So, Carmen’s out and we’re now down to five contestants. It’s American Idol and it’s grown big enough to have coerced more than 21 million people to vote in its weekly contest and to drive American Idol alum Kelly Clarkson’s new album to the number one spot on the charts.
The phenomenon of American Idol, however, is about much more than household boredom and national crazes. It is also a successful business model that specializes in market interactivity. The formula for this business model is relatively simple — imagine a product, create an audience for the product, make the audience feel responsible for the product, and have the audience create the product. It puts on new spin on the old adage — “If they build it they will come.” Continue reading ‘Lessons from American Idol and Open Source– Creating Interactivity in Education’
Archive for April, 2003
Of course, if you are using Blackboard on your campus, you need to make the best of it. And there is an art to making the best of everything! The Math adjuncts at my school asked me and my IT colleague Charles Bender to come speak to them about how to use Blackboard to increase and improve communications with their students. They know that there are all kinds of difficulties with trying to do math equations in Blackboard - but they were willing to put that aside in order to see how Blackboard could help them do a better job teaching in general. (WebCT does do a much better job of supporting math equations, but we will have only limited WebCT availability starting next year: budget constraints.) Continue reading ‘Making Blackboard Required … and Valuable … and Fun’
Web ad sales are up, eBay is reporting record increases in revenue, and Web news is starting to make fiscal sense. Are we still in 2003?
Since the dotcom crash, the biggest problem for e-commerce has been how to make money on the Web. Recent technological and sociological shifts, however, seem to be opening new avenues for profitability. They also point to possibilities for increased and improved uses for the Web in education. Continue reading ‘New Trends in Web Profitability Portend Possible Paths for Online Learning’
As someone pointed out to me after my observations about Blackboard yesterday, there is a new version of Blackboard out. So it is not really fair of me to take excerpts from the Blackboard manual from the previous version of Blackboard - I need to take a look at Blackboard where it is today. Agreed! So the first thing that I did was to click on the Academic Web Resources button on my Blackboard homepage, and I received this error message:
An Exception occurred!
Message:
java.lang.NullPointerException
Stack Trace:
java.lang.NullPointerException at com.blackboard.scholar.data.SubjectArea.getChildrenSubjectAreas(SubjectArea.java, Compiled Code) at … [it goes on like this for a very satisfying 20 lines or so).
Now I don’t want to dwell on this error for the wrong reasons (things break all the time, and they get fixed). But what is interesting about this error is that I can imagine that I am perhaps the first person on this campus to have ever pressed that button. It’s probably been broken all semester long, and perhaps even all year long. And nobody even noticed. Why? Because Blackboard has done nothing to make the instructors, much less the students, on this campus turn to Blackboard to find out about “Academic Web Resources.” Continue reading ‘A Visit to Blackboard Website Wonderland’
It should come as no surprise that the popular Zelda series’ latest installment for Gamecube has powered that console platform back into prominence against Microsoft’s Xbox.
Zelda: Windwalker features Link as the protagonist who travels to a chain of islands, locating mystical pearls and saving his little sister as he prepares to battle the evil Gannon. Throughout the adventure he is armed with a sword, boomerang, and grappling hook. The environment he moves looks like a three-dimensional, though crudely drawn, Saturday morning cartoon, and the unique look gives the game a free-flowing feel. Continue reading ‘Why and What Stories Matter for Education — Decades of Proof’
And this week… let’s talk about Blackboard! Last week I did a quick survey of how the Internet and web publishing can completely change the way students write - the Internet gives students a real audience for their writing, it expands the content of their writing (images!), allowing them to link and be-linked-to, while promoting continual revision throughout the semester. Does Blackboard, a web-based course management system, take advantage of any of these features? It does not.
Blackboard lets faculty members share documents with students, but it does nothing to promote web publishing by students. Continue reading ‘Blackboard, Students and Publishing on the Web’
The San Francisco Chronicle ran a story today about how online education saved the day in Hong Kong when schools were forced to shut down because of the SARS outbreak.
According to the story, Macromedia Inc. and First Virtual Communications Inc. of Santa Clara have helped thousands of those students keep up with their studies via virtual classrooms conducted over the Internet. Continue reading ‘Online Education Helps Life Continue in Shadow of SARS Outbreak’
Back in February, Mitch Kapor wrote something rather revolutionary.
Sharing calendars among a small group should not require the considerable effort and expense of purchasing and maintaining an Exchange server. Instead, a peer-to-peer protocol can be used to coordinate the flow of information. In this way, Chandler will enable small groups of non-technical users to be far more self-sufficient than they would in a situation which requires special server hardware and software, the administration of which is outside the expertise of the users themselves. Continue reading ‘What if a Server Didn’t Matter — Real Collaboration with Chandler’
Budgets are decreasing but when it comes to technology student expectations are not. Therefore the challenge is how to do more for less. When it comes to computers and networking you just cannot do without good software but software can be very expensive. Security is another serious consideration since lack of security could result in loss of data or worse, it can dramatically increase man hours trying to recover the system. This being the case, why do so many institutions put so much of their technology budget in Microsoft products? The perception seems to be that somehow spending more gets you more. However, that is not necessarily the case. I cannot help but think this has more to do with marketing than logic. Let’s face it, few people in networking or network security would define Microsoft products as being especially economical or secure. Yet for reasons that defy logic, the average person tends to think of Microsoft’s products as being better and more secure. As it stands today the primary real advantage Microsoft holds in the market is familiarity. That is, most PC users are familiar with Microsoft products and therefore lean towards them. This, in spite of the fact that in the recent years the open source community has made real progress in the form of the Linux graphical user interface (GUI) and office productivity suites that rival anything from Microsoft. Continue reading ‘Dispelling the Microsoft Illusion’
A recent report estimates that camera-cell phones will outsell stand-alone digital cameras by the end of this year. In spite of the lower resolution the combination devices offer, their popularity is surging as the public votes for integration and mobility when it comes to everyday use.
One force driving the adoption of camera-cell phones is MMS — a wireless technology that supports messages including a mix of audio clips, still images, video clips, and text. By summer, all major operators in the U.S. will have MMS up and running, although interoperability and pricing details are still being developed. Continue reading ‘As MMS Surges to the Forefront Education Must Start Planning New Contexts for Learning’
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