Daniel Bachhuber's weblog

There are two points I’d like to argue about education as it stands today. For one, the traditional university system is fundamentally incompatible with the information transformation we’re now swimming in. This redesign will have to happen in the next decade, or else major pipes are going to break just like they’ve broke with the music industry and how they’re now breaking with newspapers. Number two, a type of non-traditional learning has arisen which I find particularly valuable: peripheral education. Many of these ideas around these two points have been floating in my mind for the last six months, but recent events have made me more inclined to write them down. The first was a darn astounding Twitter conversation last Saturday night about J school educations, captured nearly in full by @greglinch, and the second was a recent post from Jeff Jarvis about hacked, organic education. As he argues, we’re moving from an analog world to a networked, digital one. The analog industries who do not make a hasty, well-executed evolution will be unsuccessful in the digital realm.

Let me begin with my first point: the traditional university system, just like newspapers and General Motors, is obsolete, ineffective, and outdated. It is a monopolistic institution designed for the 19th and 20th centuries, eras when information was a scarcity. In the networked world, access to information is ubiquitous. Of the five classes my friend DJ has at USC this fall term, he only goes to two lectures. One because he doesn’t have the textbook, and the other because it’s the only class he values. My other friend Shane feels most classes are just regurgitated from the textbooks, which I tend to agree with. Another friend, an honors student, is kept so busy that he doesn’t have enough time to do his homework. In the end, he copies it from cramster.com. Personally, I have to take school one term at a time because the things I’m learning in class are so far removed from the education I hold valuable outside of the university. Case in point: this term I am taking Physics 201 for my Environmental Sciences major. Unfortunately, most of the information covered in the course I already learned in my junior year of high school IB Physics. More than any other course I’ve taken, this one is just for the grade.

To work with the key issues, one needs to understand what the core strengths of universities are and how these traditional strengths are eroding. The why is ubiquitous access to the network. According to Jarvis, universities serve four functions: teaching, testing, research, and socializing. Teaching is imparting knowledge upon students, generally a one-way flow. Testing is ensuring the students memorize the information well enough to pass the final exam. Academic research is still a monopoly universities can hold, but does little to add to their business model. A parallel could be journalism to newspapers. Journalism is crucial service newspapers have provided in the past, but hasn’t been what pays the salaries of the reporters. Socializing is synonymous to both networking and group learning. Three of these four roles, in my opinion, are almost lost to the network already. Testing, the fourth, will be lost to the network as soon as a suitable ISO-esque certification for education is established.

It is not as though education is becoming any less important, however. Part two of my argument is that one type of learning, what I call “peripheral education”, is becoming increasingly valuable. There are three types of education relevant now: technical, experiential, and peripheral.

Technical education is the knowledge you learn to fulfill a specific role or position. Let’s talk metaphors. If I wanted to be a mechanic, learning the different car parts, how they work together, and what to fix when they didn’t work together would be my technical education. If I were a developer, this education is technical knowledge to prove my skill in Python, databases, etc. For journalists, technical education is learning the tools of the trade. When Pat Thornton went through J school, the tool was Quark. In my case, the tool is InDesign. These tools don’t need to be imparted in class, however. Greg Linch taught himself InDesign in high school, and I’d like to say I’ve taught myself 99% of what I need to know based on previous experience with Photoshop (which I learned on my own in high school). With exponential change in the tools, it is more efficient to teach technical education via tools like Lynda than in the classroom environment. It is simple economics of scale.

Experiential education is learning through the hands-on application of knowledge. Whitman Direct Action, and our Sadhana Clean Water Project of last spring, is one approach. Students give themselves specific goals, and learn on their feet how to achieve those objectives. In our case, it was compiling a book on water development issues in India, hosting a conference in Mumbai, and researching the socio-political constraints to clean water access. This type of education serves two purposes: the students learn leadership, planning, and implementation skills through the process, and the project results in valuable contributions towards whatever issues it is trying to address. Institutions need to make the transition from squandering student creativity and brainpower, to applying those characteristics to solving some of the world’s most pressing issues. Taking this to journalism, many newspapers and news organizations are shutting down their bureaus as cost-cutting measures. If universities were innovative, they would launch foreign bureaus staffed by J school students to steal that market back. To date, I haven’t ever heard this happening.

Peripheral education is learning through continuous exposure to the increasing quantity of quality information. It is the hidden pearl of networked education, the process culling information you push yourself to absorb, letting it change the way you think, and then understanding the connections between the information. In an increasingly digital world, understanding how information works together is critical. One key part of this philosophy is that the information you absorb at any given point isn’t necessarily related to what you are working on at that given moment. Instead, peripheral education is about exposure to a wide variety of information types. Podcasts are one enabling tool of peripheral education. In Our Time, TED Talks, and Social Innovation Conversations are all information sources I consider as valuable, if not more, than classes in the traditional university system.

In addition to the types, the tools for education changing too. Blog posts are the new social essays. The traditional format, obviously, is to write an essay, submit it to the professor, have the teacher’s aide grade the work, and then recycle the paper. The essay served a single, cradle-to-grave purpose. Blogging, however, is the art of cultivating conversation. When I write a post, I can be quite certain to get organic feedback on both the content of what I write, and the format it takes, by more than one person. Twitter is the new class discussion. Saturday night’s conversation about the future of J schools was far more enriching than most any other class I’ve had this term. Twitter offers somewhat organized, niche conversation about a wide range of topics. In the “traditional” classroom setting this is almost unmanageable, but on Twitter it can happen organically. I think having this type of valuable, enriching, and constructive conversation via Twitter, and not in the classroom, only strengthens the argument that real education can easily happen outside of the university system. Furthermore, I completely disagree with Kevin on podcasts. Podcasts, audio and otherwise, are the new lectures. It’s about sourcing your information correctly, just like picking the right university or the right professor.

Schooling has traditionally been a top-down approach. We are quickly moving to a networked paradigm. For universities to survive the changes, they need to transition to an approach which fosters creative action. To take a newspaper parallel, this is early 2001. The internet has been around for several years, but doesn’t pose a serious threat to their core business. Yet. What happens to the paid teaching positions, though, when the students can educate one another?

Correction: I inappropriately attributed the Twitter conversation transcription to @gmarkham when it was really @greglinch. My sincere apologies for the error.

At the ad:tech conference this year in New York City, the most widely anticipated news came from a company less than three years old. This is hardly a surprise to those who follow the tech industry; Facebook, currently valued at over 15 billion dollars, is the hottest thing since Google or MySpace. It has been on the radar along with Apple’s iPhone as one of the biggest stories of the year. Accordingly, the first announcement of how the social network is going to monetize its service, a problem plaguing every Web 2.0 startup, set the blogosphere aflame. Facebook’s name for its new ad marketing platform: Beacon.

The origin

Targeted advertising isn’t anything new. It’s only natural a business would want to pitch its product to the audience most likely to buy it. Time spent on a consumer who isn’t going to be a buyer is simply a wasted effort. Selling the merits of a men’s cologne to pre-teen girls isn’t effective just like pitching hearing aids to twenty-somethings with perfect hearing is a waste.  It pays to focus advertising as directly as possible; in financial terms, it minimizes the dollars spent selling to each consumer while maximizing the company’s overall profits.

In 1932, Young and Rubicam became the first firm to advertise based on statistics. Twenty years later, the A.C. Nielsen Market Research Company, realizing the extraordinary potential of television to reach a mass audience, began tracking which prime-time shows were being watched in what types of households. As technology progressed, so did the sophistication of the ability to track viewers and their habits; by the 1970’s, tracking services could report many more details about audiences including race, gender, age, and educational background. Personalized advertising started crawling on its hands and feet.

Jump forward another twenty years to the commercial advent of the Internet. Its digital nature allows for inherently easier tracking. While transferring data back and forth, the web requires unique electronic addresses to ensure the bits requested make it to the correct recipient. This characteristic also means a digital “paper trail” is left in every transaction. Capitalizing on this technology, web metrics have advanced to a point where a nearly infinite amount of consumer information can be aggregated and analyzed. The current difficulty, if it can be summarized, lies in determining which information is most important and how it should be interpreted.

Problems to some are opportunities to others. One burgeoning market is online advertising, with has had over 150% growth in revenues since 2000. Success in this arena is defined by the businesses who achieve the highest conversion rates; it’s what has made Google the 5th largest company in the United States in less than a decade.

There are now a few common ways of using consumer metrics to target advertisements online.  One method, borrowed from the print media, is selling advertising space based on the perceived reader demographics of a website. Grist, an environmental news nonprofit, and The Economist, a business and political analysis publication, both do this for placements on their websites. Making the deals in-house, albeit a significant amount of work, does have some added benefits. The most significant include being able to target to a specific demographic and using richer media (e.g. images and video) in advertisements. Google’s AdSense, on the other hand, is an example of a newer, content-based approach to delivering advertisements.  Known abstractly as “contextual advertising,” it optimizes ad placement by analyzing the content of the website and listing the only most relevant promotions. Doing this by looking at topics, keywords, and phrases pretty well guarantees that the text-based advertisement will be on line with the focus of the site. Yet, at the same time, those ads lose efficacy when readers learn how to ignore them.

So begins the cat and mouse game.

Facebook, by capitalizing on the social graph between its users, is making advertising “social.” Originally exclusive to college students, this social network hasn’t been without its controversial business decisions. One such event, the launch of a tool called the “News Feed” which is designed to aggregate friends’ activities on the site, caused users to go up in virtual arms about privacy concerns. A mass exodus was only averted after the founder, Mark Zuckerberg, published an open letter promising to alleviate those worries. He might have to do this again.

Unlike Google’s AdSense, which advertises based off contextual data, Facebook now has two advertising platforms which exploits the social data its users provide: Social Ads and Beacon. Social Ads places advertisements for sponsored businesses and products in the sidebar and previously controversial News Feed. These placements are targeted based on information from a user’s profile; for instance, having “photography” listed as interest in the personal section will incur a higher than normal number of ads for photo contests or camera equipment. The other system, Beacon, works by through a hybridization of “viral marketing.” When a user buys a product on an affiliated site, the information gets sent back to Facebook and is placed in the News Feed of another user. The idea, or at least in theory, is that the advertisers gain traction through a “forced word-of-mouth.” Facebook hopes to make this possible with their platform, although users haven’t been so happy about it.

Personalization is in the future of advertising. AdSense, Beacon and others are only the forerunners in a continual evolution of marketing directly to a consumer. Take, for instance, a product such as Google Maps. In the past year, Google has introduced sponsored, location-based results when a user types in a query like, “pizza portland oregon.” With the launch of Google’s Android Mobile OS in the next year, Google Maps will be available on a number more handheld devices. Add a GPS-enabled wireless device into the mix and the user will no longer have to type in the “portland oregon.” Google will know, thanks to technology. Thanks to technology, advertising too will become more targeted in every way; based on location through GPS, based on past purchases with online retailers, and based the personal interests listed on social profiles.

Or at least that’s the current trend of thinking.

Some implications

Privacy. A world where information about an individual’s actions flow freely to businesses leave little maneuvering room for a personal life. Transparency should be a two-way street. Consumers need to critically assess how much privacy they are willing to give up, and to whom they want to give it to. In the case of Beacon, the platform has become so disputed that is has attracted the attention of MoveOn.org, a civic action organization normally focused on politics. As part of a multi-pronged approach, the nonprofit created a Facebook Group titled, “Petition: Facebook, stop invading my privacy!” and draws upon members to be activists. Their intent is to call upon the company for a public response to an issue which has created headlines such as, “Does Facebook Hate Christmas?,” “Is Facebook a Privacy Nightmare?” and “Are Facebook’s Social Ads Illegal?” With enough voices, and media publicity, the tactic is sure to be successful; Facebook, unless interested in committing financial suicide, has no interest in causing the entire core of its business model to migrate to another social network. What the long-term loss, or gain, to user privacy is, however, has yet to be decided.

Integrity. The effect advertising has on content is also a very important question. In a world where it is becoming the easier choice to monetize a business with paid advertising, one must ask what sort of effect such as decision has on independence. Take journalism, for instance. Although this model is not yet entirely true of major papers, many blogs write journalistically, are supported by advertisers, and have become primary sources for niche news. Without an established and transparent code of ethics, it is impossible to guess at the editorial integrity of a website. Some naive audiences assume their authority, but every reader must be a critical reader and look at the policies behind their business practices. Grist and The Economist, for instance, have advertising policy links on top of clearly defined ads. Some sites running Google AdSense, conversely, embed their advertisements in the content of the page or in faux navigation bars. An uneducated visitor, subsequently, does not know the different between what is real and what is advertisement. For the integrity of journalism, and of all media, there needs to be a clear line between independent content and advertising.

In an economy increasingly dependent on universal participation, it doesn’t pay to exploit user data. Using those same crowds to deduce such a decision, however, is a smart choice to make.

Written for the final paper in J 201 Mass Media and Society. Also available to download in PDF

This is the first in what I hope to be a series of articles on applying the concept of “open-source” to a non-profit organization.

A month or so ago, I was hit with the notion that the open-source movement might be applicable to systems beyond software. What I quickly realised, much like when I “invented” the word guesstimate, is that someone had probably already thought of this idea. Undaunted, I began to brainstorm on how I might apply it to an organization I’m working with called Whitman Direct Action, primarily because I feel the concept behind the organization itself is revolutionary and could prove to be a useful model for other colleges and universities to build upon.

For those who are not well-versed in open-source’s history, the philosophy could be argued to have gone pop culture with Linux, a free-to-use and distribute operating system licensed under the GNU Public License. The idea of free software had existed long before Linus Torvald started working on his operating system but, from my uneducated viewpoint, that’s when it began to go mainstream. At present, Linux has become the dominant operating system for many of the internet’s web servers, and a popular distro called Ubuntu is rapidly gaining popularity as a free and open alternative to Microsoft’s proprietary Windows operating system. Unless the trend changes, and again from my viewpoint, open-source architecture will continue moving broadening its marketshare because of the speed at which intellectual property now moves across the internet, as well as the apparent mutual advantages to people who collaborate on open-source projects.

This change in scenery is also apparent with the rapid rise of Wikipedia, a system that encourages adapting and building upon intellectual material. Wikipedia, for those who have been living under a rock for the past few years, is “the free dictionary” where anyone can edit and improve upon its articles. It relies on the collective intelligence of the masses, something normally believed to be inferior to a professional editor. However, a recent study found the Encyclopaedia Britannica had just a small percentage less errors per article than the seven year-old Wikipedia. Considering Wikipedia now has 8.29 million articles in 253 languages compared to the Britannica’s 29 print volumes, it’s no stretch to say the writing is on the wall.

Open-source is a tricky concept to explain to people who have little to no experience with programming. For those beginners, the term “source” refers to the structure of commands which lie behind any digitally created object and “open” implies that the code is free to use and distribute. Take, for instance, the construction of an automobile. Most cars and trucks have, among other things, an engine, a drivetrain, and a way to control the vehicle, sometimes called the wheel, gas pedal, and brake. Those systems are parallel conceptually to code in the digital world because they are the means to an end. They determine the overall output of the product. When you apply open-source to a car or truck, this means that the parts, or information to create the parts, is to be freely used and distributed. If person B wants to improve upon person A’s automobile, they would be free to copy and adapt person A’s orginal designs. Of course, persons C and A could then have access to the adaptations as well. In fact, a system like the one illustrated is beginning to take place in China. Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams’ Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything documents how businessmen in China have opted to open-source the designs of their motorcycles to cut down on the costs associated with developing intellectual property. Working together is now becoming a very smart business decision.

In another example, this piece of writing is being published by the open-source blogging software WordPress, and some of its research has been done on Wikipedia. The list goes on.

Jumping the fence from open-sourcing intellectual property such as code and blueprints to the functional structure of an organization has only recently become possible; thanks for the ability to do this goes to the spreading ubiquity of the internet, and the brilliant tools some companies are building on top of it. An open-source organization is one which seeks to become completely transparent to the public, meaning that any or all of its processes are easily visible and adaptable.

With Whitman Direct Action, or at least initially, we hope to:

• Podcast all and any of our staff meetings or phone calls
• Transform the departamental update emails into blog posts, and encourage interstaff discussion in the form of comments
• Make our financial strategies and budget freely available online
• License applicable content through Creative Commons
• Actively seek feedback from the community on any aspect of our organization, and make that conversation open to anyone

The driving philosophy, of course, is to make our organization “open-source” in the same sense of any software code: free to use, distribute, or modify.