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.

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.

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

More Google Goodies

There is no doubt in my mind that Google is an arm of USGovt Total Information Awareness, but who cares?  One of the delightful things about having your book up "for free" on google books is it will start to track any other book that cites your book or talks about the same things.  For example, here is a listing of my book cited in other's books. It also quickly shows if anyone has purloined your work as theirs.  What fun!

What Online Teachers Need

Steve Jobs continues to revolutionize education from beyond the grave.  The iAuthor function should shake up the exploitative textbook market.  Turning a reading packet into a anthology of your authorship just got a lot easier.

http://www.apple.com/ibooks-author/

Now if someone would develop a platform for teachers to deliver courses online.  I am still using an amalgamation of online services to deliver my courses.  Moodle requires vast resources and exceptional skills to use, and a company that recognizes this and attempted to help teachers out now founders.

http://www.keytoschool.com/about-us/

Check out the "forum" page, where last I checked it was clogged with complaints regarding reliability issues.

It was brought to my attention that game dynamics (not game theory) might be added to online courses for better results, and social media was the medium for adding this.  I was hoping google+ would lend itself to this, but no...

http://gamification.org/wiki/Game_Mechanics

In any event, it seems to me that WAOE might create a website that lists freely available tech from the ever expanding universe of options, and links thereto, that teachers may employ for delivering courses.

Of course, this assumes that teachers desire to secede from the closed systems that their schools offer (or require) that teachers rely upon.

The #1 online educator by far is Sal Khan, at khanacademy.com ...  which is no school at all.  That may be the future for online teaching.

Apple Has Done It

I had considered developing a version of the kindle which allowed a person to create a book on the device. Apple has done it, with their iPad 2.

As expected, Apple also launched a new app to write and publish books, called iBooks Author. You don't have to just be a textbook writer, however; you could write cookbooks, novels, or children's books. Any kind of book you can think of, you can build with iBooks Author. With a simple drag-and-drop interface, text is easy to place and alter, and it automatically wraps around media like pictures and movies, which you can resize on the fly. If you wrote your original document in Microsoft Word, iBooks Author quickly scans the pages for style and automatically lays out sections and headers for the book.

This will not only serve up textbooks, but allow instructors to create their own.  Keep this in mind for your first book, the anthology, and how easy it will be to publish it immediately.

From the grave Steve Jobs is still making the world a better place.  One big scandal in education is the cost of textbooks, a renown rip-off.  

Today in Hong Kong almost no one talks politics, because there is so little government interference in peoples lives.  Talk is about businesspeople and leaders of those other mediating institutions in society.  Once upon a time it was just so in USA, too.  Steve Jobs does more good even dead than any politician will ever do alive.