir-crazy at big state schools.)

Putnam told me about the softlaunch of a Facebook feature I’ve been dying for: “Facebook Video is now embeddable,” he said.  I had been waiting for this moment.

Facebook video, just like Facebook, is a technological wonder. It keeps better resolution, presents a bigger window, and has fewer glitches than most video offerings. As with most technological problems on the internet, it’s not the actual product (in this case, the video) that’s hard to make, it’s hard to make that same product highly functional and fast when there are millions of concurrent users.  This is where only Facebook and Google can play, and its amazing that Facebook can even play on this field because until this past year it was literally a bunch of ivy grads and dropout savants staying up late drinking red bull.  I think YouTube, now powered by Google, recently came out with a size and res that trumps Facebook, but I haven’t figured out where to load one and Facebook Pages are way more conducive to marketing purposes than are YouTube channels.

Here’s our video conversations on Facebook for Colleges and Universities. It talks about how Facebook can be used for recruiting, enrollment management, retention and persistence, educational enrichment, and alumni engagement.

At Inigral, we’ve been using Vimeo for our promotional videos up until now. Viddler, I think, has the best UI on their video player, but both Vimeo and Viddler get choppy when during playback.  I think YouTube is so cluttered with nonsense that I don’t want any Inigral promotional content to get much audience there.

I’m sure as Educators we sense the power of reduced barriers to video distribution. Unfortunately, most video content on the internet is senseless; but on the back of senselessness educators everywhere will have their own video content publishing and distribution platforms for free. John Couch, VP of Education at Apple, told me in his office once “the brilliance of iTunesU is that it’s becoming the most powerful distribution platform for educational content and it’s all subsidized by the music and movie industries.” How’s that for innovation.

Now if we could just get the oil industry to subsidize school improvement…..

Reduced Class Size: An Inefficiency in School Improvement

December 14, 2008 in class size, school reform with 13 Comments

I got a chance to chat with with a successful former Yahoo! manager the other day at a VC in Palo Alto; the discussion focused almost exclusively on school improvement at the k12 level.  Of particular energy was our conversation on class size.  My perspective, confirming Dan Meyer, is that class size is more or less besides the point and not worth pondering too much as a school improvement tool; but worth pondering, no actualy highly concerning to me, is that the movement to push down class size is probably the most inefficient, least cost-effective way to improve our schools.  To boot, the backbone of the movement is based on controversial and misappropriated research that kind of resembles Mortgage Backed Securities (it’s meta-analysis of less than scientific studies, like divvying up the findings of so many research projects that even the authors can’t keep track of where their data comes from or what’s in it).

No, actually, I can think of an equally inefficient use of money: one-to-one computing and the One-Smart-Board-per-classroom movement.  But, back to class size.

Smaller class sizes show a correlation with increases in performance, sure.  But it’s teachers 1) having control over the classroom and 2) building relationships with students that are behind the performance increases.  There are simply more cost effective ways to achieve these same elements of a good education.

My major thesis about class size is that it totally depends on the point in the lesson cycle the students are in.  Students benefit from effective, relevant delivery – but this could happen in groups of hundreds, through a textbook or through programs like Sesame Street.  Students benefit from rigorous, diverse, and differentiated activity – but this can happen in small groups and independently as long as there is focus and guidance.  Students benefit from cooperative, creative activities with analytical problem solving – but that’s more likely to happen in the performing arts.  And students benefit from formative assessment, re-teaching, and performance and content evaluation – but this can happen with a combination of an adaptive learning environment, a learning journal, and a college-student grader.

Really now, I think the conversations in education should move away from expensive diamond-studded, silver-bullet ideologies (based on opinionated research) and move towards outside-of-the-box, common-sense thinking.  Is that too much to ask?

School Reform Ideas and Michelle Rhee: Bankrupt on Big Ideas?

December 6, 2008 in school reform, talent with 13 Comments

Well, I’ve been following this Michelle Rhee dictatorship for some time with much interest. With all the buzz lately – the article in the Atlantic and Time Magazine for instance – I figured I might lay down some commentary IMHO.

Michelle Rhee doesn’t have any ideas. At least she hasn’t revealed any yet. Or, most likely, the press doesn’t care enough to cover them. From what I see, her bold first move seems to be stuck in the bold first move phase.

With a long-run perspective, I’m interested in destroying the political structure that stifles school reform and allowing myriad beneficent dictatorships to bloom and comparing their results. In the short term, I’m remarkably skeptical until I see real Ideas (Ideas with a capital I) come out of DC.

Rolling heads and scaring the pants off everyone, generating resentment from most people you have to work with ( even with the applause of spectators ) isn’t an idea; it’s poor leadership and a hackneyed way to quickly get the allegiance of subordinates.

Leadership must invest in talent, must have a commitment to bringing in good talent, pushing out bad talent, and creating incentive structures that bring out the best in everyone. And in this, Michelle Rhee does have an operating principle that has been missing in education. One that, unfortunately, isn’t as revolutionary as people want to laud. Managers in the private sector have been complete champions in investing in talent, and the fact that it is so difficult to use this “must have” operating principle in more public sector services and institutions is deplorable. The fact that this operating principle has not been in use in public education is not an indicator of its revolutinonariness but is rather an indicator of a political system designed for stability and inclusion rather than efficiency and innovation. In the sense that Michelle Rhee wants to create a structure where leadership can invest in talent, I cheer Michelle Rhee on. If she has to do something with dramatic flare and uncompromising intimidation in order to shake up the system to get to where this operating principle becomes, well, an operating principle within our school system, I will be her fan boy.

The part where her lioness tactics come up short is twofold. First, dismissing hordes of people whose talent has been confined by the structures in which they work assumes that those individuals don’t have latent talent. I’ve worked with alongside hundreds of teachers, and for the most part they universally are committed and can be innovative when given the freedom and the wherewithal to do so. Second, axing people only generates allegiance when the entire community is given a coherent vision to work towards and each community member can clearly see their own role in the renaissance. Otherwise, it either quickly disintegrates into a disorderly herding of cats or behind the uncanny order is chronic dishonesty that leads to nice statistics but Great Leap Forward style mistakes.

My humble recommendations to Michelle Rhee:

1) Work with people to release their talent.
2) Publish a coherent vision with Big Ideas.

And, in case Michelle Rhee reads this, or in case you want to introduce me to her or anyone else going head first into school reform, I will list my Ideas below:

1) Scaffold skills and behaviors with more attention than academics. Once kids learn how to engage, the academic payoffs are gargantuan.
2) Streamline aligned multimedia content delivery and assessment, creating time for teachers to address real teaching and learning. Every teacher building content and assessments, stuck in continual delivery, is a complete inefficiency and wholly distracting.
3) Mandate comprehensive remediation using adaptive learning environments until every child is blue in the face or has the fundamentals to participate. Start this as soon as a child gets even a month behind. Children that don’t have the fundamentals ultimately hold back entire classrooms.
4) Build a schedule from scratch and alter building design around moments in the real lesson cycles: preview, delivery, reflection, assessment, content evaluation / activity modeling, monitored activity, individual activity, assessment, process evaluation. Hour or Two hour blocks provide no structure and make no sense.
5) Dramatically increase the number of hours engaged in school. All the data shows we lose them when they’re not in school.
6) Facilitate students relationships with authentic role models. Otherwise everyone can only imagine careers they see on TV.
7) Focus on health and fitness, the arts and creativity, and social, creative, and constructivist projects. It’s these totally neglected elements that create an environment for engagement.

I can go into more detail for anyone with the mind to chat.