Harold Jarche

Do we need a public alternative to Facebook?

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As we become more interconnected and use the Web for problem solving, finding love and sharing our sorrow, we should seriously consider public infrastructure as the backbone for social networking. Just as we have funded roads and airports, we need to provide safe and open platforms for online community forming. As private systems proliferate, it’s time for our publicly-funded institutions to jump on the Web 2.0 cluetrain and offer an alternative.

Following the recent mass murder at Virginia Tech, over 200 Facebook communities were created as “a gathering place for those affected by this event, both for people who lived through it and those moved to express their condolances”. At Library 2.0, [dead link] Laura Cohen also noted that there was no equivalent social networking system (SNS) provided by Virginia Tech, so people, mostly students, had to use a commercial platform.

When I advise clients on Web 2.0 applications I discuss the pros and cons of free systems. These are excellent “use as is” systems, as long as you don’t intend to move your data or think you will need it in the event of new rules or a system shut-down. Some platforms, like social bookmarks, let you export your data in an open format which can be used by other systems. However, you cannot do this with most SNS, nor can you export your posts from the ubiquitous Blogger. That is a critical distinction between “free” and “open source”. With the latter, you can access the source code, export your data and move to another host. The more data you create, the more important it will be to control it.

Our public institutions may be missing the boat on SNS. Currently there are over 15 million Facebook users and the growth curve is steep. Universities could easily adopt open source SNS, like Elgg,[dead link] to provide a similar free service. The advantage would be ownership by a publicly-funded institution or perhaps even the alumni association. Laura Cohen [dead link]sees the loss of this information as a cultural issue:

I’m concerned about this because many academic libraries are charged with preserving the cultural memory of their institutions. In the age of Web 2.0, a great deal of this culture is being played out in networked communities unaffiliated with these institutions. If campus constituencies are gathering in external spaces, how will their activities be preserved? The third party gathering places – Facebook and many others – may or may not survive over the years. In fact, they surely won’t outlive most of the institutions with which their members are affiliated. When these services fold, their content will fold with them. Issues of privacy aside – and these are major issues – a great opportunity for preservation will be lost.

I noticed that our local university is highlighting student bloggers [dead link]. Unfortunately, all of these blogs are hosted on Google’s Blogger. Why not provide a Mount Allison University blog for life to all students? Hosting it on an open source platform would also give students the ability to export their data if they so wish. Furthermore, a free blog and/or SNS would be an excellent way to stay in touch with alumni. An easy first step for educational institutions would be to test out Elgg’s Eduspaces [dead link]. It’s free AND open source.

Open data protocols and open source systems have become more important for me as I realize that I have almost one thousand posts on this website and many more comments. This is an important professional archive for me now, but this was not an issue initially. You don’t realize the importance of the open source model until after you’ve passed the point of no return.

Update: You may want to watch this video overview [dead link]of the money and politics behind Facebook, though I haven’t researched it to verify that it’s accurate.

Blog Comment Tracking

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When I discuss the basics of personal knowledge management on the Web I usually suggest starting with a Feed Aggregator (like Bloglines) and a Social Bookmark service (like Ma.gnolia or del.icio.us). Using these two tools, you can manage the streams of information that flow by and mark items of note for future reference and sharing.

One of the more difficult aspects of reading blogs has been tracking the comments. Now there are several services available to help you with that. Basically, they act like a feed reader for specific posts and tell you if anyone has added another comment since you last looked. I started with coComment last year, but found it had a few glitches when I used the Firefox plug-in, so I abandoned it. It probably works fine now, as I get frequent visits to my site via coComment.

How do I know that I get visits from coComment? I use Blogflux’s MapStats which is a service only for blogs that shows you who has visited your site, where they come from, what search terms they’ve used, etc. Blogflux has recently introduced Commentful, which is similar to coComment and lets you track any conversation with a right mouse-click. So far I’ve found it simple and easy to track blogs where I’ve left comments.

One other comment tracking service that I’ve come across is co.mments, which appears to be simple and easy, but I haven’t tried it out.

Once you’re comfortable with an RSS feed aggregator, the next addition to your learning 2.0 toolbox should be a comment tracker.

Our Crooked Broker Society

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Dave Pollard shows how dysfunctional relationships in a “crooked broker society” create systems that are not fit for meaningful human life.

In each industry, an Exploiter oppresses a Desperate Supplier. This unbalanced relationship is reinforced by a Procurer who in turn gouges an Addicted Buyer. Dave’s graphic shows several examples:

brokersociety.jpg
Image: Dave Pollard

So what about public education?

Are teachers the desperate suppliers, exploited by the school system which has a virtual monopoly on education jobs?

Are publishers, testing companies and universities the procurers who gouge the addicted parents, looking for any advantage in a shrinking middle class?

To show how vested interests control public education and stifle reform, Roger Shank describes the roles of these groups, in Rich Folks Misunderstand Educational Reform:

1. Teachers – Teachers would have to teach differently and no one really wants to change what they do on a day to day basis. True, teachers’ lives have been made so miserable by previous politicians’ attempts at reform that they are more open to change than ever, but still, they really don’t want to have to go to school to learn new methodologies.

2. Publishers – Big corporations have a real stake in education staying the way it has been. They don’t want to throw out all their textbooks and start over. They would spend a lot of money making sure this doesn’t happen.

3. Testing companies – Politicians have helped create an enormous industry that prepares and grades tests. They won’t give up their business without a fight. No real reform will take place if teachers are still teaching to the test and if we continue to teach stuff that is easy to test rather than giving kids open ended issues to think about and real workplace skills.

4. Universities – Any real school reform means changing how universities conduct admissions and convincing them to teach in college the subjects they have foisted upon the high schools (like algebra). This will never happen since it would also mean that colleges would need to interview students instead of relying upon grades and test scores for admission.

5. Parents – Parents tend to think school is a competition and they reinforce all the testing and grading in the hopes that their kid will win. In addition they believe that whatever they learned in school is what should be taught despite the fact that they have since forgotten all that they learned in school.

I think that local control of public education could fragment this system and weaken the position of the middlemen so that the Exploiters and Procurers would lose their centralized power and influence. “Small pieces, loosely joined” may be the right strategy for educational reform.

World Intellectual Property Day :-(

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World Intellectual Property Day has become little more than a lobbyist day with creators, users, and the facts once again getting lost in the process.

Read the rest of Michael Geist’s commentary on WIP Day in Canada.

On the bright side, there is Creative Commons as a counterbalance to vested corporate interests:

In sum, the Creative Commons toolset encourages and enables participation in creativity by everyone, not only those with access to copyright lawyers. This is as it should be in modern democracies, where the tools for expression and creativity are available to everyone as everyday consumer goods.

How our structures shape us

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If you pit a good performer against a bad system, the system will win almost every time.

This quote from Geary Rummler and Alan Brache in Improving Performance, sums up many of the symptoms of hierarchical systems, whether they be schools, businesses or prisons.

I believe that the great work to be done at the beginning of this century is to create new organisational models that reflect our humanity. Efficiency and effectiveness are not enough, and in many cases have become mechanistic. It’s time to discard industrial management models that emphasize command and control and ensure that individuals at all levels have opportunities to engage in and question the system.

What happens when we don’t question authority? Let me re-quote this article on ABC’s recent re-enactment of the Milgram Experiment:

One of the subjects in the television program was a 7th grade teacher who explained that she didn’t stop shocking the learner because as a teacher she had learned when a student’s complaints were phony. I thought to myself, “Has she electrocuted many students?”

The teacher asked the researcher, “There isn’t going to be any lawsuit from this medical facility, right?” When told that the teacher was not liable, she replied, “That’s what I needed to know.” It is however worth noting that this was after she induced the maximum shock and the learner demanded that the experiment be terminated.

In this interview, Dr. Philip Zimardo discusses the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, where students played their roles as guards or prisoners and abuses started within 24 hours:

But on the second morning, the prisoners rebelled; the guards crushed the rebellion and then instituted stern measures against these now “dangerous prisoners”. From then on, abuse, aggression, and eventually sadistic pleasure in degrading the prisoners became the daily norm. Within thirty-six hours the first prisoner had an emotional breakdown and had to be released, followed in kind by similar prisoner breakdowns on each of the next four days.

In A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan (1967), John Culkin wrote that, “We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” This reminds me of the question about who is the most important person on board a ship. Is it the Captain, the Navigator or the Engineer? Actually, it’s the Architect, because the initial design influences everything else.

Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you cannot change the way things work in an organization. The problem may be the organizational model itself and it may be better to leave and create an alternative model than to help keep a flawed one going.

Atlantic Standard Tribe

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The Future of Work has an article on distributed work zones — Zevillage in Normandy and Hidden Tech in Massachusetts. These zones offer a sense of local community to freelancers and micro-entrepreneurs. Zevillage is unique in France in that it is the only rural area with high speed Internet access, something that is available in most parts of Canada.

The basic premise of these zones seems to be that many workers have the ability to tele-commute and don’t need to live in an urban area. Avoiding a costly commute seems to be a motivator as are lower housing costs. The zones fill a need by connecting local, mostly home-based, workers who can meet face-to-face to made professional life a bit less lonely.

Work Commons seem to be similar or complementary to these kinds of zones. What I noticed about these two examples is that both are fairly close to major urban centres. For instance, Zevillage is 2 hour train ride to Paris. Out here in Atlantic Canada we don’t have that easy of a commute to a large city. Montreal is an overnight train trip and Boston is a full day’s drive.

Still, I’m wondering if an Atlantic distributed worker zone would be of interest? It would be kind of like a virtual Commons, linking all of us who work in our time zone. Perhaps we could call it the Atlantic Standard Tribe (inspired by Cory Doctorow – another Canadian).

Here is what Hidden Tech is focused on:

In general, HIDDEN-TECH members fall into the following broad market categories: PR/Marketing/Newsletters; Content; E-commerce services/Retailers; Hardware/Software Developers; Web Design/Hosting, and Management Consulting/IT Training. Everyone from jewerly designers to photographers, software developers to marketing specialists attend meetings. Their connection is that they are small, usually not incorporated and use technology to drive their business.

Is this worth following up? I’m willing to do the ground work if there is some level of interest, so contact me or add a comment.

Management is the problem

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Richard Florida writes that Toyota has now surpassed GM as North America’s largest automobile manufacturer, and says that it was due to better systems and better management:

The problem has long had one source: management. Oh, they have had their excuses. High wages, recalcitrant unions, pensions and healthcare. Nonsense. Toyota, Honda and other Japanese companies showed how workers were not real problem. They used American workers – sometimes the very same workers in the very same factories – to make quality cars American want to buy. The real problem was management. Given the right management and production systems, American workers did just fine.

I would say that most of our problems in our industrial economy can be attributed to bad management models, whether it be ineffective public education, short-sighted politicians, bloated bureaucracies or arrogant telecommunications companies. Toyota used the same conditions, changed the rules of the game and came out on top.  Who’s coming under the radar to defeat the  flawed operating models in your industry?

Tempus Fugit

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Sara Bennett has posted a guest article that looks at how much discretionary time is available for homework in the average student’s day.

I’d like to build on this argument and look at the research behind it, because I think that it is about time that we demand that our public educational practices be based on solid research and understanding about learning and human health.

Looking at the 24 hours in each day, one begins with the need for sleep. It seems that school age children need between 8 and 10 hours of sleep, depending on age. The average of 9 hours stated in the article seems accurate. Does anyone dispute these figures?

Next, we need 2 hours for three meals. Is this too much? My own experience is 30 minutes for breakfast as well as lunch and one hour for supper, so it seems appropriate. Exercise time is one hour, which I think may be a bit low. In our case, swim practice is 1.5 hours and Tae Kwon Do is 1.5 hours. The American Heart Association recommends:

Schools should ensure that all children participate in at least 30 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity during the school day, with options for more activity in extracurricular and school-linked community programs.
School-based PE [physical education] programs should be evidence-based, should include moderate-to-vigorous physical activity for at least 50% of PE class time, and should teach students the skills needed for lifelong physical activity.
PE programs should meet national standards, including 150 minutes per week for grades K through 8 and 225 minutes per week for grades 9 through 12.
Schools should promote walking and bicycling to school where possible, with routes made safe by the joint efforts of school leaders and local governments.

One hour of exercise per day, of which 30 minutes is rigorous, is the professional recommendation for cardio-vascular health. In our high school, physical education is only offered for 1/3 of the school year, so the time for exercise must be made available outside of school hours.

The research agrees with the conclusion that 12 hours per day of sleep are necessary for maintaining basic health, but this could be 13 hours for younger children and only 11 hours for older children. Research also shows that one size does not fit everyone and that perhaps we should re-think school start times for teenagers:

All students performed better in the afternoon than in the morning. Students in early morning classes reported being wearier, less alert and having to expend greater effort.Potential solutions to this problem could be solved by changing school start times and by giving standardized tests later in the day, the authors suggested.

We can now look at the time for school. In our case, school starts between 8:17 & 8:25 AM and finishes between 2:30 and 3:00 PM. This includes 30 to 60 minutes for lunch. Actual class time is 6 x 50 minutes in middle school (5 hours) and 5 x 103 minutes in high school (5.25 hours). Let’s use 5 hours instead of the six stated in the article (your mileage may vary).

Commute to school time is given as one hour. Our experience is one hour for our high school student and 30 minutes for middle school. I cannot find any data on average commute times, but each community should be able to determine a mean or a mode. After-school activities are listed as taking one hour and this seems appropriate, but I would assume that this does not include excercise, which has already been accounted for.

My calculations then show 12 hours for health maintenance, 5 hours for school, one hour each for commuting and after-school activities, for a total of 19 hours, as opposed to the article which says that there are 21 hours of non-discretionary time.

These additional five hours of time need to account for family activities and chores, personal hygiene, relaxing time and of course: homework. So what is a reasonable extra imposition of homework on those meagre five hours of discretionary time? The rule of thumb given by many educators (not based on any evidence at all) is 10 minutes per grade level, so that almost half of students’ discretionary time is taken up with homework at the senior levels.

A national survey, conducted in1989/90 showed that in Grade 10, 18% of boys and 35% of girls spent more than two hours per week night on homework. The same study showed that 23% of boys and 38% of girls in Grade 10 spent more than two hours per weekend day on homework. A 2001 Canadian study showed that, “Teens in households with Internet access spend eight hours a week doing homework – an increase of one hour over 1998”. That’s 1.6 hours per 5 day week. My estimate would be that the “average” for high school is about 1.5 hours today, but I don’t have conclusive data on this. I would conclude (for now) that about 30% of students’ discretionary time is spent on homework, though this varies widely.

Dr. Cathy Vatterott, professor of middle level education at the University of Missouri, sums up the research on homework:

Research shows there is a slight correlation between homework and achievement in middle school and high school, although we can’t prove that homework causes high achievement. In middle school, students doing between 15 minutes and one hour of homework a night do just as well as students spending one to two hours on homework. For high school students, achievement declines after more than two hours of homework a night.

There is zero correlation between the amount of homework given and achievement at the elementary level.

Youth is short-lived and time flies, so why waste it on ineffective homework? We have let homework encroach upon our daily lives, and watch it continue to increase. Spending a third or more of our discretionary time on homework may be causing us to miss out on opportunities to grow as families and communities. Because public education is a state-owned monopoly, it must be accountable for the time demands it makes. Homework doesn’t seem to be worth the time.

Net Neutrality, Copyright and You

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Monday, April 23rd, is World Book and Copyright Day, and according to the Director General of UNESCO:

Much has also been said about the book as the driving force behind a wide array of income-generating activities and about the role of the book within today’s knowledge economies as an instrument for learning, sharing and updating knowledge. Of course, the linguistic dimension of publishing, an instrument of expression that lives through language and within a language, has also been emphasized and remains a decisive factor.

Lastly, as there can be no book development without copyright, the celebration of the Day has always been closely associated, from its inception and throughout all these years, with an awareness of the importance of the moral and heritage protection afforded to works of the human spirit and their creators.

Well, I think that the DG of UNESCO is way off the mark on the value of copyright and how much it protects the individual creator, especially in a digital, networked world. Organisations like Creative Commons are of even more value in the developing world than in the richer countries, helping individual artists reach their markets without going through the bottleneck of middlemen like publishers. Writers who publish books in the traditional way only receive a small amount of the end unit price, while direct to consumer models like Lulu give up to 80% of proceeds to the creator. When copyright outlives the actual creator, whose interests are being served?

At this time in the evolution of the industrial economy, copyright helps to entrench corporate incumbents and makes it difficult for innovative start-ups.

net-neutrality.jpg

The same goes for Internet access, where large corporations with their vested interests control the pipes. Jevon has put forth a good explanation on why Net Neutrality is an important issue for all of us:

Most large internet service providers come from incumbent industries such as Telecom or Cable TV. These large companies have been good and reasonably efficient at rolling out infrastructure, but they have also been birthed in the womb of government protection, artificial market dominance and a market segment that has an inelastic demand for their services.

Why does that matter? Well, it’s a fair bet that if it hasn’t already happened, high speed internet subscriber rates will soon start levelling off. As markets like Canada, the US and the UK see this peaking of subscribers, these incumbent companies will begin to look for ways to meet revenue growth projections. We’ve already seen what this can do here in Canada, it’s happened with our national cellular phone providers.

Get involved in the debate now, before it’s too late and our Big Brothers control not just our past culture but our ways of sharing information to create new culture.

I recently wrote about Packet Shaping and mentioned an organisation called NetNeutrality.ca. Today, this is all that is left of their website:

Thank you to all those who have supported our websites. Due to increasing legal concerns resulting from our public participation in the Net Neutrality debate, we have at this time decided to shut down the operation of these sites.

We have no comment for the media and will not be releasing any additional detail about the factors leading up to this decision. We are currently looking for an appropriate organization to take over these properties and who has the resources to properly operate these sites.

Update: the Net Neutrality website is back up and running :-)

Google buys Marratech

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I knew that sooner or later Google would get into the synchronous web-conferencing business. They just announced the purchase of Marratech, which is in my opinion one of the best web conferencing products out there. And on top of that, it was built in Sweden, not Silicon Valley, and designed by a Canadian [félicitations, Serge].

I’ve used Marratech on several occasions over the past few years and for a while spent several hours a day collaborating with colleagues across the country on Marratech. It is just as good, if not better, than most of the other platforms that I’ve used, and at the time had the least restrictive licensing model and an excellent load distribution capability.

Now that Google owns Marratech we will see the commoditization of these platforms that have, up to now, been very expensive. We’ll also see some competition from open source, like DimDim, for those who want to host their own system. It’s pretty obvious that the days of selling six-figure web-conferencing license agreements will soon be over. I wouldn’t buy a new proprietary web-conferencing system at this time, until we see what Google does.

Via Geoffroi Garon