Swift Kick Central

The Danger of Internet Filters at Schools

If you haven't yet subscribed to Weblogg-ed, make sure you do so. Will Richardson is spot on with many of his posts about digital literacy. His latest post, Filter Fun, talks about his on going frustration with schools putting filters on internet use and the potential damage caused.

...I truly believe that filters make our kids less safe. They step off the bus into unfiltered worlds with no context for making good decisions about the stuff coming at them. It’s a huge problem. But on some levels, the bigger problem is what we are doing to our teachers. It insults the profession to not at the very least provide desktop overrides for teachers when they bump up against a filtered site. Have a policy in place to deal with incidents where teachers make poor choices if that’s what the concern is...The only way we’re going to get students, or teachers, to master the Web is to let them use it.

The Ivory Tower: Attack or Negotiate? Part 1

Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures is an accidental iconoclast. He wants to disrupt (usurp!) the power of educational institutions, among other institutions, and give the "Power to the People." He thinks it's inevitable, good for the people, and good business.

It's not a mean spirited interest. He's looking at the inevitable economics of change. Craigslist didn't hate newspapers, it just destroyed their cash cow (classified ads) replacing it with a simple free version for it's own purposes. The newspapers' printing press (that gave them eyeballs and classifieds revenue) suddenly wasn't required.

Like many venture capitalists, Albert summarizes his extensive experiences into a few "characteristics" that can be used to judge ventures: "technology leverage, disruption of markets, no gatekeepers, capital efficiency, data asset/ network effect defensibility."

It's the third characteristic, "no gatekeepers", that is most interesting to me strategically. For us, with Red Rover, the question is simply this - if we want to improve, or "disrupt", higher education:

Should we work with colleges?

Albert, I believe, would say no, they are gatekeepers. It's a big red flag for him. I spoke with him briefly, and he told me he is "not interested in the next Blackboard." I think I can safely conjecture, based on Albert's blogs and much of the discussion in those circles, that "the next Blackboard" would mean an incremental improvement based on the current business model. Nice, fine, but not fundamentally disruptive and therefore not so interesting. The idea being, one can't simultaneously work with and disrupt the same folks. They will simply close the gate.

Let's look at the landscape.

Starting with our old-school approach anchor:

Blackboard. Blackboard sells to schools. They are a 1.3 Bn company focused on providing a "single, seamless learning environment". Web 2.0? We've got that! They solve the school's problems with privacy and control and get paid for it. The students don't much like it, but they have to use it. Blackboard cannot innovate for the students where their desires are in conflict with the schools.

Blackboard has a few open source competitors based on a "single learning environment" approach. It's a "power at the center" approach, but we're interested in empowerment - power at the edges.

"The disruptive technology almost always takes root in a very undemanding application, and the established market leaders almost always try to cram the disruption into the established application." -Clayton Christensen, author of "Disrupting Class" (clearly on topic).

The shift is from centralized to decentralized - it's the opposite of Blackboard's model, and no amount of embedding / cramming will change their underlying business model and structure. Following Christensen, we're looking for something simple, with a new model, based on decentralized philosophies.

The scenario is easy enough to outline, as Albert does on his blog as well: the centralized university model was built on scarcity of information. Libraries were a big deal, so gather 'round. Professor's knowledge was a big deal, so gather 'round (and buy a very expensive ticket). Those things are not centralized anymore. Information is everywhere and often free. Professors and their bits of knowledge are everywhere, at all times, with text, audio, pictures and video. Itunes U. MIT's open coursewear. Colleges are left arguing for their own necessity with "the people you'll meet!" at the high end and "you'll never be anything without a degree" at the lower end.

Leaving aside the degree issue, the info is there. The problem (expense) is now the navigation. If you're interested in anything beyond the 1800 or so topics covered in the MIT courseware (or other repositories with curated taxonomies) it's spread out all over the internet. It's highly decentralized. This viewpoint is so common it is cliched in the ed tech "echo chamber," so let's move forward.

Defining the Goal:

Let's say education is growth. It's X + 1. With X being where the learner is at with a given topic plus one step forward.

So the technical solution: peer to peer sharing of information "steps" so the learner can navigate through the noise. We need a relevancy filter by topic and level (x) plus a record of others' exploration tracks to create scalable next step recommendations (+1). The more accurate we can make these two steps, the easier the navigation, the more people will participate, and the greater the disruption.

This isn't new. Amazon.com does this wonderfully. Itunes' "Genius" is decent as well ("If you knew a lot about music, this would be your next purchase!"). There are many examples.

In the digital infospace, many folks manage this x+1 process through curation of their own peer learning networks - consisting of a mash up of buzzing tools:

Twitter
Delicious
RSS readers
Disqus
Blogs
Digg
Wikis, etc.

They create and manage a network of some relevancy and filter it with varying levels of success. Because this is working in practice, with a little effort, it's obvious to these geeky folks that undergraduate education would be at least better, at most unnecessary, if more people did what they did.

But they don't. Almost none of this excitement has had an effect on your typical college student's education process.

Unfortunately, both disruptions and revolutions require participation.

So what characteristics can we cite so far?

Working with schools: Blackboard has both a business model and student usage. Sure it's forced usage, but two check marks where it matters.

Not working with schools: The rest of the tools on the list above are simple and potentially disruptive as far as they facilitate x+1, but none have both revenue and students. Most have neither.

This is just the current state of course, and as a VC and entrepreneur our bet is on the trend moving forward from this current state. What will change over the next five years?

What about other start ups / growth stage companies in this space? Where are they betting? A quick sample:

With Schools:

Collegiate Link - "Integrated technology for student affairs."

Inigral - "the first interoperable Facebook application designed for institutions of higher learning."

Orgsync - "collaborative software for an online campus."

Without Schools:

Popego - "Cut out the noise. Get a shortcut to the good stuff." (I love this interface and it's an elegant (x) relevancy filter tool)

Twine - "a new way to gather content and connect with people who share your interests"

Diigo - "a powerful research tool and a knowledge-sharing community"

Hybrid: (market straight to students, work with / get paid by schools)

Zinch - "an interactive community of high school students and colleges. . . " wanting to admit and be admitted to college.

Unigo - "College connected. Find, Review and Explore America's Colleges" This one is questionably hybrid. Perhaps they are Without Schools. Seems like schools would likely be advertisers and thus b-model, but the money quote in their recent write up is "[colleges] should be a bit scared of [us], but they're not. They don't really understand the immensity . . ."

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So if you were a venture capitalist wanting to invest in disrupting education, in which category would you invest?

What do you think, should Red Rover hang out with Inigral and Collegiate Link, or Popego or Zinch?

More to come in Part 2.

Filling the Gumption Tank With Some Help From Friends

Had a great day today. A few quick thoughts:

Vid Blog 9/20/2008 from Kevin Prentiss on Vimeo.

I feel like McCain's team: what I meant by "scalability" was: we are trying to hone our app and message to grow faster. I said "Garvee", but meant @garyvee : )

State of the (Red Rover) Union

Red Rover is an experiment with many layers. It's a big vision made of many small steps.

Here's where we are at: what's working, what's an issue, what's a real challenge, and our plans moving forward.

What's Working:

The tag cloud / folksonomy architecture. Students can tag themselves. Many don't know what "tags" are, but the interface is getting them to put 20 or so tags on themselves anyway. This is plenty to get started and make for useful and interesting comparisons.

The tag match recommendation. Students are finding groups on their campus and joining them. I've heard, "Wow, I've been on campus for three years and didn't know [x group] existed." That's perfect - local discovery= increased engagement. Perfect. While there is very little baseline data available for comparison, what's there suggests Red Rover is 2 - 4x more effective at connecting students to groups than the old methods.

Joining Groups. In our user survey 63% of students found 2-4 groups that interested them, 58% spent time looking at recommended groups, 34% looked for more groups, and most importantly 64% of students joined one or more groups.

The social experience. Students like it. 81% said that they would recommend it to their friends despite the fact the interface and messaging both need work (see challenges below.)

The face to face conversation with schools and students. We are unique in that we are visiting many schools with Swift Kick training. We are actually talking to student affairs folk and student leaders constantly. We get their feedback, challenges, and hopes directly. The relationship matters, now (at startup when we are far from perfect) more than ever.

The Student Leader and Student Affairs Blogs due completely to the great people involved. Special thanks go to Tania Dudina and Debra Sanborn for leading the charge. We're excited to spread the content and conversations via Red Rover.

What's an Issue:

The interface. Simplicity and functionality are difficult to balance. To be successful it has to feel easy. Red Rover scores a C on this right now (down from a C+ when we had fewer features). 53% of respondents said sign up was easy, 30% said it was simple but long and 17% said they were confused. It's also too "plain" according to the surveys. Students using Facebook and Google have come to expect / demand the best. We need to focus on this to get better numbers. We're interviewing new team members to address this specifically.

Communicating the Value to students. We're adding an additional context layer in between social (which the students want to do) and school (which they have to do - think Blackboard). Red Rover needs to start far more on the want side. We have cool personal comparison features (e.g. one click, whole school, interest comparison) but it's not enough of a video game feel to register as entertainment. This is part interface and part message clarity. Either way, it's a pressing challenge. Students will spread "kind of cool," but not nearly as fast as "really cool". Which brings us to:

Adoption. Our fall goal was 30% enrollment leading heavily towards freshmen at thirty schools. Three weeks into school we're almost half way there with about 7 schools, with many more in the 2-10% of enrollment range. I think the interface / clarity above will help, as will new invite / email features that just came out. With adoption, group density is paramount. Meaning that it's almost pointless to talk about 300k installs, what matters is % of a single school or even % of a single class/year at a school. It's the density that creates the "everyone is doing it" feeling and creates a good full dance floor feeling in groups - student groups or classes. No one seems to have cracked this yet. Not Courses 2.0, Course Feed or even Blackboard. Our strategy was to try different adoption methods at different schools and disseminate best practices back to the schools - we're still early with this.

What's a Real Challenge:

Focus. Knowing we would be crossing a chasm with a free product, keeping our costs low was critical. (Meaning if we staffed up and free adoption took 2 years, we would have either needed to raise a decent amount or we would have run out of money.) This left us with not enough staff to maintain aggressive development speed and school support while traveling and training at the same time. It's frustrating for us. There are more schools that would be farther along had we done a better job of proactively communicating about bugs and plans. We should have hired on contract for the July to November window. Not doing so was a mistake. We're trying to hire for this spot now.

Free equals "if I have time" and very few have time. Student affairs folks get slammed on day one of school. Because Red Rover is free, I suspect the project fits into a muddy "would be nice" category - the same category as say, going home at a reasonable time (which also rarely happens). We're working with great people in a tough position. We looked at charging for a joint experiment where charging would increase follow through and compared it to open, at will, collaboration where our project might get put off. Most tech vendors choose option A. A few of these vendors have told us we would find Option B didn't work in higher ed. We went with option B any way. I do not believe this decision was a mistake. It allows for the student led effort which will ultimately be the key. At this phase of the project, however, being lower on the list of priorities for our stake holders presents a challenge. Especially when we are not doing a good job of proactively communicating.

Plans Moving Forward

1. Focus on communicating with our stakeholders. We know so many amazing people - staff, faculty, student leaders, and students. The user survey was listening, now we need to make it a conversation. We need to get our folks the info they need to participate. Specifics: more blogs here, increase phone call check ins, new student leader newsletter, including application news in all newsletters.

2. Focus for 2 months on the user experience. We are slowing down new features development and focusing on making what we have easy, fun, and pretty. Specifics: hiring a user experience designer, 80% of time improving what is there, additional focus groups of students.

3. Hiring a support person. We are doing something very new. It's understandable there would be hesitation and questions. Having a person dedicated to these questions will help.

4. Finish first year experience curriculum. Scott Silverman, Coordinator, First Year Programs, UC - Riverside is heading up this project. It will embed identity development, college connectedness and tech into the curriculum. Including Red Rover and Path101 for career planning. I'll post more on this later. This is a solution to the adoption challenges.

5. Spread student government case studies. Tiq Chapa is launching Red Rover at Stanford as part of his student government responsibilities. This is an exciting direction. We will be telling this story, and the other launches by students, at the ASGA conference coming up shortly (Tom is keynoting).

Rediscovering the Passion of Education

Watching a great TED talk is like drinking hot mint tea on a crisp morning from a balcony overlooking crystal clear ocean water with dolphins swimming by as the sun rises. Get the idea :)

This morning I watched Benjamin Zander talk about his two infectious passions: classical music, and helping others realize their untapped love for it. As the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra since 1979 he spared no time in channeling his experience with classical music into words that can be translated into all professions.

The conductor doesn't make a sound.....he depends for his power on his ability to make other people powerful. And that changed everything for me....I realized my job was to awaken possibility in other people.

Sound familiar?

And you know how you find out [if you are doing your job correctly]? Look at their eyes. If their eyes are shiny you know you're doing it. If their eyes are not shiny you get to ask this question. Who am I being that their eyes are not shiny?

5 million freshman enter college every year. That's the potential for 10 million shiny eyes at orientation.

Benjamin talks about how the classical music world believes that 3% of people care about their music, and if they can increase it to 4% then all their problems would be over. 

I say, how would you walk, how would you talk, how would you be if you thought 3% of the population likes classical music and if only we could move it to 4%? How would you walk, how would you talk, how would you be if you thought EVERYBODY loves classical music, they just haven't found out about it yet?

Let's start with the non limiting belief that 100% of freshman are excited about education, they just haven't discovered their "why." Our job is to awaken the "why" within them and help them realize their untapped love for it. Success is thus based on the number of shiny eyes we have around us, not by the number of students that enroll or graduate. If we don't see the shiny eyes at orientation let's ask ourselves first, "Who am I being that their eyes are not shiny?" before we jump to passing blame to other factors.

Join Our Team - Hiring an Account Manager for Red Rover

Red Rover is a free online tool for schools to use that improves education by increasing the engagement, effectiveness and relevancy. We are out to change education for the better and looking for someone, maybe you, to join our team.

As Red Rover continually expands to more and more schools, we want to hire a part time Account Manager to be the direct link to the school admins and help schools through the entire setup process. Please review the information below and if it excites you, send us an email to ( tom at redroverhq dot com ). Feel free to forward this message on to anyone else who might be interested.

THIS JOB IS FOR YOU IF:

- You are passionate about improving education
- You have experience with student activities and/or student clubs and orgs
- You know about, or have experience with, student affairs
- You are technically literate with the internet
- You quickly grasp new software
- You are available for 3-4 hours of daily work M-F 9-6
- You are familiar with Facebook
- You have a bigger left hand than right...
- You are personable on the phone and in person
- You quickly solve problems
- You work in an area that allows quiet and uninterrupted phone calls
- You might have customer support experience

RESPONSIBILITIES:

- Reviewing the Red Rover adoption pipeline for friction with schools
- Working with schools to overcome friction points in setup process
- Reporting on adoption pipeline to RR team
- Suggesting RR enhancements to improve pipeline effectiveness
- Testing development tickets and coordinating with Program Team
- Cleaning out old development tickets and posting new tickets
- Trouble shooting RR issues with admins / regular users
- Following up on RR Facebook Page issues
- Following up on UserSuggest issues

DETAILS:

You will initially be hired as an independent contractor on a per hour wage or per month stipend. Wage/Stipend will be discussed individually and based on experience and excitement for the job.