Recently in Education Category

Last week, I wrote up the design of an experiment to improve our affiliate performance at Michigan Innovators, an educational non-profit that connects innovating companies with innovative people. That write up served a dual purpose:

• Force me to be explicit in my experimental design goals.
• Act as a guide for a pilot course I am teaching on optimizing non-profit landing pages.

We're planning on turning the pilot course into a full offering in the Fall. Current plans for the course include approximately the following agenda:

• First five weeks: Become familiar with non-profit business model; learn non-profit search engine marketing campaigns and goals; relate campaigns to measures provided by Google Analytics; perform initial LIFT analysis culminating in presentation to non-profit.
• Second five weeks: Conceptualize, design, and execute landing page variations for search engine marketing campaigns; start experiment using Google Website Optimizer; present completed design to non-profit.
• Final four weeks: Track results of Google Website Optimizer experiment along with other metrics and prepare final report for non-profit.

The thing I'm excited about here is that we have a chance to make this a sort of open laboratory on the web. That will give the students plenty of opportunity for exposure and feedback.

Full Circle Online Interaction Blog: Open Peer Review of Scientific Articles

I'm looking forward to what is learned in this trial for Nature. I'm also looking forward for what it stimulates in the scientific community about the possibilities of openness. To move away from the publish or perish model, or to reimagine it to support cross boundary collaboration where the public good can be served, is a huge change. It would rattle down to the tiny bones of every organization. It would change donor and funding streams. It would change higher education.

I like the attitude of collaboration here. I'm just not sure it's practicable. Being inside academia, a clear issue is measurement. So much depends on getting certain kinds of counts.

Well, you might say, just count differently. The problem with that is that "differently" implies "different". Can I justify rewards that I gave based on set of counts using another set of counts? Can I give lifetime employment based on the new counts? There will be a lot of hesitancy around that because once you open debate on the basis of reward, you effectively open debate on the nature and extent of the reward itself. People who have already gained the rewards do not want that.

And it's not because people are reward grubbing or selfish necessarily. In the vast majority of cases, you're talking about people's life's bread. All of us are very conservative when it comes to life's bread.

I suspect that what will ultimately have to happen is that a new system will have to come up to replace the old. Disruptive forces like wikipedia might help with that. Can current academia be replaced by a creative commons?

I gave a talk at IA Summit yesterday on the work we have been doing on architecting self-organizing knowledge communities. Just a quick link here.

We're in the third week of the latest blogging bootcamp, and we're just about to cover how to track conversations. In the process, I've come to the conclusion that mass conversation tracking just doesn't work. It's pretty easy to see why.

Just consider technorati. They track 26.3 million sites and 1.9 billion links. That's less than 75 links per site. In a good month of blogging, I can generate that on one site. So, technorati's coverage is not adequate to the task of tracking every link. The same is true of icerocket and Google blog search.

So, I quit using NetNewswire, my main feedreader for a month. Why, well as one of the students in our current business blogging bootcamp said, "What about information overload?"

What I had taken to doing instead was setting up aggregation sites. That way, I can share the information with the world easily. Hey, just go to this or that site, grab a feed or an OPML file if you want, but you're not required to know all that stuff. Your plain old browser will pick it up fine. Those aggregation sites also tend to be focused.

What convinced me to start back up with a feedreader? John Nardini, EVP of Marketing at Denali Flavors, makers of moosetracks ice cream came to give a lecture in the bootcamp. He showed how he was tracking competitors in his reader and basically using it to manage his own information space. Well, sounds good. My information space needs cleaning out, though.

I'm building a text book for the next rendition of the High Octane Blogging Bootcamp using O'Reilly's Safari U. The main advantages I see are:

• Good corpus of material.
• (Potentially) Convenient web interface.

But, I wonder how they are bringing this thing to market. In many ways, they are tied to their book publishing model. A lot of the recent content is not really available because it has not been converted for custom publication. Also, the custom book has to be ordered in quantity, no one-offs. This requirement essentially dictates that the book be pushed through traditional marketing channels. You can't really offer it to small client groups over the web. Finally, any access to the book is only available online for a fee. Why not provide a preview as in their regular Safari offering? Frankly, such previews would just provide more reason to purchase a Safari subscription.

I'm having some frustrations getting the material I want out of this service. I may resort to a last minute coursepack from a local copy center. The copy center will call O'Reilly for permissions, and the book should be done in time for the January class. Ironically, although the bootcamp is about Web 2.0, we are likely going to have to resort to pre-web methods to get the textbook produced.

Local copy centers integrate publishing and delivery, simplifying up the process of creating custom books for customers, and providing more certainty. Oddly, O'Reilly decouples these two processes making the process more complex and less certain, all under the veneer of advanced web technology.

Over the past couple of months, I've been developing a new rendition of the high octane blogging bootcamp. We ran the original at The University of Michigan's Ross School of Business last Spring. In that bootcamp, 33 MBAs were able to alter the search landscape in Southeast Michigan for queries on the cleaning and restoration industry with 6 weeks of blogging effort.

This rendition will be offered at University of Michigan's Ross School of Busines starting in January and at Quinnipiac University starting in March. In the bootcamp, we treat blogging as an introduction to the interactive web. Teams of participants will have as their project to create a family of blogs around a partner business or their own business. The projects will be judged on the extent to which they follow strategies that build search visibility and traffic.

The bootcamp is broken into a set of seven modules that build on each other. Each module includes an overview, some practical examples, and exercises for participants to complete in service of their project. Here are the modules:

I'll be giving a talk at Quinnipiac University this Saturday, home of the famous Quinnipiac presidential poll. They're interested in some of the things I have been doing with High Octane Blogging Bootcamps and our current Learning Remix projects.

In the first half of the talk, I'm going to introduce people to the basic value proposition of blogging. Even though blogging appears to be taking off in the corporate world, I agree with Shel Holtz that a lot of people have heard the term without really knowing what it could do to help their business. Further, it may be inapparent at first glance that the real work of blogging is in generating posts, not in technical wizardry. These slides attempt to cover these points succinctly.

The next set of slides show what technical wizardry is possible if you have done the real work of blogging, making posts. Here, I focus on things like search and conversation tracking. If we get time, I may talk about our attempt in the learning remix to use tags to mark conversations (I sense this is it own presentation). Here are the slides for the second half of the conversation.

In his post, Remixable Web: Public RSS Aggregator, John Tropea makes this point about our current learning remix project at Michigan's Ross School of Business:

This newsmastering portal is aggregating blog posts as well as del.icio.us bookmarks, with categories/tags intact...it's the best I've seen yet!

John Tropea

which is an incredible compliment, and I thank him for it. But I see the real challenge here as creating a community site, and a simple aggregation site is just not enough to achieve that.

So, we've launched the remix learning site. The idea here is that students in a class about databases and information contribute by making blog posts and bookmarking web pages. Students tag each blog post and bookmark based on the class conversation topics they feel they contribute to. Posts with multiple tags contribute to multiple conversations.

The remix learning site gathers student contributions several times a day and archives them in a movable type blog. The interface allows people to view contributions grouped by tag. That's great, but the question is how to present these topics to people in a way that they can view: the most recent, the most talked about, the whole universe.

To do that, I have come up with this tag cloud:

The key element in the default view is that items are sorted in reverse order by recency. Frequency is indicated by size of the tag in the cloud. Visitors also have the option of sorting alphabetically and by pure frequency.

A perennial classroom issue is student participation. Even if students are enthusiastic, limited time dictates that only a few will be heard in any single session. Limited participation limits instructors' opportunities to find out what students know and inhibits the potential discovery of useful information for everybody. This post outlines a web-based learning remix project at Michigan's Ross School of Business that is designed to remove classroom limits on student participation. The system operates according to a few simple pinciples:

• Require that everyone participate.
• Move the vast majority of class participation online.
• Structure online participation so that it is self-organizing.

We believe our system achieves the first and second goals and makes good progress on the third. On the input side, each student makes fifteen tagged (informally categorized) microcontributions per week by bookmarking sites in del.icio.us and making blog posts in WordPress Multi-User. Multiple times each day, reBlog and the Movable Type publishing platform gather, remix, and present the student contributions based on the tags students supplied.

From May 10 through June 23, 2005, we ran the first High Octane Blogging Bootcamp for 33 MBAs at University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. Our client for the bootcamp, Coach's, served the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, Michigan market for disaster cleaning and restoration services. Recent surveys indicate that over seventy percent of households search the web when shopping locally for services such as Coach's. We wanted the bootcamp to demonstrate how Web 2.0 technologies like weblogs and RSS could help better establish a company's search presence to take advantage of this channel. To really push the idea, we informally set a goal that bootcamp participants' team weblogs outperform Coach's site on searches for its own keywords.

Susie Gardner has provided some impressive feedback to the High Octane Blogging teams. She really emphasizes getting all the small points right that when summed together lead to effective communication. You can see in both her criticisms and her praise that she sat down and took the time to read the posts and let them speak to her. Here are her remarks as she applied them to each group:

• Review of Restoration and Cleaning Industry Blog
• Review of The Art and Science of Commercial Restoration Blog
• Review of Restoration & Remediation Industry Blog
• Review of Restoration University Blog
• Review of Restoration and Catastrophe Clean Up News Blog

update: Jeremy has completed his final two reviews, and I have added them to the list below.

Jeremy Wright is posting his critiques of the first High Octane Blogging Bootcamp over at ensight. He has done some really in-depth reviews, and I very much appreciate his effort and insights. As you may recall, The High Octane Blogging Bootcamp is dealing with the restoration and cleaning industry. Here are the specific reviews he has published so far:

• Restoration Catastrophe
• Restoration Commercial
• Restoration Residential
• Restoration Fire Smoke
• Restoration Water

I'll update the list as he adds.

We began our first High Octane Blogging Bootcamp last Saturday. As I mentioned before, participants are working in the Restoration and Cleaning industry with Coach's, a local area cleaning and disaster recovery firm employing approximately 80 people.

Participants are divided up into five teams who are competing to write effective blog posts and gain Internet visibility in five weeks. We have a bootcamp aggregation site at: http://highoctane.portspaces.com. On the site, you can see my blog about the bootcamp with several entries. You can also see, from the left-hand pane, an aggregation of each of the participant's team sites.

Frederik Wacka makes a great point:

I guess the question is when to stop saying You should consider blogging and start saying You know blogs, right, what if you should use that kind of publishing to strengthen your web presence? or even Hey, shouldn't you write more openly and authentic on your site?

CorporateBloggingBlog: ...Once Known As A Blog...

For the past several months I have been presenting blogging as pushbutton web publishing with syndication and interaction. This view is fundamentally different from the static web site that has not been updated in 6 months to a year. It also implies that you cannot make a separate, high-value career out of simply maintaining a blog. Most companies that are blog candidates simply cannot afford those kinds of fees for that one activity.

Yesterday, I mentioned that we were using The Port Network's platform for the High Octane Blogging Bootcamp. This decision is deeply rooted in what I expect to be the main value creation dynamic for bootcamp participants:

• Learn about the target industry: cleaning and restoration.
• Collect ongoing information about cleaning and restoration.
• Determine who the target audience is and how to influence them. I expect the target audience to be a mix of: customers, media types, and web opinion makers.
• Write blog posts that leverage the information collected to influence the target audience.

Participants will be working in teams of five or six. So, the question is how to get this dynamic to work in a team?

The High Octane Blogging Bootcamp will start May 14, 2005. There have been a number of developments since my last post. Let me lay them out:

• Twenty-nine students have signed up to be in the Small and Medium Enterprise course of which the bootcamp is a part. That's a good number to start. Not too big and not too small.
• In alphabetical order: Susie Gardner, Sarah Goldman, and Jeremy Wright have agreed to be blogging judges for Bootcamp. They will do two evaluations each of the six teams.
• We will be working with Coach's, a local Ann Arbor company in the cleaning and restoration industry. A good web resource for this industry is the Association of Specialists in Cleaning and Restoration.
• The Port Network has agreed to host the blogging communities.

This last point is worth some elaboration. There are really a number of factors here. The two that weighed the most heavily in my mind were: (1) getting a simple enough environment to use that would allow us to fully unleash the power of xml syndication; (2) various network effects related to using widely adopted vs. narrowly adopted yet well-tailored technology. I will likely devote a post to the platform decision soon.

The first high octane blogging bootcamp will start May 14 at University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. The bootcamp immerses students in blogging so that they have a practical basis for assessing three elements critical to the newly emerging face of the Internet: pushbutton web publishing, xml syndication, and mass interaction. In combination, these elements allow companies to more easily discover and engage their online community, with potential to influence key customers and opinion makers.

The bootcamp takes place in three installments:

In six weeks time, I will be helping teach a course on small and medium enterprises at Michigan business school. We're going to use blogging in an innovative way, and I would like some feedback.

The course is a project course where evening MBA students (4 – 7 years experience) work with a small enterprise to help it improve its business. The business that will participate is interested in a blogging strategy to increase Internet visibibility.

Here I will present quantitative analysis indicating that blogging led to an inversion of control in the learning blogosphere I developed in Fall, 2004. Over the course of the term, there were 1,078 posts in the blogosphere. The number of posts represents a doubling in online communication over when interaction in the course occurred principally in email. Student posts accounted for 78% of this volume and determined the content of the discussion. The group leader (professor) level of involvement represents a halving of moderator effort relative to the email method. Thus, the use of blogging tools, specifically RSS, appears to have led to a quadrupling of moderator productivity over email.

Inversion of control

The accompanying graph shows levels of contribution by the 31 student and 1 moderator (me) participants ordered from left to right by decreasing order of contribution. As can be read in the graph, I made 233 posts, 22% of total. The graph is labeled as the long tail because the individually lower volume contributors in the tail of the distribution actually made most of the aggregate contribution. I will have more to say on this below.

Given these figures alone, one might wonder that I was guiding the conversation from the top down. However, a closer examination of the content of his posts reveals that all but 14 (six percent) of my posts were direct comments on the 845 posts by students. Further, I only account for 9 of the 50 longest posts, and a large part of the length of these 9 posts was due to heavy excerpting of the posts I was commenting on. Thus, my posts were almost entirely responsive to and generally shorter than the other posts in the blogosphere. Students controlled the topic of conversation, not me.

Interestingly, had students only been responding to the course blogging requirement, we would have expected the majority to meet the 26 one-paragraph blog post requirement and then stop. The graph shows that 17 of the 31 students exceeded the minimum requirement with only 6 failing to come near the requirement (but still posting almost weekly). Further, 60% of posts exceeded the one paragraph minimum length, 25% were greater than two paragraphs, and 15% greater than three paragraphs. Thus, more than half the students went beyond the minimum frequency, and students tended to write more than the minimum length. The posting requirement got students going; after that they became engaged and went further.

This post follows up on a project to build a distributed learning blogging community (blogosphere) that I initiated with a class of 31 non-technical students at The University of Michigan's Ross School of Business in Fall, 2004. I initially began reporting on the project here and continued making posts through late 2004 on the project here. Lou Rosenfeld wrote about the project at its conception when he asked “Blogs + Egos = Learning?”. One fragment from a comment to that post stands out as prescient of what the whole experience became:

Ultimately, blogs are probably a tool best suited for a constructivist learning environment.

MaryH

In this spirit, a number of high-profile bloggers generously agreed to contribute content to our effort, and by design, their contribution shaped the path we followed. Let me recognize each individually (in alphabetical order): John Battelle (Searchblog), Jason Calacanis (the RSS Weblog), Todd Cochrane (Geeknews Central), Asa Dotzler (adot's notblog), Chris Pirillo (lockergnome), Robert Scoble (Scobleizer), Andy Seidl and Bill French (Think Outside the Feed), Brent Simmons (inessential), and Dave Winer (Scripting News). I'm very grateful to these bloggers as well as all the many other people who contributed to this project.

This post narrates the pragmatic odyssey of our ultimately successful attempts to mix technology and behavior to achieve useful online interaction through blogs. The next post in this series takes a quantitative look at the impact blogging had on the class.

Moore Stuff: Handling questions about a specific lecture:

[Responding to Ed Vielmetti's suggestion that he keep one big blog for students in his 1000 student class.] Yeah, this is another way to handle it. I, as course professor, am going to have an “official” course blog that holds announcements, assignments, and the like. I could also have one entry for every class meeting. This way, if a student has a question about the readings or lecture for a specific topic, they could do one of the following (but which?):

In this context, the idea of having one central blog makes a lot of sense. You do need an organizing principle, and one has to remember that students are faced with the dual task of understanding your course and the technology.

Moore Stuff: Bloglining all over the place:

This tool is very easy to use. I put the Bloglines Subscribe Bookmarklet in my toolbar (right next to the bookmarklet for quick posting from MovableType.

To get started, I mostly just went down Bloglines list of most popular feeds. I then inserted the code into the template for my blog to share my blogroll with anyone who visits. I haven't yet changed the CSS to make this look right, but that'll be fixed soon.

All in all, a very nice setup. I'll post more later about how I'm thinking of using this in my class.

We used a similar setup to what Scott is describing in a distributed learning blogosphere we set up last term. Some pointers on how we used bookmarklets and other tools in our class can be found here. An important issue is that anytime you use bookmarklets (a sort of permanent javascript application that looks like a bookmark and allows you to interact with external websites while you browse other websites) or any other “installed” software is that you can run into coverage issues. Has every student installed the bookmarklet on their own compuer? Is the bookmarklet available everywhere the student might choose to compute?

Moore Stuff: Using blogs and wikis in my course:

But the main point that I took away from our meeting was how wikis are for collaboration. If I want the assignments to be true collaborations, then I should look at wikis. If I want students to be more directly tied to their input, if I want the work to be more about individual synthesis, then a blog is more the way to go.

This quote from Scott is great. It's so interesting to hear where the person you were talking to found value compared with your own perception of of how you were adding value. To be honest, I think I was just repeating what is, in some circles at least, common wisdom about wikis, a sort of web site where anyone can volunteer to help maintain and update information in it on relevant topics. However, except for the cite to the Blog Business Summit presentation that I just gave, I don't know anywhere on the web where it is stated so succinctly by people in the know. The current state of blogs (individual pushbutton publishing on the web) and wikis is such that you have to look pretty far to get clear ideas about their main attributes. There are a couple of other thoughts I have on Scott's post.

I had breakfast with Scott Moore, director of the undergraduate business program at Michigan's Ross School of Business. He's wondering how he might use social software (blogs, wikis, etc.) to enhance a class of 1000 students that he will run in a year. He was speaking to me because of my experience creating the “BIT320 Distributed Learning Blogosphere” where we had a quite successful classroom experience enhanced by an active blogging community. Put on the spot like this, I managed to come up with three keys to success that I think are worth sharing. They all have to do with fostering online interactivity and should work across many different types of social software.