BlueJeans Videoconferencing

There is a new kid on the block for videoconferencing, one that looked quite promising, called bluejeans, at bluejeans.com.  Easy, flexible, fully featured, and

You're currently using Mac OS 10.5.8, which is quite old.

Try one of these:

Mac OS X Mountain Lion

Windows 7

Sigh.  My system, which works quite well for everything I do otherwise, is no good for this.   So for 80% of my students, they will have to upgrade for me to use this?

What are these people thinking when they develop these things? 

Teaching, Writing, Consulting - AND Keynoting...

Another paid gig one gets when one is an "expert" in a field is a "keynote" address, for which organizations pay very well.  My guess is "keynote" is shorthand for content, the speaker who has something to say, as opposed to the group housekeeping and awards announcements that make up meetings otherwise.  I've been doing several of these in the last year, but this one came with ribbons!

Breakout Search: Adjunct Professor

It seems Google has found another "breakout" search term, that is one with a suprisingly high inquiry level, Adjunct Professor and related searches. Check it out here...

What Happens When Out of Stock On Amazon

How flattering.  Used copies on offer at Amazon.com for up to $800 some odd dollars.  What happens is if you are out of stock, which happened recently for me while I was printing another run, those with used copies jack up their prices hoping to find someone desperate.    Now that I am back in stock, the prices will come a-tumbling down.

Ideogram Etymology

This fellow is teaching physics at Beijing Normal, but it is his passion that is getting him renown:

For 20 years Richard Sears has been devoted to making the etymological information of Chinese characters available online for people to trace them back to their original form, when they were first carved or written on bamboo slips or silk more than 2,000 years ago.
Although the 62-year-old launched his website in 2002, it elicited little response from Chinese netizens until last year, when two Chinese newspapers published his story.
That led to Chinese bloggers praising his work, as well as bemoaning the fact government-funded cultural promotion agencies had been unable to create such a good website for people fascinated by Chinese characters. Each character on his website comes with three former variations - the seal script, bronze inscriptional and oracle bone inscription - and an illustrated guide on its etymology.

And next he needs to extend his reach worldwide by teaching his methods and having his students help in in the task.

The University as Co-op

Comes a report on Mondragon University, in the Basque...

Nor is the cooperative university model a solution to all education’s ills. It’s private and charges tuition (a little more than $7,000 a year),

Hey, those are exactly the figures I show in the biz plan for Seattle Teacher's College!

What is being done now is to collapse education into vocational training, teaching into a fee-for-service form of employment, and research only as a profit generator. The faculty are being put on term contracts and administration is now a career with big salaries and great distance from the places where value is actually being produced. The overall result is the consolidation of a two class system: elite education for economic and political elites and vocational education for the masses.

So when will this take off?  Who knows....

MOOCs In Retreat

Comes an article in slate that covers what we covered a few months ago...

As of this month, that prediction is looking overblown. After a year in which almost every big-name university in the United States rushed to get in on massive open online courses, or MOOCs, the backlash is in full force. And no wonder: The idea of free online video lectures replacing traditional classrooms not only offends many educators’ core values, but it threatens their jobs. Worse, the early evidence suggests the model may not work very well: A partnership between San Jose State and Udacity this spring ended with more than half the students failing. In the same spaces where advocates not long ago trumpeted the MOOC revolution, critics now warn of the “MOOC delusion.”

The idea that MOOCs would replace anything was absurd,  the medieval model of sage on the stage will live on like the Pub and the Trade Show Booth.

The MOOC will never be anything more than a study group, and will not come into its own until is figures out how to take the top 5% (one in twenty) and let them lead the other 19 in studying the material.

People keep trying to ascribe to the web powers just not there.

Counterintuitive and Bifurcation

There is something counterintuitive about these articles...  one the one hand we have witness that traffic does not matter on websites.  I've been saying that for a while...

Capital New York is small in traffic. Is there a mandate to boost those numbers?High traffic is way overrated.  It works if you are truly a traffic hose, like BuzzFeed. But, for speciality sites, it is all about the right readers. The advertisers we want are the knowing ones seeking to influence a very attractive and hard-to-reach set of readers. If we deliver those readers, the traffic numbers will mean little.

And then comes this, in media it is the conference, not the magazine that matters.

“From my experience, I knew conferences and live events were a big revenue generator,” Waxler, who had previously co-founded the Glasshouse NY and Glasshouse SF events, said. “There’s something special about live events and the FABB conference immediately became the big, shiny, attractive thing to sell to advertisers. It pushed a lot of revenue to the magazine.”

 So we have these business realities based on human imperatives.  The web was supposed to be a mass communicator, when in fact it is a mass customizer.  The web was supposed to connect people, when in fact it isolates them.

When you market right and get an audience in the cold online world, you then invite them to meet-up at conferences.

People don't change.

Bernstein on Teaching

Leonard Bernstein considered teaching and working as integral, and upward spiral.  When you have a topic you love as much as Bernstein loved his, you love working and teaching as much as he loved his.

We may not be as great, or even as sensitive and intuitive in ours as he as in his, but we can certainly enjoy to our full capacity, as his does in his...

http://www.wiziq.com/ webex citrix Summary

Comes yet another enterprise promising the world... at no cost if you have a .edu email address.

Create, manage, & deliver courses online. Use the WizIQ Virtual Classroom to deliver live classes to any number of students, online.

My skepticism comes from more than 20 years of listening, testing, etc on promises.  The challenge is in no instance do the people who develop the offerings have any sense of what teachers want or need.  These platforms are what investors want, loaded up with junky, counterproductive patent-rich clunk-fests that make me sorry that yet again, I tried the offering out.

This one is sure to be a stinker since it has as partners (how come?) with blackboard and moodle, two systems that require massive tech support to operate marginally.

I do a bit of teaching online, so I keep up with the ever expanding universe of means to deliver content.   Two of the most admired online webinar systems, citrix and webex, I find abominable.  I still use the ancient IRC for the live sessions, since the most modern delivery methods, for some reason, are relentlessly unproductive

I mean relentlessly because every upgrade does not make it workable for a wider group, it makes it workable for a smaller group.

I have a 3 year old mac v 10.5.8 which cannot host those systems.  Both swear they have plug-ins, but not that I can get to work.  My year old 10.7.5 will host it, both, but why cut out 90% of the market?

I was in a Nuance voice recognition software online webinar, and the opening was a technical disaster and the presenter was under much stress from that opening.  Several times the webex system has gone down.  I wonder to myself how this can be tolerated?  50 minutes into the presentation they were still having technical difficulties.

Well, because their main users do not care.

1. Their #1 customers are govt and big biz.  (opening target makes that clear...) The content of the seminars is pointless, so it does not really matter if it gets delivered or not.

2. Big biz and big govt spend their "use it or lose it" budgets on brand new equipment, so these platforms compliment the people who waste money and time with features that workable only on the newest systems.

I have noticed a pattern, the more Indian engineers are involved, the more difficult the system, and the more subsidized the market is targeted.  They seem to subscribe to the Bill Gates school of thought, that one is guaranteed to become a billionaire if you write lousy code that forces users to be your development team, and captive "could care less" users.   I yearn for the day Indian coders reject this failed ethic, and get to writing clean, easy code.  This is not to pick on Indian engineers, for it was Gates who pioneered the failed technique.  It is only to recognize we are denied the good of Indian genius.

Also, giving away memberships to .edu people is a back door marketing technique.  Why not develop something that can be sold through the front door?

Real productive people cannot buy the brand new always, don't want to anyway, so we are not able to access the junky clunk-fest systems on offer.

Google hangout is difficult with no method for effective feedback and change.

I will try yet again, but not right away.  I am enjoying my summer, and don't want to wreck it by having another bad experience brought to education by angel investors.

Feel free to forward this by email to three of your friends.

Udacity On Pause at San Jose State

Udacity.com came on with a rush with high profile plans to aid education.  But it seems San Jose plans to take a breather on its association:

After six months of high-profile experimentation, San Jose State University plans to “pause” its work with Udacity, a company that promises to deliver low-cost, high-quality online education to the masses.

It might be low cost, but online education and classroom education are not the same things.  With the classroom as the standard, online is more akin to time with a librarian.  A very good learning experience, if done right, but different.  I suspect most online education is not unlike being alone in a library.  In any event, education is the one area where there is almost no valid and reliable studies because the money flows most to scammers.  Education, like medicine, could be fixed, but with "social engineering" the goal, the means will remain hijacked by ideologues, and the easily scammed, like Bill Gates.

EdX and Udacity, along with Coursera, are part of a trio of closely watched MOOC start-ups. MOOCs are not-for-credit, free online courses. The three startups are also branching out into other teaching and business models.

I bet they are.  There is one that brought the West from the "dark ages" to the enlightenment.  It would do well now.  But it would take deregulation and de-subsidizing education to achieve.  Just have the students pay the instructors directly.

Feel free to forward to three friends.

Graduating into Unemployment

India has a million engineers looking for work.  It is unwise to have a few hundred people decide what a country needs in terms of education.

Somewhere between a fifth to a third of the million students graduating out of India's engineering colleges run the risk of being unemployed. Others will take jobs well below their technical qualifications in a market where there are few jobs for India's overflowing technical talent pool. Beset by a flood of institutes (offering a varying degree of education) and a shrinking market for their skills, India's engineers are struggling to subsist in an extremely challenging market.

The alternative is to introduce more freedom, so people might seek gainful self-employment.

Google Hangout

Google has what is called the Hangout, that looks promising...  Tried it a couple of months ago, and we could not get technical problems solved...

Maybe it has gotten better, and if so, I could see moving to it...

New Income Stream For Teachers

One reason I am so anti-"intellectual" "property" "rights" is it so constricts creativity and distribution.  As copyrights is dying out, artists are learning to market their work themselves.  The guitarist for Dire Straights has a tour coming up.  Now, of course you can buy tickets from his website, nothing new there.  But you can also pre-order a recording of the live concert from his website as well.  

Sadly his website seems not up to the task, as people are complaining an inability to make a purchase.  Sigh.  Yahoo offers bulletproof ecommerce solutions for $30 a month but people still spend megadollars reinventing the ecommerce site wheel.

Now, this marketing in some ways is nothing new, because the Grateful Dead used this method to promote their record sales, that is the bootleg tape.

My guess it is audio only since the media is a USB stick, but one in the shape of the fellows famous guitar.

So, if you are giving a live seminar somewhere, record it, and sell it on your website, or pre-sell it. Make it an event.

Why?

I've been listening to this for over 40 years.  And there is absolutely no improvement, or help from any quarter, or a single plan on offer to make a change.  I guess USA must end, then things might improve. In the meantime, everyone is on their own.

Catalogs Are King

I was on the U Washington campus the other day so I dropped in at the offices of the once glorious ASUW Experimental College.   I mentioned to the nice receptionist I had taught for 25 years with them, but had to decline once they cut catalog distribution.  I mentioned in the heyday they put out 140,000 catalogs and got 7,000 enrollments each quarter, a 5% response rate, which is fantastic.

I asked how they were doing now.  She looked it up.  20,000 catalogs and 1000 enrollments.

Hmmm...  so 20k is 1/7th of 140k, 1k is 1/7th 7k.  Exact!

Still 5% response rate.

The paper catalog is king in noncredit continuing education.

Studying the Classics Today

Ted Turner studied classics at Brown and this aggravated his father...

If you are going to stay on at Brown, and be a professor of Classics, the courses you have adopted will suit you for a lifetime association with Gale Noyes. Perhaps he will even teach you to make jelly. In my opinion, it won't do much to help you learn to get along with people in this world. I think you are rapidly becoming a jackass, and the sooner you get out of that filthy atmosphere, the better it will suit me.

What a strange view of education, to help you get along with people.  The word means "to lead out.." (presumably the darkness...) to enlighten.  You learn to get along with people, or not, by age 5 or 6.  The point of an education is to be able to have a wider reference to draw on when navigating these treacherous waters.

I am reading Plutarch right now, The Makers of Rome, and the parallels to events today are remarkable.    I am convinced one reason the classics are now denigrated is that it in fact tips people off as to various power-scams, and the results.  Ignorance is victory for the powers that be.

Another thing I note is how these people would kill themselves rather than suffer ignominy.   Christianity takes bad times as having meaning, and even the idea of "time in the desert" as a purifying thing, a stark contrast in those times.

Ted was going to need that perspective he got from the classics later, when his father shot himself to death.  His old man could have used a classical education.

Why You need to make Your Course Free on youtube

Here is a common enough email...

Dear John,

After watching all of your videos (Some of them many times) I realized I MUST take your course. Thank you so much for providing humanity with such immensely valuable content and at no cost. I find your insights into economy and your way of teaching absolutely genius.

Anyway, I currently live in Barcelona, Spain and am trying to get an import/export business going and I really really want to take your class, but it would be realistically impossible to attend live sessions at 7-9PM with a +8hr time difference. What do you advise? How much would I miss without the sessions? Or is there an alternative?

Thank you very much.

Sincerely yours,

--
A D

Your youtubes sell your class. Some 50% of google searches end up on youtube, and google put youtubes high on searches because the front run the videos with ads from which they make money.

I learned from Gary North.

The First Known MOOC: The Jews

I have many good and original ideas.  The original ones are not good, and the good ones are never original.  MOOC means massive open online course.  The problem is having 40,000 people taking an online poetry course, and having them all understand it.  So my great idea what to note there would be one in 20 who would be natural teachers who could form up small groups and get the sense of the content.  Brilliant!  Except, my great idea about having natural teachers emerge in MOOCs has been done.  Nehemiah chapter 8:

2 And Ezra the priest brought the law before the congregation both of men and women, and all that could hear with understanding, upon the first day of the seventh month.
3 And he read therein before the street that was before the water gate from the morning until midday, before the men and the women, and those that could understand; and the ears of all the people were attentive unto the book of the law.
4 And Ezra the scribe stood upon a pulpit of wood, which they had made for the purpose; and beside him stood Mattithiah, and Shema, and Anaiah, and Urijah, andHilkiah, and Maaseiah, on his right hand; and on his left hand, Pedaiah, and Mishael, and Malchiah, and Hashum, and Hashbadana, Zechariah, and Meshullam.
5 And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people; (for he was above all the people;) and when he opened it, all the people stood up:
6 And Ezra blessed the LORD, the great God. And all the people answered, Amen, Amen, with lifting up their hands: and they bowed their heads, and worshipped the LORD with their faces to the ground.
7 Also Jeshua, and Bani, and Sherebiah, Jamin, Akkub, Shabbethai, Hodijah, Maaseiah, Kelita, Azariah, Jozabad, Hanan, Pelaiah, and the Levites, caused the people to understand the law: and the people stood in their place.

OK, it is not online, but it was the closest thing at that time.  So with Ezra teaching everyone at once, Jeshua and so on worked the crowd to make sure everyone understood what Ezra was teaching, as the people stood in their place.

Good ideas are never new.  But we need to update it, and have a means of providing a platform for those natural teachers in the crowd in a MOOC, who can then begin teaching online in their own right.

Feel free to forward this to three of your friends.

MOOCs & Natural Teachers

No sooner than I mentioned the idea of natural teachers and MOOCs comes a reply forma  colleague at WAOE:

John -

We're on the cusp of giving the natural teachers a way to collaborate on leading others through material. 

Just as Wikipedia allowed crowd-sourcing of reference material, a tool like SlideSpeech will allow crowd-sourcing of learning material. 

Consider the Learning Creative Learning MOOC today:

10233 members organized in small groups by time zone/location

As you say, all they need is a platform.

SlideSpeech is a platform which uses text-to-speech for making interactive web/mobile presentations, so multiple authors can work together to create lessons which 

1) speak with one voice

2) are searchable (since the voice over is text and the text is searchable)

3) can be collaboratively developed and improved over time (check out a bit of this video which produced this presentation)

As noted in a post to the EdTech Google group:

"If you are not surprised by A. G. (the awesome kid who created this)  math skills, then let me tell another thing about him. A.G. is from Venezuela. English is his second language and he teaches math like Salman Khan from Khan Academy.  We arrived to a point where is possible to imagine that the next wikipedia of educational content for children may be made by kids."
http://bcontext.com/bfile/solo/fqydpr/?width=507&height=422

SlideSpeech homepage

SlideSpeech interactivity tutorial

SlideSpeech Google+ community (check out the presentation for the Fountainhead Schools in Gujarat, India)

Please contact me for more information.

Regards,

John Graves

john.graves@slidespeech.com