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? 

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.

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.

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.

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

Testng Google Hangout

Google Hangout

Last night as a part of a class on self-employed teaching, a trio of us tried out the new google hangout.  It is easy to sign on, and the sound quality is excellent.  The other two were in Chicago and Ontario, Canada, and I in Seattle.  They could see each other and me, but I could not see them, why, I'll have to investigate.

It has a chat function and claims to offer the ability to record and post to youtube the sessions.  That could be very useful.  It allows for desktop sharing and document collaboration, but although we could open each, we say no way to close them except to exit and re-enter.

Google hangout looks promising, and it is in beta, but for now the learning curve is too steep to employ as a classroom medium.

Synchronous vs Asynchronous

Here is a list of myths on online education...  some are debatable, and one in particular struck me...

Unmotivated students fail whether a teacher is watching him/her or not. While eLearning does not require a student to be in a certain place at a certain time, it still offers them access to the teacher and other classmates for help and support.

The old saying, “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink,” is applicable to this myth. Students lacking the desire to succeed will fail no matter how robust the program or the teacher. Placing the blame on eLearning is foolish. eLearning is simply the catalyst for delivering information, it cannot be responsible for a student’s work habits.

Course completion is an issue.  This presumes the courses are asynchronous, which I think is something of an error in delivery.   I think course completion is best addressed by offering synchronous courses.  The idea that a big benefit of online education is that is can be asynchronous is one idea that should be challenged.  I believe something like 99% of online courses are asynchronous.   I believe when 99% are snchronoous, we'll see most of his 30 problems solved.