Swift Kick Central

Not That We're Wrong, But Just In Case

“Success is moving from one venture failure to another one without losing enthusiasm.”

- Sir Winston Churchill

Reposted from Swiss Miss

Setting up and Launching Red Rover For Pilot Schools

Updated on 2/18/08

- For latest, see the Red Rover Wiki Adoption page here. -----------------------------------

This blog is a quick 'How To' for the first round pilot schools (there are 15 of you!) for setting up Red Rover.

There are five main steps in the process:

1) Signing up yourself as the admin (meaning the person capable of editing Red Rover for your school). (ten minutes)

2) Finalizing the group categories. (five minutes, plus thinking time if necessary.)

3) Uploading the list of groups, group leaders and advisors with e-mails. (Gathering time, plus 1 minute to e-mail it to us.)

4) Getting Student Leaders and advisors to set up their groups.  (20 minutes, one day.  10 minute follow up two days later. 10 minute follow up three days later. 30 minutes chasing the 5-10% slackers over the next week and checking groups.)

5) Getting students to fill out the Red Rover profile.  (30 minutes.)

Here are the details for each step:

 

Step 1: Admin Sign Up

You will receive an invite e-mail from us. (Check your junk mail folder if you don't see it in your inbox.)

If you can't find the invite e-mail, you can simply sign up yourself up as a normal user and then we will upgrade you to admin status.  You would do this from your school's Red Rover home page.

You can find your school's home page and login by using your school's website address and adding "redroverhq.com" to the end.  For example, Juniata College's web address is http://www.juniata.edu, so their Red Rover web address is http://juniata.redroverhq.com

If your school is part of a network of schools, i.e. CUNY or SUNY, and your web address is something like http://qc.cuny.edu, then you would drop the extra period and your Red Rover web address would be http://qccuny.redroverhq.com.  You'll know you are in the right place because you will see the correct full school name at the top of the page.  If you don't see the correct school name at your web address, send us an e-mail  and we will fix it for you.

After you are finished filling out your personal profile, e-mail us and we will upgrade your account to admin status.

 

Step 2: Setting Up Group Categories

You will find this step either in the admin sign up wizard (if you are invited as the admin) or, if you sign up as staff and get upgraded, you will find it under the admin tab in your navigation.  Just click on the "admin" tab, and then "categories":

 

The importance of this step is proportional to the number of groups you have.  If you have under 40, it's not that big a deal to change it later.  If you have over 500 it will be a pain, so put some thought into it.

Red Rover starts out with a default category list and you can add or delete categories as you wish.  We recommend keeping it to no more than 10 categories, otherwise it will be annoying for students to sift through.   

 

Step 3: Uploading your groups

Just download this template excel doc and match your school's group information to the column headers.

Two important points:

1) To add a group it must have at minimum an advisor name and email.

2) Keep the excel doc headers exactly as they are, don't move them or the file will not upload correctly.

After you are finished, e-mail the excel document to us and we'll upload it and let you know when it is ready.  Should be quick.

 

Step 4: Getting Student Leaders and Advisors to set up their groups

The goal of this step is to get all the student leaders and advisors to fill out a profile for themselves and set up their group. 

They just need a link to your school's Red Rover sign up page and sign up.  This page is at your main web address, i.e. http://uga.redroverhq.com. 

To help you accomplish this, Red Rover provides an invite tool.

Red Rover can either send an invite e-mail to all of the Student Leaders with one click, or, if you prefer you can invite them one at a time.

To invite them all at once roll over the "Admin" section and select "Group Leader Status":

Then click the "send to all" button.

The same process can be repeated for the group Advisors by navigating to "Group advisor Status" under the Admin tab.

To send an invite to the student leaders one at a time, just click the mail icon next to their name. 

We recommend also putting your school's Red Rover web address on the school leader Facebook groups or e-mailing it out separately on your own.  Sign up rates will go up when students see the link in multiple places.

Also, every time a leader signs up for Red Rover and installs the Facebook application, their friends will be notified and this will create sign ups as well.

You can check a group's sign up status by clicking on "Groups" under the "Admin" section.  Groups that are filled out will be under "Active"  and the groups still unfinished will be under "Inactive".

It is best to wait to move on to the next step until all or almost all of your groups are in the "Active" section of groups.

Step 5: Getting Students to fill out a Red Rover profile

The goal of this step is similar to step 4 - get the Red Rover sign up page in front of students - this time, it just applies to all the students.

There are many strategies for this and it is up to you and your creativity to decide what is best for your school.  Some ideas just to get you started:

1) Look for the freshman class Facebook group.  There is almost always one if not more.  Search for your school name with a year.  i.e. "Kutztown 2011" brings up http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2242708647 and has 749 members.  This is 70% of the entire freshman class.  You could either leave the Red Rover link in the comments section, or contact the group's admin and ask them to e-mail out the link. (Facebook Group admins can e-mail the whole group at once.)

2) Put the link on your activities web page.

3) Ask the student leaders to spread the link within Facebook or Myspace. 

4) Put up posters in the computer labs or student union with the link (anywhere student's hang out and use computers.)

Keep in mind that all of student's friends will be notified when they install the application from within Facebook.  If you can get 20% of the students to sign up, it should spread out from there because it will become the thing to do in Facebook. 

At any time, you can check your school's sign up statistics by clicking on "network stats" under the "Admin" section. 

We know you will come up with all kinds of new solutions to these steps.  That's the fun of the pilot program - leave us some comments here or send and e-mail, we want to hear your thoughts.

Use the Megaphone to Grow Your Passion

Due to the nature of our research, we continuously come across the most recent websites on a variety of topics. Our goal with this post is to segment them into areas that would be most interesting to you. Check back often as we are always adding more. Enjoy!

Acting

Architecture

Art

Business

Comedy

Comics

Cool Random Tools

Dance

Design

Event Planning

Fashion

Film

Fitness

Gaming

Health Care

Job Tools

Law

Magic

Modeling

Music

Philosophy

Photography

Poetry

Quick Cash

Real Estate

Religion

School Tools

Social Work

Speaking

Traveling

Writing

(K)no(w) Context

Being a critic is easy. Breaking things is easy.

Suggesting practical improvements to complex challenges is hard. Building things is hard.

A good reminder from the Carpet Bagger Report:

* Public education in America is trying to do something unprecedented. We strive to educate every child — regardless of race, creed, socio-economic level, family background or mental and physical challenges. Universal public education is a relatively recent idea. It is no longer just the children of the upper crust who are being educated. Public education serves the masses. This is a commendable concept, but it’s one that obviously presents a unique set of challenges.

At Swift Kick, we do our fair share of critiquing. We are also builders and soon we'll get our own critics, I'm sure. I hope, actually, as that's one of the important signs you are actually doing something: someone cares enough to argue.

I just wanted to pause for context. Public Education is trying to do something unprecedented. That's very exciting and commendable.

Nice to Finally Get Some Respect for Motivating

Tom and I have been motivational now for years. And we've been dressing well too. (Not as well as Jonathan Sprinkles, but we try.) So it's nice to see one of ours get some respectful national media coverage. Front Page!!

Self-Help Lecture Attendees Surprised To Hear Speaker Was Once Just Like Them

Assuming: You and Me, and Hopefully Good (Opposed to . . . ) Software

When reading a review of the new iMovie '08 on macworld.com, I was struck by how much hope, belief, educated guessing, and philosophy hardens into assumptions to inform software design.

In the review, Macworld says that many of the iDVD integration features have been dropped from iMovie, because Apple believes that the web is the way video will be distributed. 

Apple believes the DVD is dying and will soon enough be dead. 

They also believe that one should be able to create a movie in under 5 minutes.

These simple ideas, along with all the other myriad beliefs and assumptions of Apple, get mapped on to the software and result in an entirely new piece of software.  They literally threw the old one out, because they changed a few key ideas.

It got me thinking about our beliefs and assumptions with Red Rover.  As we begin working with the pilot schools and do further strategic refinements, I thought it would be useful to make a list of those assumptions.  I know I won't get them all, many are so much the way we think they are invisible to us, but the exercise is still useful.

Some are more controversial than others.  Some were controversial when we started and are not anymore.  Some we believe whole heartedly.  With others we just needed to pick a side.  Some of these, we're not sure which quite yet, are the keystone ideas, that make or break the whole project. Here's the list, Draft One:

On Social Networking and Education:

Education is social. 

Social Networks are the new social method.  They are here to stay.

Therefore schools belong in social networking. (See recent studies.)

Staff and faculty belong on Facebook.  They need to play nice.  They need to not act like parents.  Training is needed.  So is emotional intelligence with a digital native twist.

Students will come to embrace the blend of education and social contexts.  They need both and they value convenience; one stop shopping.  (This assumes education acts politely, a BIG caveat.)

Social networking specifically, and the internet in general, has flattened hierarchies. 

Learning is now about flat networks, peer to peer, and collaboration in any information vector.

Walled gardens are nice for some things, just not higher education.  Education needs to get away from ivory towers - it should not try to limit its students, but instead should compete on an open playing field.  (Concretely: Elgg is cool.  Ning is cool. Students are still, and should be, on Facebook.  The students' networks, and their information should be free to roam in the real world.  The dangers of this are overstated, the opportunities are endless.  And, importantly, they won't, and shouldn't have to, log in to places that provide little value.  So good luck competing with Facebook.)

There will be a suite of web 2.0 tools on Facebook. They will beat out Blackboard.  Google will gobble.

On Colleges

As information becomes a free commodity with a very short shelf life, schools will be places for teaching values, building networks, and fostering engagement.  The "content" will be a distant 5th on the value proposition.

A college needs to be a blend of top down and bottom up organization.  (Bottom up, while very real world and idealistic, does not suffice for the majority - see pre-frontal, train surfing, and yes there is friction here with the "no-hierarchy" above.) 

School should be just like wikipedia.  "Experts" competing on more or less open ground with the mob.

Control of tools, information, and organization exists on a continuum and the pendulum needs to swing towards the students.  (In fact, it is swinging that way because the students have the tools. Schools need to work with this fact.)

The school, like the parents, must prepare the students to handle ambiguity, chaos, and increasing amounts of responsibility.  It's a tricky balance.  That's life.

Colleges are coasting on social tradition. The early adopter types use them for their networks and then move on, often without waiting for permission or unnecessary validation.  (The degree is rapidly losing its cachet with trend setters.)

Colleges need to reposition themselves: change up their business model, offering and value proposition. This might take a long time.  No one will die because of it, though much student potential will be wasted while we wait.

On Communication

Relevance is paramount.

Good communicators should embrace filters and empower their receivers. This means schools should give students tools to selectively filter them out (with exceptions only for emergencies.)

Communication will follow the social graph. (Relationship = Influence)  This is why text messaging is still cool and students use Facebook to communicate.  Schools need to build trust and relationship.  SPAM is a slap in the face.  Requiring students to read your spam is really obnoxious.

On Interface / Web 2.0

Tags are the way to organize things.  (They are flexible, adaptable, surprising, and folksonomy is fun to say.)

"Works well" is pretty.

"Good design is clear thinking made visible." -Tufte

Bottom -> up organization releases some of the incredible power stored at the edges. This is great for students.  It's also good for shrinking school budgets.

Top-> down organization is old school.  Loosen up.  Err on that side.  Buy insurance and leash your lawyers. 

On Education

Digital portfolios will become the new grades.  Short hand points systems will develop (probably relying on a fair amount of peer feedback, see above, think eBay) where the professor is just one of many inputs. 

These systems will be transparent and real time, giving learning a video game interface.  (Think character development in a role playing game.)

Aggregated digital portfolios with tags on timelines will result in automated, personalized recommendations.  Sophomores like you liked these classes.  Click here to sign up. Click here to see the collaborative notes from years past. Click here to see a list of available mentors who match your life vector.

Aggregated digital portfolios will exist outside of the control of the school systems.

Students will use free software to see what school is currently the best match for their interests.  (Think shopping for books on Amazon.)  The enrollment process will dramatically change because of this automated matching.

Every student is at a different place. Each +1 has a different x starting place,  different maturity, and different vector of relevance. Personalized customization will be the norm and expectation all the time.

Engagement is paramount.  Relevancy (when defined by right info, right schema, right time, right packaging/ delivery) is 40% of engagement.  The other 60% is emotional attachment to community.

On Orientation

Everyone wants an introduction.  Preferably to people who are like them.  Especially when entering anything new where we don't know anyone yet.

Common interests are a great place to start relationships.  Embracing diversity comes later.  It is bad to force too much diversity too fast or let people stay in their comfort zone.  This balance will be different for each student.

The process outlined above will be visualized with the social graph.  It too, will look like a video game.

Relationships get better in the real world.  Online is a good place to introduce and warm things up. 

Orientations should not be only online.

Orientation should use online components to make the real world aspect better.

On Research

Research and "truth" are great.  Trying things is an important first step towards both.  We are on that first step.

Entrepreneurs can't do research and market at the same time.  We like research and researchers and hope to work with lots of them.  Ethics will require transparency, that's a good thing.

On Academia vs. Business

We would like to build a bridge over the "vs."  see research above.

Business should be more honest and transparent.  They have no monopoly here. 

Academia should be more flexible and experimental. They have no monopoly here.

 

On Changing the Education System

We're not setting out to revolutionize anything.  We are doing things that seem smart that are now possible.  It's incremental change that's now obvious to us. 

We might be wrong.  That's cool.  Luckily we'll only be losing our own money. 
This isn't foreign policy, if we are wrong, our mistake won't hurt anyone.

"If you aren't prepared to be wrong, you'll never do anything original." -Sir Ken Robinson

Pedagogy is great, it's just not our focus with Red Rover.  There is pedagogy built in to the tool.  Much of it is unconscious. This post is the start of that process, but again, it's not our focus.

Very few people do things for the "right" reasons.  Most people do it because everyone else is.

Most people don't know or care why myspace or ipods work or how they change the music business.  They use them because they work well and everyone else does. We have to figure out the why and how for Red Rover and know that most people will never care.

Tools that people use but don't understand can change the world. This can be dangerous.  We hope we're not dangerous.

We don't know as much history with education reform as we should.  We will catch up on our reading as soon as we are done building this thing.  In the meantime, we really appreciate summaries and reading lists.

. . . . . . . .

Hmmm.  Interesting first draft.  Most of these would be better with some time spent in the sharpener, but it's a start.

 

Platforms on Platforms: FB and Education Tools

Facebook dropped their "Courses" function. (To make sure new users knew they weren't just a college focused site and to give developers a crack at what Facebook now considers a niche.)

Developers rush in:

Our assumption/prediction is that the Facebook application platform will eventually have a suite of apps for college students. There will be an "ecosystem" with a number of different apps handing data back and forth, supporting each other, each trying to solve some college student challenge.

The students outside of IT won't care or notice while this goes on. They will just use what everyone else uses once something hits the tipping point.

Being the thing that "everyone uses" in college will be the holy grail for developers and just one reason why the apps will ban together in some sort of platform on a platform.

Most of these apps, Red Rover among them, are reliant on network effects for their utility. So they won't be too useful with 2,000 and under users spread across 100 different networks. (This is the current state for the courses type apps.)

But if one college app can get traction, it will offer any other college apps the same incentive that attracts developers to the Facebook platform in the first place: users.

Maybe it won't be a race with a clear leader, but instead a bunch of small apps will combine their installed base to to get to critical mass. Wouldn't that be nice and friendly?

Eventually, this suite of web 2.0 apps working together will supplant Blackboard for small schools and then big schools too.

Maybe, just maybe, some of these tools will be picked up and used by the students before their schools even notice.

The suite will include:

Courses: matching, collaboration, sharing.
Student Activities: communicating, calendaring, polling
Digital Portfolio: a record of student's work attached to digital identity.
Communication: filtered school communication, (e-mail doesn't work anymore, the new thing solves this.)
Recommendation Engine: Other sophomores like you liked x class and x experience. Click here to sign up.
Assessment Modeling: peer reviews, advising, a whole new grading system that is learner centered, and deeply transparent.

There are already many companies and individuals with apps that fit into these categories running around. They'll roll out and API up and we'll see how it shakes out. It's very fertile ground for innovation in education tools.

The hard part is making an education app viral (because education is just not as cool as pirates v. ninjas). That's why we believe there will be a college platform on the facebook application platform. This will include a set of tools that work together to give the students a unified tool set with one login, and all data linked on the back end.

How this is priced as a suite. . . and who pays . . . we don't have the foggiest. Except to say that Google is a given. And advertising will be all over it.

Our preference is to keep it advertising free. We don't think advertising and education go together. That's just us.

But will the schools be willing to be as creative with their funding as the developers will be with their approach and business models? We'll see.

In the end, price points for functionality will come crashing down, and this will be a great thing for school budgets and students.

New Red Rover Graphics

Many things are better said with the help of pictures.

Here's a new one from the final Red Rover UI work.

It's definitely a draft and will get replaced fairly soon, but still serves as a quicker "get" than a bunch of text.

From Easiest to Hardest

Idea
Money
People
Execution

Of course you need them all.

I talk to so many would be entrepreneurs that have this order confused. They think because they have an idea, they have some value.

Sure, better to start with a good idea than a bad one, but if you have the rest the original idea quickly changes.

The idea, without the rest, is rarely any sort of differentiator. An idea that has been built well, now that is something.