Noise Between Stations

Month: February 2008

  • The State of Video Education

    Having started a school of sorts, I’m interested in anyone pushing the envelope of what can be done to teach people, and lately I’ve turned my attention to reaching more people with sessions online rather than only in the classroom. The first generation of “distance education” from universities mostly sucked; schools were sold software that forced them to shoehorn pedagogy into a particular medium (discussion boards, online text, chat rooms) and it really only worked when you had a perfect storm of content that fit the medium, students and teachers comfortable and patient enough to use the medium, and classroom instruction that filled in the gaps. I taught an information architecture class at the New School/Parsons School of Design years ago and it was a royal pain in the ass, but for those few people in Asia that had no other option, it was probably fairly useful.

    Fast forward several years where Web 2.0 meets the classroom. Specifically, with broadband our palette of media opens up to include audio and video, and our business models open up to include architectures of participation. YouTube is now the richest playground of education experimentation online. Here’s two examples:

    You Suck at Photoshop
    Boring, technical techniques are thwarted with dark humor. Perfect for graphic designers.

    Team Ukemi Parkour Tutorial
    Instructional techniques lifted from technical illustration, mixed with attitude, and applied to video (“just take the marker and draw right on my back”)

    Awesome, but this just scratches the surface. How can we use this approach to teach business, design, and business design? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

  • We’ll Reach the Semantic Web One Small Step at a Time

    XFN and FOAF were two small steps in that direction, and Google just built on them with the Social Graph API (watch the friendly little video intro).

    Any day now we’ll see an application that not only helps us generate XFN and FOAF data, but does so in a way that manages our online identities, particularly with regards to search. It’ll tip the balance of art and science in SEO toward science.

    Top-down semantic web visions were judged by skeptical-but-realistic critics to be overly systematic. Well, yes, but if we get there a piece at a time, helping people understand, implement, experiment, and capitalize with each little piece, we’ll get there in an organic way.

    Time to go generate some XFN…

    Links to what others are saying.

  • Microsoft Offer for Yahoo! Shouldn’t Be Too Surprising

    Ray OzzieIn my Internet Strategy Class I walk through the 2005 Internet Services Disruption memo from Ray Ozzie. The takeaway is that Microsoft realized services have become strategically crucial but that the company has significant organizational obstacles in the way of making the transition from installed software.

    So it’s not terribly surprising when they start buying up companies like Avenue A/Razorfish and now an offer for Yahoo. They need to add this capability and revenue stream, and it’s extraordinarily difficult to turn the Microsoft ship around fast enough.