Swift Kick Central

Why Students and Faculty Sometimes Miss Eachother

The current crop of adults grew up in a world of physical identity where behavior was modulated according where someone was. The audience was clear. One could swear in front of friends - Not at school.

The current generation of students grew up in a world largely influenced by digital identity where the reality, consciously noted or not, was that context was in the eye of the searcher.

If you google my name, you will get my myspace blogs, written for friends, press releases written for corporate audiences, and if you search deep, you will find some early college poetry that got posted with an early online college magazine. Google does not care what my originating context was. It's up to you, the searcher, to cut me some slack for my 11 year old poetry.

Students reasonably expect some flexibility around appropriate behavior and context. The overlap and muddiness of "appropriate in context" is simply a fact of the tools they grew up with. They are more public and forgiving because of it.

If your paradigm is based on a lifetime of physical identity, with its clear boundaries and expectations, this muddiness is extremely difficult to understand.

No one is wrong. It's just different ways of looking at it, based on different experiences.

It's easy to say that the old folks or the young folks "just don't get it" - it's just not very accurate.

These graphics were inspired by a conversation with Scott Silverman about his dissertation, THE EFFECTS OF OSN COMMUNITIES ON COLLEGE STUDENTS' EXPERIENCES. HOW CAN STUDENT AFFAIRS PROFESSIONALS BEST RESPOND TO THIS EMERGENT PHENOMENON - and it's well worth a read if you are at all interested in Student Affairs. You can find it here.

Please Stop Buying and Building Walled Gardens For Higher Ed

There was an article a few days ago in the Chronicle with the headline "Colleges Create Facebook-Style Social Networks to Reach Alumni."

The first paragraph claims "hundreds of college alumni associations have begun to offer their own online social networks . . "

To me this seems like a very sad waste of time and money. (The article mentions the two major private network vendors are charging $10,000 per year plus set up fees.)

We've talked about walled gardens for a long time.

Walled gardens are simply networks that are cut off from the outside world. Schools like them because it feels like control and privacy.

We're generally against them for college and above. Younger, it makes more sense.

College students are different. They're not just adventurous, they actually know - or at least feel - an extremely important reality of today:

The social, educational, and economic value is in the network.

Anything that restricts their network, constrains the student's value.

College can be an important network, but it is only one among many. Whether or not any given student can find what they need within the college at any give time obviously depends on the student and the college. At some point, however, most are going to need to get a job outside of the school network. At this point, the student needs to be a good global networker.

The schools should be teaching this skill. The earlier the better.

The school should not be setting itself up with a conflict of interest by competing with Facebook or Linkedin. It's tantamount to trying to fend off the real world.

Locking students into old technology and closed networks is a huge disservice, verging on irresponsibility.

Students generally just won't follow, but that doesn't absolve the university from the responsibility to prepare the students for the world they will live in. Or to provide experience with the tools the world currently uses.

If you are an alumni director, and feel that you must give a private network a try, please try Ning.com. It is free. Then, at least, when alumni or students don't use it, you will only be out the time.

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If you don't have a Chronicle subscription, there's a nice commentary on Alumni Futures as well.

It's Not a Technical Challenge, It's an Education Challenge

The goal is increased engagement in education.

We have focused on two main areas:

1) Peer grouping / increased social capital

2) Relevancy of content (topic, level of difficulty, timeliness, and share-ability)

Red Rover is focused on helping students "find their people". First for orientation, and then in classes. There is a consistent "recommendation" theme (people like you . . . ) that we will be pushing forward as more data begins to pile up in the system.

Grouping inevitably leads to communicating and area number 2. When we first started building Red Rover, we assumed we would be building some sort of group leader blogging platform to disseminate information and leave a learning record.

With a little research, it quickly became clear that focusing on RSS feeds would give us, and the groups, a flatter information structure and greater flexibility. By setting the Red Rover goal as organizing, recommending, and filtering feeds, we can deliver on relevancy without building the content publishing or aggregating systems ourselves.

This keeps Red Rover simple, ready for whatever comes next, and saves us time and money (allowing us to continue to offer it for free.) It's a win / win.

Red Rover is working towards becoming a recommendation platform for education. Just like amazon.com recommends books. People who bought x, then bought y.

We will be matching users based on tags and participation so we can eventually say: "Incoming first year students like you joined x group, and a little later, took y class, and took z internship."

If it sounds complicated to build - that's because it used to be.

Now, however, 95% of the technical challenges have been figured out and are sitting on the web.

You want machine learning and user matching/clustering in Ruby? Here you go.

A blog / RSS / or any site into a matchable tag cloud? Check.

RSS mashups with quality filters? Yup.

Group twittering into tags? No problem.

An easy way to move a group of feeds from one node to another? Uh huh.

Turn tag clouds and feeds into portable attention profiles that can used for almost anything in education? Easy.

Not to mention the thousands of free flavors of group communication, collaboration and learning tools, all with handy RSS feeds.

Getting to an engagement increasing social and academic recommendation platform for college is not a technical challenge. That part is mostly sitting in the open. It's an education challenge.

Do we start top down? Or bottom up?

Top down:

If schools knew about this stuff . . . well they do (sort of). The IT department does and the librarians do. They just have not yet been able to get a comprehensive solution past the administration or the faculty.

If schools just tried using pieces of it . . . well they do. Tons of schools have RSS feeds on their web pages. Then they get frustrated because of extremely low adoption rates of the students. This damages the credibility of whoever pushed it and that person gets looks when they come up with the next thing.

Bottom up:

Students, for the most part, use the popular tools (meaning pretty much Facebook, Myspace, youtube, and some music stuff) but do not yet have the contextual understanding to put them to use in novel ways to improve their educational experience.

On average, they don't yet know what to ask their schools for, so instead they hunker down in Facebook and complain about what doesn't work with the school's offerings.

Who should teach them the bigger picture and the bigger possibilities? The faculty that IT departments are having trouble convincing.

There are many fantastic individual examples of faculty members mixing and matching their own amazing 2.0-ish solutions. M Wesch comes to mind. And BJ Fogg is doing great work at Stanford. There are many more, I'm sure, who keep a lower profile.

What's needed for a good recommendations platform in education, however, is not isolated points of excellence but a unifying framework with mass adoption.

Right now, the various institutional interests (students, administration, IT, faculty) seem jumbled and full of crosscurrents.

Despite the fact that the pieces are dangerously (if you are company that is currently milking higher ed) FREE, there is not yet significant alignment on any one solution.

(Or even end to end for part of a solution - does anyone know of a college specifically teaching RSS readers as a literacy skill to all students?)

To date, there has not been a unifying curriculum that ties the various constituencies together in a common understanding of the possibilities. So Blackboard continues to dominate.

We need a new story.

If you had a choice as an entrepreneur, would you prefer a technical challenge or a education/marketing challenge?

The Randomness of How Students Currently Meet at College

While keeping tabs on some student blogs in my RSS feed, I came across a video about some students who met in college and started a band. What caught my eye was when one of the band members talked about how they initially met:



I think most people would agree that this band's story of connecting is pretty much how people meet at college. While there is a romantic side to the random connection of strangers that leads to international music success, how many students never stumble into relevant connections that would increase their social integration? As important as social integration is, the current "system" is very inefficient which is why Red Rover's potential excites us. The bonus is everything within Red Rover is measurable.

Teaching The Google Effect and Digital Identities

Have you ever Googled yourself? What did you find? What didn't you find?

This morning Will Richardson wrote about several conversations he's had with principals and administrations regarding if and how they use Google when hiring new employees:

"When you have some applicants lined up for a teaching vacancy, do you “Google” them? Seems a pretty large majority say that yes, they do take some time to see what a standard Google search might pull up about a potential hire. And some even admit to doing a cursory MySpace search to see what comes up. In most cases, they say that the intent is primarily to find out if there is anything negative that surfaces. Almost all of them admit, however, that finding positive things about their applicants, as in portfolios or collaborations or even social sites, does or could make a positive difference in the process."

The main point of our training, The Secrets Behind Facebook and Myspace, is to use the megaphone of technology to promote your good qualities so you leave positive footprints for people who want to find out about you.

I feel like our training is the start of what will eventually turn into a standard class for all students, much like home economics. Students Everyone needs to be aware of their digital identity and the importance it will play for our entire lives. It should be a required skill for graduation.



The increasing importance of our digital identity is a game changer:

• When this generation grows up and tells their kids not to do something, and then with a quick search their kid shows them online pictures of them doing the same thing at the same age...game changer.
• When the first Facebook president is running for office and we all can see what he/she was like as a child through pictures, articles, and videos...game changer.
• When you apply for a job and the first and only place they look is your Google Identity...game changer.
  

A big concern I hear in our training is the lack of privacy and fear that too much information is being shared with too many people too fast. I empathize with the concern because I think that we are in a shock period right now and those feelings will become a minority over the next few years. The reason is because the amount of information we can know about another person eventually maxes out. Meaning that at some point you know everything there is to know about me and there is nothing more I can share with you. I think our shock period right now is because we are exponentially jumping in a short period of time the amount of personal information that is available from the previous period due to the growth of our digital identities. As this maxes out our shock levels will decrease as it will be a societal norm for anyone to have access to a vast amount of personal information.

But just because the shock fades away doesn't mean our digital identities are any less important. In fact, our digital identities will become even more important, so we need to start educating people as soon as possible. I think we are going to have a generation of digital Guinea Pigs for us to learn the importance of digital identities.

Don't Market. Build Well. And Then Community Content.

Found this over at Logic + Emotion - for us and every other entrepreneur out there, it's essential.

| View | Upload your own

There's a little caveat in this theory when it comes to innovation within your target segment.

When, for example, your target market needs education to understand why your product is useful. Let's just say your product relies on Facebook App viral dynamics, uses tags and meta data, and will be the center of a filtered RSS feed ecosystem in education, well then you have to do a fair amount of education. It's not really marketing per se, it's just scaffolding. Building a foundation of understanding so that folks can appreciate.

How to Bankrupt a Startup - A Funny Take From SXSW

No one starts a business with the goal to go bankrupt, but yet somehow 9 out of 10 businesses fail within the first 3 years. Good thing we are in our 4th year :P

A panel at the recent SXSW conference had a humorous take on how to bankrupt a startup. It was a collection of entrepreneurs telling their war stories from the front lines of multiple failed businesses.

Once you listen your way through the first 1/3rd of the podcast of pure humor you get to their actual advice, but be warned the satire continues.

For your reading pleasure, here are the main points I grabbed on how to make sure your business fails:

- hire a CEO who doesn't know anything about your business/industry.
- over engineer everything and build more than you need before launching and testing.
- worry about growing your site without considering how you are going to make money.
- spend a lot of resources building up your company infrastructure before starting.
- make your plan to have x employees by x time.
- never question your current business plan.
- don't check your growth against your cash flow.
- don't have enough cash.
- make sure everyone you talk to fills out a NDA and only talk to people who will fill out a NDA.
- don't make an exit plan.
- make raising investment money the main source of your revenue.
- don't start until you have all the money you need.
- follow every new fad on the web.
- micromanage everything.
- ignore the naysayers and continue to drink your own Kool Aid.

One of the panelists ends with comparing starting a business to playing the nickel slots in Vegas. Some entrepreneurs play the slots with only the strategy to win the big jackpot while ignoring the odds. Others play knowing the big jackpot is a slim possibility but keep their eyes on each spin and have a plan besides just winning the big jackpot.

Blown Mind

I just watched a Google presentation that seemingly took place in the woods but was streaming live from Scobleizer's cell phone. I, and 20k other people on Twitter, were invited by Scobleizer to watch the presentation live. While it happened I chatted online with a couple hundred folks about the future of the software codes, Ruby on Rails vs. Python, as seen by Google.

Google wants to host Python based applications for free. This is exciting as hosting is not cheap and we budgeted a pile of cash for hosting Red Rover. The problem is we didn't use Python to build Red Rover. It was all done on Ruby, so we are crossing our fingers that Google will work with Ruby next.

I'm done watching for now, but it looks like it's going to go on for a bit more. Everything about the last 10 minutes in front of my lap top is mind blowing.