A Discretionary Digital Divide?

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Seth Godin takes on the over-hyped Digital Divide – that invisible wall separating the Internet connected and the disconnected – stating that the new digital divide is more a matter of choice. Those who choose to engage in the social web, the "Digerati", subscribe to RSS feeds, read meta-blogs, write their own blogs and avoid the mainstream press. So what does this mean, other than the fact that we have a new label? According to Seth:

As a result, your most-connected, most influential customers are part of the digerati. They can make or break your product, your service or even your religion’s new policies. Because the Net is now a broadcast (and a narrowcast) medium, the digerati can spread ideas.

The second thing to keep in mind is that the digerati are using the learning tools built into the Net to get smarter, faster. A new Net tool can propogate to millions in just a week or two. Unlike the old digital divide, this means that the divide between the digerati and the rest of the world is accelerating.

Using the Law of the Few as described in Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, it seems that the Digerati are simultaneously playing the key roles of Mavens, Connectors and Salespeople.

The Rules

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Albert Ip has some positive words to say about Bill Gates, especially his views on education, and provides these rules, attributed to Bill:


RULE 1
Life is not fair – get used to it.

RULE 2
The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

RULE 3
You will NOT make 40 thousand dollars a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice president with car phone, until you earn both.

RULE 4
If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. He doesn’t have tenure.

RULE 5
Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping they called it Opportunity.

RULE 6
If you mess up,it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

RULE 7
Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent’s generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

RULE 8

Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

RULE 9
Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.

RULE 10
Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.


RULE 11
Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.

Not bad advice.

Blogs – Essential Tools for Small Business?

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According to an HP Report, more small businesses are including blogs in their business marketing plans. This link, through Small Business Trends (which includes some additional charts), explains what has been fairly obvious to me. Small businesses cannot afford pricey marketing campaigns, and blogs allow them to have direct conversations with their customers. For those offering services to small businesses, Anita Campbell suggests:

Web design firms need to incorporate weblogs into their offerings. Partnering with blog consultants could be a good marriage, since blogging is such a different animal from a typical business website. Let the blog consultants worry about the unique marketing aspect of blogs and training clients how to use them. The design firms can focus on what they do best: customizing the designs, actually building the blogs, and integrating them with businesses’ commercial websites.

As a small business, I have my own reasons for blogging.

Ladies & Gentlemen, the Advertisers have left the room

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Last year I thought that the new medium (AKA Web 2.0) was in the processs of making marketing and advertising obsolete, stating that, Amazon is proving that marketing ain’t what it used to be, and the new Medium has obsolesced the darlings of the broadcast model – marketing & advertising. I also saw indications of open source marketing. Perhaps I was a bit off about marketing (for now), but this recent event, sponsored by Absolut is a good indicator of the obsolescence of advertising:

The only thing missing was the one element that has been present for the launch of a major spirits brands since marketing was invented. Last week, Absolut made marketing history when it launched without a cent being spent on traditional advertising.

The drink company opted instead to lease its own bar, brand it and stage a major photography exhibition there.

Absolut’s strategy flies in the face of marketing convention; an average of $3 million is spent on advertising to launch a brand.

Hang on to your hats [and business models] folks, because there is a lot more of this in store.

 

Higher Ed Social Software Project

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Brian Lamb at UBC has just received some funding for the development of weblogs for higher education. The project includes UVic and BCIT as partners, and Brian states;

What did we propose to do? Nothing less than creating and sharing a framework for social software applications for BC’s higher education institutions. In less grandiose terms, we have proposed to create a set of policy recommendations, tutorials, templates, and multimedia resources that can be reused by a school that wants to support weblogging and wiki use (and possibly other social software tools) for its own community. We also hope to foster a community-centered model for sharing expertise amongst practitioners attempting to develop their own projects.
We intend the project to be platform-agnostic: we will definitely be using Movable Type and Drupal, but do our best to ensure that resources we create are not tied in with any one system.

This is very refreshing to see such an initiative that includes the use of open source software, connects various systems and does not tie these academic institutions into a long-term relationship with a given technology vendor. The group now has the choice of private sector partners, without being handcuffed to any particular system. It’s about time, and it’s wonderful to see this happening in Canada :-)

Open Source: More than a Commodity

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I’ve been a bystander following the GRICS controversy in Québec and learning as I go. The latest installment is an open letter written to Le Devior newspaper by Louis Desjardins, past-president of the Board of a secondary school on Montréal’s south shore. Michel Dumais has reprinted the entire letter, and there is much of interest.

For instance, I now discover that GRICS may be a non-profit but it is governed by all the school districts in la Belle Province – what some might call a monopoly. GRICS is also committed to the Microsoft platform for all of its application development, forcing schools to upgrade to newer and costlier MS systems instead of opting for cheaper, open standard systems like Linux. As Desjardins puts it, GRICS has created its own cage of MS products from which it cannot escape. The main thrust of Desjardins’ letter is in addressing GRICS’ recent press release stating that GRICS would use open source applications when deemed suitable.

La première erreur que comment la GRICS est de considérer les logiciels libres comme un simple produit. C’est inexact. Aucun logiciel propriétaire ne peut etre redistribué, modifié, étudié, évolonté, amélioré ou partagé. Les logiciels libres n’encourent aucuns frais de licence. Ils sont bien plus que tout simplement économiques : quoi de plus simple que d’utiliser un logiciel libre dans toute une classe, toute une école, toute une commission scolaire, en toute égalité? Sans avoir faire approuver un budget au préalable et identifier le petit nombre de postes sur lesquels on l’installera. On peut installer les logiciels libres partout, sans mot de passe ni numéro de série, sans contrainte lire la peur de la copie, à la perte de revenus de licences, au piratage.

Une autre erreur est d’envisager qu’on puisse se servir des logiciels libres comme d’un simple objet de consommation. Il n’y a pas de consommateur ici. Il y a des partenaires, des membres d’une communauté, des utilisateurs et des développeurs. Concrètement, cela veut dire qu’à partir du moment ou la GRICS croit que les logiciels libres ont une place dans les écoles, elle doit aussi assumer sa responsabilité à  l’égard de la communauté du libre et l’aider à  progresser. Cela s’appelle partager et c’est une valeur qui est au coeur de l’approche libre. Il se trouve que le partage est aussi une valeur chère au monde de l’éducation, comme il a si bien exprimé M. Jacques Daigneault, président de l’Association des utilisateurs de l’ordinateur au primaire-secondaire (AQUOPS) dans sa récente et remarquable lettre ouverte, toujours disponible sur le site web de l’organisme : www.aquops.qc.ca. my translation:

The first error that GRICS makes is in considering open source as a simple product. This is not correct. No proprietary software can be redistributed, modified, studied at your leisure, improved nor shared. There are no licensing costs with open source software. Open source software is more than just cheap: what is simpler than using open source software in a class, an entire school, or a school district, which is completely legal? Without having to go through any budgeting processes, and identifying each machine, we can just go ahead and install it. We can install open source software everywhere, without passwords and serial numbers, without fear of copying, loss of license revenue or of pirating.The other error is to view open source as a simple consumable product. There is no consumer here. There are partners, members of the community, users and developers. Concretely, from the moment that GRICS believes that open source has a place in schools, it must take reponsibility within the open source community and help it to progress. This is called sharing, and it is the value at the heart of the open source movement. We find that sharing is a value dear to the world of education as was well-explained by Mr Jacques Daigneault, president of the Association of Computer Users for Primary and Secondary School, available [in French] on www.aquops.qc.ca.

I watch these happenings in Quebec and wonder about the situation in other provinces, including New Brunswick. As Desjardins says, open source is a value system, not just cheaper products. Learning and education are about sharing. Unfortunately, I see our own province continuing to pay significant licensing fees for proprietary software, even though there are open source alternatives. Embracing open source creates a commons for sharing and innovation. I have already suggested this to our government, but to no avail :-(

Analysis not required for traditional media

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Having just discovered Michel Dumais, the author of the article comparing open source vs proprietary software costs in Le Devoir, I now find out that he is leaving the newspaper. After working there for six years, Dumais decided to leave when he was told to return to traditional technology reporting and basically “dumb-down” his articles on open source software and the impact of technology on society. He mentions being asked to focus on the hard facts of technology, and to minimize his analysis. This editorial request followed directly on Dumais’ piece about the GRICS learning portal software that I mentioned this week.

However, Dumais (also a blogger), sees all of this in a positive light, and gives his readers these parting words:

Soyez zen et gardez plutot vos énergies – continuer d’encourager l’appropriation du libre dans tous les domaines de la socièté civile, lorsqu’il est le meilleur outil disponible. Et à  surveiller de près le nid de frelons.

my translation: Be Zen-like and keep your energy to continue to support the use of open source in all sectors of civil society, wherever it is the best tool available. And keep a close eye on the hornets nest.

Merci Jacques.

Learning Quote of the Day

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From Will at Weblogg-ed:

And that’s sad, isn’t it, because kids see teachers as the people who deliver content, not as the people who teach them how to learn. That’s what kids need teachers for. To show them what learning looks like, how messy and reflective and individualized it really is. To show them what a wonderful gift failure is.

Seeing What’s Next

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I had previously written about Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution, and more recently Seeing What’s Next. This last book gives new business entrants (upstarts) and incumbents a theory-based set of tools to understand and use disruptive innovations. One of the strategies for upstarts is to target non-core customers of the incumbents. These come in three categories (overshot, undershot and non-customers) and by targeting these customers entrants can avoid direct confrontation, while developing skills and expertise in areas outside the core business of the incumbents. Once the entrants have grown “under the radar”, they can grow to directly confront the incumbents.

Roger Kaufman has reviewed the book from the perspective of a human performance technologist (HPT) in April’s Performance Quarterly. Kaufman states:

This book, which is not written by HPT professionals, brings powerful illustrative value to our field. I highly recommend it, as it will stimulate your thoughts – and likely your actions. Seeing What’s Next is about one way for organizations and individuals to cope with the future.

I have been stimulated to take some of this book’s ideas and create the following graphical representation of how an upstart company should look at the “Signals of Change”, especially from non-market conditions. Upstarts should use their asymmetrical sword & shield and focus on non-consumers and overshot customers, such as those paying too much for what they really need (think bloated word processing applications where customers use only 20% of the features). By avoiding the cash cows (Undershot Customers) of the incumbents, upstart companies can develop asymmetrical skills in new fields before the incumbents know what hits them (think Voice over IP and traditional telcos).

SignalsChange.png

A real comparison of costs – OS vs Proprietary

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I had recently referred to an article on a cost comparison of portals for education, specifically open source versus proprietary, but could not find the entire report. Yesterday, Jacques Cool told me about this article in Le Devoir (in French only), which summarizes the report. I will point out the highlights in English, but if you understand French then please read the entire article.

The cost comparison was of the free, open source MILLE system and a proprietary system, based on a Microsoft platform, called Edu-Groupe from GRICS. The evaluation was conducted by a reputable university scholar, Michael Wybo, and focused on the specific needs of the Québec public school system. The report evaluated similar costs for similar types of installations. Each system was put on its own server, as well as separate servers for e-mail, databases and user authentification. Consultant and staff costs were deemed to be the same for each installation, and the starting point was from a Microsoft IT infrastructure. This last point meant that the move to the Linux-based MILLE system required a system transition as well.

Prof Wybo concluded that the use of MILLE over Edu-Groupe GRICS resulted in savings of between 59% and 75% over a five year period. According to Wybo, these are the total savings when ALL costs are examined. Michel Dumais, in Le Devoir, goes on to tell us of Microsoft’s strategy to address this issue. Microsoft is presenting at the annual conference for the Quebec association of school superintendents in May, and will be giving its own version of “Microsoft and the MILLE project”. Dumais notes that the people in charge of the MILLE project are not getting equal billing or time to present their version to these public servants.

It seems that even when the case is exceptionally clear, vested corporate interests will win out over best practices, saving tax dollars and just building a better mousetrap. Dumais concludes:


D’un côté, nous avons une solution en libre, financée à  même les fonds publics, et qui répond entièrement aux besoins du monde de l’éducation. De l’autre, nous avons des solutions propriètaires, celles de la GRICS, financées elles aussi avec des fonds publics, mais qui reviennent beaucoup plus cher à   l’état québécois.

Et on repose la question : À  terme, comment la socièté GRICS peut-elle justifier le développement de ses offres de service en logiciel propriètaire, financées à  même les fonds publics, devant les conclusions du rapport Wybo ?

my translation:

On one side we have an open source solution financed with public funds, that responds to all of our educational needs. On the other side, we have proprietary solutions, those of GRICS, also financed by public funds, but these will be much more expensive to Québec.

And we resubmit the question: in the end, how can GRICS justify the development of its proprietary system, financed with public funds, in light of the conclusions of the Wybo Report?