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.