Digital Musings

Teaching, learning and blogging: Some further evidence

Readers of this blog know that we have advocated the use of blogs as a teaching and learning device for quite a while. Indeed, we have preached the blogging gospel and converted some Cyberlibris users who are now veteran bloggers.

If you're not convinced yet of the depth and scope blogs can bring to the process of teaching and learning, here is some further evidence coming from Australia.

Anne Bartlett Bragg is a part-time academic at the University of Technology in Sydney. She is currently writing a PhD on how digital media can enhance the learning experience of students. Of course, she could not miss blogs (being a blogger herself). What she says about blogs and learning in a recent ABC Science News interview fits very nicely with the experience we have at Cyberlibris with our users.

The most striking phenomenon when a professor starts to blog is that he or she becomes really a "primus inter pares". More specifically the teaching and learning processes switch from vertical to horizontal and that's what makes blogging very addictive to both the teacher and the learners. Moreover you don't need to be a computer cat to use a blog, you just need to feel like sharing with others!

Thanks to Corporate Engagement and Michael Specht for the link.

Happy Birthday Dr Moore!

"With unit cost falling as the number of components per circuit rises, by 1975 economics may dictate squeezing as many as 65,000 components on a single silicon chip."

Moore, Gordon E., "Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits", Electronics, Vol 38, Number 8, April 19, 1965

This article by Dr Moore, co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductors and Intel, has become the basis of what has been dubbed Moore's Law. This law says that the number of components one can print on a chip doubles every two year. So far the law has never been revoked. Just think of the amazing number of components you carry through your laptop, cellphone, PDA, wristwatch etc... Moore's law seems to be to electronics what the compound interest is to finance.

Its 40th birthday was celebrated a few days ago. Dr Moore was interviewed in a recent podcast by Larry Magid (through ITConversations). It's interesting to note that when the article was published it triggered no reaction at all. These days, quite the opposite! It has become an industry benchmark.

There is another birthday that is forthcoming and that we should not forget about, namely that of the article entiteld "As We May Think" by Vannevar Bush (published in the Atlantic Monthly in July 1945). Dr Vannevar Bush coined a term, "memex", for what he anticipated would be a reality in the future:

"Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library.  It needs a name, and to coin one at random, "memex'' will do.  A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.  It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory."

Sounds familiar? Well, read what's next:

"It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading.  There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers.  Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.

In one end is the stored material.  The matter of bulk is well taken care of by improved microfilm.  Only a small part of the interior of the memex is devoted to storage, the rest to mechanism.  Yet if the user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely.

Most of the memex contents are purchased on microfilm ready for insertion.  Books of all sorts, pictures, current periodicals, newspapers, are thus obtained and dropped into place.  Business correspondence takes the same path.  And there is provision for direct entry.  On the top of the memex is a transparent platen.  On this are placed longhand notes, photographs, memoranda, all sort of things. When one is in place, the depression of a lever causes it to be photographed onto the next blank space in a section of the memex film, dry photography being employed."

Now to make the whole vision complete here is an example of how to use "memex":

"The owner of the memex, let us say, is interested in the origin and properties of the bow and arrow.  Specifically he is studying why the short Turkish bow was apparently superior to the English long bow in the skirmishes of the Crusades.  He has dozens of possibly pertinent books and articles in his memex.  First he runs through an encyclopedia, finds and interesting but sketchy article, leaves it projected,  Next, in a history, he finds another pertinent item, and ties the two together.  Thus he goes, building a trail of many items. Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own, either linking it into the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item. When it becomes evident that the elastic properties of available materials had a great deal to do with the bow, he branches off on a side trail which takes him through textbooks on elasticity and tables of physical constants.  He inserts a page of longhand analysis of his own.  Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him."

No need to say these visionary sentences are for us at Cyberlibris "music to our ears".

What we work hard for, what we dream of is somehow a blend of the visions of the two doctors. What we do is possible because Moore's law work and what we do is precisely what Dr Bush was hoping for!

PS: To know more about Vannevar Bush, follow this link.

Teaching finance the Podcast way

Serial entrepreneur (and interestingly enough a former leading activist of the UK Revolutionary Communist Party) Keith Teare (he co-founded Easynet, Cyberia, RealNames etc...) runs a podcasting blog entitled Earnings Cast.

This blog should be very useful to finance professors who want to put more of the real world into their teaching. Indeed, through Teare's podcasts blog they will be able to monitor quarterly corporate earnings reports and listen to the associated investors' conference calls. These calls are in mp3 format and, hence, easily podcastable. Although less fun to listen to than rap or R&B music, students will be able to download them on their iPod or other mp3 players. Or, the podcast can be played and commented in the classroom itself (Professors, be ready to invest in an iPod and loudspeakers!)

The Google 2004 Q4 conf call is for instance really good and should be a nice starting point to discuss issues such as market myopia (guys at Google insist that they take the long view even though they have to comment on Q4), GAAP or non GAAP statements, hiring and retaining talents (designing relevant compensation packages) etc...

Cherry on the cake, students and professors will be able to listen to the co-founders themselves and how they handle investors' questions. They also have access to Google's 8k filing. Always good to learn from the people who are truly on the fireline.

On top of his podcasting blog Keith Teare runs a standard blog. I enjoyed his last post entitled Building to sell. His ten points are well-taken and I must admit that these are points that haunt any entrepreneur!

Now if you want to know more about Podcasting and how it can enhance the classroom experience, please refer to this earlier post.

 

Podcasting: Spreading your Gospel the MP3 Way

Apple's Ipods have almost become icons. Furthermore, it is amazing to see the many tools, softwares, objects that have been designed around the Ipod and its little brother the Ipod Mini.

Now a new trend is emerging fast: Podcasting. What is it? Well, this is about using your Ipod or any portable MP3 player to time-shift audio broadcasts. According to Podcasting News, "Podcasting lets users subscribe to an audio program and have it automatically downloaded to an MP3 player. Once it's on your portable audio player, you can listen to it whenever you like. The beauty of podcasting is that it takes care of keeping your MP3 player current automatically."

The implications of Podcasting are mind-boggling (not to say mind-blogging). Indeed, suppose you missed your favorite radio show, no problem you can download it later on your MP3 player and listen to it in your car or in the train. You want to start your own radio channel. Easy, use Podcasting to broadcast your shows on the Net. A famous example is Adam Curry.

Assume you're a faculty member and you run a blog (alas, not many do these days...), you can can tape your class and make it available in your blog as an MP3 download. Even better, you can make it available as an RSS feed easily downloadable and readable by a software like ippoderx. Not convinced, well again read carefully what Podcasting News has to say about religions and priests who quickly embraced the Podcasting bandwagon. Podcasting News calls it Godcasting ! (Interestingly enough, religion seems to have been faster on this one than the Adult industry and in any case faster than business schools!).

Joking apart, Podcasting should be (along with Cyberlibris and faculty blogs of course!) the next killer app in business schools and in any place where people do care about pedagogy and message delivery. After all, when you think of it, is not it sad that knowledge that is disseminated in a classroom gets lost forever?

Don't know where to start? Well, start here and here.

Podcasts have already been introduced in Cyberlibris. Just check Newswatch (finance radio news) and blogwatch (books section: CEO Read podcasts).                                     

Here is a sample of what you could expect. This is drawn from James C. Collins and  Jerry I. Porras best-selling Built To Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies. Just click on B-T-L Podcast.

And this is only the beginning!

Academic Blogging: Some BloggerCon III Afterthoughts

I have not been blogging in a while. Well, reason is that we went with my business partner on a Cyberlibris round-the-globe tour visiting leading/rising business schools. Fascinating and inspiring believe me. Check forthcoming posts as we'll share our enthusiasm and information for what's happening there. On our way we made a stop at the Stanford Law School and attended the BloggerCon III conference. This was the third of its kind and it gathered many very active members of the blogging community.

In our view, the best session was the one devoted to Academic Blogging. The discussion leader was a "veteran blogger": Jay Rosen. Jay is a Professor of Journalism at New York University. He also runs a famous blog named PressThink.

Jay did a great job and lots of key issues were debated. The first thing that struck us was the small number of people in the room. The other sessions attracted a lot more people. This came to us as a surprise. Indeed, blogs seem to be part of the "compulsory panoply" of any academic especially most of the students already have their own blogs. The second thing that was cool is precisely the high percentage of students in the room. refreshing indeed!

The main points covered in the discussions were the following:

1. Why should academics blog ? : Seems to be the obvious number one question. Was funny to see that most of the academics in the room did not have a straightforward answer to this. Our view is simple: They should in order to extend the richness and reachness of their pedagogy. The best answer came from the students themselves (they were from the Law School, the School of Medicine etc...): We think our professors should blog because this is a great way to know them better (that's right: a blogging professor sticks his/her neck out).
2. What changes for academics when they blog ? : This is the point: Academics are afraid more often than not of what could change the pace of their academic life. One professor in the room said that blogs were "disruptive for the Ivory Tower". Great, that's what we want! Another professor added that "the University has never been great at distributing knowledge". That's why they nicknamed it the Ivory Tower. Well, it doesn't have to be so, especially in the so-called knowledge economy. Blogs are wonderful tools to expand the reach of knowledge. This would be an oxymoron not to take advantage of it.
3. What’s the potential effect of blogging in the academic world ?: Well, we don't know yet but we can try to anticipate some effects. First, it will make academics more visible and more accessible to society as a whole. There is no reason why the academic community should remain a remote tribe almost as difficult to access as some African tribes in the XIXth century. Second, it will provide academics with a straight access to ideas, suggestions, comments and challenges (stemming not only from their colleagues but also from people outside their "specialized world" which will eventually improve the quality and relevance of their teaching and writing. In a sense, a blog is a place where the academic accepts to be a "primus inter pares." Not always easy to accept when you're supposed to be the one who knows. A blog is a good way for an academic to put him/herself at risk. in the course of doing so, some nice and unexpected rewards (famous law of unintended consequences) may be reaped.
4. Why do academics make good bloggers ? : Well, the question should be "why would they make good bloggers?" Bad news first: They may not be good bloggers after all if they are not willing to stick their neck out of the Ivory Tower. Good news then: Most academics do write and do communicate. A blog is a great addition to the panoply.
5. Blogs vs. Blackboard : One faculty member in the room was asking whether e-learning platforms such as Blackboard or WebCt had any future now that we have blogs and wikis. Well-taken question indeed! Unless these e-learning firms do embrace the blog trend, it will become more and more difficult to see what their added value to the end user is all about (especially when you factor the sheer price of their platform in the equation). This boils down to the forever debate: Home-made vs. ready-made.
6. Publish or perish ? : One professor noted that "Academic journals should have their blogs. Professors could post comments, reviews on articles. Everybody could look at these discussions and expand on them." This would indeed be a major breakthrough for most academic journals. After all, a published (refereed) paper has been evaluated by a handful of people. Would not it be nice if people could post their views, criticisms etc..., publicly on a blog, even after the paper has supposedly earned its credentials? The peer community would expand as a result. Blogs are also a great way to disseminate one's research. Think for instance of the success of the SSRN (which is not a blog) and it should be obvious what blogs could achieve in the field of academic research too. That's where we disagree with the notion of academia creating value through scarcity. SSRN is precisely the opposite!
7. How do blogs affect the value of attending university ? : Blogs are a unique way of leveraging the value of attending university. You should not think of blogs as competing with the university system but as a unique opportunity to revisit it and make it even more attractive.
8. How can we make blogs more attractive to academics ? : Make them simple to use and lead by example. There are already a few good blogs around (e.g. Walter Baets, Nouriel Roubini, James Mahar etc...)
9. Who should be the audience ? : This a matter of individual choice. Some professors want to reserve their blog in-house (to their students only) while some other want to make it public, open to a broader audience. But again there is no rule except the famous one: Just do it!
10. Blogs as a student learning tools : Many students do have blogs. Hence, it should not prove too difficult to convert them to blogs as learning tools. Professors could even learn one or two things from their students.
11. University policy towards blogs? :Here is how Claude Muncey, one of the participants, summarized the issue "In the end, summing up, what becomes clear is the disruptive effect that blogging has on the academic world, which is founded on the idea of control, more than dissemination of information is an  "attack on the DNA of the university"  and we will see attacks on blogging in academia and attempts to simply graft blogs onto current publishing and control structures" (See also jzip's account)

We are not sure that we are willing to share the pessimism of this last point. Yes, faculty members are reluctant to change. Yes, scarcity has often been the major currency traded by the academic world. But, things change: Most kids, these days, blog. The challenge for faculty members will be to adapt, to be on the same page as today's kids when these kids will show up in the amphitheater. Moreover, the dividends from academic blogging are numerous, as the session run by Jay at BloggerConIII has shown: What matters is the willingness to capture them, not to say to invent them.

As usual, (academic) attitude can and must defeat (academic) latitude!

Let's blog and roll business schools - Part II

In a previous post we observed that, sadly enough, blogs had not really made their way through business schools. Indeed, only a handful of courses are really shaped around blogs. Well, there is a great news: This is changing! Euromed-Marseille is launching the first (as far as we know) course in a European business school truly articulated around a blog.

We are proud to join forces with Professor Walter Baets to build this Complexity, Innovation and Knowledge blog. We are working hard on adding a new dimension, that of leveraging his blog with Cyberlibris resources. In a few days, Walter has become a genuine blogger. Not only that! He has come up with lots of ideas on how to transform his class in a genuine learning and knowledge sharing community. In a sense, Walter has empowered his students with new ways of expressing themselves. The class is about to start and we wish Walter all the best.

Walter's example is one example of what blogs can do in and to a business school pedagogy and research environment. Schools have long contemplated e-learning platforms. Some have invested in them. Now, blogs are around and they may indeed be a simple and flexible solution. You'll find on Joi Ito's wiki an interesting discussion on the respectives advantages of blogs and e-learning platforms.

In a next post, we'll go into more details on how best to implement class blogs and how to take advantage of content management through RSS feeds (which we are currently using a lot at Cyberlibris). To put it simply, the pianist does not have to bring the stool to the piano anymore. The piano is coming to the stool (not any kind of piano though!)!

Blogjet your blog....

Yes Ecto is great to create your post off-line, especially for Mac users. But for Windows users there is a challenger Blogjet . Here is a screen shot of what it looks like. Easy to use indeed! This post was made with it. Thanks to Buzz at Buzzmodo for the hint!

PS: The one thing I have not found yet is the trackback function.