Embracing the Hybrid Future of Education

The classroom is changing. Technology is transforming education, blending the old with the new.

The Old

Traditional classrooms have a charm and nostalgia. The social interaction, the structure (physical rows of desks but also the schedule of activities and teacher rules), the chalkboard, that cleaning solution smell. But they also have limitations.

The New

Digital tools—online platforms, virtual classrooms—are breaking barriers. They offer flexibility, accessibility, and personalized learning. They don't provide visceral connections or common classmate experiences.

The Integration

The challenge is combining these effectively. Here’s how:

1. Blended Learning: Mix in-person with online. The best of both worlds.
2. Interactive Platforms: Foster engagement and collaboration beyond the classroom.
3. Personalized Learning: Tailor education to individual needs using adaptive technology.

The Mindset

Change can be daunting, but it’s essential. Educators must be learners too, embracing technology to enhance the human elements of teaching.

The future of education is hybrid. It’s about enhancing the learning experience, making it more engaging, accessible, and effective. Let’s embrace it.

Embracing Change: Thriving in a Dynamic Business Environment

Change is constant and inevitable. In business, embracing change is essential for survival and growth. Change leadership is more about mindset than job titles. Here’s how to thrive amidst change:

Understand Change

• Constant: Businesses that don’t adapt risk obsolescence.
• Multidimensional: Impacts all levels—organizational, team, individual.
• Driven by Multiple Factors: External (market trends, tech) and internal (culture, leadership).

Strategies for Success

1. Foster Continuous Learning: Promote upskilling and reskilling. Encourage lifelong learning.
2. Embrace Technology: Use digital tools to enhance productivity and customer experience.
3. Promote Agility: Adopt flexible methodologies. Respond quickly to changes.
4. Empower Leadership: Encourage initiative at all levels. Foster a culture of ownership.
5. Communicate Effectively: Maintain transparency. Address concerns promptly.

Conclusion

Change brings opportunities for growth and innovation. By understanding and embracing it, businesses can not only survive but thrive. Prepare, adapt, and leverage change for success.

Pros and Cons of Using an AI Text Generator Like ChatGPT

This time I asked ChatGPT to write an article about the pros and cons of using an AI text generator:

Artificial Intelligence (AI) text generators like ChatGPT are becoming increasingly popular in various fields, including content creation, marketing, and customer service. These tools use machine learning algorithms to generate text that mimics human writing. While AI text generators have numerous benefits, they also come with their fair share of drawbacks. In this post, we'll explore the pros and cons of using an AI text generator like ChatGPT.

Pros:

1. Time-Saving: One of the most significant benefits of using an AI text generator is the time-saving factor. Generating high-quality content can be a time-consuming and tedious process. However, with an AI text generator like ChatGPT, you can quickly generate high-quality content in a matter of seconds.

2. Consistency: AI text generators can help maintain consistency in tone and writing style across different pieces of content. This is especially important for businesses that want to maintain a consistent brand voice across their content.

3. Cost-Effective: AI text generators are generally more cost-effective than hiring a professional writer to create content. This is particularly true for small businesses or individuals who may not have the budget to hire a dedicated writer.

4. Scalability: With an AI text generator, you can quickly generate a large volume of content in a short amount of time. This can be particularly beneficial for businesses that need to produce a high volume of content on a regular basis.

Cons:

1. Lack of Creativity: AI text generators lack the creativity and originality that a human writer can bring to the table. While the content generated by AI text generators may be grammatically correct, it may lack the depth and nuance of human-written content.

2. Limited Domain Knowledge: AI text generators may not have the same level of domain knowledge as a human writer. This means that the content generated may lack the depth and specificity that a human writer can provide.

3. Quality Concerns: While AI text generators are becoming more advanced, the quality of the content generated may still be a concern. This is particularly true for more complex or technical writing, where errors or inaccuracies could be problematic.

4. Over-Reliance: There is a risk of becoming over-reliant on AI text generators, which could lead to a lack of human creativity and critical thinking in content creation.

In conclusion, AI text generators like ChatGPT have numerous benefits, including time-saving, consistency, cost-effectiveness, and scalability. However, they also have limitations, including the lack of creativity, limited domain knowledge, quality concerns, and the risk of over-reliance. It's essential to carefully consider the pros and cons before deciding whether to use an AI text generator. Ultimately, the best approach may be to strike a balance between using an AI text generator and human-written content to achieve the best possible outcomes.

AI

As a new semester begins in my business communication class, I wonder where we stand in the world of artificial intelligence. I had a great discussion with some of the other faculty members about how it is important to figure out where to go with AI engines that can write better essays than students can. At what point will students be able to simply input a few facts or even questions and have the technology instantly spit out something that they could hand in and get a better grade than if they took the time to write it themselves.

We briefly discussed the possible copyright or other IP ownership issues of using AI tools. Does ownership go to the person who programmed the AI or to the person who entered some text and hit a button?

Is there a way we can use this technology to improve writing but not completely replace the humans in the process? There has to be.

The two main tools from OpenAI right now ChatGPT for text and Dall-E 2 for images.

Ignoring it and hoping it won't go away is not really an option, but how can we use these tools to our advantage and not to the detriment of students? At the end of the day, they're just tools.

Great Teachers

I've been thinking recently about some of the great teachers my children have had. There have been many. There was the kind elementary teacher who would play guitar and sing with the kids and bring her dog in to visit as a reward. There was the history teacher who regularly traveled with the kids to a national history competition or the science teacher who did the same for a large science event. There's the band and orchestra teachers who share their love of music with a new generation of musicians. There is the English teacher who stepped up to make a school musical happen when no one else would. There's the one who runs the birding club.

Then there's our school system that has been traditionally built around core subjects that are not as relevant as might think they would be, given the emphasis placed on them. There is the push for measurements and accountability of teaching, learning, school quality, etc. This push at times results in an educational industrial complex where large centralized assessment companies sell their assessment services to school districts to help them measure student performance and then at the same time they also sell the key in the form of study materials that make it easy for teachers to teach to the test and give students the ability to perform well on the matching assessments.

Then there's the COVID-19 pandemic which has forced a harder look at what is or isn't important, what can be cancelled, what can be postponed, what should still go on, and so on. The big question is whether we will take advantage of the pandemic to undo the maddening assessment culture we have built and focus on what is really important. Universities need easy ways of measuring who to give scholarships to (GPA and ACT/SAT scores), but they have been willing to bend the rules and find other ways to reward students who were not able to take standardizes tests due to the pandemic.

What if we stopped focusing so much on some of the mostly irrelevant topics like calculus (relevant to engineers but not many others) and pushed more for creativity and travel and experiences and useful projects and actual skills? What if we pushed to teach our kids languages, cultures, how to serve others, and be generally good people? At some point there can and should be exposure to some topics that may spark a desire to go on and become a great scientist or mathematician, without forcing those who don't need those skills to waste time focusing on something they will quickly forget anyway.

What if we explored nature and performed music and built things?

New Normal

As the year 2020 hurdles along, I am reminded of what I thought was such a funny joke at a New Year's Eve party - something along the lines of where do you see yourself in a year and the punchline about not having 2020 vision. I don't think any one of us foresaw any, let alone all of this, from an impeachment to massive conspiracy theories in the political realm, the COVID19 pandemic and all the businesses/sports/schools being shut down with it, famous people dying (Alex Trebek, Eddie Van Halen, Sean Connery, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Regis Philbin, Kobe Bryant, and countless others), California and Australia fires, the monolith appearing and then disappearing in the Utah desert, racial unrest and riots, murder hornets, and who knows what remains with a month left.

How many of those things do we recover from? Celebrities die every year. There are always wildfires. People get sick. Social media is always on the lookout for the next big cultural talking point.

More importantly, how do we work together to build a new normal? Is it possible to come together like we did in the early days of the pandemic, before it seemingly permanently divided us? I hope we can roll into 2021 with a determination to keep the things that unify us and make us happy and healthy and leave behind the divisiveness and bickering. I see flashes of brilliance in between all the crazy, and I'm hopeful that this Christmas season can be an early start.

Conscious Capitalism

Why capitalism needs to evolve:

Capitalism has improved income, quality of life, literacy, and lifespan, but most people don't trust businesses. The invisible hand of Adam Smith has worked to increased income for many people through the industrial revolution and other changes and improvements, but the idea of shareholder maximization has had the opposite effect of decreasing efficiency and productivity.

John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods pushes back against Milton Friedman's assertion that businesses should only be looking out for maximizing returns for their shareholders. Whole foods considers a range of stakeholders that should benefit from a company's existence - customers, employees, suppliers, investors, vendors, communities, and the environment.

Mackey discusses what a common answer would be to the question about the purpose of business. The first answer is always to make money. At the same time, a doctor who is very well paid will not say healthcare's purpose is to make money. It is to help people become healthy. Of course, a hospital or doctor's office is still a business and one that shuffles a lot of money through it, but there is still an overarching purpose beyond just the money itself.

He argues that legacy companies with a different mindset will have to evolve or else they will be replaced by start-ups to have a conscious capitalism approach.

What is conscious capitalism?

The metaphor is given of a caterpillar who simply consumes as much as possible, adding no value. Eventually nature takes its course and the metamorphosis to a butterfly results in a creature of light and beauty that gives back as much as it takes.

The four tenets are higher purpose (why), stakeholder integration (what), conscious culture (how), and conscious leadership (who).

Conscious capitalism goes beyond corporate social responsibility, which only mitigates some potential negative impacts without significantly building beyond that. Other concepts such as sustainability, triple bottom line, and shared value capitalism likewise do not go far enough in terms of who can benefit from the company and how.

Raj Sisodia presents conscious capitalism as a philosphy of doing business rather than a business strategy or business model. Such a philosophy will create value rather than extract value, leading to a Win-Win, rather than a Zero-Sum result. The key is patience. Such a metamorphosis cannot happen overnight, and there will be failures along the way. Companies trying to practice conscious capitalism may fail, but that does not mean it wasn't a good idea. It just means they need to keep trying.

Just like a doctor or hospital is still a business but working towards a greater purpose of improving health, really any non-profit is at the end of the day a business. The local humane society can't fulfill its mission of taking care of pets if they don't have the money from adoption fees or donations. The thrift store can't keep the lights on if no one donates their used items. Individual owners and employees can still be paid decently personally while the organization gives back to society.

The CC Credo:

We believe that:

Business is good, because it creates value.

It is ethical, because it is based on voluntary exchange.

It is noble, because it can elevate our existence.

It is heroic, because it lifts people out of poverty and creates prosperity.

Local News

Over a decade ago, my old hometown paper was downsizing, but my new hometown paper seemed to be doing okay. Over the past several years, my small town has apparently caught up with the big town trends.

The local paper has been struggling for years, going from 7 day delivery to 6 day delivery for subscribers and a minimal ad-filled paper on the seventh day for non-subscribers (TMC or Total Market Coverage was the product).

My kids delivered papers, up to three routes at once at times, but the TMC products which they had been getting paid for eventually just sort of stopped showing up at our house. At one point, one route wasn't getting it at all and the other was getting twice as much as we needed.

Then they moved to ditching Sunday for a big Saturday paper, so down to 5 delivery days per week.

Near the end of that, they did a big push for the Saturday-only subscription - a one day paper that was fairly inexpensive. A couple months later, they got rid of the one day subscription, so bumped everyone who had subscribed to it up to a regular subscription. Bait and switch.

Now they are delivering three days per week, through the mail. They claim there have been issues with finding enough carriers due to low unemployment. I think they lost good carriers due to a reduction in a quality newspaper and issues with getting them out on time to the carriers (which I suppose could be back to a low unemployment thing).

It's not a good day to be in the newspaper business. I don't have the solution for it. I'm a fan of the local interest story. I like community traditions and letters to the editor from local crazies. It used to be you paid for something that was scarce, because someone had to produce and deliver it to you. Now there is no physical production, and distribution is free electronically, so how do you still make enough money to create something no one is willing to pay for?

More and more of what is delivered to us electronically is in the hands of just a few massive media conglomerates, meaning the independent voice is being stifled. I have a feeling those free stories are being sold by someone who has something more than a nice story to tell.

Tragedy of the Common Carrier

The Tragedy of the Commons is a well-known example in economics of how a common or public resource can be destroyed through over-use.

Adam Smith's famous Invisible Hand worked differently as he applied it to privately owned resources. Take the richest person you can find, and their wealth and resources are distributed to the poor due to the fact that the rich person will hire others to help take care of the estate. They can't possibly consume everything they own or create, and they can't take care of it either. Hiring someone poorer than them helps to maintain or grow the estate, while benefiting others at the same time. This is in some way the basis for Trickle-down Economics.

A commons, however, is a public space, with no majordomo to place limitations on its use. The tragedy comes in when this public resource is overused to the point that it becomes useless. Normally individuals acting in their own self-interest will provide a net benefit to society through their actions. The problem is that public lands can be overgrazed, roads can be shut down by gridlock, and a once-beautiful park can be spoiled by trash.

The stock market has the potential to be destroyed by those large players who manipulate it in a variety of ways.

I think our phone system has all but passed this point. Between mobile phones, the Internet, and scam calls, something major needs to happen to fix the problems that our common carrier phone system is faced with. There used to be natural limitations on abuses of the phone system, long distance calling rates being one of the biggest. There is no security system in place with our phones, as they were built as a commons, to allow anyone to call anyone if you had their number (and these were published). With the advent of free calling via VoIP, the minimal cost gatekeeper is gone, and untraceable nuisance phone calls flourish. Scammers are riding a dying wave, as fewer and fewer people have a landline anymore, and fewer people answer phone calls that they aren't expecting. There are still a few people left to scam, so they continue trying, and as they do, they hammer their own coffin even tighter.

With many messaging and voice apps available, we still have options to communicate within private systems. This requires that everyone maintains multiple accounts, in order to have the ability to talk with different groups. Those under Apple's spell are locked into their communication tools, yet there are many other providers. Facebook had gotten too big and has taken a stumble because it got away from its original mission and sold out to scammers and advertisers, so alternatives arise. It is a pain to deal with so many protocols and username/password combos, but the pain and cost is what puts up just enough of a wall to keep tragedy at bay.

Genisys

This type of thing happens all too often. You're talking about something random, let's say your favorite pieces from a bag of Chex Mix. You don't type anything into a search engine about it. You're not using your desktop computer or mobile phone at the time. You haven't purchased any from the store or Amazon or looked up any Chex Mix recipes recently. You just briefly talk about it for a minute and then the conversation changes.

The next day, you open up Facebook, and the following ad appears:

That is an actual screenshot I took when this happened to me. The strangest thing about this is that I don't have the Facebook app on my phone. I access it through my web browser, which means Facebook can't be constantly listening in to me. My wife and daughter do have the Facebook app. So if it was listening on one of their phones, it made the connection to show the ad to me.

Genisys in the title above is a reference to Terminator Genisys, which I just watched so is fresh on my mind. It is interesting how the time travelers are blown away by everyone's obsession with their mobile devices. And [spoiler alert] the artificial intelligence network which was a missile defense system in the initial movies ended up being a social media cloud system in this movie reboot. It was honestly more of a MacGuffin than an important plot point, other maybe when the security guard was looking at his phone instead of the surveillance cameras. Of course 2 or 3 decades ago people were concerned with Soviet missiles, while now social media is the big thing.

Is it a big leap from your phone showing you ads for Chex Mix to robots controlled by social media and destroying mankind? Maybe. But next time you're out in public, look around at who's being controlled by their phones.

Career Day at the Middle School

My sixth grader, Landon, had a career day in one of his classes recently. He could either interview someone about their job and write up a report about it or a certain number of people could invite someone to discuss their career in the classroom. He opted for inviting me to talk instead of him having to write a report. Smart. The following are my notes that I prepared. The asterisks are where I was asking a question and would throw out a piece of candy to anyone who would answer. Two or three kids raised their hand for my first question. As soon as they saw the candy flying across the room, 90% of the kids raised their hand for every question.

How many of you know what you want to be doing 20 years from now? What? *

How many don't know?

That's okay. About 20 years ago, I remember a professor telling me that many of us would have jobs doing things in 20 years that didn't exist at that time. How awesome is that to know that some of you will be doing things that don't exist today?

20 years ago I did have an email address, but most people I knew who weren't university students didn't. At the time, only a few people had cell phones. If I needed my parents to come pick me up from somewhere, how do you think I let them know? * I'd use a payphone, and if you didn't have a few coins to put in to make the call you called collect which meant that the person you were calling would agree to pay a ridiculous amount of money to accept your call, and it would record your name, and then ask the person if they were willing to take the call. So if you were a fast talker you could just say something like comegetmefromschool, and then it would call and your mom would hear "Will you accept a collect call from 'comegetmefromschool'" and then she would hang up and come get you. That was the old school method of voice texting. You all think that's so new, but it's been around for a while.

So now I work for WGU. Anyone want to guess what that stands for? * Western Governors University. I teach college courses in business, technology, and project management. The school is completely online, and it did not exist 20 years ago. I have students all over the country and even in some other countries. I work from my office in my basement. Are you guys pretty busy outside of school? Do you ever have things that keep you from getting your homework done or that you'd rather be doing instead of coming to class? What? * WGU was designed to help adults who are working full time to get their bachelor's or master's degrees on their own schedule. So instead of having to come to a class at a certain time, you just slip in your studying wherever you can on your lunch break, on the train, waiting to pick their kids up from soccer practice, or late at night after the kids go to bed.

In order to teach in college, I earned three degrees. If any of you want to follow in those footsteps, you probably have another 15 or 16 years of school ahead of you. I know some people who just did degree after degree straight through, but I stopped and worked for a while in between each, which I liked because it gave me some more real world perspective instead of only knowing what we talked about in the classroom. I worked for a manufacturing company that was spread across three different states, did quality assurance testing at a company that made videoconferencing equipment, managed the database of alumni and donors at USU, and then moved into teaching. One of my favorite jobs was doing quality testing. Why do you think that is? * Because I got to be creative and try to find ways to break things and tell other people to fix what I broke.

What are your favorite classes? Why? * One of the things I like to talk about when I teach is how the things we discuss can be used in real life. A fun thing to do is ask your teacher how you would use what they are teaching you in real life. They really like it.

One of the things I teach is project management. Who knows what project management is? * One concept is the difference between operations and projects. Logan High is a good example - from an operations perspective, they have people who teach classes, play sports, clean the bathrooms, and that kind of thing. Every year, the same thing. But what's been going on at Logan High these past couple years? * Construction. That is a temporary situation, which means it's a project. It has a beginning and end with a transformation taking place in between.

Because projects have limited resources and need to achieve a specific result, a project manager helps define what they call the triple constraints - money, schedule, and scope. If you increase or decrease any of those three, it affects the others. If you try to do something faster, what happens? * It probably costs more money. What if you increase what you are trying to do during the project? * It will probably take more money and time. And if you are running out of money, how do you deal with that? * You have to reduce what you expect to accomplish.

With limited resources, it's important to use those resources efficiently. Landon and I were cooking dinner on Sunday. We made biscuits and gravy. You should have him make some for you sometime. One of the things we made sure to do was manage our critical path. It took about 15 minutes for the meat and gravy to cook. It took about 5 minutes to mix up the biscuits and 20 minutes for them to bake. Overall, how long is that? * 15+5+20 = 40 minutes. Well, instead of doing the gravy first and then having it sit there for 20 minutes and get cold or burn, we made the biscuits first. Why? * So we mixed up the biscuits for 5 minutes and put them in the oven for 20 minutes. During those 20 minutes, we made the meat and gravy. We did the same amount of work, but by managing the schedule efficiently, we got dinner done in 25 minutes instead of 40 and everything was hot at the same time. Now imagine a 3 year project to rebuild Logan High School taking 2 years or 4 years because of good or bad management of the schedule. That's where having a good plan and a good project manager comes in. The PM takes a large project and breaks it up into small pieces, schedules all those pieces at the best possible times, and then helps the team stick to the plan until the project is over.

Three Sides to Every Story

On Friday, President Obama announced new fuel economy standards that will be worked towards over the next 15 years.

Shortly thereafter, the obviously politically neutral folks at impeachobamacampaign.com posted about how these new fuel economy standards will result in death. Simply put, cars must be lighter in order to attain higher fuel economy, but people in light cars are more likely to die when they collide with heavy vehicles.

Just two days earlier, the even more politically neutral folks at freakonomics.com posted a similar story, but unless they had some White House connections (which is possible) was unprovoked by Obama's announcement of higher standards. Their line is that heavier cars cause more deaths.

What's interesting is that the two stories are saying both the same thing yet opposite things at the same time. One claims that lighter cars result in more deaths, while the other claims that heavier cars result in more deaths. The difference is in which car they're talking about. If car A is heavier and collides with car B, car B's occupants are more likely to die. If car B is lighter and collides with car A, car B's occupants are more likely to die. What I take from this is that it's the difference between the two that counts. The relatively lighter car will always fare worse.

So if over the next couple decades, most cars get smaller, there would not likely be a large increase in deaths, because everything would get smaller at about the same rate. Some of the behemoths currently on the road will still be out there, true, but you're not going to last long driving a 20 year old SUV pulling in 12 mpg when everyone else is getting 50+ mpg.

So there's two sides to the same statistical story, but what's the third side? My side is the third side. I question whether we'll even be thinking in mpg in 15-20 years. Between CNG, electricity, Mr Fusion, methane, solar, hydrogen, etc. there are so many alternative energy sources poised to take the place of the archaic gasoline that you'd have to hope something else will have matured enough by then to take its place. At the very least, we'll see more hybrid or bi-fuel vehicles that either automatically or manually switch between gasoline and the alternative power source.

Then what if there's an alternative power source that is so cheap and powerful it allows for heavy vehicles? Add to that computers and sensors that detect imminent crashes and stop you before they happen, and it won't matter the size of your vehicle, since we won't crash into each other anyway. Perhaps cars will be driven by Google so we can just rest in our sleep pods while Google optimizes our travel for us.

Maybe 2025 is too soon to expect an accident-free, emissions-free future. After all, I'm pretty sure Back to the Future's vision of hovercars and home energy reactors won't be reality by 2015 even though they've had 30 years to work on them. But we can dream. Maybe we'll see Obama channel JFK's speech from almost 50 years ago about going to the moon and rally the country around a monumental transportation goal, ironically just after he dismantles NASA.

We'll see where the big dreams take us, but with all the fantastic possibilities my mind can dream up, 50 mpg doesn't seem like that big of a deal, even if it requires a little extra technology to keep us from crashing into each other so much.

No More Books

It's interesting how an initiative touted by one group as being a revolutionary improvement will often be seen as counterproductive or ineffective by another group.

At a recent faculty meeting, where discussion of a new writing center was taking place, I was witness to such an example. One faculty member pointed out that as important as it is to help students improve their writing, which the writing center is intended to do, there is unfortunately something else that has the potential to hurt our students even more.

What's the insidious plague about to be unleashed on our students' writing skills? It is an initiative aimed at reducing the amount they have to read. If we require them to read less, it will have direct impact on their ability to write. Well, of course, the matchup between reading and writing seems pretty obvious, but why would anyone propose to dramatically reduce student reading?

It turns out the faculty member misunderstood the initiative. The proposal is to create integrated learning environments where students can access multimedia, direct themselves to activities based on formative quizzes, oh yeah, and read. His understanding was that the multimedia and pretty websites were going to replace books.

While it's true that the goal is to move away from traditional printed textbooks, the same text from the publishers is going to be integrated in an electronic form with the bells and whistles that improve student engagement and track progress in ways that a plain old book could never do. I know a lot of publishers create companion websites where students can access some bonus materials, but they're not integrated with the text. Bringing them together in one place reduces the extraneous cognitive load associated with having the text and bonus features in completely separate mediums, giving them more time and mental capacity to devote to their reading.

Wireless Electricity

How soon will this be available for my Wii remotes?

Collaborative Filtering and Web 2.0 Technologies

Filtering Methods

Collaborative filtering systems connect a person's needs with content based on ratings by others with similar interests and needs. Depending on the system, filtering may be based on human or machine analysis of content or a hybrid approach (Herlocker, Konstan, & Riedl, 2000). An example of the hybrid approach is Google Images, which uses a machine analysis of file names and text content in the page around images in combination with its Image Labeler. The Image Labeler is a game of sorts where users accumulate points for matching key words with a randomly selected partner, with more points awarded for providing more specific terms. The two sets of data are combined and then used in searching (Google, 2009).

Doctorow (2001) claims that observational metadata by a machine is more reliable than that created by humans, listing several obstacles to dependable human-created metadata including people's inability to fully report their own behavior and the ambiguities and non-neutral nature of many measurement and reporting techniques. Avery & Zeckhauser (1997) suggest that some incentive to evaluate content is necessary to avoid issues where the majority of users wait for others to evaluate content for them.

Some of the problems with the lack of human-created metadata may be due to the types of tools available to catalog resources. As I've mentioned before, the complex metadata standards like LOM were designed by engineers and just take too much time to implement; however, with the advent of many Web 2.0 tools there is an abundance of tagged resources and RSS feeds that easily work together. However, an abundance of tags does not necessarily solve problems without causing new ones. Tagging with a common or ambiguous word may cause unrelated content to be displayed together, and spammers may mark their garbage such that it displays alongside legitimate content (Walker, 2005). A closed community might help keep these ambiguities under control, but restrictions would likely lead to lower participation.

Communities

Communities use social interaction to combine existing knowledge with new knowledge to meet their needs. One piece of content may mean different things, based on the context in which it is used (Burnett, Dickey, Kazmer, & Chudoba, 2003). The question is how to make open tools like Del.icio.us, Twitter, and Flickr work to facilitate individual communities without blending them all together or limiting access. It may be ideal to build or expand collaborative filtering capabilities that work in conjunction with manual tagging and machine analysis of content. In order to be successful, such a collaborative filter should filter out irrelevant information and provide a means for community members to access relevant information at the appropriate time, based on the behavior of others in the community (Walker, 2002).

De Souza & Preece (2004) point out two components by which an online community can be assessed: sociability and usability. The sociability component applies to any community, whether online or offline and includes the people, purposes, and policies involved. The usability component focuses on the technical and HCI issues of the software used. In their framework, these two components have to be aligned to produce success. Web 2.0 tools do well in terms of usability, based on the large numbers of people blogging, tagging, editing wikis, and otherwise collaborating. In terms of sociability, there is still work to do. It is easy to set up whitelists of content producers or tags once you know about them, but finding that content to begin with is difficult to do.

Web 2.0 Technologies

Walker (2005) lists Flickr tags that are related to the tag "bush" including: protest, election, politics, kerry, president, graffiti, snow, war, vote, iraq, tree, winter, cameraphone, cheney, and antibush. These associations among terms are then described as "sheep paths in the mountains" that have just formed over time, with no systematic approach. Over the past few years, clusters and pools of related content have made it a little easier to find what one is looking for. Now when searching for that same term, instead of just listing a few related tags, Flickr will prompt the user to see the clusters of related tags such as bush/green/nature/tree or bush/protest/war/iraq. These clusters help bring the sociability level of Flickr up towards its usability level which has been high for awhile now, however they are still based on manual tagging of content.

So one tool has begun to work on becoming a little bit more community-friendly, but how are the rest doing? Digg does well at quickly floating news stories in and out of the spotlight, based on their popularity within certain categories, but it is done by manual voting and categorization. Youtube videos can be associated with channels, contests, groups, categories, and tags, in addition to being rated by viewers. Videos can also be prioritized based on the number of overall views, but not by views of those similar to the user, which would be ideal. Wikipedia allows users to collaborate on documents and hold behind-the-page discussions before doing so, but in order to find a page that might be interesting to the user, a text-based search engine is used. Wordpress and Blogspot seem to follow the same pattern as these other popular tools, using RSS and tagging and linking, but not following a truly dynamic model that builds rules based on behavior and interests rather than cataloging by humans. Much of the human-generated data is good data, but it is simply not enough to narrow down the results by removing false positives. Combining with observational data and machine-generated contextual data will help triangulate the most accurate results for each individual user. Twitter and third party tools built on its API may be the closest to success with its ability to bring together both spontaneous and organized groups of people in real time for any given event.

Good Examples

For an example of non Web 2.0 collaborative filtering, we can look to TiVo (Ali & van Stam, 2004). TiVo still depends on users give shows they watch a thumbs up or thumbs down rating, but it has a few additional features most current Web 2.0 tools do not. It recommends shows the user might like, based on other shows they have watched and rated using correlated pairs of shows. It can also predict a "thumbs level" for unrated shows based on other characteristics.

For another example, Google tracks the searches and site visits of users that are logged into Google while they surf. Users can view statistics on their surfing habits and receive recommendations from Google for searches, web pages, videos, and gadgets the user might like based on the user's searches.

What's Next?

So if Google and TiVo can utilize a combination of factors to pinpoint content that would be appropriate for a user's general searching or entertainment needs, how do we harness those algorithms to extend the widely available Web 2.0 tools so they are more effective in the classroom or in business environments? Setting up a closed system is an option, but as mentioned above, a more open system should encourage more participation. With several of the tools such as wikis and blogs designed for teamwork and collaboration, it seems that the most useful collaborative filters would be those that perform well with newly created, unrated content that is identified by RSS feeds and then quickly react to the actions of users.

I'm not really sure how all these pieces ultimately fit together, but I am interested in further study on the topic. As I have been reading about virtual communities and open content lately and using several of these Web 2.0 tools for various projects, I am drawn to the power that is given to the masses to create content and influence politics, education, and many more aspects of our lives that were not open before. Traditional newspapers have new competition. There are free alternatives to the content traditionally provided by textbook publishers.

With my background in business, I believe that a reasonable amount of competition can be a very good thing. Enabling teams to more efficiently communicate with each other prevents duplication of effort and miscommunications within the group, as well as allowing the group to meet synchronously or asynchronously as schedules allow. Collaborative filtering seems to be an important next step in enabling virtual communities to better utilize the resources currently available to them. The tools for generating new content within a well-known context seem to be well developed, but an essential component of successful teamwork is better organization and dissemination of content and culture that already exist in order to maintain order when certain dynamics of the group change.


REFERENCES

Ali, K., & van Stam, W. (2004) TiVo: Making show recommendations using a distributed collaborative filtering architecture. Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data mining.

Avery, C. & Zeckhauser, R. (1997). Recommender systems for evaluating computer messages. Communications of the ACM, 40(3).

Burnett, G., Dickey, M.H., Kazmer, M.M. & Chudoba, K.M. (2003) Inscription and interpretation of text: A cultural hermeneutic examination of virtual community. Information Research, 9(4).

de Souza, C. S., & Preece, J. (2004). A framework for analyzing and understanding online communities. Interacting with Computers, 16(3), 579-610.

Doctorow, C. (2001) Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia. Retrieved from http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm.

Google (2009). Google Image Labeler. Retrieved from http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/.

Herlocker, J., Konstan, J., & Riedl, J. (2000). Explaining collaborative filtering recommendations. Proceedings of the 2000 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work.

Walker, A. (2002). An educational recommender system: New territory for collaborative filtering (Doctoral Dissertation, Utah State University).

Walker, J. (2005). Feral hypertext: When hypertext literature escapes control. Proceedings of the 2005 ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, 46-53.

Politics

I sometimes feel like Don Walsh in The Chromium Fence. The political issue in this story is not as relevant as the politics themselves. Politics do not seem to ever change, as the issues at stake ebb and flow - peace, energy, hygiene, arts, education, religion, economy, healthcare, recreation, immigration, transportation, morality, etc. We move up and down Maslow's hierarchy of needs, but no matter our level, there are two opposing points to argue.

As Don refuses to take sides in the political battle taking place because of the extreme nature of the two positions, his counselor points out,

You see, Don, you have a psychological inability to come to grips with an issue. You don't want to commit yourself for fear you'll lose your freedom and individuality. You're sort of an intellectual virgin; you want to stay pure. ... You've got to make a decision. You've got to resolve this conflict and act. You can't remain a spectator. ... You haven't quite got to the point of facing reality. But you will.

I find myself asking what's so wrong about Don's position, probably because I straddle the fence on some issues myself and refuse to register with either of the major political parties. I believe both have strayed far from what their founders intended and that neither is as concerned with the issues their polemicists debate as they are concerned with maintaining the status quo, that is, their own power.

So am I maintaining my integrity as Don asserted he was doing or am I separating myself from society by registering with a minor political party? Am I, in effect, ripping up my vote and allowing myself to be disposed of just to make a statement?

I maintain my own beliefs about the issues, and it is only by apathetically restraining from making a choice between the two equally but oppositely distorted views of reality that an actual choice is made. In voting one way or the other, my vote is truly thrown away, because in this world of artificial dichotomies, one vote does not make a difference. Every vote for a third party, however, lends credence to the claims of third parties, gradually increasing support and funding until they hold enough sway to start influencing the actions of the major parties. There will actually be another option to replace them if they don't temper their extreme beliefs and learn to compromise.

One day, we'll have the opportunity to choose among instead of simply choosing between in our elections. That is worth sacrificing for.

New Way to Cheat

We had another person this week open up a website in full view of our test proctors to look up the answer to a question on the web-based test they were taking. Really? You're taking a test. Of all the ingenious ways one could think of to cheat, that's what you come up with? Of course, the really novel ways to cheat on our tests probably take more energy and time to pull off than just taking the tests, so it's not worth it.

An interesting company, Microvision, looks to have some cool laser-based projection technology that may make it easier to cheat in certain situations. Of course, there are many appropriate applications of their technology, but as with anything, there will be inappropriate uses as well.

A pair of glasses that can show video to the wearer could be used for many things, per their website, such as giving a speech, reading email, watching movies, viewing schematics while performing repairs, and more. Hook it up with a GPS and you can see a friend or acquaintance coming from several blocks away or follow directions to a restaurant. Or cheat during a test.

Of course, the cool products they have displayed on their website are much more interesting to me than facilitating bad behavior. The PDA-sized projector is pretty cool. The Heads Up Display (HUD) for cars will surely be common soon, so you can follow directions reflected off your windshield instead of having to look down to the nav screen mounted in the dash.

Hopefully professors and other teachers will embrace new technology and encourage students to use it for good purposes rather than be scared of it and ban it or (even worse) ignore it. Those who teach will have to adapt and choose different assessment methods that are not quite so prone to cheating as multiple choice tests. On second thought, that would require change - we'd better start thinking of something else.

Oh baby, that's a nice pen!

In about a week, a new product should hitting the virtual shelves. It has the potential to really hit it big. What is it? A pen. Specifically, the Livescribe. In addition to being a pen, it's also a computer, with an open platform to develop applications. We've all heard of products that are supposed to change the world. The difference with this particular device is that it's not supposed to change the world, and that is the exact reason that it might. Let me digress for a moment, then I'll come back to the pen, and hopefully that last sentence of mine will make more sense.

Think back a few years ago when Dean Kamen released the Segway. It is a transportation device that was heralded by some as having the potential to change the way that cities are built. Everyone in the world would want one. It would solve traffic problems, encourage walkable communities, clean up the air, etc. Fast forward about six years, and you'll maybe see an airport cop patrolling the terminal on one. A few mailmen deliver on them. There are specialty tours where you can see the city on a Segway. There are also arguments about whether the Segway should be allowed on the sidewalks since it could knock over pedestrians, but cars don't want to share the road with them either. Why isn't the Segway catching on, even though it's a wicked cool device? It requires us to change or adapt the way we do things in order to use it. It's neither a pedestrian device nor a vehicle. There's nowhere to park it. It takes about 5 hours to fully recharge after driving a maximum range of about 10 miles. It's too different, yet does not provide much benefit over a standard bicycle, other than being easier to make it up hills and harder to throw on the rack on the front of the bus.

My daughter got a doll for Christmas. (I'm still digressing, and I'm still planning on coming back to the pen.) This doll was supposed to be different than the dog my other daughter got for Christmas the year before. It's not. Both the doll and the dog are voice-activated. You talk to the dog and it does tricks or plays with a chew rope or eats a bone. You teach it to howl and shake. Well, when it understands what you say anyway, you can do all that stuff. It has to be perfectly quiet in the room, which doesn't happen much with four kids running around the house. It can't hear you if its moving or talking. You can only tell it commands that have been preprogrammed. You have to talk clearly. With high end voice recognition software like Dragon Naturally Speaking, there is a training period where it learns your voice, but it also trains you to speak more clearly. With this doll and dog, there's no training. It either understands you or it doesn't. I don't know how the experience with the dog didn't make it obvious that the doll wouldn't be a good buy either, but nevertheless it made its way to our house in Santa's bag. She plays counting games. She cries, and you have to ask her what she needs. You can feed her and make her go to sleep. Well, when it understands what you say anyway, you can do all that stuff. A good toy lets you do whatever you want with it. These voice-activated toys that don't understand what you want them to do just cause frustration, because you can only play with them how they were programmed to let you play with them.

What did all that have to do with the Livescribe? Well, it's a pen. It writes - whatever you want to write, in your own handwriting, as fast or as slow as your hand moves, just the same as any pen or pencil you've grown up with. You don't have to change or learn anything new. We've been writing so long that it would be hard to learn to write in another way. Just like the Qwerty vs. Dvorak keyboards - Dvorak is more efficient, but you have to relearn how to type, so we perpetuate Qwerty. So Livescribe simply lets you write, and while you write you can have it record audio. Later, when reviewing your notes, you can click on a word and play back the audio it recorded while you were writing that word. You can upload your notes to your computer and email them to your friends or search for certain words that you wrote down. So you still take notes the way you always have, but you now have recorded the audio that went with it. Cognitive load is decreased, because you don't have to worry about transcribing every word if you missed something. If you record a lecture using a regular mp3 voice recorder or tape recorder and you want to find the part where your professor explained a certain concept, you're going to be fast forwarding and rewinding, trying to find it. With Livescribe, you click on the word in your notes and hear the professor's voice defining it for you. Think of the uses: business meetings, field reporters, servers in a restaurant, professors grading student essays, etc.

In addition to being able to synchronize handwritten notes with recorded audio and easily share both with others, the Livescribe is an open platform, which will allow anyone to develop new applications to use the Livescribe. So really, the uses are endless and there will be little or no training required to use it. You just click record and start writing. Then you click play and point to the word where you want it to start playback from. It costs less than many iPods or cell phones, at about $200. You don't have to do anything different from what you might normally do, but you get the benefit of multiple technologies working together.

I hope it lives up to all the possibilities. The company is run by a team of experts who have collectively worked at such big names as Apple, BEA, Leapfrog, IBM, HP, Palm, GE, CNET, Chevron, and Lexar. If anyone can do it, hopefully these guys can.

Do No Evil

I recently discovered Cory Doctorow. Apparently he's pretty well known. I had never heard of him until I stumbled upon some of his writings in searching for articles related to a paper I was writing. Of course, I ended up reading a bunch of his stuff instead of what I needed for my paper.

He has a fun story called Scroogled where he pictures a world in which Google turns evil.

I haven't gotten to it yet, but I'm looking forward to reading his When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth, when I get a minute.

Time Keeps on Slippin Slippin Slippin

As I look into the future of higher education and the impact of the OER movement, I read OpenCourseWars again, having read it a couple times recently. A problem of this particular fictitious history, which simply requires some amount of suspension of disbelief, is the short amount of time in which the story takes place. It seems unlikely that any major changes in higher education generally could occur in a 7 year span, especially given several court cases and multiple levels of appeals, which themselves probably take most of that time. Then there's the part where Google becomes evil, but I digress, as that is not really the point of the story. What's important is the discussion of the problems with the CC-NC clause, license compatibility issues between GFDL and CC, and the explosion of the sharing culture.

My first prediction is that we will have compatible versions of the GFDL and CC licenses by 2010, although concessions will have to be made on both sides, and they will not be fully compatible. There will be certain versions of both that play together. Some people will care and use the license-exchange option, and some will continue not to care and mix them anyway.

My second prediction is that as new collaboration and communication tools are created and distributed over the next 10-15 years, more virtual schools like WGU will pop up, and the jucos, tech schools, and for-profit institutions will embrace collaborative education methods. Broadband access will finally become universal and inexpensive after a narrow vote in Congress funds a major investment in infrastructure, as lobbied for by Google. The two major options will be wireless and powerline networking. With increased access a whole new market of potential nontraditional students will open up. With the lower-tier schools enabling and empowering their students, the research universities will have no choice but to adjust their practices to remain competitive. The top-tier schools will be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the collaborative age and then will immediately turn around and congratulate themselves on their innovative practices (like how the cellphone companies fought against phone number portability, but now tout it as a great feature since they were forced to implement it).

My third prediction (a subset of number two) is that the textbook industry will go away as we know it. As Wikipedia and its sister projects continue to grow, the younger professors, who are adept at Web 2.0 tools and who resent their professors that forced them to spend $1,000 per semester on out of date textbooks, will stop requiring textbooks for their courses. It will be a slow process, and some form of printed textbook will always be around, but the demand will eventually diminish.

My fourth prediction (also more details on number two) is that these young professors will adopt new teaching methods that leverage student and alumni knowledge and information-gathering skills to develop their lesson plans, giving them more time to complete their research. That won't last long, though, as many faculty positions will become 12-month, rather than 9-month appointments to deal with the increasing numbers of students and their tendency to take classes year-round, since many classes can be done from any location.

My fifth prediction is that my children will not remember a time when you had to pay for long distance phone calls. Okay, so that doesn't have much to do with OER or higher education, but that will be the seamless nature of technology within a few years, and openness will be expected in all facets of life.