Category: Education

Ashes, Ashes, They All Fall Down

Some readers may know that my day job is providing faculty support for our learning management system (a.k.a. an LMS). We had a difficult start to our semester, and it got bad enough to get a little press: Campus Connection: Problems plaguing UW’s online course management system. Naturally students and faculty were extremely (and understandably) frustrated by the problems. That the issues continued for a solid week made matters much worse.

However, I would argue that each and every educational technology will go down at some point. It has happened to most all of the major platforms, regardless of whether the service is hosted on campus or in the cloud.

The moral of the story is that outages tend to happen (especially at the beginning/end of the semester). I don’t mean to make excuses, but rather to encourage instructors to be ready for problems.

  • If you can, start composing your online course before the semester begins.
  • Help your students know what they can do (download materials when they have access, compose postings offline, don’t wait until a deadline to upload assignments)

I think the cloud will become more robust to handle the start-of-semester load in the near future, but for now — prepare!

Has the opportunity passed us by?

A recent piece in The Observer (The real cost of the smartphone revolution) started to get at a very interesting notion — that we’re oblivious to the implications of the information revolution that is going on around us.

Strangely, our problem is not that we are short of data about what’s going on; on the contrary we are awash with the stuff. This is what led Manuel Castells, the great scholar of cyberspace, to describe our current mental state as one of “informed bewilderment”: we have lots of information, but not much of a clue about what it means.

The author then goes on (citing Zittrain) to describe how the power of companies like Apple, Facebook, and network providers have locked hold extraordinary power over the shape and use of this technology.

This might not seem a big deal – after all, it’s just capitalism doing its thing. But what it means is that with every new smartphone subscription we take another tiny but discrete step towards a networked world dominated by powerful corporations that can not only “regulate” the system in their own interests, but also control the speed of technological innovation to a pace that is convenient for them rather than determined by the creativity of hackers and engineers.

I agree with this conclusion, but not the defeatist attitude. The early internet was filled with walled gardens, with networks like AOL and Prodigy, and hardware that was closed to experimentation (hello, Mac Classic). While they realized some success, their more open and standardized counterparts (the Internet and the PC) found much greater success.

The problem of today is that companies like Facebook, Apple, and Google offer such great experiences that it is difficult to envision things any differently. The shortcoming of these experiences, however, is that they have all taken a “one size fits all” approach — if you don’t like the design of any of these tools, you either don’t use them or break the terms of service.

Open source products (like Linux or Diaspora) are taking a long time to evolve, but I believe that over time their flexibility will win people over. Rather than killing off e-mail, people will look to an open standard for social networks to make disparate tools work together. Rather than succumbing to digital locks, the urge to tinker will defeat efforts to keep a curious mind out of the iOS lockbox.

I think innovation depends on it. Hopefully the opportunity has not passed us by.

Twitter is killing its new user base

I am often called upon to do Twitter support at conferences. Explaining non-intuitive concepts like “hash tags” to folks who aren’t digital natives takes a bit of… effort.

I have posted before about how great Twitter is at conferences, and I’ve found that it’s an environment that often brings in these new users.

A year or so ago, Twitter for the web began breaking their search function into two tiers, “top” and “all,” with top being the default. Only seasoned tweeters appear in the Top search.

The result of this decision is that newbie tweeters don’t see their own tweets without clicking the obscure “all” link, and have no way of seeing their tweet on mobile. This causes questions like, “did I submit my tweet,” or “why are my tweets not showing up?”

I am sure that this design helps with server load, but it is a bad decision for building a user base. On the web, first impressions are everything. I have personally seen this initial experience drive some very smart people away from tweeting.

Follow me @fixtobreak

A Journalism degree – it’s all about research

Search Strategies in Mass Communication
A book from a class that was foundational in my academic career

I was fortunate enough to attend a capstone competition for an advertising class here at the J School (which I attend). The outcome of their hard work (as well as that of their instructor and some support staff) was truly remarkable.

It reminded me of something long forgot about a degree in journalism. No matter what the emphasis –news, advertising, PR, or academic– research skills rank high the core skill set. While it may not be academic, market research skills are just as valuable and just as tough to develop.

I am reminded of my own undergrad “search strategies” class, and really made me long for the classroom.

Addendum: OK, it’s not all about research.