Swift Kick Central

Web 2.0 to Take Down Blackboard

In the Chronicle this afternoon there was a choice quote:

Weller says new Web tools (such as wikis and video-capture technology) put power in the hands of students, but traditional learning-management systems (such as Moodle and Blackboard) emphasize central control by the learning institutions, so he predicts that “monolithic LMSs will be deserted, digital tumbleweed blowing down their forums. Students will abandon this in favor of their tools.”

This idea is still fringe. Many bets are still on the side of privacy, control and professors' fears about intellectual property.

The first comment for me sums up so much of the education challenge:

Students will abandon monolithic LMSs? Yes, in spirit they will, but as long as institutions are granting the credits and degrees, students [as always] will have to go with the flow.

— Kate Jun 18, 05:18 PM

In short: They don't have to like it. We can control them. Just like China.

Just for the record, I still stand behind a nearly one year old prediction that Mr. Weller at least partially agrees with:

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

More Assumptions and Beliefs for Red Rover

Awhile back I posted a preliminary list of assumptions for Red Rover. As we are in the process of gathering up our ideas for discussions tomorrow at our first advisory meeting, adding to that list seems appropriate.

The goal with this is to state our ideas plainly. Or failing that, put out some rough drafts of thoughts to get to plain later. All of these ideas get baked into the software and strategy. With a list, our advisors and stakeholders can be clear on what they agree with and what they don't. We can then focus the discussion and learn.

On Facebook and social integration with academic integration.

Fred Stutzman has a draft paper where he questions the wisdom of using Facebook for class management due to challenges of "moving instruction into student spaces of sociality." In short, students get weird when professors hang out in their bedrooms. So let's not.

I'm really looking forward to talking this out with Fred tomorrow, but here's my take:

Education is social. It is peer social.

Younger students want to socially integrate first. What matters is the feeling. They lead with the "where are my peers who I can hang with / feel comfortable with?" question.

As we get older, we start to prioritize common interests. Knitting comes first, friends come later. I want to find the entrepreneurs in NY. I assume I will like a few, but I lead with the topic. Being uncomfortable is worth the networking benefit.

Our prioritization of "social" shifts as we get older. Once our emotional needs are met (or dismissed), we socialize for other reasons and reduce the prioritization of comfort. We call it growth.

NASPA, ACPA, APCA, and NACA are all banging on about "Learning Reconsidered" where one of the arguments is that the school must help facilitate the interaction between the Social, Academic, and Institutional context. When this happens it creates holistic, transformative learning, the ultimate goal. They give "service learning" as an example of an activity that blends all three contexts.

More challenging, and incredibly rewarding, is the integration of the social into your standard classroom. Learning Communities are one approach.

Online folks call a social / learning group Personal Learning Networks and the web folks' tools offer incredible flexibility, speed, and reach. This makes the conference far more social ("we've been twitterin' for 6 months!").

Fred's right in that professors do not belong in a student's bedroom. "Uncomfortable" is not the type of emotional engagement we are looking for.

I believe, as Fred noted, this is less of an issue when students are more professional (higher levels, greater maturity) with a more goal/topic prioritization.

Further, this "I want to maintain my party space in public" (and 500 FB friends is public, ask Ms. New Jersey) idea is an immature and limiting desire. It certainly won't help with job networking. So it is a school's responsibility to gently move the student along the transformative learning and maturation process. At some point this means helping them learn to effectively expand, for the sake of their engagement and networking, their binary ideas of work and social.

Students can use tools or privacy settings to create their small rooms for close friends. This is how Fred uses Twitter - it's a choice, bonding over bridging capital to reduce cognitive "is this appropriate?" strain.

We do this as adults. If students don't learn how to think and use tools like adults in college, when will they learn?

Beyond teaching context negotiation (and we can debate when is a good time) I believe that working with educational data in Facebook has two important benefits:

1) Convenience. People do more of what is easy. The lack of another login matters. One click from where I am already matters. FB groups are easier to navigate than Blackboard.

2) Peer socializing. Not the same as socializing with a professor. Peer connectedness leads to higher engagement. Educational environmental design matters. Your typical large room classroom is set with all seats facing the front. Facebook is inherently social graphy. This is a good thing.

This does not necessarily mean only using FB groups. It could mean using a page and porting the feeds into the page. I'm not sure what the correct technical implementation is for blending contexts, but I do believe it is way too early for institutions to abandon Facebook.

On Groups:

College is a series of groups with different sizes, structures and goals. (Student Body, Class, Major, Residence Hall, Class, Student Group, friend cliques.)

Colleges spend most of their money managing these groups. (Think paperwork and leadership, both big $) The old model used to be: Bigger Groups = Bigger Expense. Grouping finding, organizing, and communication tools are dramatically reducing the cost of grouping.

Smart students are creating their own learning networks outside of the school. Network reach has a high economic utility. Students should be taught how to network at the local and global scale.

Seeing who is like you in any new group helps put people at ease. ("Whew, someone is weird just like me!") Ease increases engagement and involvement. This is why Red Rover is including group member matching.

There is no one right tool set for all types of groups. Instead, Red Rover focuses on finding and joining groups (like a school specific Meetup) and then aggregates feeds from whatever compilation of free group tools the members / leaders of the group decide to use. (I.e. Red Rover is fine with a group using a blog, a wiki, friend feed, twitter, etc. as long as the tool generates a feed.)

RSS, XML, and API's will be used to plug tools into Red Rover groups.

Changing Education Practices:

Free tools (Web 2.0) are innovating in the aggregate much faster than established LMS providers such as Blackboard. Innovative professors (my standard top of the head list: M. Wesch, Fred Stutzman, BJ Fogg) are mixing and matching these FREE tools to create rich classroom experiences. As these leaders explore best practices, other faculty will follow. New faculty, who used these types of tools throughout their graduate experience, will use free tools without thinking twice.

Institutional Information Management Systems:

Various departments in the institution tend to have their own software solutions (i.e. career center, alumni relations, activities, advising, learning management, enrollment, etc.) most of these pieces do not talk to each other.

Most schools are incapable of telling a student everything the school knows about them. Academic transcripts are the norm. Activities transcripts are still fairly cutting edge. What about career? What about mentors? What about preferences?

Large tech vendors are starting to say "one college" and Banner and College Management Software will both sell the school a module for everything that supposedly works together. I do not have experience with either of these vendors, but I don't think the top-down bigger more complicated solution is the most interesting solution.

Far more interesting, I believe, is pushing the data management to the end user. In the exact same way that Google is changing the handling of medical records, and for pretty much the same effect: efficiency and improved experience.

This data used to be "expensive" (in the broad economic sense of money and time) to manage. So the school would take on this expense and buy expensive software to make the process more efficient.

If web tools, Facebook, wiki's, blogs, delicious, friendfeed, twitter, etc. become standard use for organizing and managing groups on campus, and they all can feed into a student's record system, then the management of this data becomes nearly free. For a great example of passive information management, see mint.com. Josh Koppleman calls this trend the implicit web. Your data works for you without your effort.

If the students control the data, they can do whatever they want with it. This gets us around the lawyers that so weigh down the institution with terms like "duty of care" and FERPA. It amounts to Universities saying to students: "We know you will use your own tools and be online. We want to help you be successful, and not limit you. Therefore it's best for you to have your data, because if we have it, your options and networking are limited. As a college, we are severely encumbered (and expensive!) when we try to work with your information. It's best in your hands."

Higher Education Software Vendors:

Most tech vendors see the institution as their customer. This is wrong. The student is their customer. Ask students how they feel about WebCT. [Full disclosure: our marketing is 90% focused on faculty interests, we are working to correct this.]

Because of the institution focus, most vendors focus on control, increasing the "expense" (broad economic definition) of student use. Now that students have many options for grouping and information, they will increasingly choose the easier option. Leaving both the software vendor, and the school, out.

Software vendors should take more responsibility for use of their product. If the students hate it, or just don't use it, that should not just be the school's problem.

It Will Be Amazing, If People Use It . . .

I got a very straightforward question on Facebook today from a staff person at a very large school:

About your software: do you have evidence that students will use it? How do you suggest schools get students to do that? (Just wondering if students would see this as one more "hoop" to jump through and simply ignore it.)

I wrote up an answer that was probably inappropriately long for her question, so I'm making double use of it by sharing here:

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That's exactly the right question.  How can we make it not just a hoop?

We have evidence that student leaders like it. They too are very worried about "one more thing" but really Red Rover is designed so that they don't have to go there and upkeep. Most of it will be pushed to their cell phone, this is just a matter of proving to them that it really does add a benefit without much work on their part.

As for your regular incoming first year student, "adoption" is an important conversation.

If students use it, all these great things occur (assessment, recommendation, etc.) Adoption is always the problem with college led initiatives - and technology of any kind.  It's especially a problem when the software is useful / important to the school, but not important to the student, i.e. emergency text messaging. 

In the test runs so far we have reason to be optimistic.

There are three important parts on our side:

1) Solving a real pain. Students want to meet each other over the summer, at the beginning of school, and during every new semester. Identity management and grouping are huge needs and have been common themes (compare your friends!) in successful applications on Facebook. I give us an 7/10 on this one. (We need to do a better job of communicating to the students how to think about Red Rover before and after they have signed up.)

2) Making it incredibly easy. It needs to feel as nice (simple / fast) as Facebook. I give us a 6.5/10 on this. Though it gets better all the time. For comparison, I give Blackboard a 3/10.

3) Building a community. (This will convert the 10% adoption to the 30% adoption which gets into "most of my friends are doing it" territory.) With student leaders, that looks like peer created blog (http://www.theslblog.org/) and then building community from group to group. I.e. hooking up the members of Latino clubs from nearby campuses. We've just begun this process and should be in full swing late summer.  With incoming first years, that means

From the school side, there are few things we recommend for getting the link in front of students to get to the initial 10-20%.

1) Use the FB group. (See instructions here: http://redrover.swiftkick.wikispaces.net/Adoption )

2) Send an email telling the students that this is a Facebook application to help them "Find their people." Find in their dorm, or major who share things in common.

3) Use the student ambassadors to encourage students to sign up before and during the orientation process.

We expect that we will be able to get to 40% of the freshmen class with these methods (much higher % at smaller schools) and 1/4 to 1/2 will actually sign up.

That is enough adoption to make the system fun to use. Then it's a matter of 1) using cell phones for registration and 2) providing real value so students tell other students. (And it goes back to building community and growing adoption over the year.)

So that was a long answer : )

The short version is that we are focused on this question, have a good strategy and will be publishing what we learn.

Because of the design of the system (we see live data from each school and can do benchmark comparisons) we will have 15 different approaches tested shortly. We can see what works best, and immediately tell the other schools what strategies work best. We can even parse the live data by same sized school (so you could compare to UW Madison, for instance).

Unless we've completely missed on the student motivation part, the test and learn with marketing should get us there this summer.

The testing part is free : ) and the potential benefit is huge.

Please let me know your thoughts on this, I know it's a common concern and I would love to discuss it with you.

-----

As we come near to marketing to first year students (we are still working on setting up leaders and groups with most of our schools) this adoption conversation will come front and center.

There are so many technology vendors who will sell a college a "solution" that very few students will use.  The college takes the risk, the vendor gets the money.

While the college's marketing may be part of the problem, usually the root of the problem is a little deeper.  It's the motivation of the school (and the vendor's supplication).  Is the benefit to the student clear to the student?  Does it matter to the student?

Why is it that students like Facebook and use it like crazy but often complain about Blackboard?

Who understands / listens to students better, Facebook or Higher Education Tech Vendors and colleges?  It just seems strange, Facebook provides the service for free.

So we are taking on the adoption risk by offering our software for free and publicizing our approach.  We're partnering with schools, with the intent of listening better. 

 

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.

------

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

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.

APML and Education

A pretty little video:

DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.

At the moment this is a highly fringe technology conversation - solving a problem of only the most involved and finicky mobile networkers.

The idea of data-portability is great - though the current challenge is two fold: you can't get your data out, and if you did, you can't plug it in.

The hope is that all this will change.

We will be adopting OpenID, APML and open social with the 1.1 release of Red Rover coming out in May. We will be doing our part to encourage portability, playing nice, context control, and plug and playing for education.

Plus APML is a pretty cool concept and direction. It's still a chicken and egg problem, if we build the profile for students, they need some place to plug it in, but we have to start somewhere.

I'm very excited to apply attention profiling to education and the relationship / relevancy challenge.

Facebook Scholarship and Academia

With a serious but hip academic posing seriously and hip-ly in front of a monitor I would love to own, showing a Facebook profile some dots and lines (presumably social graphs), the New York Times notes how great Facebook is for research. See the whole article here.

Some interesting tidbits from the article:

"Researchers learned that while people perceive someone who has a high number of friends as popular, attractive and self-confident, people who accumulate “too many” friends (about 800 or more) are seen as insecure."

We've been recommending that schools find the folks with many friends, as they will have the widest social networking sites "reach" with their news feed (assuming they are active and effective with the sites). Perhaps we need to define a good range. More can quickly lead to "too many".

"An important finding, Ms. Ellison said, was that students who reported low satisfaction with life and low self-esteem, and who used Facebook intensively, accumulated a form of social capital linked to what sociologists call “weak ties.” A weak tie is a fellow classmate or someone you meet at a party, not a friend or family member. Weak ties are significant, scholars say, because they are likely to provide people with new perspectives and opportunities that they might not get from close friends and family. “With close friends and family we’ve already shared information,” Ms. Ellison said."

It's this last little quote that sparks thoughts for me. We throw around "Relationship = Influence" as a simple leadership axiom and tend to be looking for ways to increase relationship as a means of increasing engagement and learning. While this is still the policy approach that makes sense (the pervasive problem is not enough relationship), it's interesting to equate the "weak ties" with diversity and new information. This suggests the social programming goal is not more quantity and quality of relationships, but that quantity of the right quality is optimum - where quality is defined by strong enough to pay attention and weak enough to be new.

Great that these ideas are going mainstream. This will reduce the friction within the schools to Red Rover research and assessment.

Timing Matters and Immunity to Viralness

There are three stages to Red Rover setup:

1) School admin sets up groups at school. 2) Student leaders set up their individual groups (summary and tags) 3) Students set themselves up and join groups

Step three is basically the "online orientation" part.

We've been told by a few schools that they plan on including step three as part of their required online orientation process. This solves it pretty quickly.

For the rest, it will be a marketing push. Putting the links where they will be seen, e-mailing it out, getting to the thought leaders on campus and getting them to get their friends . . .

It's the need and desire for "spreading among friends" where the timing of our rollout is frustrating. The timing has made viral spread far more difficult.

Facebook has built up an immunity to viral apps. It's not a complete immunity, but compared to the early days - say the first two weeks where everything was a plague - the body politic of Facebook is far more resistant.

There are three types of spreading on Facebook, personal invite (direct message), assisted invite (app sends it for you) and passive (newsfeed or see it on someone's page). None of these three work as well as they did. Because a) Facebook has changed the interface to limit assisted invites because b) folks are feeling like this:

And those feelings mean that no method of spreading an application from person to person is as easy as it once was.

As a wannabe virus this is annoying. If we had just been earlier, we could have slipped by easily.

With a little bit more vision, and a little less self-ishness, this immunity is a good thing and perfectly normal.

I'm an active Facebook user. I'm sick of invites to silly things. I'm glad Facebook is putting limits - I wish my friends were more discerning with their invites.

Keep out the bad, and let in the good.

Most Facebook applications don't do much. With some notable exceptions, they are trinkets and games. I'm not into that right now.

Neither are the folks above.

Our challenge is to build (and describe) a good application that can navigate the strengthening immune system.

It's a worthy challenge.

I would have preferred an easy one.

Why Walled Gardens are Wrong for College Social Networking

In the Secrets Behind Myspace and Facebook lecture we do a quick introduction to digital identity:

It was easy, when your digital identity was primarily how you represented yourself in chat rooms, to pretend to be anyone you wanted to be. Your digital identity did not have to overlap with your real identity.

Now, with Facebook's (and now "me too" myspace's) helpful upload pics and tag your friends feature it's pretty much impossible to have friends and pretend to be someone you are not. The more friends you have, the more pics they upload, the more really "you" your digital identity will be.

We tell the students there are two main stages. The stage where you can't, and shouldn't trust yourself - we say "you know you are here when you did something stupid last friday and you are pretty sure you are going to do something stupid this friday too." We say, "If you can't trust yourself, hunker down. Keep your digital identity as small as possible. Use privacy. Keep your online friend group small. Avoid pictures."

If, on the other hand, you are at the stage where you can trust yourself, where you are pretty responsible and focused on doing good things, then the opportunity is to let your digital identity fill up with all of this good stuff.

To expand. To network. To see what is beyond your current horizons. To use the power of the tools you have at your finger tips: youtube, linkedin, del.icio.us, facebook, etc. etc. etc. To let your digital identity stretch out across the world and represent you in the best possible setting. To become searchable. To become a node in the network.

We tell stories about students just like them that have landed full time pay for part time jobs doing what they love. Who have done this as sophomores in college using facebook. It's not rocket science, it's networking using the tools.

The opportunity, when the student is ready, is immense:

I believe expansion of self is a responsibility of higher education. The digitalization of self allows for massive expansion. Sure, this can be bad when the identity consists of racially stupid halloween parties. The same tool allows a student to make a national ass of themselves, but that reality should not push the schools into limiting the rest of the students.

The students will be ready at different rates. This is where education comes in - to help the student be ready and know when they are. And when they are ready, they should have the ability to expand as big as possible.

Restricting the students to an online social network run by the school limits the student's ability to expand. This is antithetical to the aims of higher education.

Orchestration: Building Bridges - Academia and Business

Integrated business models are when you do everything yourself.

Orchestration is when you put all the people and pieces together and orchestrate the outcome of their work.

We are pursuing orchestration.

photo: D. Knisely

We are busy trying to orchestrate very diverse pieces of this project.

We have a development team in Uzbekistan. A project manager in San Diego. College students all over the place. Tester in New York. Partners in Chicago. Advisors / Customers in colleges everywhere. Facebook on its own planet. And now we are reaching out to researchers in Academia.

Every one of these parts has its own world, culture, value sets, and etiquette.

An important part of orchestration is getting everyone on the same page. Communication and connection are critical.

That's why language is so important. So is trust.

As the orchestrator, we are at the nexus. Or more accurately, we are at the center and it's up us to pull the pieces/people together so that they have some common overlap. Not long ago we were really excited about this position. We still are, but it's pretty intense yoga - we're doing some stretching to reach everyone. (This stretch, btw, is a huge part of the global, mutli-disciplinary, tech powered, 21st century education thing people keep talking about.)

I'm going to do a few postings about the gaps and their potential bridges. Starting with . . .

Business ------> Academia

The two arenas have different languages and different priorities. While tricky, the language is not as big a stretch as the trust. Academia does not trust capitalism. For profit is a dirty concept to many.

One of the major issues of trust comes from the expectation that capitalists are greedy. That money is the first priority for business, where "education" is the first priority for academia. This last sentiment is not wrong per se, but like most stereotypes, there's just more to it.

It is tricky for us when we talk to researchers and they say "You need a theoretical framework for what you are doing."

We would just prefer to try something and see if it works.

In the academic world of research, theory is step one. The theory is the foundation. Researchers' careers die when they are seen as sloppy or horrendously wrong - when their theories are killed off by other, better, theories. Research death means no theory or reputation.

In the business world (our home base and history) what matters is practice. Many businesses that sounded good (in theory) died in practice for various mistakes that left them with no money. Business death means no money.

Even if Red Rover works great in theory, we are still dead if it doesn't work in practice.

We spend a decent amount of money every month developing (and huge amounts of time, which has a substantial opportunity cost). We know the base code will be free and open source. We hope to recoup our costs by building additional modules of functionality that will be worth something to the schools that use the free core. That's our business model.

While it sounds dramatic, a business that is spending without making is bleeding. Trying to find papers that go back to 1960 to frame the theory of a Facebook app is hard to understand when, in the business mindset, we are bleeding.

Back to orchestration. Academia has its gatekeepers, its values and culture. If we refuse to learn the language (or respect the culture) we are tourists and won't be welcome very long. We deserve the door we will be shown.

So we will be humble, open to learning, and as transparent as possible. Palms up. If we can find the common language - and a cogent theoretical framework is basically our idea said in academic speak - then we can work to build the crucial trust.

So far so good. Bridges are starting to form. We have the (appropriately) cautious interest of a number of folks who have been generous enough to talk about the project.

We will stretch to understand and work within their world. We will make etiquette mistakes and hopefully they will be kind enough to help us correct them.

The exciting thing about orchestration (especially among diverse elements as in this project) is that success means a new community, a new network - new pathways and new possibilities.