Get ready...
Windows Phone 8 pre-orders to begin on October 21st
By Tom Warren 15 Hours Ago
Microsoft's first Windows Phone 8 devices will be available for pre-order in the US on October 21st. Sources familiar with AT&T and Microsoft's plans have revealed to The Verge that the carrier will start taking pre-orders for its range of Windows Phone 8 handsets on October 21st — including the HTC 8X and Nokia's Lumia 920.
Pre-orders for Samsung's Ativ Smart PC and the Asus Vivo Tab RT will also commence on October 21st in preparation for a launch on October 26th. We understand that the Windows Phone 8 devices will be made available in early November, following the pre-orders on October 21st. A Microsoft spokesperson refused to comment on the pre-order date directly, stating that "Windows Phone 8 phones will be available to customers later this year."
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Video hosting service and Twitter? More control or a new charge service?
Mike Isaac
Twitter Mulls an In-House Video-Hosting Service
OCTOBER 9, 2012
If you want something done right, do it yourself.
Twitter is considering building its own video-hosting technology, according to sources. That means users could upload video directly via the service’s mobile apps, instead of using hosting services like yFrog, TwitVid and Vodpod.
That potential change would be in line with a number of tweaks the site has made to its applications throughout 2012. Until recently, Twitter also delegated photo hosting to third-party services; Twitter moved that hosting in-house with the most recent app updates.
Mind you, this doesn’t mean Twitter expects users to start using its homegrown solution for the bulk of the videos people share of the service. It still expects most people to post clips using links from sites like YouTube, Hulu and Vimeo.
People familiar with Twitter’s thinking say the switch would be a way of further refining Twitter’s consistency and user experience, better shaping how users encounter Twitter content. It’s Twitter’s theme over the past year. (Example: The LinkedIn situation from months ago.)
While these video services take some of the heavy lifting off of Twitter, they also create difficulties. For one, Twitter has no control over the changes others make to their products. Yet often, Twitter must deal with the fallout when these changes occur. So, say, a third-party Twitter developer screws something up for its users — those users don’t necessarily go to the developer with complaints, but instead take it directly to Twitter.
I’d imagine, too, that every time Twitter updates one of its clients, it is frustrating to configure the new version to work with a number of outside hosting services. Add in the fact that Twitter has clients across multiple operating systems, and it fast becomes a logistical headache.
It’s not only about tech problems, but creating better ways to make tweets richer. Over the past few months, Twitter has slowly, increasingly updated the product to be more media-friendly, with full photos, videos and snippets of news articles now viewable from within individual tweets themselves.
Owning that rich video experience has monetization upside. One source says building a more effective video player could be a way of better enhancing the company’s existing advertising products, namely the promoted suite.
Look at it this way: If a big brand buys a promoted tweet, the advertiser needs to make that tweet as compelling as possible to get their money’s worth. The better the tweet, the higher the likelihood of click-through or, at minimum, brand awareness. A simpler, more reliable way for partners to host their video makes for a better, media-rich stream. In theory, it’s good for both users and advertisers.
Who it’s not so good for: These third-party hosting services. Were Twitter to follow through with the plan, this would seriously dampen the number of video uploads these services would receive. Users could still upload video to these third-party services and then add the link in manually, but the loss of official Twitter app integration would sting.
As of today, it’s not a done deal; Folks inside the company are still hashing out whether to make the change. But if it were to come about, I’d expect it to come quietly in a future product update.
(Image courtesy of Juan Manuel Romo)
Twitter Mulls an In-House Video-Hosting Service
OCTOBER 9, 2012
If you want something done right, do it yourself.
Twitter is considering building its own video-hosting technology, according to sources. That means users could upload video directly via the service’s mobile apps, instead of using hosting services like yFrog, TwitVid and Vodpod.
That potential change would be in line with a number of tweaks the site has made to its applications throughout 2012. Until recently, Twitter also delegated photo hosting to third-party services; Twitter moved that hosting in-house with the most recent app updates.
Mind you, this doesn’t mean Twitter expects users to start using its homegrown solution for the bulk of the videos people share of the service. It still expects most people to post clips using links from sites like YouTube, Hulu and Vimeo.
People familiar with Twitter’s thinking say the switch would be a way of further refining Twitter’s consistency and user experience, better shaping how users encounter Twitter content. It’s Twitter’s theme over the past year. (Example: The LinkedIn situation from months ago.)
While these video services take some of the heavy lifting off of Twitter, they also create difficulties. For one, Twitter has no control over the changes others make to their products. Yet often, Twitter must deal with the fallout when these changes occur. So, say, a third-party Twitter developer screws something up for its users — those users don’t necessarily go to the developer with complaints, but instead take it directly to Twitter.
I’d imagine, too, that every time Twitter updates one of its clients, it is frustrating to configure the new version to work with a number of outside hosting services. Add in the fact that Twitter has clients across multiple operating systems, and it fast becomes a logistical headache.
It’s not only about tech problems, but creating better ways to make tweets richer. Over the past few months, Twitter has slowly, increasingly updated the product to be more media-friendly, with full photos, videos and snippets of news articles now viewable from within individual tweets themselves.
Owning that rich video experience has monetization upside. One source says building a more effective video player could be a way of better enhancing the company’s existing advertising products, namely the promoted suite.
Look at it this way: If a big brand buys a promoted tweet, the advertiser needs to make that tweet as compelling as possible to get their money’s worth. The better the tweet, the higher the likelihood of click-through or, at minimum, brand awareness. A simpler, more reliable way for partners to host their video makes for a better, media-rich stream. In theory, it’s good for both users and advertisers.
Who it’s not so good for: These third-party hosting services. Were Twitter to follow through with the plan, this would seriously dampen the number of video uploads these services would receive. Users could still upload video to these third-party services and then add the link in manually, but the loss of official Twitter app integration would sting.
As of today, it’s not a done deal; Folks inside the company are still hashing out whether to make the change. But if it were to come about, I’d expect it to come quietly in a future product update.
(Image courtesy of Juan Manuel Romo)
Monday, October 8, 2012
Scape, Brian Eno, and the iPad.
Pereptual innovator Brian Eno has developed a new iPad app for composing music.
The app, called Scape, was designed with Peter Chilvers for Generative Music and is available to purchase on iTunes for $5.99.
With Scape, users create atmospheric soundscapes using a pallet of on-screen "building blocks" of various shapes and colors. Each element triggers a unique piece of sound-- drone, melody, percussion, or texture-- which all "respond intelligently to each other," as demonstrated in the video, below. Users also control the work's key, scale, and tone, and can save work in playlists or share with others.
"Can machines create original music?" the creators ask in the iTunes description. "Scape is our answer to that question... Scape makes music that thinks for itself."
According to the video demonstration, "each element has an independent life story," allowing for slight variations of a "scape" with each play. The whole app seems to emphasize the ritualistic quality of music-making.
Speaking to The Guardian, Eno said,
I felt what was very interesting to do as a composer was to construct some kind of system or process which did the composing for you. You'd then feed inputs into it, and it would reconfigure it and make something beyond what you had predicted. I worked on things like that for a while: Music for Airports and Discreet Music were examples, but they represented recordings of these processes in action. What I really wanted to do was be able to sell the process to somebody, not just my output of it.
This follows Eno's 2008 iPhone app, Bloom, and comes just after the news that he'll release a new solo album, Lux, November 13 via Warp.
The app, called Scape, was designed with Peter Chilvers for Generative Music and is available to purchase on iTunes for $5.99.
With Scape, users create atmospheric soundscapes using a pallet of on-screen "building blocks" of various shapes and colors. Each element triggers a unique piece of sound-- drone, melody, percussion, or texture-- which all "respond intelligently to each other," as demonstrated in the video, below. Users also control the work's key, scale, and tone, and can save work in playlists or share with others.
"Can machines create original music?" the creators ask in the iTunes description. "Scape is our answer to that question... Scape makes music that thinks for itself."
According to the video demonstration, "each element has an independent life story," allowing for slight variations of a "scape" with each play. The whole app seems to emphasize the ritualistic quality of music-making.
Speaking to The Guardian, Eno said,
I felt what was very interesting to do as a composer was to construct some kind of system or process which did the composing for you. You'd then feed inputs into it, and it would reconfigure it and make something beyond what you had predicted. I worked on things like that for a while: Music for Airports and Discreet Music were examples, but they represented recordings of these processes in action. What I really wanted to do was be able to sell the process to somebody, not just my output of it.
This follows Eno's 2008 iPhone app, Bloom, and comes just after the news that he'll release a new solo album, Lux, November 13 via Warp.
FB. Who uses it more often, iOS or Android?
Everyone knows that Google’s Android operating system has a larger market share than Apple’s iOS market share. When it comes to Facebook users, however, the two mobile platforms aren’t quite as far apart as you’d think. Android is still ahead of iOS, but just barely.
20.1 percent of Facebook users connect to the service via an Android device, compared to 18.9 percent of users who do so with an iOS device, according to data from social advertising and analytics platform Optimal, cited by Inside Facebook. It’s worth noting that these are unofficial numbers and aren’t comparable to the latest figures we’ve seen from Facebook (1 billion users, 600 million mobile users).
More specifically, Optimal says there are about 189.8 million active users on Android (including the app and accessing the service via the browser) and about 178.3 million active iOS users (also app and browser). If you’ve already done the basic math in your head, you’ll see that this doesn’t add up, because Optimal is comparing the figures against the 944.2 million monthly active users that it found via the Facebook Ads API, not the full 1 billion.
Android has the highest Facebook share in South Korea: 52.6 percent compared to 20.3 percent on iOS. On the flipside, Singapore and Australia have the highest iOS penetration for Facebook users, both with 48.8 percent. Lastly, and least surprisingly, the US has the highest penetration of both platforms combined with 83.5 percent of its Facebook population using Android and iOS smartphones and tablets.
These Facebook numbers will continue to see huge shifts in the coming months, and not just because Facebook hard with its mobile apps. A recent study from Macquarie Research, first noted by MediaPost (via All Facebook) says 56 percent of users between ages 15 and 25 check Facebook from their phones, up from 24 percent last year.
So, where is the huge skew towards iOS coming from? It’s most likely the mobile Web version of Facebook. Since almost every mobile market share study shows the iOS browser is used significantly more than the Android browser (see Net Applications for an example), it’s safe to say it is tipping the scales away from Android and toward iOS. As Chrome gets on more Android devices, this will likely start to change.
See also: Zuckerberg: More people use Facebook on mobile web than on Android and iPhone combined
Image credit: Math TheRivo
20.1 percent of Facebook users connect to the service via an Android device, compared to 18.9 percent of users who do so with an iOS device, according to data from social advertising and analytics platform Optimal, cited by Inside Facebook. It’s worth noting that these are unofficial numbers and aren’t comparable to the latest figures we’ve seen from Facebook (1 billion users, 600 million mobile users).
More specifically, Optimal says there are about 189.8 million active users on Android (including the app and accessing the service via the browser) and about 178.3 million active iOS users (also app and browser). If you’ve already done the basic math in your head, you’ll see that this doesn’t add up, because Optimal is comparing the figures against the 944.2 million monthly active users that it found via the Facebook Ads API, not the full 1 billion.
Android has the highest Facebook share in South Korea: 52.6 percent compared to 20.3 percent on iOS. On the flipside, Singapore and Australia have the highest iOS penetration for Facebook users, both with 48.8 percent. Lastly, and least surprisingly, the US has the highest penetration of both platforms combined with 83.5 percent of its Facebook population using Android and iOS smartphones and tablets.
These Facebook numbers will continue to see huge shifts in the coming months, and not just because Facebook hard with its mobile apps. A recent study from Macquarie Research, first noted by MediaPost (via All Facebook) says 56 percent of users between ages 15 and 25 check Facebook from their phones, up from 24 percent last year.
So, where is the huge skew towards iOS coming from? It’s most likely the mobile Web version of Facebook. Since almost every mobile market share study shows the iOS browser is used significantly more than the Android browser (see Net Applications for an example), it’s safe to say it is tipping the scales away from Android and toward iOS. As Chrome gets on more Android devices, this will likely start to change.
See also: Zuckerberg: More people use Facebook on mobile web than on Android and iPhone combined
Image credit: Math TheRivo
YouTube adds 60 new channels to its programming.
YouTube has announced they are taking its original programming global with 60 new channels. The new channels will come from Britain, Germany, France and the US, will follow the current YouTube model of being celebrity driven or niche-oriented. Check out this link for a list of current and upcoming channels.
The new YouTube channels cover everything from local cuisine, health and wellness and parenting to sports, music, comedy, animation and news, and YouTube says they are "backed by some of the biggest producers, well-known celebrities and emerging media companies from Europe and the U.S."
Online education? For sure. It's the new paradigm shift in society.
Building open-learning platforms in Canada
JAMES BRADSHAW
THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Last updated Sunday, Oct. 07 2012
Using the BlueJeans networking software, developed by the Technology Integration and Evaluation (TIE) Lab, and a high definition video conferencing camera students in the Educational Psychology and Leadership Studies class at the University of Victoria are able to learn from home in BC, Alberta and the Yukon with students locally from the MacLaurin Building at the University of Victoria, in Victoria,BC Friday September 28, 2012 . (CHAD HIPOLITO for The Globe and Mail)
Among the tens of thousands of people signed up for the University of Toronto’s online computer science course Learn to Program: The Fundamentals, there are a lot of unconventional students. There are 30-somethings who never went to university and never earned a degree, and are searching for skills that might lead to a job. There is an octogenarian with a curious streak and a stable of retirees looking for a chance to buck the stereotypes of a generation that grew up without computers. And there is a student from Malaysia.
EDUCATION Can Canada's schools pass the next great intelligence test?
Our Time to Lead Editor's note: Education needs a course correction
Education Innovator Daphne Koller: Education as a right
Paul Gries, one of the course’s two instructors, does not know if that student is male or female, but he knows it is someone whose education stopped at high school, and who badly wanted to learn programming but couldn’t find a viable local option.
“These are people I’d never, ever have imagined teaching,” Prof. Gries said. “This is a big rush.”
These students are online learners, a few of the 100,000 who have enrolled so far in three courses the Toronto school just launched. They hail from Indonesia and Tunisia, Lithuania, Sudan and Kyrgyzstan – and the United States, the United Kingdom, China and Canada too.
The classes are the University of Toronto’s first through U.S.-based Coursera, one of several new ventures in massive open online courses, or MOOCs, the not-for-credit courses available for free to anyone with an Internet connection. (The University of B.C. is also offering a small slate of courses.)
Of late, MOOCs have dominated the conversation around online learning. They drastically change distance learning, breaking down the barriers of geography and fees, while connecting students across the globe with each other and with some of the world’s top teaching talents. Through Coursera, Princeton is offering Spanish civilization professor Jeremy Adelman’s A History of the World since 1300, while Wesleyan has its president, Michael S. Roth, teaching The Modern and the Postmodern.
Armed with millions of dollars from venture capitalists and university coffers, and fuelled by universities eager to brand themselves as innovators, three American MOOC providers – Coursera, edX and Udacity – have launched in the last nine months alone. Yet despite excitement over this apparent democratization of higher learning, skeptics are multiplying. They argue the medium hasn’t fixed the message: Many MOOCs simply take traditional classes that were small, closed and expensive, and amplify them to be huge, open and free. The learning may be multiplied, but so are the classroom’s existing limitations.
“These ways of teaching don’t adapt to diversity, to different learning styles,” said Sara Diamond, president of OCAD University in Toronto. “The learning experience is absolutely uniform.”
The Canadian answer to how much MOOCs can contribute to learning will have to rely largely on the American experience. But it didn’t have to be this way – Canada had a chance to lead.
In 2008, two University of Manitoba teachers prepared a course for 25 paying students exploring ways to make learning more social and less hierarchical. In a nod to the subject matter, UManitoba’s George Siemens and Stephen Downes of the National Research Council decided to throw open the virtual doors and let anyone join in for free.
“We just said, it costs us nothing to do what we do in a regular classroom and reduce the walls and open it up,” said Dr. Siemens, who now teaches at Alberta’s fully-online Athabasca University.
They expected a couple of hundred responses at best. But soon 2,300 people from 60 countries delved digitally into blogging assignments, discussion forums and “synchronous” online get-togethers, unconcerned that they would receive no credit – not even the certificates of completion offered in some newer MOOCs.
The UManitoba course, widely acknowledged as the first MOOC, took early inspiration from an idea that is only now gaining momentum in the U.K., Finland and Spain: that universities should be less protective of their newest ideas and brightest minds, allowing them to mingle more freely online.
“We used to think that when you hold on tightly to your ideas, you’re going to get better recognition, but the reverse [is now true]: If you put things out there, people look at you,” said Alec Couros, an educational technology professor at the University of Regina who has similarly experimented with opening for-credit online courses to a wider community.
Looking back on the UManitoba course, Dr. Siemens wishes Canadian schools would band together and build their own open learning platform.
MOOCs are not a cure-all for higher education’s challenges, he says. Even fervent e-advocates caution online classes are not a substitute for in-person instruction. But they offer a low-risk testing ground for ways to engage students in remote locations using video, new learning software and social media.
“It would give Canadian university leaders an opportunity to experiment and to really have their finger on the pulse,” he said.
Rather than investing in their own technological platforms, however, Canadian and U.S. administrators have felt it “safer to contract out,” said American instructional technologist Jim Groom, of the University of Mary Washington. Universities settled into secure but limited learning-management systems such as Blackboard or Moodle, creating “a decade of lost innovation.”
For Canadian innovators, spreading change is difficult in a university system that that has been averse to taking risks. The collaborative, egalitarian spirit of the online world demands a different style of teaching than a professor delivering a lecture. Students say professors in good online courses have allowed them to alter the course outline by adding their own sources and materials.
“[Universities] don’t want to fail. They don’t want to get a black eye,” Dr. Siemens said.
A few schools have created administrative roles dedicated to teaching innovation, but most are “not really pushing limits,” said Valerie Irvine, a professor of educational technology and co-director of the University of Victoria’s Technology Integration and Evaluation (TIE) Lab.
At UVic, Dr. Irvine has piloted a teacher-education course that joined 10 students in a classroom with 17 tuned in from afar by live video stream, which she now calls “multi-access learning.” She also applied to a corporate foundation for a $1.75-million grant, hoping to develop a pan-Canadian open online program that faculty from numerous universities could join. Despite the huge enrolment in MOOCs, Canadian and U.S. surveys show students and educators are still lukewarm toward online learning, though research also suggests the more exposure they have to online classes, the more positively they react to them.
Alison Seaman is a convert. At age 34, she has two bachelor’s degrees, a college certificate, and will soon finish a master’s – and until last fall, she hadn’t taken a single online course. She was dubious of e-learning after hearing tales of heavy readings, scarce support from professors, and superficial message-board discussions.
But a friend prodded her to sign up as one of 20 paying students in Social Media and Open Education, a URegina online course taught by Dr. Couros, who invited another 200 people from several countries – many of them professors and experts – to join less formally as participants and mentors. They blogged assignments, met once a week through a live video stream, and traded ideas on Twitter at all hours, across continents, and even after the course ended.
It was a “transformative experience” Ms. Seaman said. “The structure of the class really lends itself to collaboration.”
As digital prophets and classroom traditionalists polarize the debate over online education’s future, Dr. Couros’s mini-MOOC hints at the potential to harness the technology’s unlimited reach to enrich more traditional, for-credit classes. “Instead of the ratio being one instructor to 20 students, it ended up being 10 mentors to every student, which was sort of amazing,” he said.
But more broadly, it may signal the start of a new, more open university culture that could change the way Canadian knowledge moves and grows around the world.
“When you take those Nobel Prize winners, those Canada Research Chairs, those excellent minds from a research angle, and you actually open access to them, I think that’s where we can really blow the future of higher-ed in a different way,” Dr. Irvine said. “I think a lot of these bricks-and-mortar institutions are kind of like sleeping giants. And I think they’re about to wake up.”
JAMES BRADSHAW
THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Last updated Sunday, Oct. 07 2012
Using the BlueJeans networking software, developed by the Technology Integration and Evaluation (TIE) Lab, and a high definition video conferencing camera students in the Educational Psychology and Leadership Studies class at the University of Victoria are able to learn from home in BC, Alberta and the Yukon with students locally from the MacLaurin Building at the University of Victoria, in Victoria,BC Friday September 28, 2012 . (CHAD HIPOLITO for The Globe and Mail)
Among the tens of thousands of people signed up for the University of Toronto’s online computer science course Learn to Program: The Fundamentals, there are a lot of unconventional students. There are 30-somethings who never went to university and never earned a degree, and are searching for skills that might lead to a job. There is an octogenarian with a curious streak and a stable of retirees looking for a chance to buck the stereotypes of a generation that grew up without computers. And there is a student from Malaysia.
EDUCATION Can Canada's schools pass the next great intelligence test?
Our Time to Lead Editor's note: Education needs a course correction
Education Innovator Daphne Koller: Education as a right
Paul Gries, one of the course’s two instructors, does not know if that student is male or female, but he knows it is someone whose education stopped at high school, and who badly wanted to learn programming but couldn’t find a viable local option.
“These are people I’d never, ever have imagined teaching,” Prof. Gries said. “This is a big rush.”
These students are online learners, a few of the 100,000 who have enrolled so far in three courses the Toronto school just launched. They hail from Indonesia and Tunisia, Lithuania, Sudan and Kyrgyzstan – and the United States, the United Kingdom, China and Canada too.
The classes are the University of Toronto’s first through U.S.-based Coursera, one of several new ventures in massive open online courses, or MOOCs, the not-for-credit courses available for free to anyone with an Internet connection. (The University of B.C. is also offering a small slate of courses.)
Of late, MOOCs have dominated the conversation around online learning. They drastically change distance learning, breaking down the barriers of geography and fees, while connecting students across the globe with each other and with some of the world’s top teaching talents. Through Coursera, Princeton is offering Spanish civilization professor Jeremy Adelman’s A History of the World since 1300, while Wesleyan has its president, Michael S. Roth, teaching The Modern and the Postmodern.
Armed with millions of dollars from venture capitalists and university coffers, and fuelled by universities eager to brand themselves as innovators, three American MOOC providers – Coursera, edX and Udacity – have launched in the last nine months alone. Yet despite excitement over this apparent democratization of higher learning, skeptics are multiplying. They argue the medium hasn’t fixed the message: Many MOOCs simply take traditional classes that were small, closed and expensive, and amplify them to be huge, open and free. The learning may be multiplied, but so are the classroom’s existing limitations.
“These ways of teaching don’t adapt to diversity, to different learning styles,” said Sara Diamond, president of OCAD University in Toronto. “The learning experience is absolutely uniform.”
The Canadian answer to how much MOOCs can contribute to learning will have to rely largely on the American experience. But it didn’t have to be this way – Canada had a chance to lead.
In 2008, two University of Manitoba teachers prepared a course for 25 paying students exploring ways to make learning more social and less hierarchical. In a nod to the subject matter, UManitoba’s George Siemens and Stephen Downes of the National Research Council decided to throw open the virtual doors and let anyone join in for free.
“We just said, it costs us nothing to do what we do in a regular classroom and reduce the walls and open it up,” said Dr. Siemens, who now teaches at Alberta’s fully-online Athabasca University.
They expected a couple of hundred responses at best. But soon 2,300 people from 60 countries delved digitally into blogging assignments, discussion forums and “synchronous” online get-togethers, unconcerned that they would receive no credit – not even the certificates of completion offered in some newer MOOCs.
The UManitoba course, widely acknowledged as the first MOOC, took early inspiration from an idea that is only now gaining momentum in the U.K., Finland and Spain: that universities should be less protective of their newest ideas and brightest minds, allowing them to mingle more freely online.
“We used to think that when you hold on tightly to your ideas, you’re going to get better recognition, but the reverse [is now true]: If you put things out there, people look at you,” said Alec Couros, an educational technology professor at the University of Regina who has similarly experimented with opening for-credit online courses to a wider community.
Looking back on the UManitoba course, Dr. Siemens wishes Canadian schools would band together and build their own open learning platform.
MOOCs are not a cure-all for higher education’s challenges, he says. Even fervent e-advocates caution online classes are not a substitute for in-person instruction. But they offer a low-risk testing ground for ways to engage students in remote locations using video, new learning software and social media.
“It would give Canadian university leaders an opportunity to experiment and to really have their finger on the pulse,” he said.
Rather than investing in their own technological platforms, however, Canadian and U.S. administrators have felt it “safer to contract out,” said American instructional technologist Jim Groom, of the University of Mary Washington. Universities settled into secure but limited learning-management systems such as Blackboard or Moodle, creating “a decade of lost innovation.”
For Canadian innovators, spreading change is difficult in a university system that that has been averse to taking risks. The collaborative, egalitarian spirit of the online world demands a different style of teaching than a professor delivering a lecture. Students say professors in good online courses have allowed them to alter the course outline by adding their own sources and materials.
“[Universities] don’t want to fail. They don’t want to get a black eye,” Dr. Siemens said.
A few schools have created administrative roles dedicated to teaching innovation, but most are “not really pushing limits,” said Valerie Irvine, a professor of educational technology and co-director of the University of Victoria’s Technology Integration and Evaluation (TIE) Lab.
At UVic, Dr. Irvine has piloted a teacher-education course that joined 10 students in a classroom with 17 tuned in from afar by live video stream, which she now calls “multi-access learning.” She also applied to a corporate foundation for a $1.75-million grant, hoping to develop a pan-Canadian open online program that faculty from numerous universities could join. Despite the huge enrolment in MOOCs, Canadian and U.S. surveys show students and educators are still lukewarm toward online learning, though research also suggests the more exposure they have to online classes, the more positively they react to them.
Alison Seaman is a convert. At age 34, she has two bachelor’s degrees, a college certificate, and will soon finish a master’s – and until last fall, she hadn’t taken a single online course. She was dubious of e-learning after hearing tales of heavy readings, scarce support from professors, and superficial message-board discussions.
But a friend prodded her to sign up as one of 20 paying students in Social Media and Open Education, a URegina online course taught by Dr. Couros, who invited another 200 people from several countries – many of them professors and experts – to join less formally as participants and mentors. They blogged assignments, met once a week through a live video stream, and traded ideas on Twitter at all hours, across continents, and even after the course ended.
It was a “transformative experience” Ms. Seaman said. “The structure of the class really lends itself to collaboration.”
As digital prophets and classroom traditionalists polarize the debate over online education’s future, Dr. Couros’s mini-MOOC hints at the potential to harness the technology’s unlimited reach to enrich more traditional, for-credit classes. “Instead of the ratio being one instructor to 20 students, it ended up being 10 mentors to every student, which was sort of amazing,” he said.
But more broadly, it may signal the start of a new, more open university culture that could change the way Canadian knowledge moves and grows around the world.
“When you take those Nobel Prize winners, those Canada Research Chairs, those excellent minds from a research angle, and you actually open access to them, I think that’s where we can really blow the future of higher-ed in a different way,” Dr. Irvine said. “I think a lot of these bricks-and-mortar institutions are kind of like sleeping giants. And I think they’re about to wake up.”
Klout. Read on.
Your Klout score must be greater than 35 to read this
By Ben Popper 1 Hour Ago
Microsoft recently invested in Klout, the first time the tech giant has funded a social startup since it put money into Facebook back in 2007. The company is part of an emerging class of startups like PeerIndex and Kred that aim to measure your online "influence": a statistical take on how many people you reach through social media, how much they trust you, and on what topics. Klout, the largest of these startups, will get a big push into the mainstream through a new partnership with Bing, which will feature Klout scores as part of its search results. As Google’s Pagerank defined the last decade, the thinking goes, "people rank" will define the next.
Despite its growing business success, you would be hard pressed to find a more loathed startup. In the "criticism" section of its Wikipedia page the company is described as a "evil" form of "internet herpes" that preys on user’s social anxiety. There are clearly still a few kinks in the system. On Klout, where my score is 65, I’m cited as influential on the topics of Forbes, Branding, Boats and Manhattan. In reality I write for The Verge about technology, was born and raised in Brooklyn, and couldn’t tell the difference between a sloop and schooner to save my life.
You too can be a digital pitchman in 140 characters or less!
"It’s a tough challenge," said Marissa Campise, a tech investor at Venrock who helped lead the last two funding rounds in Klout. "How do you put a number next to somebody’s name and not piss them off? But 'influence' is the reality of the increasingly social paradigm on the web. Klout's goal is to help consumers master that, even if that means showing them some tough love." The company could easily keep its rankings private, sharing them only with marketing departments interested in appealing to influencers. But CEO Joe Fernandez insists that is not the point. "We have always been about the consumer, first and foremost. The internet has democratized influence, and we want to help everyone share in the rewards." Somesh Dash, a tech investor with IVP who backed Klout, says the two parts of the business model are developing at different rates. "For a company with around seventy employees, Klout's impact on the web is very impressive. The value for advertisers is very clear. For consumers, it's still developing."
It’s important to acknowledge this isn’t just some Silicon Valley pipe dream. Rod Sterling, the VP of emerging technologies at IBM, spends most of his days thinking about big data and sentiment analysis. He has no doubt that the kind of work Klout is doing will be big business. "I hear over and over from the small, medium and big sized businesses who are clients of ours, ‘How can we find the most important people who are talking about our products or services?’ They want to understand reputation and influence." It’s not just the sheer number of followers a person has, an easy metric to inflate. What really matters is how far across the echo chamber of the internet your voice can carry, and whether your audience trusts what you say. "This is a very important problem that I think every big company is pondering," said Sterling. Even Google, which held search so sacrosanct, has introduced social results around topical authorities.
In an ideal world this would create a virtuous back and forth between brands and consumers. The Fancy, an e-commerce startup, pays users cold hard cash every time their tweets and status updates lead to a sale. "We’re making it simple for our users to transform their online influence into real money," said Fancy founder Joe Einhorn. "That’s something that anyone, no matter how web savvy, can see the value in." Klout and its peers have a similar system for distributing "perks". PeerIndex makes this compact explicit. "We give you exclusive access to products from your favourite brands," reads the website. "The more active you are on social media, the more stuff you will receive." You too can be a digital pitchman in 140 characters or less!
"How do you put a number next to somebody’s name and not piss them off?"
The drawback, of course, is that this kind of practice encourages users to artificially inflate their own rankings. Klout users can gain status when people give them "+K" in certain topics. I found Klout user Kathy McCrae while searching for people influential on the topic of food. On her Twitter feed, McCrae doesn’t discuss many recipes. Instead there is an endless stream of +K posting as McCrae and other shower one another with digital compliments, inflating their appearance as "influencers".
Marshall Kirkpatrick, a former tech journalist, announced on Friday that he had raised $1 million from Mark Cuban and others to build Little Bird, an influence tracker that helps users find the most trusted experts in certain topics. "We're working hard to try and avoid building a douchebag machine that encourages users to engage in self-promotion in order to earn rewards," Kirkpatrick told The Verge. "The only way to become more relevant on Little Bird is to win the trust of your most influential peers." Social capital will become an increasingly important part of running a business or brand, says Kirkpatrick, but he sees little value in measuring raw popularity, as Klout and Kred do. "We think its much more valuable to tell you, 'These are the biggest names in cloud computing, and these are the twenty people they follow who nobody has ever heard of.'"
When online influence becomes something that can be quantified, boiled down to a two digit number like a Klout score, it inevitably turns into a double-edged sword. The press reacted with outrage recently when Joe Fernandez tweeted about a Salesforce posting that said it would only consider job seekers for a position who had a Klout score of 35 or more. Students were up in arms when Todd Bacile, who teaches marketing at Florida State University, decided to start grading his class based on their Klout score, after it was cited by multiple hiring managers as part of the interview process. "If my marketing students are going to use these tools in the workplace, they should have firsthand experience doing so with their personal brands," said Bacile. It’s this element of Klout that disturbs many. Do we really want another number, along with our blood pressure and our credit score, that we need to worry about improving?
Over time, says IBM’s Sterling, measures of our influence or reputation will become an accepted facet of our digital lives. "No one is surprised anymore that you need to think about what happens when a potential employer Googles your name. Just as we curate that information, people will work on their social scores." Hiring and firing right now, however, based on something like a Klout score, would not be wise. "Klout is one of the leaders in building this technology, but its far too loosey goosey to be making business decisions with today," says Sterling.
The score is just one part of what Klout offers, argues the company’s CEO and Founder Joe Fernandez. "People get hung up on the number, but we are also giving people a lot of context around your passions and areas of expertise. I think we’re still just at the tip of the iceberg. We’ve got a lot of work to do educating people about the value of understanding their online influence." His comments highlight the odd flavor to Klout’s success. The company is mainstream enough to be referenced in a New Yorker cartoon, but only as a punchline that mocks its score as meaningless in the real world. "I certainly never expected to be in the New Yorker," says the eternally optimistic Fernandez, when I mentioned the cartoon. "It feels good to be noticed."
By Ben Popper 1 Hour Ago
Microsoft recently invested in Klout, the first time the tech giant has funded a social startup since it put money into Facebook back in 2007. The company is part of an emerging class of startups like PeerIndex and Kred that aim to measure your online "influence": a statistical take on how many people you reach through social media, how much they trust you, and on what topics. Klout, the largest of these startups, will get a big push into the mainstream through a new partnership with Bing, which will feature Klout scores as part of its search results. As Google’s Pagerank defined the last decade, the thinking goes, "people rank" will define the next.
Despite its growing business success, you would be hard pressed to find a more loathed startup. In the "criticism" section of its Wikipedia page the company is described as a "evil" form of "internet herpes" that preys on user’s social anxiety. There are clearly still a few kinks in the system. On Klout, where my score is 65, I’m cited as influential on the topics of Forbes, Branding, Boats and Manhattan. In reality I write for The Verge about technology, was born and raised in Brooklyn, and couldn’t tell the difference between a sloop and schooner to save my life.
You too can be a digital pitchman in 140 characters or less!
"It’s a tough challenge," said Marissa Campise, a tech investor at Venrock who helped lead the last two funding rounds in Klout. "How do you put a number next to somebody’s name and not piss them off? But 'influence' is the reality of the increasingly social paradigm on the web. Klout's goal is to help consumers master that, even if that means showing them some tough love." The company could easily keep its rankings private, sharing them only with marketing departments interested in appealing to influencers. But CEO Joe Fernandez insists that is not the point. "We have always been about the consumer, first and foremost. The internet has democratized influence, and we want to help everyone share in the rewards." Somesh Dash, a tech investor with IVP who backed Klout, says the two parts of the business model are developing at different rates. "For a company with around seventy employees, Klout's impact on the web is very impressive. The value for advertisers is very clear. For consumers, it's still developing."
It’s important to acknowledge this isn’t just some Silicon Valley pipe dream. Rod Sterling, the VP of emerging technologies at IBM, spends most of his days thinking about big data and sentiment analysis. He has no doubt that the kind of work Klout is doing will be big business. "I hear over and over from the small, medium and big sized businesses who are clients of ours, ‘How can we find the most important people who are talking about our products or services?’ They want to understand reputation and influence." It’s not just the sheer number of followers a person has, an easy metric to inflate. What really matters is how far across the echo chamber of the internet your voice can carry, and whether your audience trusts what you say. "This is a very important problem that I think every big company is pondering," said Sterling. Even Google, which held search so sacrosanct, has introduced social results around topical authorities.
In an ideal world this would create a virtuous back and forth between brands and consumers. The Fancy, an e-commerce startup, pays users cold hard cash every time their tweets and status updates lead to a sale. "We’re making it simple for our users to transform their online influence into real money," said Fancy founder Joe Einhorn. "That’s something that anyone, no matter how web savvy, can see the value in." Klout and its peers have a similar system for distributing "perks". PeerIndex makes this compact explicit. "We give you exclusive access to products from your favourite brands," reads the website. "The more active you are on social media, the more stuff you will receive." You too can be a digital pitchman in 140 characters or less!
"How do you put a number next to somebody’s name and not piss them off?"
The drawback, of course, is that this kind of practice encourages users to artificially inflate their own rankings. Klout users can gain status when people give them "+K" in certain topics. I found Klout user Kathy McCrae while searching for people influential on the topic of food. On her Twitter feed, McCrae doesn’t discuss many recipes. Instead there is an endless stream of +K posting as McCrae and other shower one another with digital compliments, inflating their appearance as "influencers".
Marshall Kirkpatrick, a former tech journalist, announced on Friday that he had raised $1 million from Mark Cuban and others to build Little Bird, an influence tracker that helps users find the most trusted experts in certain topics. "We're working hard to try and avoid building a douchebag machine that encourages users to engage in self-promotion in order to earn rewards," Kirkpatrick told The Verge. "The only way to become more relevant on Little Bird is to win the trust of your most influential peers." Social capital will become an increasingly important part of running a business or brand, says Kirkpatrick, but he sees little value in measuring raw popularity, as Klout and Kred do. "We think its much more valuable to tell you, 'These are the biggest names in cloud computing, and these are the twenty people they follow who nobody has ever heard of.'"
When online influence becomes something that can be quantified, boiled down to a two digit number like a Klout score, it inevitably turns into a double-edged sword. The press reacted with outrage recently when Joe Fernandez tweeted about a Salesforce posting that said it would only consider job seekers for a position who had a Klout score of 35 or more. Students were up in arms when Todd Bacile, who teaches marketing at Florida State University, decided to start grading his class based on their Klout score, after it was cited by multiple hiring managers as part of the interview process. "If my marketing students are going to use these tools in the workplace, they should have firsthand experience doing so with their personal brands," said Bacile. It’s this element of Klout that disturbs many. Do we really want another number, along with our blood pressure and our credit score, that we need to worry about improving?
Over time, says IBM’s Sterling, measures of our influence or reputation will become an accepted facet of our digital lives. "No one is surprised anymore that you need to think about what happens when a potential employer Googles your name. Just as we curate that information, people will work on their social scores." Hiring and firing right now, however, based on something like a Klout score, would not be wise. "Klout is one of the leaders in building this technology, but its far too loosey goosey to be making business decisions with today," says Sterling.
The score is just one part of what Klout offers, argues the company’s CEO and Founder Joe Fernandez. "People get hung up on the number, but we are also giving people a lot of context around your passions and areas of expertise. I think we’re still just at the tip of the iceberg. We’ve got a lot of work to do educating people about the value of understanding their online influence." His comments highlight the odd flavor to Klout’s success. The company is mainstream enough to be referenced in a New Yorker cartoon, but only as a punchline that mocks its score as meaningless in the real world. "I certainly never expected to be in the New Yorker," says the eternally optimistic Fernandez, when I mentioned the cartoon. "It feels good to be noticed."
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