Swift Kick Central

Red Rover Milestones

Downloadable as a pretty .pdf here.

Or as a small picture:

The order of things might change. When we need money depends partially on how fast we develop, on how much we speak, or timing of key employees. We might decide it makes more sense to have a paid feature extension before we go open source.

In whatever order they get done, having these milestones helps us keep our focus on the right thing at the right time - which is the most important thing when your resources are limited.

Yah, What He Said

From The Chronicle this morning:

Mark David Milliron, from Catalyze Learning International:

OK, what happens at Amazon after you buy a book? People like you who bought this book also bought this, this, and this, right? They immediately give you that kind of a choice. They do data mining about the past, predictive modeling about the future, and in one second they give you a choice that is customized to you, based on the knowledge that they have. The challenge for our students is they are walking into an infrastructure where they do not have anywhere close to that kind of information.

He then goes on to point out that it would take a year for a university to figure out what to think (and maybe do) about retention numbers where amazon.com is working real time.

Mr. Milliron, if you have google alerts set up and come across this post, we would love to show you our roadmap to amazon.com functionality for institutions. We couldn't agree with your more and would love to hear your thoughts on the plan to get there.

In the meantime, keep up the good work.

First Year Students as a New Thought - The Learning Institutional "Brain"

Because we speak quite a bit at Swift Kick, and because we work on the new stuff, where abstraction is common, "vision" is everywhere, and hard experience is limited, we love analogy.

We love to ground the new in the schema of the old. This is just what effective teachers do all the time. This is what learning is, I'll come back to this.

Analogy is also wonderful for innovation. It's more fluid to think in familiar patterns.

Every once in a while we find an analogy that "has legs." Meaning it gets more interesting the more you play with it. Dance floors are one of those analogies and we've been playing and learning in that one for almost three years now.

Through the analogy, one can come up with new and interesting ideas that would not have been visible without the analogy.

Going back to learning . . .

We store information in patterns - little neurological patterns in various parts of the brain: "long tail" over there, "folksonomy" on the other side, "social graph" somewhere else, all attached to the larger pattern of "web 2.0" in my head. Through the interconnections of these sub-patterns "web 2.0" becomes an operational concept. I can use the embedded sub-patterns summarized by "web 2.0" to think about things and to understand new ideas that come to me.

Take Twitter.

Twitter is insane unless you've been networked learning for a bit, or Facebook status-ing - it would be these activities that would provide one with an existing pattern in which to attach and weave the new concept of Twitter.

I mean literally "insane" - defined in my dictionary as "a state of mind that prevents normal perception, behavior or social interaction." Insane is a strong form of "unrecognizable pattern." "I have no idea what you are talking about." is a milder form of the same thing.

With new ideas, "Insane" is determined by the beholder, or specifically the beholder's patterns. If the person hearing about Twitter for the first time has the requisite existing patterns, Twitter makes sense and is even exciting. If not, if the learner does not have the existing patterns, Twitter will not be perceivable (there will be nothing to attach it to) and the behavior of the the "tweet-ahs" will be inscrutable and appear, well, insane.

Building schema/patterns up to reach understanding is what teachers and curriculum planners call scaffolding. The end goal is a series of patterns that become operational, allowing the student to learn more (attach new ideas / patterns) and do things (map patterns into the world).

Scaffolding is done by reverse engineering various patterns necessary for understanding any given concept and building them up in the right order, each pattern connecting to and building on the last.

In short:

Learning is attaching a new idea to an existing pattern.

If a new idea can't be connected to an existing pattern, that idea will not be learned, in fact, it will often be rejected. (There is typically negative emotion attached to discord or chaotic patterns. Listen to this, it's the sound of difficult learning, especially if you are missing the "post rock" pattern.)

Good instruction (to teach new ideas) involves identifying requisite patterns and purposely building them in order.

The more one learns, the more one can learn. Many patterns, especially diverse patterns in a flexible mind, provide greater surface area for attachment.

Teachers try to check for patterns through testing, to see what new ideas the student is ready for.

The patterns in our head must be accessible to be useful. It doesn't help me that a math pattern exists, lost in the basement of my head. If I can't find it, statistics won't have anything to stick to and I will have to rebuild the necessary patterns.

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The above is all just how learning works and how our brains work. Using this scaffolding as an analogy makes "social networking" vastly more interesting.

People operate in the same dynamics at a larger scale. Our social patterns are analogous to our synaptic patterns. Socializing works like thinking.

As individuals, we connect ourselves to social patterns to create our identity (our self-model). Our various contexts, family, work, church, school, etc. are all simply patterns and sub-patterns.

Within a school there are many existing social patterns.

The degree to which these patterns are intra-connected determines their individual effectiveness as groups. In leadership training, it's called "team building." The goal is to make the social pattern more effective in thinking and working together.

The degree to which these patterns are inter-connected determines the effectiveness of the institution as a whole.

Social networking increases the ability of students to retain bridging capital (loose connections) thereby increasing the connectedness and effectiveness of the institutional brain. The institution, by having more patterns, gets better at learning.

Red Rover, building upon social networking, is specifically designed to help with social pattern integration. We learn in a social context. Red Rover is an institutional learning tool.

A first year student is a new idea to the institution. If that student cannot connect to a pattern, or multiple patterns, the student is not likely to be retained. The institution won't "learn" the new student.

By identifying, surfacing, and optimizing social patterns, Red Rover automates the connection and learning process, at the micro and the macro levels.

Once "connected," other relational factors come into play and students become pass/ fail filters for memes in the network - each according to their individual patterns.

The implications for society are extremely exciting.

By increasing the visibility and effectiveness of social pattern connection we can literally increase the effectiveness of our institutions while simultaneously optimizing the learning of the individuals within those institutions.

With social networking, we can do externally what is nearly impossible internally - we can map, visualize, and systematically optimize our patterns.

It will be fascinating to watch the science of this social graph optimization unfold.

Numerous information patterns, stored in unrelated areas, are not as useful as when they are connected.

Information patterns cannot be predictive about the systems in which they reside until the information is attached within a model. Disconnection creates wasted time and energy. In business this is called dysfunctional siloing. The lack of cohesive model is generally the problem with neuroscience today.

Somewhere, at some point, a cohesive unifying social model will become visible. Will it be usefully analogous to the emerging brain model? My money is on yes.

Thoughts on Thoughts on Thoughts

Our ideas come from a collection of conversations, books, articles, blogs, and videos among many other sources. We are active participants in what is coined the Read/Write Web in which someone takes a little content to produce a little content. We are both consumers and produces at the same time.

It's very gratifying to receive an email weeks after a training in which I can tell the person was mulling over our content and now has produced some content of their own in the email. Last week I received this type of email from Larry Androes of Bossier Parish Community College.

Thank you Larry for your thoughts on our thoughts so I can have more thoughts. Larry makes many great points so with his permission, here is his email in full:

Hi Tom!

I attended the talk you gave at Bossier Parish Community College about two weeks ago. I was one of the two students who stayed to talk with you (I would have thought everyone would be wildly exited by these ideas). I was the guy with grey hair and a cane, and I talked with you about the exponential curve of all this information.

I definitely want to be included in the information you are getting through the del.icio.us site. Hopefully, my email is enough for this connection.

But I also wanted to take a moment to express how important I think what you are doing is. On one level, it is certainly about advising students to be careful about their online identity and using it to pursue future goals.

…Yet on another level, you are part of a wave nudging young people toward a paradigm shift in how they conceive personal identity, moving from physical to digital. This cultural shift might be the biggest change since one of our ancestors picked up a rock and used it to crack a nut.

So, at a deeper level, you are teaching kids to change their inner software – outmoded beliefs about who they are (physical, local, separated) – toward a new dimension of global digital identity that is supported by our expanding technology.

I am reminded of two current streams of thought. One is by Peter Russell, who talks about different revolutions in our history – agricultural, technological, information, and consciousness. Each is exponential, but they differ in the rate that information/knowledge doubles. If I remember correctly, the information revolution doubles every six years and began in the early 1900’s, and the consciousness revolution doubles every three years and began in the 60’s. So we are now seeing huge changes in who we are and how we know the world.

I also think about the Spiral Dynamics ideas, in which portions of humanity are opening to new memes, or ways of interacting with the world. The turquoise and coral spirals are about global consciousness and new neurological capabilities.

I thought of a couple of ideas – there are probably already five dozen web sites I don’t know about yet (that’s the way it is with exponential curves):

1. For our physical identity we generally use a mirror; we look at a mirror for feedback about who we are physically. We need the equivalent of a mirror online for our digital identity –something like a ‘digitalme.com’ – where we could click and see a view of our current digital presence (a Google list just doesn’t do a striking reflection). I am thinking of a page that would look something like kartOO.com.
2. Parents need to start at the beginning with the idea of digital identity. We need something like a ‘firstdigitalfootprint.com’. “Hey! Flipoo was born yesterday. Google him – check out his website and profile.”
3. I’d also like to see a page one could pull up – oneself as a circle in the center, with online contacts as circles connected to that one (kind of like a mind map). And if you clicked on a connected person’s circle, you could see all of their connections – and so on outward. It would be a fun way to explore how many degrees of separation existed between you and any other person on the internet (What is the shortest path between you and the Dalai Lama?).
   

Thanks for stimulating some new ideas!
Larry Androes

A Facebook Crazy Ivan T-Bones an Application Company

Social.im got some play on mashable a few weeks ago. They are one of a few outside application developers that were working on an instant messaging platform for social networks. They did a few things well. The review was decent, the future looked decent.

The team working on social.im dropped all of their other projects to focus on this one.

Yesterday, news was out that meebo, a reasonably established IM platform, was trying to raise money at a huge valuation.

The crew at social.im must have thought this was exciting. There was some action in the space. Even if the deal was done for half of the hoped for valuation, it would mean there was appetite for what they were building.

Everyone work harder! Let's get adoption up!

Then Facebook comes out today and says they will be launching their own chat - to everyone on Facebook at once. In two weeks.

Game. Over.

Sorry guys.

It's rough out here.

College Speaker of The Year - 2008

Each year student activities departments from around the country vote for their favorite speaker of the year. Last week, in Atlanta, we were honored as the 2008 College Speaker of the Year. To add to the honor, it's our second year in a row winning the award.

Last year we spoke at 60 schools, went to 15 conferences, and spent around 210 days on the road. In short, we work hard and it's nice to be recognized for the work we do. Thank you to all the advisors, students, schools, staff, administrators, educators, and other folk who supported us in 2007. Stay tuned as we have lots planned for 2008 and it's your input, support, and feedback that allows us to do what we do.

How We See Ourselves

Swift Kick is a laboratory.

Photo Credit: improbcat

While there are many layers of experiments underneath (business structure, marketing, virtual company, transparency, etc.) our primary value to education is in the ability to visualize, put together, and sustain experiments in the fields of student engagement and education technology.

To be clear, we are not the researchers. We cannot be both entrepreneurs and researchers.

Swift Kick the company is the virtual hardware of the laboratory. We are the lab technicians.

We design systems and reactions that will churn out data.

Of course we will have opinions on the experimental direction and what the data means, but the actual academic research will be done by others. Folks that are completely independent. Like everything else, we will be transparent with these relationships.

Abilene Christian University's mLearning (Mobile Learning) Initiative

Oklahoma Christian University partnered with Apple Computers to offer every 1st year student attending orientation the option of a new Apple MacBook, iPhone, or iPod Touch!

While it sounds unique, it's not the first time as Abilene Christian University (ACU) were the pioneers in offering a free iPhone or IPod Touch as a bonus just to go to their school.

According to ACU:

Freshmen will use an iPhone or iPod touch to receive homework alerts, answer in-class surveys and quizzes, get directions to their professors' offices, and check their meal and account balances - among more than 15 other useful web applications already developed, said ACU Chief Information Officer Kevin Roberts.

ACU is serious in trying to make the iPhone a major part of every aspect of college life. They created two hypothetical Youtube videos to demonstrate how they envision campus life with an iPhone.





Ignoring the fact they say "iPhone" every 10 seconds and paint a very glossy world in which everyone is auto trained in effective/productive technology know-how, it is exciting to see a school actually spending the resources to be this forward thinking. The videos were not cheap productions and to give every student an iPhone (with service I assume) is not cheap. I couldn't follow the money trail to see how much was being sponsored by Apple as schools with normal budgets obviously can't afford this kind of mLearning.

ACU's Vision:

As a university, ACU has invested much energy considering emerging trends in education. We've done this because our ongoing goal to help prepare our students to be critical thinkers, knowledgeable professionals, and responsible citizens calls for continual reevaluation of almost everything that happens in and out of the classroom - even a reevaluation of what constitutes the classroom itself.

Here's a behind the scenes look at where ACU is in terms of deployment:



ACU has the resources and what looks like a great team working full time to pursue their vision. I'm excited to see them experimenting so they can figure out the challenges and when the technology is free the rest of the schools with normal budgets can join in.

You can continue to follow their progress at iThinkEd.

Talking vs. Doing

I was complaining to my girlfriend last night about talking vs. doing.

That I like talking. It's much easier than doing.

We get paid to talk right now. But it is a small part of the solution. Reconfiguring the system is doing - it's much harder and a much bigger part of the solution.

Red Rover is doing. It costs us lots of money and time.

Exploring the HASTAC.ning.com group that Mechelle invited me to this morning, I came across a Dead Poets' Society clip in Mechelle's feed.

The scene is classic. One student, Neil, is excited about a plan. His friend, Todd, is the wet blanket - Neil then asks if he is going to the club meeting, and Todd is wishy-washy.

Neil comes charging back:

"Being in the club means being stirred up by things. . .

But being in means you gotta do something, not just say you are in."

We're in this Edtech club. We get stirred up, and we gotta continue to do.

It's fun to revisit formative movies as an adult. There's so much weight buried in memories with this film.

"You gotta do something", not just talk, is just part of me.

It's an annoying part sometimes.

If I recall correctly, Neil commits suicide in the end.

My father, however, is extremely supportive.

Getting an "Expert" Mentor in 3 Minutes With Delicious

Used to be one had to put long hours of googling into research. Not so much anymore. Want to get and stay current? Use delicious.com to find the fast fingered searcher types in any field.

I thought this was a known way to use delicious - that of course it was fine for storing things, but even better for finding RSS mentors to feed the latest right to your desktop. In conversations at the Center For the First Year conference, and with many college students, it seems it's an easy hack that is not yet well known.

So enjoy:

UPDATE: Sorry - having screencast sizing issues. Please check out the video here.