Swift Kick Central

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.

Cutting the Fat

My fiancee and I (Tom) recently sold our car and signed up for the non-profit car sharing service iGo Cars. Our reasons for breaking free from the car chains were partly environmental, economical, and practical as we live in downtown Chicago. But three months into the program, I discovered another unexpected reason and it interestingly relates directly to my work with Swift Kick.

When we owned a car, the trip to the grocery store would take an hour and some change to complete. The goal was to get our weekly grocery supplies. That goal hasn't changed since selling our car, but the time it takes to do the task has. With iGo you rent by the half-hour, and I realized the exact same trip to the grocery store can be achieved in under 30 minutes. This gives me an extra half-hour to enjoy the better things in life.

Take this same concept and apply it to being an entrepreneur.

Everyday I have a defined set of tasks I'm working on that builds up to our established weekly, monthly and quarterly goals. Since I don't have a "boss" looking over me, the deadlines for individual tasks are set (or not set) by me and roughly have to be done by the end of the day.

"A task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for it's completion." - Ferriss, Timothy. The Four Hour Work Week. pg. 27. New York: Random House, 2007

Instead of just saying my daily tasks have to be done by the end of the day, I also put a minute deadline on each task. In the morning, before I open my computer to start working for the day, I estimate how long it should take for me to accomplish each task. Then I cut off 5-33% of the time and make that my new deadline. It forces me to "cut the fat" from the task and really focus.

I also downloaded Apimac Timer as a desktop timer to give me a visual cue of my deadline.

It's been three weeks since I started reorganizing my work flow and just like with our trips to the grocery store, I'm able to get the same goal completed in about 1/3rd less time.

Next I'll post about our process for deciding our quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily goals and the joy of ruthless prioritization.

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?

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.

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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.

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.

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.

MacArthur DML Competition - Reading the Tea Leaves

Traveling has me late with this post. Procrastination too. I've been worried about "sour grapes" and hoped that with a little time, I might better be able to get the right tone.

Awhile back, when it seemed that we did not win the MacArthur DML grant, I said I was interested in reviewing the winners to try to guess what the judges valued. I set aside some time this morning.

On a deeper review of the innovation award winners, my reaction to the innovation winner pool is a more forceful version of my first thought: they are kind of lame.

They are just not exciting to me.

Clearly they were exciting to the judges. So it must be a values disconnect. The judges understood the idea of Innovation in Digital Media and Learning differently than I did. It's their competition of course, they can interpret their own words however they want.

So I tried to go back to the innovation contest explanation to see how they described it. I wanted to see how much I was projecting what I value/ believe on to the words they used to describe what they were looking for. When I was reading the page, it sounded completely different from what I had in my head. It sounded like their description fit the winner pool pretty well, actually, so clearly I had just read my own meaning into what was there. Then I saw the "Updated" note at the top: February 21, 2008.

The description of what they were looking for was changed on the date they announced the winners. No wonder the description and the winners match up nicely.

I understand it's a new area and so of course definitions will change. It just seems strange to change the questions on a test after you've given the answers. It would have been easy to update their thinking somewhere else.

Changing the "what we are looking for" page makes it very difficult for the student (me) to learn where they went wrong with the answer. I didn't think to take screenshots, so all I could go on is a six month old interpretation of a memory.

This makes it impossible for me to argue about the judges choices based on the original description of the competition. And maybe that's kind of a good thing - helps me avoid a little of the sour grapes deal. I'll just argue based on what I believe.

Common Themes in the winner pool:

- Games (roughly half of the winners are a game of some sort)

- Academic projects (most are housed in, or born from, a university and none have a "business model" that would make them economically sustainable, with the possible exception of FabLab, which might squeek by on laser etching unless one of their machines breaks.)

- As Tom Hoffman pointed out, four of seven are from Duke or University of California schools.

- They are all Nonprofits? Seems like it, but it is hard to tell. Didn't see any mention of pricing, not even "free" on anyone's website. The word nonprofit is large-ish on their tag cloud.

These are not really exciting themes to me.

(Nonprofit btw is a neutral to me. Only annoyance is the consistency of it compared to stated desires of the competition. They decided not to explore other structures to acheive impact. Go with what you know, I suppose. I know I do it all the time, it's just not very innovative.)

Here are themes I would have been excited about:

- Ideas that solve an existing pain. NOT technology looking for an application.

Educational games are "neat". If they are not cooler than what is on the X-Box, it's a hard sell to kids (at any age.) So then just force them to use it in the classroom, and you have a hard sell to schools. It's massive supply competing for minimal demand. It's not innovative if it doesn't get used.

- Ideas with leverage. Smaller effort, big impact.

Two of these "Digital" innovations have serious hardware bottlenecks. All of them, existing in the "sort of neat" category, will have very serious, potentially terminal, marketing/ adoption friction.

- Transparency in the process to build community.

Communicate. Participate. Network. Collaborate. Community. These are all buzzwords the actual competition ignored in their process. More than the money, connecting the 1000 project initiators with each other in a meaningful collaborative project / learning community around the contest would have done huge things for digital media and learning.

- Economic sustainability.

This is just the entreprenuer in me. I get this is my value. I just don't think the grant process, at the 250k level, provides enough time to make much of a dent. I think there needs to be some other plan besides grants - the sucess rate is just too low. Getting paid forces the initiative into quantifiable relevance to someone. This is good and helps reduce "neat" ideas that don't really go anywhere.

- Defensible Positioning.

It's a business term, I know, but it matters if there is going to be impact. Where do these ideas fit in the world today? Do they have a space? Can they hold on to it? How can they avoid wimpy "me too"-ness? YouthActionNet Marketplace is wonderfuly idealistic, but TakingITglobal dominates that space, does a great job, and has better sponsors. How is YouthAction different? Hypercities is cool, but google earth already combines story, space, and soon mobile. The folks that are interested already use google. It seems like hypercities' positioning is only safe in academia for academics (they have been receiving grants since 2003.)

- Mashable or Open Source-able.

Hypercities could be mashable (see google above). Maybe the MILLEE project could become a mobile platform for learning (though they seem to be aiming at developing their own language learning games.) This goes back to leverage, but these ideas seem to have a "create-it-alone" mentality built in. This isn't a very modern approach, and I don't think it's a recipe for big impact. Getting people to invest time in your project serves the same purpose as getting paid - you have to be relevant and meaningful to someone. (Our project, for full disclosure, is mashable, but not very open source - mostly because our niche is not too technical. I do respect the challenges with this and would have loved to see someone else do better.)

Going into the competition, we said we didn't have any experience with grants and thus we were interested in trying it and learning. I'm disapointed that I don't feel like I learned much. I can't see a clear, coherent, cause and effect in the selection of the winners (I can't even check the question). The "right" answers don't seem right to me and nowhere is there an explanation that might add to my understanding of the digital media and learning space.

The cultural gap between my business background and this competition, as much as it fits my stereotype of academia, feels painful. I want to be excited about decent money that is being spent on innovation to improve education.

I care deeply about education. There are exciting possibilities for innovation and change with tehcnology and education. I really hope that one of these initiatives creates a meaningingful impact on digtial media and learning. I would love to be wrong.

Working Out in the Open and Eating our own Dog Food

In an earlier post Tom mentioned that one of our goals for 2008 was to work out in the open.

We often recommend this in Dance Floor Theory leadership sessions - telling students to hold their meetings in the commons every once in a while, with a flip board showing what they are doing. It piques interest. It shows movement. It builds credibility.

We also recommend wikis. Especially for student government, though activities can be equally as powerful an application. It's a way to show interested students how much work goes into planing. It's a way to involve others in that planning.

Eating your own dog food is always a good idea. Especially with web 2.0 tech. I've been the victim of technolust so many times - something seems like it will be really cool, but for whatever reason it just isn't that useful and falls out of my workflow. (DevonThink, is a recent example among many.)

Today we're proud to announce the opening up of the Swift Kick (wiki) kitchen. It's not done, of course, but it's a good start. The goal is for this to be our workspace. So that advisors and students who are interested can come play and learn.

We're using this space for case studies - where each school gets a page for their program flow (trying to figure out how to embed follow up surveys now . . .) and for all the content that Swift Kick has created so far.

"Giving your content away" (it's under CC 3.0 noncommercial) is a horrifying idea to a number of established speakers. They work hard to "protect" their intellectual property. We completely understand that position and have decided to test the other side.

We're using this space to elicit feedback on marketing and initiatives (and boy do we appreciate all the input from all of you!)

Red Rover, of course, is up here too, with its own space providing live feeds from the development environment and new user interface discussions.

So come on in to the kitchen, find something that looks good to you, hang out, talk, and cook up something tasty with us.

2008 Themes for Swift Kick

1) WORK IN THE OPEN



Like the jewelry maker, we want to work in the open for every to see how we do what we do. Share our work whether raw or polished. Share our work with others and have others share with us. It takes a village to grow an idea.

Education is best served in the open and not behind walled gardens. We are in education and  thus want to be open. We want to push the idea of being an open source, open content education company. Though we are a for-profit company, income is #5 on our list of motivations for building Swift Kick. Just ask us about our personal bank accounts and you'll see what we mean :)


2) EXPAND OUR SURFACE AREA



When we started we were a tiny fish. The past 3 years we grew to be a bigger fish in a smaller pond. We went to the same conferences each year and though it was a great start for us, it's time to expand out and see what other areas of education there are. It's time to expand the pond we are swimming in. What other conferences can we attend? What other people can we meet? What other communities can we connect with?


3) STRENGTHEN THE COMMUNITY



Imagine going to a dance where no one knows each other. The DJ could put on the hottest music of the day and chances are very few people would dance. Now Imagine going to a dance were everyone knows each other and are friends. The DJ could put on the Happy Birthday song and chances are people would go wild. Why? Relationships.

Building relationships is one of the key principles of our Dance Floor Theory Leadership Training, and we want to take the same idea and exponentially apply it to our entire community. We want to strengthen the current relationships we have, strengthen new relationships, provide a platform to help others strengthen their relationships.


4) THINK BIGGER THAN WE KNOW HOW



We know what we know, and we don't know what we don't know. We want to hire/consult with people who are more skilled than us. We want to hire/consult with people that can teach us, guide us, and grow us. Swift Kick has a lot of potential and we've only tapped 2% so far, we want to know what the other 98% looks like.

SK Blog Stats for 2/1/08

One of our major goals of 2008 is to "work out in the open" like a jewelry maker in his/her shop creating the next piece in the open for everyone to see. Education and learning should be an open process so we can all learn from each other. This blog is a piece of jewelry we are continuously crafting and from now on, each month we'll share some data on it's (hopefully) growth. Enjoy!