Harold Jarche

Open Source for the “R” Word

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RWW features a story about DimDim, which is an open source web-conferencing platform. I’ve used it and it compares well with the various proprietary systems around. RWW talks about DimDim’s three business propositions:

  1. Big company – cut your Webex/GoToMeeting bills by 50% or more
  2. Established online venture that needs online meetings to close sales with end users – no hassle revenue share
  3. Start-up with enough techies, but no cash – use the open source base with normal GPL rules (and thus grow the platform for DimDim and everybody else)

I’ve discussed open source business models a lot on this site, and dug up these 3 basic OS business models from Matt Asay (2004):

  1. Product Proprietary or Commodity Model
  2. Commodity (Brand & Servicing) Model, e.g. Red Hat: make money from your services
  3. Transitional (Pragmatic) Model. The transitional model is focused on solving problems (e.g. MySQL and JBoss) and is open source in the sense that code is open, but may be closed in terms of controlling the development process and the developers.

DimDim’s model would be #2, making money from services, including software as a service, but still remaining open to engage a wider user/developer community to fuel growth. When times are tough (can you say recession?) then cutting costs takes on a higher priority and it will be interesting to see if there is a forthcoming spike in OS adoption.

I’m preparing a talk that I will be giving next month to NRC-IRAP industry technology advisors and one of the themes will be open source business models. I’ll be updating my research and would appreciate any other unique or interesting business models around the use of open source software or OS content. Wikipedia would be an example of the latter, but I’m looking for lesser-known examples. Of course I’ll summarize and publish my findings here.

Departures & Arrivals

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The Capitol Theatre will be presenting a bilingual presentation of Carol Shields’ play, Departures & Arrivals this month.

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Given all of the discussion about the need for bilingualism in the province, let me just note that our son, who is in the early French immersion program, is acting in this production which is showing on 18 & 19 April 2008 in Moncton. There is also a shorter and free show at the Moncton Airport on 27 April. Come out and support bilingual theatre in New Brunswick!

From the Facebook Group description:

Conceived through the genius of Carol Shields in 1990, this play demonstrates why she is among the most distinguished and honoured of all Canadian writers. To more closely reflect the cultural predispositions of people in southeastern New Brunswick, portions of the play have been translated into French by Jeanette Landry. The result is a fast-paced truly bilingual piece of theatre with its own percussive musical score created by Etienne Levesque. This play for the whole family is directed by Tim Borlase and assisted by Annie Laplante. It is the first time that a bilingual production has been mounted of this piece.

Reputation and Transparency

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I’ve referred to my blogging as a permanent presence on the Web and have encouraged would-be bloggers to first get a permanent domain name. My site is where anyone can find out most things about me, such as what I think, who I’ve worked for or how to contact me on various platforms. Michele Martin writes that you can’t hide with Web 2.0 and that “managing your online reputation becomes a critical success skill for both individuals and organizations in a global trust economy”.

I just received an invitation to a service, Naymz, that will supposedly let you manage your online reputation. Kind of like a broker for your whuffie. This seems to be a step up from ZoomInfo which aggregates online information about people. I’m sure we’ll see more of these cropping up.

Of course, I can see the downside of these reputation management systems and I’m sure that there are people figuring out how to manipulate them already, just as Google Page Rank is constantly gamed. However, anonymity on the Web seems to bring out the worst in us. I’ve been reading CBC’s French immersion articles with some nasty and bigoted comments by anonymous posters. Viewing anonymously makes sense and in certain cases anonymous posting may be useful, but for the most part, online forums should tacitly encourage the use of real names, perhaps through OpenID or some other user-controlled service.

Overall, transparency is a good thing but I’m going to reserve judgement on whether we need centralized services to manage our reputations.  I’ll stick to having my own little piece of the Web on which to make my own mistakes for the world to see.

End of an era

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The debate on the elimination of early French immersion will continue, but the NB Liberal government has drawn a line in the sand and is moving ahead with its one-size-fits-all approach to fix its industrial school system. Immersion was the grand experiment that began 32 years ago in order to put fact to the policy that this province was officially bilingual. Some embraced this view while others rejected it. Now even the Minister of Education is telling people to get their early language learning outside the school system.

Today our students score low on international literacy tests and have poor numeracy test results as well. The Minister wants to fix the system and fix it quick. However, he is stuck with an industrial school system staffed by an aging unionized workforce using crumbling facilities with students arriving in diesel powered buses from far and wide on a daily basis. There is not much room to manoeuver. Just imagine what fuel price increases will do to the bus contract in the next few years.

In order to get more leverage, the Minister and his staff have decided to consolidate their efforts in a last ditch attempt to make school relevant and hopefully effective. But hope is not a strategy.

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Departure of RMS Titanic

What has kept this industrial school system going is that most parents feel that it is a “good enough” option and the costs of leaving (e.g. home-schooling) are high, especially when many families have both parents working outside the home. Early French immersion kept many of the more involved parents committed to the system. Now it is gone. We’ve run out of money and options, constrained by years of added bulk to the system.

I do not believe that this strategy will work for several reasons:

Just as the newspaper, radio and music publishing industries (all based on a broadcast model) are becoming obsolete, so too is broadcast education – we teach, you learn; perhaps. One system to save us all will not work and I think that this decision will create a sea change in the people’s relationship with their public education system.

See my Public Education bookmarks for more resources.

Just after posting this, I came across Ross Dawson’s post on industrial policy [my emphasis]:

Japan and Singapore are examples of nations that have had highly interventionist industrial policies and industry support through the second half of the twentieth century, with great success. However once economies become developed, the key issues are far less about manufacturing prowess. Today the buzzwords in national economic development are knowledge, creativity, media, content, entertainment, design, and the like. All of these flow easily across boundaries. Moreover, the educational and social structures required to support them are dramatically different to those that support the creation of an industrial and manufacturing powerhouse.

Protesting the Abolition of EFI

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I’m heading off to Fredericton tomorrow to protest against the abolition of early French immersion (EFI) at the Provincial Legislature. I’ll be joining hundreds of other concerned citizens to show our disagreement with this decision. It’s my first protest, as I never had the chance to participate in these political activities while I was in the Army, so I guess it will be a learning experience.

I have many concerns with our education system, and I would have preferred to engage the government on something more substantial, such as the basis for curriculum or the whole notion of one-size-fits-all education, but EFI is the touch-point for many parents. I’m adding my voice to this protest for several reasons:

  1. Gaining a second language is one of the few useful skills that students can develop and keep long after they have memorized and forgotten useless data for most academic subjects.
  2. All of the research shows that learning a second language earlier results in better abilities with that language.
  3. A second language opens mental capabilities and makes it easier to learn other languages later.
  4. Speaking a second language opens one’s mind to the realization that there is more than one way to conceive of something, and can make you more tolerant of others.
  5. Multilingual capabilities are valued by the “creative class”, and we want to attract and retain the creative class.
  6. Abolishing EFI sends the wrong signal and encourages a myopic view of Us versus Them, especially since the Minister of Education has stated that EFI was elitist [but was open to all students].
  7. Pushing second language learning to the fifth grade and making it optional in Grade 6 reduces our other official language in this province to the status of an academic elective.

This is not the end of the world and there are other, more important issues in our society, but the abolition of EFI is sending the wrong message about this province’s vision for its citizens and it is handicapping a generation of learners who are getting little out of the education system already.

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Now it’s off to make my placard …

Update: We had about 500 protesters, of all ages, but our three-hour demonstration fell on deaf (government) ears:

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Costs of open source and proprietary LCMS/LMS

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David Bahn at Metropolitan State University of Minnesota asked me last week if I had any information about implementation and maintenance costs of open source versus proprietary learning systems. I referred him to Edutools and Brandon-Hall for comparative information as well as an older study done in French for the Québec government.

David then send me these other information sites that he had come across in his research:

Blaisdell, M. (2004). Course Management Systems >> It’s the Support, Stupid! Campus Technology, 12/28/2004. Retrieved from http://www.campustechnology.com/articles/38766/ on 3/23/2008.

Cheal, C., Cummings, R., Fernandez, K., & Penney, M. (2006). Choices and Changes: How Four Public Universities Are Coping with the LMS Market Consolidation. Presentation (and podcast) from panel discussion at the EDUCAUSE 2006 conference.  Retrieved from on3/23/2008.

Cheal, C.  (2006). LMS Comparison from ELIS at Oakland University. Retreived from http://www2.oakland.edu/elis/policies.cfm on 3/23/3008.

Heid, S. (2006).  “Course Management Systems: A Tipping Point. Campus Technology, 12/28/2006.  Retrieved from http://www.campustechnology.com/articles/41719/ on 3/23/2008.

Marshall, M. & Mitchell, G. (2007). Benchmarking International E-learning Capability with the E-Learning Maturity Model. In Proceedings of EDUCAUSE in Australasia 2007, April 29 –  May 2, 2007, Melbourne, Australia.

Learning at Work

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Note: This is part of a Working/Learning blog carnival hosted at Dave’s Whiteboard

This post repeats some themes that regular readers have seen over the past few years, but I’m finding that there is still a great need for individuals to take control of their knowledge-creation and sharing and many are overwhelmed by the Web.

I have come to consider that the basic unit of learning is the individual and this person is indivisible. To be successful, all learning activities, products and strategies must be centered around the person. We can then go on to develop environments for many people, but the individual is the building block – not the learning object, the course, the programme, or the institution. All of these are temporary organisations that the individual may use, or be part of.

I would also say that knowledge itself cannot be managed, and neither can knowledge workers; not effectively anyway. However, workers can manage data and information in order to develop their knowledge, and today we have several cheap and ubiquitous Web tools available to help us. It’s what I call Personal Knowledge Management (PKM), with an emphasis on “personal”.

In our day-to-day learning, one often repeated task is making the link from “this is an interesting idea” to “this is what I know”. The Web now provides us with an array of cheap and free tools to collect and collate information. PKM is a set of processes, individually constructed, to help the flow of implicit to explicit knowledge. However, PKM is more about attitude than any particular tool set. It’s taking (or rediscovering) our innately curious nature and tapping into it so that we can continue to expand our horizons.

One analogy of the Web is that it is a stream that we dip our buckets into from time to time. Another analogy is that of a surfer who follows the various streams and channels. It’s quite obvious that we cannot keep track of everything in nicely confined boxes with labels anymore. Even cataloging and indexing (taxonomies & hierarchies) are changing to a more flexible model of tagging or folksonomies on the Web, though the latter have their detractors.

If your work entails a need for current information, analysis, opinions or tapping into the knowledge of others, you probably need some form of PKM. If you have regular access to the Web, here is a suggested sequence:

  1. Start by moving your Bookmarks/Favourites on your browser to the Web. Social bookmarking services like Delicious or Furl let you create an online, searchable and shareable database of what you find interesting. Use tags (AKA categories or labels) to identify your saved pages and be liberal in their application. Here’s my Delicious list.
  2. Now start reading other sources of information in your field or in fields of interest. You can search for Blogs on Technorati or Bloglines. Once you are reading several sources you will need a way to organise these so that you’re not constantly going back to see if there is anything new. Use an aggregator. I would suggest Bloglines or Google Reader. Here is my Bloglines public account.
  3. Add your comments to blog posts of interest and if you make a lot of comments you might consider a comment aggregator, such as CoComment or Commentful. Bloglines Beta offers comment tracking as well.

What you are doing in these three steps is aggregating your information output and input, as well as adding information of importance to you (tags and comments). This process of sense-making is a great start to personal knowledge management. Some people have even more to say, and they usually become bloggers and podcasters, but that’s not for everyone.

Now that they’re all posted:

Here are the other Carnival posts hosted by Dave:

From cottage industry to international certification

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It’s a few years from now and you’re sitting in your office in an old Victorian building in your new position as Dean of Students. You thought that this would be the perfect job in a small university town with an easy walk to work, great colleagues and eager new students each year. However, you are looking at enrolment for this year and it’s down 30%. You have a major problem and you have some explaining to do about last year’s recruiting drive. What’s going on?

Online degrees now compete quite fiercely with “traditional universities”, especially those from reputable institutions that only charge $6,000 versus your current tuition fees of $45,000 for a Bachelor’s degree. However, you cannot decrease your fees as you’re facing rising costs. Just heating the dorms is an ever-increasing part of your budget, with oil at $3.50 a litre. You’ve even discussed shifting the academic calendar to take advantage of the warmer Summer months. On top of that, the university just negotiated a costly settlement with the faculty association, after a prolonged strike.

Robert Cringely explained the situation in 2008, but few schools or universities took action:

This [education] is an unstable system. Homeschooling, charter schools, these things didn’t even exist when I was a kid, but they are everywhere now. There’s only one thing missing to keep the whole system from falling apart – ISO certification.

I’ve written about this for years and nobody ever paid attention, but ISO certification is what destroyed the U.S. manufacturing economy. With ISO 9000 there was suddenly a way to claim with some justification that a factory in Malaysia was precisely comparable to an IBM plant on the Hudson. Prior to then it was all based on reputation, not statistics. And now that IBM plant is gone.

Daniel Lemire likened it to a similar business phenomenon:

Not long ago people bought European electronics because it was supposedly better. Now? These days are long gone.

At a certain point in time (2008?) the cost-benefits of a university education will be put in question. How expensive does it have to be before the majority opt out or look for “good enough” options? Once a certification body gets recognized by enough employers, it could become the de facto as well as the de jure standard.

Ridiculously easy group-forming

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The title of this post comes from a quote by Seb Paquet in the book Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. This book is situated somewhere between the simplicity of Wikinomics and the complexity of The Wealth of Networks, which makes it a welcome addition to the field of social networks. Shirky’s analysis is excellent and is not just a repeat of the echo-chamber of the blogosphere. For example:

When we change the way we communicate, we change society. (p. 17)

You can think of group undertaking as a kind of ladder of activities, activities that are enabled or improved by social tools. The rungs on the ladder, in order of difficulty, are sharing, cooperation, and collective action. (p. 49)

It’s when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen, and for young people today, our new social tools have passed normal and are heading to ubiquitous, and invisible is coming. (p. 105)

I saw social tools in action this week, when a parent/lawyer in Saint John, NB, was interviewed on the radio concerning the abolition of the early French immersion program in the province. The interviewer asked her what was the best way for other concerned parents to get involved. Her answer, “Facebook”. We now have tools for ridiculously easy group-forming, and these are being used at the local level by non-techies. Indeed, social media are getting close to “normal” even for those who are not so young.

Update:

Two groups on Facebook concerning EFI in NB (what Shirky would describe as “sharing”) have over 2,000 and 3,000 members respectively. The EFI Day of Protest has 104 Facebook members registered at this time (what Shirky would describe as “collective action”). As you go up the ladder, it requires more commitment, and you don’t get as many members. It’s interesting to watch this phenomenon and I’ll update the stats as time goes on, as well as confirm the actual numbers on the day of the protest.

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