Tag Archives: hacking education

Idea: Tracking support costs

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It would be sweet to have capability within a support ticketing tool or CRM to track the “cost” of a given client or topic. When the agent logs a transaction, they’d record their perceived cost to the transaction. The system would capture this information against client, topic, and type of support. A type of support might be “one-on-one” or “workshop.”

Obviously the former is a lot less efficient way of supporting. If the system logged this information, it would be much easier to see when we’re “in the red” for one-on-one support, and that we should host a workshop for a given topic.

Disrupting College

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Disrupting College. New report by Clayton Christensen, Michael Horn, Louis Soares, and Louis Caldera addresses the challenges faced by our education industry, where disruptive innovation is likely to occur, and offers approaches for existing institutions to adopt. Analysis is spot on.

Three education problems to solve: reusable syllabi, mapping demand, and adaptive teaching

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Working on a class outline for intro to setting up your website, how WordPress works, and very basic HTML CSS. In this process, I’ve identified three educational problems needing to be solved.

First, capturing class content. There are a discreet number of facts to presented in this subject area. Along with that, there are examples to be given, exercises to be done, and questions to be raised. Inventing this from scratch each time, or only having access to your prior syllabi, seems completely antiquated. It would be wonderful to be able to use historical data on how others have taught to improve your own approach. If it was a structured database you could access, even more the better. This doesn’t solve the disconnect between teaching and self-directed learning, but it could optimize the quality of teaching.

Second, identifying where students are at and where they want to go. The latter presupposes students know where they want to go, but I suspect most have some idea. Again, both of these points of data currently aren’t captured in any sort of meaningful way. This causes the instructor to prepare course material based on what they perceive necessary, instead of the more effective approach of tying it closely to demand.

Lastly, adapting teaching approaches. For the class this afternoon, there are going to be some number of students who took the January Academy WordPress workshop(s) and some number who haven’t. There are going to be some number of students who have websites set up and are ready to take them to the next level, and there are going to be some number of students who haven’t. The problem is less when class size is 12 to 15, but becomes exponentially worse when you add more students. There must be a way to scale the experience of one-on-one teaching.

Universities as hubs of journalistic activity

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In the first Carnival of Journalism of the new year, David Cohn asks: How do we increase the role of higher education as hubs of journalistic activity?

First, the why. Educational institutions often have long-standing ties to a local community, both in terms of physical location as well as relationships. In New York City, there are families with multiple generations who have attended CUNY. Educational institutions are also in a unique position where they have access to continually fresh human capital. These are the strategic advantages.

As to the how, there are dozens of projects we could embark on. For instance, we could team with computer science students build a tool that maps a community’s information needs. Or we could offer low-cost multimedia reporting courses to active community members in hopes they will take the initiative to cover their own neighborhoods. Or we could reorient the entire institution to be a working newsroom and task hundreds of students as boots-on-the-ground reporters. Continue reading →

Status

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Successfully generated a 44 recipient email list in MailChimp from contacts with a specific tag in Highrise. Email blast was sent at 11 pm and already has a 31.8% open rate and 13.6% click rate by 12:30 am. Data-driven education for the win.

Parallel between newspapers and education: Supply and demand

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Editors have traditionally determined what content runs in the newspaper every day. Teachers have traditionally determined what content runs in the classroom every day. Stated politically correct: both could benefit from tools to better understand customer demand and where areas of oversupply exist.

Also, I want to see an educational institution as a technology company. No mo’ vendors.

Thoughts on Twitter (as it applies to education)

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Susie Bartel, a University of Oregon journalism student in Feature Writing 1, is writing an article about instructors using Twitter as a part of their curriculum. She requested I offer my opinion on Twitter as it applies to education. The questions are hers via email; I thought I’d respond on my blog so she could link to it as primary source material (even paragraph by paragraph thanks to WinerLinks).

Susie: When did you start using Twitter? Was it for personal, professional, or educational purposes?

I’m almost positive I joined Twitter in April 2007, although I don’t think I started using it regularly until that summer. Since episode 1, I’ve been a regular listener of Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech. I believe I heard Twitter mentioned first in this episode, and signed up shortly after.

In 2007, all use of Twitter was experimental. There was no distinction between personal, professional, or educational. It was a new tool, and people had to invent how to use it. Since the beginning, up until about three weeks ago, I used Twitter as a mix of all three. I posted images from awesome vacation sights, scored a two-year gig at Publish2 by tweeting “I want to live in startup land”, and tapped the knowledge of people smarter than I by tweeting questions I’ve run into.

Susie: Have you always been open to using Twitter?

Yes, until three weeks ago.

Continue reading →

Leveraging blogs, wikis and other collaborative tools in the classroom

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In preparation for the upcoming semester at CUNY, we’re putting together a guide to popular web collaboration tools and identifying ways they might be used in the classroom.

In house, we’ll offer blogs for student and classroom use from a WordPress 3.0 multisite instance. On the main website, we’ll have a customized version of BuddyPress with groups, profiles, status updates, and activity streams to start, and courses, assignments, etc. later on. We also have a pretty extensive PBwiki site, and might possibly offer a hosted version of Etherpad.

The guide will offer a concise introduction to these tools, as there’s no use in reinventing the wheel. What I think is more important, though, is offering ideas of how the tools might be used and examples of related experiments at other universities.

For instance, students might use Etherpad to collaboratively take notes and share links during a class, and then publish those notes to the class blog at the end so that everyone has access to them for studying. Once published, those notes could be automatically pulled into the wiki page acting as the living course syllabus.

Other ideas that came to mind this morning:

  • Students can write an introductory post at the beginning of the course detailing their background and what they hoped to learn in the coming semester. The class could use all of these to collaboratively develop the syllabus while also identifying the strengths and weaknesses of each human asset.
  • Professor could post requirements for upcoming assignments and students can ask questions about it. The questions get answered once publicly, instead of a dozen times by email, and are stored in association with the assignment.
  • Professors can use the blog to pull in learning materials from other sources and spark conversation on top of the content. Instead of duplicating efforts, they should focus on what they do best.
  • Students can use the blog as an open research notebook, or for updates on a story in progress, and people both within the school and outside of the school can give feedback or offer suggestions.

Being able to point to examples, however, will be the secret sauce.

Howard Rheingold has a wiki for his Comm 182/183 classes that includes learning expectations, information on assignments, pages for each class session, and group project pages (behind an authentication wall).

Suzi Steffen’s J361 class uses a WordPress.com blog for posting assignment requirements, posting story ideas, posting updates on stories in progress (especially valuable: things learned along the way), posting completed assignments, and media analysis. They also use Twitter as a light-weight backchannel for the class:

Related to this, Clay Shirky held a public brainstorming session at the beginning of the year on designing college from scratch that generated several useful suggestions and is worth reading through for inspiration.

What ideas and examples are we missing?