One of my much esteemed colleagues, Keri Pearlson, is looking for examples of Fortune 500 companies using various kinds of social software, from LinkedIn to MySpace to wikis and blogs. Any examples?
Author Archives: Espen
Chris Short to the rescue
I have previously written about Tobi Oetiker, who fixed a Palm software error, then made the fix available on the web as a service. I have now found someone who fixes Palm hardware: Chris Short, pictured here at his workbench. When I was in the US in November last year, I bought a Palm M505 (I think, the color version) from Chris (on eBay) for daughter no. 1. She is using it (with a fold-out keyboard) as a note-taker in her International Relations studies.
My wife has had a Palm Vx for ages, also with a keyboard. It was dying (battery wouldn’t hold the charge, the touch-screen was responding only intermittently,) so I fired off an email to Chris on the off-chance that he might have another Palm for sale.
Chris responded immediately, saying that a better way (especially since I didn’t want to shell out for a new fold-out keyboard) would be to mail the Vx to him, recondition it (new screen and battery, clean-up) and then he would send it back. I so did, sent if off two weeks ago. It arrived back here in the northern corner of Europe yesterday. Screen and battery is new, all the old peripherals work great, and the total charge comes to $49, including international postage.
It turns out Chris is running this as a business, and has gotten good reviews on the web. I can only declare myself in agreement, and start to think about whether I don’t want to exchange that Ericsson P910 I am carting around with a used M505. You just can’t beat the form factor and usability – and the service from people like Chris.
Highly recommended. Incidentally, Chris hasn’t gotten around to setting up a home page yet, but his email is ips at chartermi.net. And if you Google for "Chris Short Palm" you’ll find find him easily.
Internet cheating, again…
I tried to enter an answer to the concerned professor (Slashdotted) who wondered what to do about Internet-enabled cheating, but you have to register to enter a comment etc., etc. So here goes:
It is not that hard to solve (or, at least, significantly reduce) cheating. Here is what you do:
- Have students turn in papers electronically through a service which checks for plagiarism (Personally, I use Blackboard’s SafeAssignment, which works fine, though Blackboard itself is crap). Yes, it will cost the university money. Control mechanisms do. Consider it an investment in academic reputation.
- Institute a rule that any student submitting a term paper can be subjected to an oral examination about it within a specified time, making paper outsourcing risky. My institution has this in their student handbook.
- Use multiple methods of evaluation, including class participation. This makes the whole course an evaluation, encourages preparation throughout the course, and might teach you something new.
- Use fresh examples and/or new and ingenious questions every year, so that the pool of available papers to plagiarize or ready-made Wikipedia entries to amalgamate is reduced.
- Design the content and teaching of your courses so that they value insight and deliberation rather than repetitive fact checking (for which you should use sit-in exams).
It’s not that hard. It just means structuring the control mechanisms to the content of your course, and getting to know your students well enough that you have a multidimensional view of their abilities.
PS: Incidentally, here is a to-the-point comic (removed, link rot) about this issue. Trouble is, not enough college professors read Wikipedia.
PSPS: The comments to this piece seem to take the same viewpoint, aside from lamenting the fact that teaching college has gone from scholarship to babysitting. It has, and that is lamentable. But if you are going to do babysitting, at least do it well, in a way that does not punish the real students…
Reality check
I have lived in the US for six years, have worked for US companies since 1994, have a daughter who is an American citizen, and consider the country my second homeland. Can somebody please explain to me how something as bizarre as this came to be? Most (come to think of it, all) people I know over there consider President Bush somewhat out to lunch, but the proposal to "reinterpret" Article III of the Geneva convention is, quite simply, evil. Not to mention that the President’s articulation of whatever it is he is trying to say leaves a lot to be desired:
This is not the America I know and love. At least a number of US politicians – from both sides – seem to recognize that.
Causality and Zipf’s Law
Chris Anderson has an interesting post about Zipf’s law, which posits that the frequency distribution of words in the English language follows a power law. He shows that if you set up a process that generates random sets of characters, you end up with the same distribution.
I am wondering if we aren’t putting the cart before the horse here – might it not be the case that the words we use more often have become shorter, precisely because we use them more often? If language evolves over time with an aim to increase understanding and reduce bandwidth consumption, this is what we would expect.
The words "mama" and "papa" are common throughout many languages because when a baby starts babbling, that is what he or she will say first. So, we made words out of babble, representing what proud parents would want them to represent. Similarly, we reserve the shortest words (single vowels, diphthongs, or combinations of one vowel and one consonant) for the concepts we need most frequently.
Saves bandwidth. Just ask any kid with an SMS thumb.
Forking Wikipedia?
Nick Carr sees no reconciliation between "deletionists" and "inclusionists" over how Wikipedia should continue to evolve.
Wikipedia was originally started to generate content for a more traditional encyclopædia, called Nupedia. It seems like it worked according to plan. Perhaps it is time to generate Nupedia.
For my part, I remain a "delusionist" a little longer, betting on people’s ability to vet out incomprehensive or incorrect information. It seems to me that people deal with information differently when they are in search mode – and that what Wikipedia needs is some sort of disclaimer to alert people that, though it may have a very high Googlerank, anyone can write and the vetting process taking place is the one done by those who read it before you. Given simple and powerful search, however, the process of validation should be quick and simple. I can live with that.
Pretexting
…seems to be the new word for what used to be called social engineering. Or lying. Brought to you courtesy of the board of Hewlett Packard.
The last word in this story isn’t said yet, but for now it looks like there will be some changes in HP’s board. HP used to be about great products (remember HP calculators and laser printers?) and innovation in its many divisions. You could trust products bought from them because of the solid engineering culture. Now it increasingly is beginning to look like a hollow shell, making most of its money on printer cartridges (for the last 8 years or so). Now the Board seems preoccupied with spying on each other.
How the mighty have fallen. And kudos to Tom Perkins for having some sense of ethics.
(Via Scoble, Techdirt, and just about everyone else)
Update: Now Perkins’ letter is available at The Smoking Gun. That’s a web site I would love to see here in Norway.
Hippopotic hysterics
In today’s department for things worth reading we bring an excerpt from Stephen Fry’s The Hippopotamus, which could be described as a comic mystery novel – though there is no crime involved, only some vaguely magical healings with an ingenious solution in the end. Howlingly funny and full of little side stories like this one, which you will find towards the end:
When Gordon Fell was knighted in 1987 he threw a celebration binge afterwards at the Savoy. Not the Dominion Club of course, as it should have been, but the Savoy. During the party he described to us the ceremony at Buckingham Palace. Gordie hadn’t been the only man there that morning to be knighted, naturally. The Queen contrives to process dozens of candidates in one hit. They are disposed, it would seem, in rows of chairs, as at a lecture, while a band of the Guards plays anus-contractingly inappropriate tunes like “A Spoonful of Sugar” and “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” in the background. Gordon was due to kneel and be dubbed next in line after the self-important fool sitting beside him. This pompous little pip-squeak had wriggled his way into the chairmanship of some large charity or another and was now coming to collect what he regarded as his due reward.
The figure introduced himself with pride and whispered, after Gordon had told him his name, “And what do you to, then? The diplomatic, is it?”
“I’m a painter,” Gordie said.
“Really?” said the fellow. “Not one of those awful moderns, I hope.”
“Oh no,” said Gordon. “Of course I am not a modern painter. I was born in the sixteenth fucking century, wasn’t I? I’m an Old Master, me.”
Not quite Buck House language, perhaps, but justifiable under the circumstances. The chap turned his shoulder on Gordie, disgusted that he could be sharing an honour with such an animal. Gordon pointedly scratched his groin and yawned.
Anyway, the turn came for the charity weasel to kneel and be serviced. It so fell out that this investiture into the Knights Commander of the Crawling Toads, or whatever order it was that he was in line for, took place unaccompanied by melody, the band being engaged in taking the sheet music of “Consider Yourself” off their stands and replacing it with “Born Free”. her Maj’s sword tapped the man’s shoulders in hushed silence and he rose to an upright position with becoming dignity, bowing his head with a crisp snap that would have shamed an equerry. As he did so his nervous, uptight and excitable system delivered itself of an astoundingly sustained and quite startlingly loud fart. The monarch stepped backwards, which was all part of the programme as it happened, but which seemed to everyone present to be an involuntary reaction to the man’s violent rip. The expression on his face as he trailed miserably down the aisle was one of deepest woe. Every person in the room stared at him or, worse, waited until he was level with them and then averted their eyes. Gordon, passing him in the aisle as he made his own way to the steps of the throne, murmured in a growl audible to all, “Don’t worry, old boy. She’ll be used to it. Keeps plenty of dogs and horses, don’t forget.”
The lips of the Queen, according to Gordie, were seen to curve into a smile at this and she detained him in conversation for longer than anyone else. When he returned to his seat next to the still-scarlet farter, Sir Gordon rasped out, in time with the band which was now operative again, “Bo-orn free, a-free as the WIND BLOWS.”
Being the vindictive sod that he is, Gordie didn’t stop there, naturally. In the mêlée of press that gathered outside the palace and especially around him, he was asked how the occasion had gone.
“That man over there,” Gordon said, pointing at the chap, who was standing with his wife and only a photographer from a local Hampshire newspaper to bolster his self-esteem, “let out the most extraordinary fart, virtually in the sovereign’s face. Quite astonishing. Some kind of anarchist, I suppose.”
The pack flew to the spot like flies to a cow-pat and the pathetic creature was last seen streaking down the Mall, his silk topper bouncing on the pavement behind him. He lost his hat, his reputation and in all probability his wife in one Gordon Fell swoop. Never insult a painter. Not worth it.
Highly recommended!
Google’s functional expansion
Chris Anderson reports and Anil Dash analyzes Google’s gradual move towards providing more functionality on top of data elements.
This is a very significant move, and starts with the information. First Google lets you find information, in the process becoming the standard interface to the net and the first port for information in general. Then functionality is added to the information – not as advanced as what you can get on the desktop, but good enough for a start.
The important issue here is that this is a potentially disruptive innovation because it allows people who formerly were not able to change/process/analyze information to do so – but with technology that will be deemed inferior by those that are the best customers of the existing software vendors. As Anil says, the 500 most important customers of Microsoft wants less change and other kinds of functionality than the infinitely larger market of individuals with smaller investment budgets.
Cory Doctorow video on Google video
Google Video has its uses – here is the video from the speech Cory Doctorow gave in Oslo in May 2005. Don’t know who put it there, but it is public domain – and yes, it is yours truly giving the overlong introduction.
Why professors should blog
Dan Cohen has an excellent article on this topic – which, if nothing else, is a pretty good argument for blogging in general and RSS feeding in particular.
Go for it. Nothing is as eternal (and as findable) as something written in silicon. Thanks to RSS, Google, and good ol’ Gordon Moore’s law, which pretty soon will lead to a situation where we are all working off the same (virtual) machine.
iPod Nano redux
Eirik Solheim is is trying to pull a Nigritude Ultramarine on behalf of all frustrated, if competent, electronics purchasers out there. The operative phrase is "Kjøpe en iPod Nano".
More power to him, I say….
The VC version of Tech adoption
Coburn, P. (2006). The Change Function: Why some technologies take off and others crash and burn. New York, NY, Penguin Portfolio.
Picked this one up on a lark from Amazon. Written by a venture capitalist, it breezily argues that the many technologies fail because the perceived pain of adoption is too high.
I found this one hard to get into – my suspicion is that it is (like Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars) one of those books where the title suffices for understanding the main idea. In this case, the title doesn’t, but Coburn helpfully provides this summary in the introduction:
ISSUE 1: High-tech failure rates stink
The commercial failure rate of nominally great new technologies is troublingly high. That failure rate is consistent with the hatred and distrust most normal human beings – which I like to call Earthlings – tend to have of high technology. That hatred and distrust is a bummer since our little planet can use all the help technology might provide.ISSUE 2: Suppliers think they are in charge but in reality users are in charge
The technology industry operates according to an implicit supplier-oriented assumption. That assumption is that if one builds great new disruptive technologies and lets cost reduction kick in, markets will naturally appear. This is known as "build it and they will come."
He then goes on to provide a semi-mathematical formula of the "change function" with, I think, the likelihood of success (or, at least, technology adoption) as the product of "perceived crisis" and "perceived pain of adoption".
OK. The perceived pain of reading the rest of the book from that point on became a little too much for me, especially since a quick glance awakened reminiscences of 140-page PowerPoint presentations and hastily grabbed examples. Plus, my perceived crisis is in too much adoption. So I disengaged.
Refuse to be terrorized
Bruce Schneier, one of the world’s foremost experts on computer security, has a great essay about how we need to get less panicky about possible terrorist threats – in order to twart terrorists.
Common sense, in other words. May the newspapers and politicians of the world hear him, but I suspect that the economics of attention and influence is against him.
Eddie Bauer customer service
My colleague Frank Capek at the Concours Group is running a project collecting outstanding customer experiences, with a view to analyzing them. He asked for examples – so here is my favorite:
Back in the early nineties I lived outside Boston, as a doctoral student. The children were small and required a lot of small items whenever we were out and about, so I used to wear one of those photographer’s vests, with lots of pockets and good ventilation. Now they are hallmarks of the elderly suburban dork, but back then they were moderately fashionable.
One day I needed a some new shirts, so I called Eddie Bauer‘s order phone. I ordered the shirts, and then (since I am a certified nerd, known to do that kind of thing) struck up a conversation with the Eddie Bauer lady at the other end:
Espen: By the way, I bought one of those photographer’s vests about a year ago – that thing has been great, very practical, use it all the time.
Eddie Bauer Lady: Great – is it still OK?
E: Sure! Well, come to think of it, there was a small tear under one arm, but my wife mended it, so it’s fine.
EBL: I’ll send you a new one.
E: But .. I am not complaining, it is fine!
EBL: They aren’t supposed to tear like that.
E: Well, but I have been using it a lot…
EBL: Still, that’s not supposed to happen. Hang on a second [sound of furious typing in the background] .. hm… here it is, yeah, you bought it last summer, at $49. [more typing] Seems we don’t have that kind any more, we have a new one, costs $54, I’ll send you that.
E: Er..well, thanks!
EBL: No problem. Anything else, Sir?
A few days later the new vest arrived. Later, I was told that the customer service representatives at Eddie Bauer have a certain dollar amount, per customer, that they can use at their discretion. In this case, it cost Eddie Bauer a garment.
On the other hand, I have mentioned this incident in many presentations around the world, and now also in my blog, so I think Eddie Bauer got their money’s worth in customer satisfaction and free advertising. And I still shop there.
Anyone else with similar stories, or other outstanding customer experiences you want to share?
MS-supplied goodies
Here is a great list of downloads for Windows XP from Microsoft – I saw my favorite tool FolderShare was on the list. The Alt-Tab replacement looks interesting, and does many others.
(Via Scoble.)
Update Aug 24: Installed the Alt-Tab replacement. Shows a thumbnail of each application as you go through with Alt-Tab. Works great on my fast machine, not sure I will install it on my laptop.
Jurassic Blackboard
Blackboard (or, as I like to refer to it, Blackbored) is a learning management system used by many schools and universities, including mine. I will have to admit to being somewhat involved in the selection process, by advocating that since there really was no difference between these products 6 years ago (still not much of a difference, really) we might as well go with the market leader, for reasons of externalities and experience.
Blackboard is not a good product. It reminds me of certain software packages I used on an IBM mainframe under VM/CMS back in the 80s – packages like PROFS, which were good then but are obsolete now. Blackboard has a few good attributes, first and foremost that it can be used by the truly clueless, both teachers and students. And it does have a nice sub-system called SafeAssignment, which does a good job with plagiarism detection.
Over the summer, the IT department here installed the newest version of Blackboard – version 7. As far as I can see, there are very limited additions in functionality, mainly associated with keeping score of students’ grades (which I do in an Excel spreadsheet, much faster and more flexible than Blackboard’s web interface). I am now working on re-establishing my courses after a six month sabbatical. That is a chore at the best of times, and Blackboard makes it worse with its tedious interface and limiting structure.
Here is a running list of irritations, as I notice them:
- When you upload a file, you can only upload one at a time (no control-click to select more than one.) Yes, you can zip the files and upload the zip archive, but that is a kluge. Why on earth can’t I click on several files at once – every web service under the sun can do that, starting with services that lets you upload pictures?
- It doesn’t work well in Mozilla Firefox. It has gotten better: Version 6 had several things that only worked in Internet Explorer. No problem, Firefox has a small market share – except on campuses, where it sometimes dominates. What kind of companies use Blackbored? That’s right, universities. Smart.
- It is not possible to publish a course, or parts of a course such as individual pages, to the web. Those of us who like to share our courses with the world will have to maintain separate web sites.
- You cannot pull external web pages into Blackboard, only link to them.
- Possibilities for customization are very limited – you can change the color of buttons and such, but you cannot, for instance, rearrange the order of courses that appear on your login screen, or where they go.
- The menu system requires an incessant stream of clicking – start at a top screen, click down in the hierarchy, click to do something, fill in a form, press Submit, wait forever, get a "success" screen that you have to click to close, and then get taken back to the screen you started with. If you have a lot to do, especially repetitive tasks, this drives you nuts.
- There is no ability to apply changes to more than one course. As a matter of fact, there are no shortcuts whatsoever for people who are comfortable working with information technology.
- There is excessive duplication of information. I am listed in 5 courses, and for each one of them I have to go in and fill out "staff information" about myself. To put it in technical terms, their database is not in normal form. If you have a number of courses that use (wholly or partially) the same material, this drives you nuts. Especially if you find an error and have to correct it 5 places.
- You cannot customize announcement displays – so I end up getting my login screen cluttered with stale announcements from courses I have guest lectured in a long time ago.
- The system is a nightmare to manage for the IT department. Trust me. Those guys usually don’t complain much, but they are swearing over the complications of adding new users to a course, for instance.
- There is no possibility to use social software tools, such as RSS feeds (meaning students could subscribe to changes), wikis (collaborative content creation), blogging functionality such as Trackbacks, or tags. (And don’t tell me about "next release" – this should have been in there a long time ago.)
- There is no click-and-drag functionality anywhere.
- There is no functionality for having a local copy and uploading (replicating), so that you could work in a non-connected setting.
- It doesn’t preserve session state, so when you press Refresh, it takes you out of the screen you were working in (the Control Panel, say) and back to the starting screen for the course.
- The courses (individual pages or courses in themselves) are not searchable (or, to use Peter Morville’s term, not findable.)
- Each screen contains very little information, mainly because the fonts are big, so it is hard to get an overview. You end up clicking around a lot just to find things. A more compressed view, perhaps with browser functionality that would let you jump between branches in an information hierarchy would be appreciated.
- You can’t log in automatically – in fact, you have to go via an opening screen with a "Log In" button. How about having the browser remembering the password and UID and jumping straight in?
- (added 8/31): The system makes it extremely tedious to change small errors in several entries. Item: I had, for one course, entered 10 assignments, all with text, due date etc. Then it dawned on me that I had forgotten to specify that they should be SafeAssignments, i.e., that they should be subject to plagiarism control. There was no way I could fix that, neither for the whole group of assignments nor for each entry. Instead, I had to create 10 new assignments, copy the text over, and set the "display until" dates again. Why oh why? Doesn’t the company have anyone with even rudimentary knowledge of user interfaces?
- (added 9/17): When students submit a paper to SafeAssignment, they don’t get a receipt that the paper has been received (for instance through an email). Coupled with performance problems in SafeAssignment, this means quite a few students think they have submitted the paper even though they haven’t.
- (added 9/17): When you send out an email to all participants in a course, there is no standard way of limiting it to only students. There is also no way to CC: someone who is not inside the system – for instance an external guest speaker. Instead, you have to go back to your email inbox and forward the mail from there.
Blackboard does something for straightening out formalities and making administration easier – but not as easy as it could be. It offers a space to leave content you want limited to the course participants, and has a rudimentary collaboration system. But the system forces you into a very rigid and limiting form of teaching and communicating – essentially, it automates a traditional way of teaching rather than make use of all the wonderful things the technology can do. Rather sad, for someone who is a market leader in learning management systems.
That being said, the fact that they are suing competitors to protect a patent for the idea of bringing together online learning in one package might be an indication that I am not the only person onto something here. It would be nice if they started listening to the people that use their softw
are and give them tools that made them better. If they did, they wouldn’t have to worry so much about the competition. And I wouldn’t have to work with a system that assumes I am an idiot.
PS: A tip if you have to work with Blackboard: Get the administration to set up a fake course for you (I call mine "0 Espens resources", with the "0" ensuring that it shows up on top of my list of courses) where you stuff all your teaching material in nice little folders, with questions, articles and data. When you are setting up a course, you can then copy materials from this repository into the new course, and not have to laboriously upload everything. Works like a charm. Would be even better if it was part of the package. Would be even greater if I could do it automatically from my PC and press "synchronize"….
Get rid of Caps Lock
There is an underground movement forming aiming to rid keyboards of the dratted cAPS lOCK kEY, which, when you accidentally hit it, screws up your typing and occupies valueable real estate on crowded keyboards.
Hear, hear. Move it to Ctrl-Shift or some other multi-key combination. And give me back that large space bar and a key (on a Norwegian keyboard, that is) for @, $ and perhaps €.
Come to think of it, my Das Keyboard has one fewer key than a Logitech keyboard, and when it is set to Norwegian, I have trouble writing HTML code. Now, if I reprogrammed CapLock and ShiftCapLock to "<" and ">", life would be simpler.
Now, how do I do that – there are files for turning CapsLock into Shift and other things. But to a regular character?
I’ll be back….
Irritating "Good site" spam
For some reason I have gotten a lot of irritating comment spam the last couple of weeks. The comments are all on the form "Good site. Thanks!", tend to hit a few old posts, and somehow manage to slip through Movable Type’s pretty good spam filter. I have tried upping the strictness of the spam filter, but that has resultet in some legitimate comments disappearing into the spam holding pen.
What to do?
Applied Abstractions 