Technology

information & communication technology

Karyn asks, How did you get started in social media?

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This is in partial answer to Karyn’s question. My first foray into using the Web for more than just gathering information was in asking questions to those who were publishing. Kieren Egan, author of The Educated Mind, posted e-mail comments on his web site, and my post from 1997 is the earliest I can find online. For the next several years, I read a lot online and made some comments. Jay Cross‘ earlier websites were a common spot for me to make comments. During this time, I used online discussion boards and many closed platforms, but not much on the open Web, as there weren’t many options.

My first step toward almost blogging was with QuickTopic in 2003, discussing topics like elearning R&D and Open Source for learning. I still find QT an excellent discussion board. I later moved to Blogger, which I found to be a more flexible platform for the expression of my opinions, such as this from October 2003:

I believe the next great business model for an elearning entrepreneur is to provide high quality installation and support services for a select group of open source learning systems. Your customers will soon realize that you are not trying to sell them the next upgrade to get more cash, because the software is free. You will be selling your knowledge, experience, and customer service. Many IT departments would be more apt to use open source if they knew that it was strongly supported. Also, there is a lot less conflict of interest when you remove the vendor from the ongoing support.

Maybe I should have invested in Blackboard stock instead ;-)

For me, social media have been closely linked with my becoming a free-agent (June 2003). Blogs were becoming easier to use, and by early 2004 I had this one up and running on Drupal. Since then, it has been a fast trip testing out so many different platforms and applications that I cannot remember them any more. Thankfully my blog has become a knowledge-base so that I can find out what I was doing and writing about four years ago.

Social media – first blogs, then wikis, bookmarks, SNS, micro-blogging, etc – have provided a richer way to engage people whom I would not have met other than online. It has allowed me to engage many communities, such as edubloggers and open source advocates. To say that social media have made a difference to my professional practice would be an understatement. Much of my current practice has become focused around social media. Five years ago I would have said that I was a training and performance improvement consultant. Today, I would say that I specialize in social media for learning and working.

Little Brother

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I picked up Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother for my son this weekend and read it myself on the plane home. I don’t read much fiction but I really enjoyed this one, which I feel is a much better story than Eastern Standard Tribe, the only other book of his I’ve read.

I really couldn’t put the book down. It reminded me of books like Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and Snow Crash, and I think that it will resonate with teenagers (I found it in the Teen section of the bookstore) as well as anyone interested in technology, culture and the limits of state-controlled security.

Little Brother is available as a free download (Creative Commons Licensed) so you don’t have to outlay any cash. I personally prefer the paper format for longer reads. Here’s the opening paragraph:

I’m a senior at Cesar Chavez high in San Francisco’s sunny Mission district, and that makes me one of the most surveilled people in the world. My name is Marcus Yallow, but back when this story starts, I was going by w1n5t0n. Pronounced “Winston.”

*Not* pronounced “Double-you-one-enn-five-tee-zero-enn” — unless you’re a clueless disciplinary officer who’s far enough behind the curve that you still call the Internet “the information superhighway.”

I know just such a clueless person, and his name is Fred Benson, one of three vice-principals at Cesar Chavez. He’s a sucking chest wound of a human being. But if you’re going to have a jailer, better a clueless one than one who’s really on the ball.

“Marcus Yallow,” he said over the PA one Friday morning. The PA isn’t very good to begin with, and when you combine that with Benson’s habitual mumble, you get something that sounds more like someone struggling to digest a bad burrito than a school announcement. But human beings are good at picking their names out of audio confusion — it’s a survival trait.

I grabbed my bag and folded my laptop three-quarters shut — I didn’t want to blow my downloads — and got ready for the inevitable.

“Report to the administration office immediately.”

Open Source & Business

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I’m preparing a workshop for later this month and one of the topics will be the rise of open source and the business models around it. Here are some interesting sites and comments that I’ve come across lately:

Matt Asay: “The benefits of SaaS [software as a service] also point to its greatest flaw: it’s the ultimate lock-in scenario when it comes to your data, even though it “liberates” the user from software. In fact, it’s this very liberation that creates the problem. If you don’t have the software, you really don’t have the data, no matter the vendor’s data policy. My data qua data is only as useful as the software used to open it up and read it.”

The Economic Times: “Clearly, the IPR-based [intellectual property rights] model for innovation is just not working. Strong IP protection is encouraging protectionism and is harming the way science is done. Many more patents are taken out to stop others from working than to protect one’s own research. It is premised on very high costs of development, that are sought to be recovered through high monopoly pricing of products.”

Dave Snowden: “… I think the position deeply confuses the concept of open source with that of not having to pay for things. It also fails to understand that all business models make money somewhere, the issue is where and (to my mind the most important thing) the degree of transparency of said business model. ”

Guillaume Lebleu: “The idea is to not view open source as an all or nothing strategy, but rather as a marketing technique to segment your market and maximize revenue, except that in the open source case, the revenue is mostly intangible.” [follow link for charts]

I’ll be summarizing my workshop and posting here by the end of the month.

Mailserver Down

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If you’ve sent any e-mail messages to the @jarche.com address this past week, i may have missed it, as we’re having some technical issues with the mailserver. My posted e-mail still works though – hjarche AT gmail DOT com.

Update: All is working now :-)

Boring is good

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I thought that enterprise top-down software was a thing of the past and that small pieces loosely joined was the new model, but I’ve been in learning hell with a community of practice platform that uses the walled garden metaphor to the extreme.

Christopher Sessums refers to Clay Shirky’s comment in Here Comes Everybody, that “Communication tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring” . Christopher adds:

In other words, it’s not the invention of the tool that holds value; it’s the tool’s ubiquitousness that contains the value which ultimately leads to profound social changes.

Similarly, the tools that support virtual communities probably won’t be very interesting until they become invisible, everyday components in our lives. For some, this is already the case and as such we are beginning to see new and powerful means to share, commune, and identify with one another.

Message to tool builders – you cannot be ubiquitous inside a walled garden.

I have spent a few days trying to figure out my client’s system. This will be a larger problem when a casual computer user has to make sense of all of the functions as well as the underlying model of the platform.  Having created several online communities and participated as a member and a moderator of many more, I can’t see how a community can grow if there is any difficulty in using the technology. The only case where a complicated system will work is when the option of not using it is unacceptable. The litmus test for any community software should be, “is it easier than e-mail?”, because that is what most users will compare it to.

Business Cards 2.0

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I’m starting to run out of business cards and I’ve been using the same design since I started this business in 2003. The original design was intentionally conservative and I have no urge to change it. However, I decided to try a parallel path and test out Moo minicards. These are very small business cards (very “2.0-ish”) which can be printed on demand. I ordered 100 cards and a small case and used one of the available designer themes. You can also import Flickr photos and best of all, each card can have a different design.

I’m already considering my next order and Andrea wants a bunch from her Flickr gallery to use as business cards and price tags for her art work. I can also see these cards as quite useful for events like conferences. The shipping is very fast, even to Atlantic Canada :-)

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.

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.

Platforms versus Programs

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Jay Cross discusses an interview with John Hagel at FastForward and sees that a move from programs to platforms is necessary in a web-centric world:

The way out of the squeeze is to move from programs to platforms. He’s not talking about media. Rather, programs are push, content, and structured (as with software). Platforms are frameworks, networks, flexible, and loosely coupled. It won’t be an easy transition; many companies will die along the way. (The lifespan of an S+P company is already down to 15 years, an 80% drop from historical levels.)

Meanwhile, on the FastForward Blog, Rob Paterson shows how Wikipedia and YouTube have greatly surpassed both NPR and PBS in number of viewers. What is interesting is that both Wikipedia and YouTube are platforms, while NPR and PBS have been pushing programs.

I can see the same change happening in education. The successful institutions [if we use that term] in the near future will provide the best collaborative platforms. Those with only programs to offer will be sidelined.