UberNoggin

ARGNet recently captured the story of a lawsuit against Toyota regarding an “ARG” that pranks people including snail mail, phone calls, and emails. Now Toyota is on the chain for a whopping $10 million in damages to the poor victim of their marketing. Threatening phone calls, being told that you’re on the hook to pay someone else’s hotel damages…this is NOT marketing. This is borderline harassment IF you haven’t opted in. And that’s the big issue here. ARGs work because players voluntarily follow the breadcrumbs out of their own interest in unraveling a mystery. An ARG inflicted on someone is something totally different. One can only hope that this extremely poor use of an interesting marketing and collaborative storytelling technique won’t dissuade others from creatively applying the approach.

Thus, I pronounce this particular fiasco of a campaign not an ubernoggin work but rather a good example of a peabrain idea.

Richard Dawkins, author of The Greatest Show on Earth, gave a “talk” last night at Indiana University. First, before I dive in to comment on Dawkins, I need to give mad props to the union board at IU for inviting him. It must not have been an easy decision and I’m sure it wasn’t an affordable one either. The event was well run and very well attended.

Now, having said that, I was incredibly disappointed in Dawkins’ “talk.” He spent about forty minutes reading from his new book. It wasn’t a lecture. It wasn’t a talk. It was a book reading. He offered very little commentary or value-add to the reading. The Q&A allowed him to engage more with the audience but the talk itself left me angry. At one point in the Q&A session Dawkins, in about the same breath, said that evolutionary biologists need to do a better job of educating those who will listen and then he corrected a student for video taping the session stating “You can video but please don’t put it on the internet.” Now don’t get me wrong, I understand intellectual property. I understand that Dawkins has a right to make a living and that video taping his talk and giving it away for free may undermine his ability to make a living. But let’s be honest. Dawkins isn’t broke. Nor is he struggling to be read. His books sell very well and I’m sure he was paid over $10k to give last night’s talk. He can afford to be a bit generous for the sake of his cause. For the benefit of every kid who is being inundated with creationist teaching at school and goes on the net to find alternative ideas. He can afford to be a better teacher.

Worst of all, Dawkins had an incredible metaphor that would have made it easy for him to advertise his book while offering something more to the audience than what they could get by just buying the book out in the lobby. He explains that evolutionary biologist and paleontologists are similar to detectives who have come to a crime scene after the crime is committed. The scientist’s job is to reconstruct the most plausible event from the evidence at hand. I agree with the metaphor completely. But rather than just reading a few pages from the book, Dawkins should have engaged the audience in a bit of detective work. He should have endeavored to convert us all to be detectives and scientists. To be better prepared to make a sound argument for the truth. Instead, he stuck a few post-its in his book, read some pages to hawk the book, and left us all wondering why we came when we could have just bought the book.

Results from today’s #geekpoll on Twitter. Apparently people really don’t appreciate the viral games on Twitter. Is is the mechanics of the games? Their demand that you pass the game on to your contacts? Is Twitter a bad platform for games?
What do you think?

I can’t help but be excited about Google Sidewiki. It allows users (with google accounts) to leave comments on any website. So now, rather than signing up for forums and chats to comment or searching through dozens of pages to read customer feedback, you can simply click a button in your browser and see what people are saying.

I could be wrong. I could be overly excited. But I can’t help feeling that this is HUGE. The whole of the web now becomes a social network. Every page can have an unbiases forum tacked on that’s viewable by anyone.

Here are a couple of useful links to see what other folks are saying about Sidewiki:

• PC World
• Google’s blog about Sidewiki
• Twitter coverage of Sidewiki release
• Viewing Sidewiki comments without installing the plugin (LifeHacker)

The Wall Street Journal recently published this article claiming that Facebook might possibly ruin friendships as a result of oversharing. Now, I’m not arguing that you should Twitter or change your FB status for every snack you have, every little odd thought that crosses your mind, or every time you have a malicious thought about a coworker. There is, of course, a filter that we all rely on in conversation to prevent ourselves from blurting out everything that crosses our minds and that should be just as effective in online conversations and status messages.

However, this idea that a few random updates about the status of one’s life might ruin a friendship puts a little too much self-importance on the receiver of those messages. I hear this a lot from people who refuse to use FB or Twitter. They tell me “I don’t care what my friends are eating for lunch”  or “No one is interested enough in my life to want to read what I’m doing right now.” That may be true but there’s another side to the issue. These little friendly, informal personal updates might actually make people feel closer to you. They may make you look like an actual person rather than a soapbox that only spouts big important ideas or personal marketing messages.  When I see a friend face to face who I follow via social media we have much more to talk about because I’m already filled in on their life and I can ask more meaningful questions about how they are. We can skip the fact sharing part of the conversation and actually engage with one another.

Besides, I guess it just makes me a little grumpy to hear complaints about social media that seem so self-centered. If you expect your friends to censor themselves or modify what they want to share just so you won’t feel overwhelmed by information…well let’s just say that the world doesn’t revolve around you. Not every message is aimed at you. Your friends don’t expect you to read and memorize every update that they post. So relax; ignore the updates if they don’t interest you; feel free to skim them rather than letting each one get under your skin.

Thanks to a glitch with my WP install and a hectic schedule it’s been more than a little while since I’ve been able to blog. But then, we all have excuses, right?

Ubernoggin is back! With a new theme and new ideas. I’m really excited to be writing here again and hope there are still some subscribers out there who will be interested to read what’s coming.

A Wordle of my current dissertation draft.

Yesterday afternoon, with no warning or rumor, Blackboard announced that it purchased Angel LMS. From the reports online, even Bb employees didn’t know about the acquisition until it was announced.  For a mere $80 million Bb purchased its largest competitor. Why fight in court to impose all of the patents Bb claims to hold when they can just purchase their competition?

Needless to say, there’s much grumbling amidst the education community, especially among folks who work for schools that migrated to Angel to get away from the rumored poor service, lack of support, and high price of Bb.

I think Bb is a victim of its own success. The sheer size of its user base makes its the enemy the same as Microsoft has become. Once a monolith like that is established it becomes an easy target even if you’re still using its product. Microsoft had the first stable OS that was easy for people to make use of then they branched out into Office and used the momentum from the OS adoption to leverage their other projects. However, now we see applications like Google Apps that go after a narrower application base but do it better in some ways and do it for free.  Is Bb trying to be all things to all people? Have they grown and diversified to the point of becoming vulnerable to competition from smaller applications that can do specific tasks better?

Buying Angel may actually be an opportunity for Bb to change its image. I’m sure it’s not easy to change the perception of the flagship product but taking Angel into the fold might mean that Bb has a product with which they can do it “right” in the eyes of the consumer base. Ideally, Bb would launch Angel as an open source alternative ala the business model of Redhat. However, this kind of business takes a serious committment to community and support…something that Bb hasn’t proven itself to be all that good at.

But then, of course, there are the patent cases and other big company behavior that makes Bb look greedy and unappreciative of the huge market share it already has.

Now more than ever, I think what would save Bb is to focus huge resources on community building and the support of good use of the LMS rather than just how to use it. Otherwise, that $80million may have been invested in Moodle or the DIY movement directly because the backlash to the acquisition will certainly fuel the fire under those who prefer to create their own solutions rather than struggle under a huge LMS.

Bb will always have customers. FERPA and other regulations that are applied to big institutions will always create a need for a one-stop solution in the eyes of administrators and those who write the checks. But that won’t last too long as individual departments and instructors rebel and do things their own way. Eventually administration will realize that they’re spending money on a product that isn’t being used and there will be a growing market for an alternative.

For more info visit the following links. Be sure to read the comments! :

• Chronicle Wired Campus
• Washington Business Journal
• Inside Higher Ed
• Twitter reaction to the purchase

Mike Wesch often says that students who ask “How much is this worth?” or “How long does this paper need to be?” are really asking you help them prevent learning more than they have to. Something about this rings very true to me and I know I was certainly guilty of it as a student. But is it the whole story?

Might students be asking you to help them prioritize their time?  Maybe. Maybe not.

I certainly know that this behavior isn’t some kind of Millenial behavior. I’m tired of hearing that these whipper snappers just want to be told what to do. This is not new behavior. Technology and the 21st century have not somehow transformed students into new kind of student incapable of independant thinking.

So if it’s not a generational behavior and it’s not completely about time management, is Wesch right? If so, how should we respond to these questions? If a student is actually indicating to us that he/she is disengaged and doesn’t have any motivation or curiousity that would drive him/her to learn more than necessary or expend any more mental energy than the minimum, how do we turn that around? How do we convert a bare minimum student into one who’s ready to engage and excited to find answers?

I’d suggest that there are a few answers:

1. Better assignments: construct assignments so they allow students to apply concepts learned in class to areas that are actually interesting to them. If the learning is relevant and applicable it doesn’t feel like work.

2. Instructor enthusiasm: Never apoligize for being in love with the ideas in your class or for asking students to share that enthusiasm. Be contagious!

3. It’s learning not busywork!: If we can convince students to embrace the joy of figuring things out, of answering questions, rather than just doing busywork we’ll do more than improving their perfomance in class. We’ll have taught them a pleasure that will benefit them their whole lives.

medical mannequin

I’m constantly amazed at the wide variety of interests and projects I get to learn about when talking to companies and faculty. I think if I could compile all the basic understanding I’ve had to gain about all of these fields I might be able to personally rival Wikipedia.

But going from a basic understanding to a research question or a rigorous way to measure the influence of a technology isn’t so easy.

For example, I’ve just returned from a great meeting with a faculty member from the medical school who is doing amazing simulations using a computerized mannequin. Students who might not experience medical emergencies until their residency when a real patient is on the table are now able to practice fast reactions with the dummies. That’s pretty straight forward, right? But what this faculty member is interested in is how the simulations improve the doctor’s ability to communicate clearly in a medical emergency. I asked tons of questions and finally we agreed that what we could actually prove was that the mannequin’s role is to elevate stress in the simulation and that we could measure whether students were able to manage the stress and if the stress influenced their communication skills. We went from “How does the mannequin help students learn to communicate” to “Is there a correlation between the ability to communicate and the stress level of the simulation?” It’s a much clearer, concise question.

It’s difficult to get from a wide question to a narrow one, though, when you’re talking to someone who is immersed in their own field and you’re new to it. I don’t know what a thyroid artery looks like but I do know that if one is bleeding I would freak out and probably freeze rather than giving the necessary direction to a medical staff to stop it and save a patient’s life. It took a series of questions and clarification for me to understand enough about the field to be able to help.

Have you been in a similar situation? What strategies do you use to gather the information you need to get quickly up to speed to help? What tactics do you use to clear away extranious information and hone in on a narrow topic to assess?