How I cut my Time Warner Cable bill by 33%

It started when I decided to get a new WiFi router. I bought one and installed it, then called my ISP, Time Warner Cable (TWC), to let them know. They told me to bring the old router to their store.

I went to the store and, after giving back the router, the very courteous representative thanked me and said "that was it" -- she was was finished with me and ready to go on to the next customer.

I almost left, but first asked her what my new monthly bill would be. She replied that it would be $110, said it had been $115 before I returned the router, thanked me again and was ready for her next customer.

But the $110 bill surprised me -- it seemed high -- so I kept the conversation going:

Me: How does that $110 break down between Internet and phone service? (I do not get cable TV).

Rep (after tapping on her keyboard): the phone is $41.84 per month.

Me: That is outrageous, I want to cancel the phone service.

Rep: I can lower your bill.

Me: OK.

Rep: (after a few more keyboard taps) Your bill is now $100, not $110.

Me: How did you do that?

Rep: I put you on a promotion.

Me: So my phone bill is now $31.84, right?

Rep: No, I lowered your Internet bill, not your phone bill, but, don't worry, the speed will remain unchanged.

Me: Then cancel the phone.

Rep: Let me try something else. (after quite a few taps on the keyboard) Now your bill is $76.37 -- $50 for the Internet, $20 for the phone and $6.37 tax.

Me: How did you do that?

Rep: I put you on a different promotion.

Me: So, after 1 year, the bill will go up to $110, right?

Rep: No, it will only go up by $5-10.

Me: Then how did it get so high after my initial promotion ended?

Rep: It goes up by $5-10 every year after a promotion ends.

Well, I am kind of embarrassed to tell you this story. I have written many blog posts about the lack of competition in the ISP market, but have been too busy and too lazy to be an active consumer. So, shame on me.

But, shame on TWC too. Their courteous rep wanted to get me out of the store without telling me I was overpaying. I am sure she was following TWC policy. Is it ethical to not tell a customer that he or she could be paying less for the same service if they asked to?

I do not recall what my initial bill was, but it had evidently jumped when my promotion ran out and then continued rising $5-10 each year thereafter. Did their cost go up by 5-10% per year? If not, are they exploiting their monopoly hold on me? (My "alternative" service is Verizon DSL at 1.5 mbps).

Well, shame on both me and TWC. I promise to be more watchful in the future, but they will not change their policy. But what would happen if every one of their 11.1 million residential high-speed data subscribers did the same thing as I did? That would be too cool!

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Update 3/7/2014

There was a long (205 comment) discussion of this post on Slashdot. The comments are of varying quality, but there were tips from ex-ISP "retention reps" and suggestions of other ways to cut your bill -- primarily through alternative phone service.

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Update 3/8/2014

I held a chat session with another TWC representative in an attempt to document this transaction and he reduced the speed of my connection. I lost. You are in a weak position when dealing with a monopoly provider of an essential service.

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Update 7/15/2014

Check out this bizarre recording of a call to a Comcast phone representative requesting termination of service. The Comcast rep makes the Time Warner Cable rep sound good and he out-panders Time Warner -- hinting at huge speed increases and price cuts. I guess this is what we can expect from a merged TWC/Comcast. These guys make door-to-door magazine salesmen look good.

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Update 7/18/2014

A senior vice president at Comcast publicly apologized for the call, stating:

We are very embarrassed by the way our employee spoke with Mr. Block and Ms. Belmont and are contacting them to personally apologize. The way in which our representative communicated with them is unacceptable and not consistent with how we train our customer service representatives. We are investigating this situation and will take quick action. While the overwhelming majority of our employees work very hard to do the right thing every day, we are using this very unfortunate experience to reinforce how important it is to always treat our customers with the utmost respect.

Great -- except that Lauren Bruce, a former Comcast customer account executive says the customer service rep in the recording was not going rogue, but adhering to company policy. Bruce says the Comcast rep in the recording was trying to upsell the caller and also complete a mandatory questionnaire they had for each call. She says it was sometimes easier to make up answers than get them out of irate customers and that the customer rep in this call is being made a scapegoat.

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Update 8/7/2014

Here is a copy of the Comcast retention representative handbook -- the call rating system encourages them to be persistent and -- "take control, ask targeted questions, make an offer", etc. I'd hate to have their job -- it's like working on an electronics assembly line.

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Update 8/11/2014

Comcast COO Dave Watson posted a note on a company blog saying the employee in the above retention call ”did a lot of what we trained him and paid him — and thousands of other Retention agents — to do ... He tried to save a customer." It's nice to see Comcast assume responsibility -- let's hope they revise their policy and incentive system.

European 5G vision spelled out at MWC

A European Union memo predicts that by 2020 there will be more than 30 times as much mobile internet traffic as there was in 2010 and that traffic will reflect the massive growth in machines and sensors using the Internet to communicate -- the "Internet of things."

They predict that 5G won't just be faster, it will bring new functionalities and applications with high social and economic value in the following areas:

• eHealth
• Connected homes:
• Secure transport
• Smart grids
• Entertainment

The memo concludes with links to several 5G research projects in which the EU has invested €50 million, a Mobile World Congress speech on the Connected Continent by Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda and the Digital Agenda Web site.

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Update 4/8/2014

UK and Germany to cooperate on 5G. The UK government signals a push on ‘5G’ mobile technology -- after falling behind on 4G mobile, they hope to catch up with 5G.

Comcast is probably not cheating ... yet

Within the last few days, Comcast agreed to purchase Time Warner Cable and Netflix agreed to pay Comcast for direct access to their network. Will Netflix pass the Comcast payments along to us consumers? Will we get better quality and fewer pauses for buffering? Is this the end of network neutrality regardless of anything the FCC might do to restore it? Is this the beginning of the end for the good old Internet we have grown to love?

Maybe not.

It is true that Netflix will be paying Comcast for direct access to their network, but they will save what they had previously been paying intermeidate transit networks like Cogent. The overall cost to Netflix may be more, less or the same -- terms of the deal have not been disclosed. Don't get me wrong -- I doubt that they will be saving money, and, if they do, I am sure they will not pass the savings on to us consumers.

How about speed increases? Netflix has acknowledged performance problems, and this deal should help. It is practically certain that we will see improved performance, even if the blockage was done on purpose. (Hey, that was some good news).

This may not even be a violation of network neutrality. Couldn't the delays have been due to capacity problems of intermediate networks rather than Comcast? Is there evidence that Comcast was dropping or delaying Netflix packets? This is not to say that Comcast was not discriminating against Netflix traffic or that they may not in the future, but, as far as I know, there is no evidence that they did. (Where is Edward Snowden when you need him)?

Don't get me wrong -- I have nothing good to say about my ISP -- Time Warner Cable -- and I am confident that the situation will be even worse if the Comcast deal is approved. That sort of concentrated power cannot be good for anyone except those who have it.

Timothy Lee points out that one result of that concentration may be the elimination of the transit ISPs like Cogent, who are in a competitive market. Comcast and other companies that connect consumers face little or no competition.

GigaOm's Stacey Higginbotham has suggested that transparency -- opening the terms of these deals to public scrutiny -- might be a solution, but I am skeptical.

The following images show the route between one's home and Netflix before the agreement with Comcast, the way it is now that the deal has been done and the way it will end up if Comcast has their way.

Before the agreement, transit ISPs connected us to Netflix servers.

Now our ISPs connect us straight to Comcast.

After the merger, Comcast will be my ISP.

Google may give us some ISP competition

Just after we heard the competition-reducing news of Comcast buying Time Warner Cable, Google has announced that they may become a competitor in the ISP market -- they are evaluating 34 cities in 9 metropolitan areas as potential Google Fiber installations.

This is not a complete surprise. A Google executive announced their intention to expand last year, stating that Google Fiber is "a great business to be in."

Google is evaluating nine metropolitan areas, but none are big like New York or Chicago. I know a large installation would be daunting, but it would also be a learning experience and at least one big city mayor, Eric Garcetti in Los Angeles, is looking for a fiber partner.

(Full disclosure on that last "hint" for Google -- I live in Los Angeles, and my chance for getting fiber dropped to zero when my phone company, Verizon, decided to get out of that business).

Cable companies back bill to prohibit municipal broadband in Kansas -- the same old story

Google Fiber started in Kansas City Missouri, but it has spread to nearby communities in Kansas and there has been speculation that it might expand nation wide. Olathe, Kansas is to be the first Google Fiber community in Kansas.

Well, the cable companies don't like that so they have introduced a bill in the Kansas Legislature to prohibit cities from offering or partnering to offer Internet service.

The bill is called the "Municipal Communications Network and Private Telecommunications Investment Safeguards Act." Opponents suggest that it should have been called the "Incumbent Telecommunications Company Protection Act."

Congress attempted to create competition with the 1996 Telecommunications Act. This is just the latest in endless court and legislative battles waged by incumbent phone and cable companies to thwart the will of Congress and stifle competition.

(I worked on a municipal network in Hermosa Beach, California that was stopped in 2006 by pressure the local cable company put on the City Council).
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Update 2/4/2014

Hearings on community broadband services bill have been postponed (http://bit.ly/1brRTCU). It sounds like they are getting some negative feedback, as well they should.

PCAST report and recommendations on MOOCS

Last year, PCAST, the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, turned their attention to smart radio technology and spectrum sharing and their work yielded an executive order on the sharing of federal spectrum.

Now they have issued a short report with recomendations on MOOCs.

The report states that they are interested in MOOCs because:

MOOCs offer something different from radio, video, and even Internet courses of the past. Improvements in bandwidth and software innovations have enabled enormous improvement in the speed and quality of communication among large numbers of students and between students and teachers.

They continue with a concise, documented survey of MOOC developments (in the US), and discussion of the possible benefits from MOOCs and the criticisms that have been leveled against them.

They conclude with three recommendations:

• Let market forces decide which innovations in online teaching and learning are best.
• Encourage accrediting bodies to be flexible in response to educational innovation.
• Support research and the sharing of results on effective teaching and learning.

Their faith that the market will do the right thing got my attention -- is there no proactive role for the government in this? Would we have the Internet today if it were not for the government's role in developing the ARPANet and seeding connectivity with NSFNet?

I'd also be a bit worried that flexibility in accrediting might mean lower standards, but, in this case, I think market forces -- the job market -- will trump credit. College students will pay for training that leads to jobs.
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Update 12/20/2013

PCAT has published a MOOC Hierarchy:

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Update 12/20/2013

PCAT has published an infographic Harnessing Technology for Higher Education.

A Hole in Space -- envisioning and demonstrating video chat in 1980

Product development often begins with a speculative vision like Vannevar Bush imagining a global network of scientific workstations (see this presentation) or the work of artists and storytellers.

But, most visions are no more than that -- visions. The critical next step is building an engineering prototype demonstrating the vision -- "demo or die." Think of Daimler's early autos, the Wright Brothers' Flyer, or Doug Engelbart and Ivan Sutherland's work in our field.

Artists Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz combined vision and prototype when they created a "Hole in Space" by linking bigger-than-life displays in New York and LA with a NASA satellite feed. It was the mother of all video chats -- they showed that size and bandwidth matter in communicating presence and emotion.

Galloway and Rabinowitz documented the installation in a video. Below you will find links to both the full video and selected excerpts. If you like the excerpts, you will love the full video -- it is full of emotion and humor.

More information on:

• A Hole in Space
• A note on Hole in Space
• Satellite-inspired and enabled art in the 1970-80s
• Archival site on a quarter century of Galloway and Rabinowitz' pioneering artistic achievement
• A conversation with Galloway and Rabinowitz
• Image as Place -- The Phenomenal Screen in Kit Galloway & Sherrie Rabinowitz’s Satellite Arts 1977 by Kris Paulsen

Excerpt video (4m 49s):



Full video (29m 44s):

Amazon photos -- yesterday, today and tomorrow

These photos are from coverage of Amazon by NPR and Sixty Minutes. They illustrate Amazon's policy of investing only in things that enhance the customer experience and create loyalty, the improved density and efficiency of their warehouse/fulfillment centers and experiments with 30-minute delivery of orders by autonomous drones.

1999 warehouse and fulfillment center

2013 warehouse and fulfillment center

Robots scurrying around with picked items

Amazon corporate office, 1999

Jeff Bezos' makeshift desk, 1999

Bezos' hopes for 30-minute delivery via drone in 4-5 years

A delivery drone prototype

Eight electric motors

Taking off from a fulfillment center

Autonomous flight

Landing, dropping package and leaving for home

The spotlight on Jeff Bezos and Amazon

I surveyed my freshmen students this term, asking if they knew who Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Larry Page, Sergei Brin, Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs were.

They all knew who Gates and Jobs were, but had never heard of any of the others.

It seems that some tech entrepreneurs are public figures and others are not and it looks like Jeff Bezos has decided to go public.

A book on Amazon was recently published and Terry Gross interviewed the author, Jeff Stone, on Fresh Air. The interview covers Bezos' intention to make Amazon an "everything store" from the very start, his foregoing of quick profit to build customer loyalty and long-run profit, working conditions in Amazon warehouses, Bezos' management style and his purchase of The Washington Post.

Last night, Sixty Minutes also did a segment on Bezos and Amazon. You get to know Bezos and get a good look at the operation of the fullfilment centers they are building all around the country. The highlight is video of a research prototype -- autonomous drones delivering packages to homes. Bezos warned that this was early research, but expects that his drones will by flying in four or five years.

Links to some Sixty Minute videos on Amazon (with commercials):

• Drone delivery
• Bezos' purchase of the Washington Post
• Bezos looks to the future
• Difficulty raising capital at the start
• Last night's full show (Amazon is the first segment)
• Overtime video from last night -- background on the drone coverage

If you only watch one video, make it this one from 1999 when Amazon was just a book and music store:



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Update 12/2/2013

I've selected 11 still images from these videos, creating. They illustrate Amazon's policy of investing only in things that enhance the customer experience and create loyalty, the improved density and efficiency of their warehouse/fulfillment centers and experiments with 30-minute delivery of orders by autonomous drones.

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Update 8/31/2014

Google has had a delivery drone project for two years according to the Atlantic Monthly. Drones from either company will face many non-technical challenges.

Thrun shifts Udacity toward lifelong vocational education

You will want to read this article on Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, the man who popularized MOOCs with his 2011 artifical intelligence class.

He has abandoned the goal of bringing conventional college courses to low performing students in developed and developing countries, and pivoted toward vocational education.

The switch was motivated by the poor results of San Jose State University students who used Udacity material rather than conventional textbooks in "flipped" classrooms. The results left Thrun dissilusioned -- "I'd aspired to give people a profound education--to teach them something substantial, but the data was at odds with this idea."

Thrun himself prepared the material for an introductory statistics course to be used at San Jose State. He did his best, stating that "From a pedagogical perspective, it was the best I could have done -- It was a good class."

But the students did poorly and Thrun concluded that they had a "lousy product."

I think Thrun's elite background led him down a garden path. Any San Jose State professor who had taught an introduction to statistics could have told him that many (most?) of his students would not have basic arithmetic skills and would "hate math." They are not Stanford students.

His response to this experience is to focus on industrial education, stating that "At the end of the day, the true value proposition of education is employment." As such they are developing an AT&T-sponsored masters degree at Georgia Tech and training material for developers.

Thrun's revelation has produced a sense of schadenfreude among some academics, who were happy to say "we told you so" and perhaps breathe a sigh of relief that their jobs will remain secure.

But, even if many college courses are best taught in a conventional classroom or in a flipped class with a conventional textbook, those jobs may still be in danger. If Thrun is right about industrial education -- jobs -- being the true value of education, we may see more and more students foregoing college altogether for offerings like Thrun's.

Those San Jose students want jobs and they are increasingly aware of the rising direct cost and opportunity cost of a college degree.

When speaking of his five-year old son, Thrun reveals his vision of the future of education, saying "I hope he can hit the workforce relatively early and engage in lifelong education -- I wish to do away with the idea of spending one big chunk of time learning."

Udacity has already moved into workforce training, and I think they have been working on lifelong learning all along.
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Update 11/30/2013
There is a long discussion of this post on Slashdot.
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Update 3/25/2014

As Udacity moves away from university education, Coursera hires a university administrator as CEO -- Richard C. Levin, who was president of Yale University for 20 years. No one seems to have figured out the university-course business model, but Levin's international experience indicates that he sees a global market -- for students and teachers.

Wolfram Language -- a paradigm shift?

As technology evolves, working with new data types becomes economically feasible. The first computers worked on numbers, they "computed." Then came alphanumeric data, text, speech, music, etc. This table shows the decade in which each data type became widely available:

Wolfram Language sounds like it might change this paradigm. This year marks the 25th anniversary of Stephen Wolfram's symbolic math program Mathematica. While Wolfram has introduced several "products" over the years, his has been a 25 year research and development project on generalized symbolic programming -- developing what he calls Wolfram Language.

Here is how he describes it:

There’s a fundamental idea that’s at the foundation of the Wolfram Language: the idea of symbolic programming, and the idea of representing everything as a symbolic expression. It’s been an embarrassingly gradual process over the course of decades for me to understand just how powerful this idea is. That there’s a completely general and uniform way to represent things, and that at every level that representation is immediately and fluidly accessible to computation.

It can be an array of data. Or a piece of graphics. Or an algebraic formula. Or a network. Or a time series. Or a geographic location. Or a user interface. Or a document. Or a piece of code. All of these are just symbolic expressions which can be combined or manipulated in a very uniform way.

And here is how he visualizes it:

It sounds like a uniform way to represent and operate on everything from text strings to user interfaces.

Wolfram's blog post is vague but enticing. He promises to make Wolfram Language freely available in the cloud so we will be able to see it for ourselves. If this blog post had been written by someone at a Silicon Valley startup, I would have dismissed it as pre-marketing hype. But, it wasn't. Instead, it reminded me of of the "Preliminary discussion" of the von Neumann architecture I read as a student many years ago.

Jon von Neumann beside the IAS computer at Princeton

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Update 11/18/2013

John Graves commented on the natural language processing promises in Wolfram's post.
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Update 11/22/2013

Wolfram has posted a Language reference manual on their site. It primarily a reference manual, but there are some examples and tutorials.

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Update 12/8/2013

Stephen Wolfram gave the keynote talk at The Next Web in Amsterdam (video below).  He mentioned Mathematica, but spent most of the time on Wolfram Alpha, Wolfram Language, complexity arising from simple procedures and data analysis and visualization.

He put the language in context by saying that "Wolfram alpha is basically 15 million lines of Wolfram Language code plus some number of terabytes of raw data plus a whole collection of real time feeds."  The description and demo of Wolfram Language begins around the 6m 50s point in his talk.

Wolfram talks fast and is somewhat elliptical, but he peppers his presentation with demos.  One might be tempted to write him off as hype, but the demos are real. The most impressive was this one liner:
dynamic[EdgeDetect[CurrentImage[]]]

which produced real time edge detection as he moved his hand in front of a camera. (It's at the 10m 10s point of the video). Impressive as that was, one has to wonder how brittle the system is. Wolfram knew the language included an edge detection algorithm, but can it be used for a variety of problems and applications? I cannot figure out a query that will get Wolfram Alpha to tell me the number of LTE mobile subscribers -- that is a bad sign.

Here's Wolfram's keynote:

Crowdsourcing college rating and innovation -- President Obama's affordable college initiative

Department of Education officials, led by Under Secretary of Education Martha Kanter, were on our campus last week, soliciting input on the president’s College Value and Affordability plan.

There were open forums and a lunch with several faculty and administrators. I was not able to attend the open forums, but was at the lunch.

The Los Angeles Times covered the forums, reporting that the plan met with skepticism about the feasibility of developing an effective rating system. Politico's coverage of the event also focused on the difficulties.

The lunch meeting was similar. Ms. Kanter described their plan and asked for input. While we all favor increased market transparency to help students pick a college, doing so is difficult. Many of the comments were warnings about shortcomings -- unanticipated side-effects of any rating system, differences in student preparation in high school, differences in levels of State support for schools, etc.

A multivariate problem like selecting a college or comparing two colleges does not have a single solution. It is like the proverbial blind men exploring an elephant -- complex and subjective.

But, that does not mean there is nothing for government to do. The role of the government in this case is to gather and publish data, not to analyze it. (Or to be only one of many analysts).

The government should publish data on colleges and outcomes in an open, easily manipulated format. Let the people -- policy experts, teachers, administrators, prospective students and their families -- anyone with an interest -- do their own data analysis and draw their own conclusions. The system should also provide a platform for presenting, sharing and discussing those analyses and conclusions.

Tools for analyzing and visualizing the data should also be provided and it should be possible for a person to document their analysis using these tools in such a manner that others could replicate it, re-run it over time, or modify it. The analysis and visualization toolkit should also be open and, of course, users should be able to analyze and visualize the data using their own tools and methods.

In short, government should publish accurate, open data and let a thousand eyes see it.

The President's plan also addresses educational quality. Their Fact Sheet on President Obama’s Plan to Make College More Affordable, discusses technology-enabled innovation, singling out several examples at elite universities and Coursera.

Coursera and elite universities are developing valuable technology and pedagogy, but, just as I would open the data analysis process, I would have the government promote open innovation in education. There are gifted teachers and innovators in schools, colleges, high schools, design firms, etc. throughout the world. Furthermore, faculty in these schools often have more experience with the sorts of students who cannot afford education today than do those at elite universities.

Can we find ways to include the contributions of those people in the President's program?

For example, MIT, Stanford and Google are collaborating on an open source platform for MOOCs, (MOOC.org). An open, hosted version of that platform would be a valuable resource for faculty and others around the world. Google has the infrastructure – not just connectivity, but services like Google Plus Communities, Hangouts, YouTube and Google Drive – to create that hosted platform. It would be terrific if the Department of Education could work with them to create an open "YouTube for education". (If Google were not willing, the CSU system or others could do it).

There are also many examples of the use of fine-grained, focused modules in education -- most prominently at the Khan Academy. Modular material can take many forms – a short PowerPoint presentation or video demonstration, a thought provoking quote, an anecdote, an image, an animation, a question, an assignment, a simulation, a grading technique, etc. can be effective and of use to others. Every teacher has some such "modules" that could be of use to others. The trick is to make them discoverable. Could the Department of Education create a system for doing that?

High school teachers and others working on Common Core curricula are also a resource for colleges. Dominguez Hills and others spend a lot of time on remediation. We should encourage colleges to discover and incorporate teaching material and insights from those working on the Common Core.

Let a thousand flowers bloom.

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Update 11/19/2013

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Update 11/25/2013 This article on the forum appeared in our campus publication, Inside Dominguez. It contains several student and faculty comments. -----

Update 11/25/2013

There is a fairly long discussion of this post On Slashdot.

Los Angeles to request city-wide fiber proposals

Ars Technica reports that the City of Los Angeles plans to issue a request for proposals (RFP) to bring fiber connectivity to every resident. The RFP is not out yet, but it sounds as though they are not looking for a retail Interent service provider, but for open infrastructure which competitors could use to offer Internet service.

The article is vague, but it seems the city envisions an open network with wholesale pricing for any one who wants to compete as a retail Internet service provider. That is reminiscent of the successful approach taken in Stockholm.

But it is also reminiscent of the thwarted desire of Congress in passing the Telecommunication Act of 1996 in the United States. The incumbent telephone and cable companies used the courts, lobbying and claims of limited facilites to kill the would-be competion.

The rumored RFP has characteristics of Google Fiber, like free or ad supported low speed connectivity for all, tiered pricing for high speed Internet, television and telephone and free or subsidized connectivity to non-profits. On the other hand, Los Angeles is said to seek business access, which Google does not allow.

Speaking of Google Fiber, they may very well have plans to go nation wide -- might they be a bidder in Los Angeles?

The article says the RFP has the support of recently elected council member Bob Blumenfield and new mayor Eric Garcetti.

I live in Los Angeles, and long ago gave up hope that Verizon would deliver their fiber service, FIOS, to my neighborhood, so am stuck with only one viable Internet service provider. (Yes, it's a monopoly). I would love to see something come of this, but seeing is believing.

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Update 7/22/2014

The city has received 34 responses to its request for information (RFI). They came from city departments as well as private companies, including my current monopoly ISP Time-Warner Cable and an optimistic report from Angie Communications, a Dutch company. The city will now take these RFIs into account in drafting a request for proposals.

Grading systems -- how do you grade?

I just saw a post by Kevin Werbach that links to a post on the grading system used by Liz Lawley -- she gives only three grades: A for "good work," C for "mediocre but acceptable work" and F if "they really hadn’t mastered the material."

That got me thinking about grading. I will tell you how I grade and would like to hear how you grade.

For final grades, I curve students relative to the top person in the class, so they are not competing against each other. I also put them in heterogeneous groups and give significant bonuses to groups with low-variance, encouraging them to help each other.

Part of their grade is based on assignments. Since I give a lot of small, focused assignments, I had to devise a grading system that did not take a lot of time. I grade assignments as satisfactory and on time, satisfactory, but late, or not satisfactory. They get full credit for assignments that are satisfactory and on time and half credit for those that are satisfactory, but late. If they are not satisfactory, I explain why and they have the opportunity to re-submit a satisfactory answer for half credit. This method makes grading relatively quick and encourages students to keep up.

But, I am still grading at the course level, which is inappropriate for many subjects. For example, to say that someone received a C in an introductory statistics course means they did not learn significant parts of the material -- perhaps understanding descriptive statistics, but not hypothesis testing or estimation.

Instead of one grade, I'd prefer a fine-grained system in which one could, for example, pass "measures of central tendency," then "measures of variability," then "basic probability," etc. In that case, "passing" an introduction to statistics would mean passing each of a series of ordered modules and understanding all of the concepts and skills presented in the course.

I've advocated and used modular teaching material for many years, but always within the confines of the standard grading paradigm -- assign a letter grade from A to F for an entire course. With today's technology, we could combine modular teaching material with pass/fail grading at the module level. The technology is the easy part. Breaking up the traditional transcript -- our current system of grading and certification -- would be tough.

But, enough blue sky dreaming -- I am curious to know how others grade. I've outlined my grading system and that of Liz Lawley -- how do you grade?

Bill Gates talk to community college leaders

Earlier this month, Bill Gates addressed the Leadership Congress of the Association of Community College Trustees.

He described a few of the projects they have funded -- flipped classrooms, using MOOCs and other material:

We don’t have to have 20 different people in a large urban area all giving a lecture in the same introductory course. We can get the greatest lecturers in the English-speaking world, every student can listen to them – and the instructors who used to spend their time preparing and delivering lectures can become 21st century community college instructors.

This implies a different, but important role for instructors:

These instructors are gifted at relating to students, running small group learning sessions, and matching up students with the best resources available – the best lectures, the best problem sets, the best assessments. They have more time to get to know the students, explain difficult concepts, and trouble-shoot when students aren’t thriving. They are the architects and motivators of learning.

The smart use of technology doesn’t replace faculty – it redeploys them, to the benefit of the students.

Gates emphasized remedial classes and his funding of the Khan Academy seems like a good fit for the approach outlined in this talk. You can read a transcript of his presentation or watch this video:

PBS Frontline report provides context for the current NSA scandal

I figured everyone else was publishing information about NSA spying, so I had nothing to add, but I came across a PBS Frontline report "Top Secret America – 9/11 to the Boston Bombings," which provides context for the action of Edward Snowden. It aired on April 30, 2013.

• Report video (53:51)
• Report transcript

PBS describes the report as follows: "In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings, Frontline investigates the vast maze of clandestine government efforts created after 9/11 for the purpose of hunting terrorists and preventing future attacks."

Here are a couple of quotes from the transcript:

NARRATOR: Ten years after September 11th--Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dana Priest investigates the creation of Top Secret America.

RICHARD IMMERMAN, Asst. Dpty. Director, DNI, 2007-08: What happens after 9/11 is this tremendous ramping up.

DANA PRIEST, The Washington Post: The money just came out of Congress- it was flying out.

ALLISON STANGER, Rohatyn Center for International Affairs: It’s shrouded in secrecy.

GARY SCHROEN, CIA, 1970-02: We weren’t going to play by the old set of rules.

...

NARRATOR: But finding the exact needle would take manpower, lots of it, and in a hurry. The NSA turned to a new force in the covert war, private contractors. (LP: one of which, Booz Allen Hamilton, employed Edward Snowden).

DANA PRIEST: You had this boom in the corporate intelligence world, as well, companies like CACI, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics. Just all the old-fashioned industrial, “We’re building ships and submarines”-type corporations quickly moved into the intelligence and information space.

NARRATOR: The NSA spent billions of dollars on more than 480 private companies. Gen. Michael Hayden led the effort in the days right after 9/11.

MOOC competition is heating up -- two European MOOC providers are going live

I discussed the global nature of online education in an earlier post. While MOOCs started in the US, and US companies and universities have offered the majority of classes to date, online education will be a global market for providers as well as students.

Two European MOOC providers, iversity and Futurelearn, are going live this month. The first course offered by Futurelearn, a coalition of UK universities, starts October 21. It is an ecology course called "Fairness and nature: When worlds collide" and it will only last two weeks. I will enroll to get a look at the Futurelearn delivery platform.

Iversity began with a scholarship from the German Federal Ministry of Science and Technology and is now venture funded. They will be offering MOOCs by university professors from around the world and are launching with six courses this month. Their course promotion videos are innovative, for example, combining video and graphics and using 3D video, as shown below. I want to keep an eye on their platform as well.

Gallup poll on traditional versus online education in the U.S.

During the first week of October, Gallup polled U. S. adults on their opinion of online education. in the U. S.

They found that online education was rated as better than traditional education at providing value and a variety of courses. On the other hand, the respondents see student success as more likely in traditional classes. They also rate traditional classes as better at individualized instruction and delivering high-quality instruction from well-qualified instructors. They see traditional classes as more likely to have rigorous testing and grading that can be trusted, which correlates with a belief that they are more likely to be viewed positively by employers. Here is a summary of the results:

The survey was done over the phone (50% cell and 50% landline) and the results are weighted in proportion to U. S. demographics. Gallup says they are 95% confident that the results are within +/- four percent.

Five percent said they were currently taking an online course and they tended to be relatively young and focused on school work as opposed to job skills or recreation.

These results are indicative of general public opinion, which may give some insight into the future of public funding for online education as well as its worth in the job market, but I wish they would survey people who have recently or are currently taking a class online -- asking what they were taking, why they took it, whether it was massive, open, a traditional college class online, etc.

For this survey, I have the impression that many of the people who were taking online classes did so as part of a degree program, but that is not made clear. I hope Gallup will follow up with surveys of online students.

Freedom House report -- "Freedom on the Net, 2013"

Freedom House publishes an annual report on Internet freedom and Freedom on the Net 2013 was published last week.

The report "headline" is an Internet freedom score for each of 60 nations. The score is based on:

• Obstacles to Access—including infrastructural and economic barriers to access, legal and ownership control over internet service providers (ISPs), and independence of regulatory bodies;
• Limits on Content—including legal regulations on content, technical filtering and blocking of websites, self-censorship, the vibrancy/diversity of online news media, and the use of ICTs for civic mobilization;
• Violations of User Rights—including surveillance, privacy, and repercussions for online activity, such as imprisonment, extralegal harassment, or cyber attacks.

Here are the controls in effect in the top and bottom five scoring nations:

The USA rank will probably drop next year, reflecting the ongoing revelations of the extent of NSA Internet surveillance. (For the full list of national controls click here).

While the index is interesting, the meat of the report is in essays on the state of the Internet in the various nations. These are concise and well referenced. They focus on developments during the year, but are a good starting point to understanding the Internet in a nation.

The report also includes graphic presentations of the data, for example, an interactive map in which data is displayed when the cursor hovers over a nation:

Chromebook + Chromecast = winner

In a recent test, I discoverd that my laptop was not fast enough to cast video from a browser tab to a Chromecast. The audio and video stuttered badly because, as you see here, the CPU was maxed out:

This was not surprising, since my laptop fails to meet Google's recommended specs for tab casting.wiki

But, I posted a query to the Chromecast community on Google Plus asking whether any Chromebooks could cast a video tab. I expected that the (very expensive) Google Pixel, which has an Intel i5 CPU, would be the only one that could, but I was wrong.

James Welbes commented that he was able to cast video tabs using his Samsung 550 Chromebook, which has a dual core Celeron processor. That led commenter Joe Phelps to speculate that "Chrome OS must have very little overhead." That makes a lot of sense -- it does not have to deal with things like overlapping windows and a local file system.

The next generation of Chromebooks has been announced.

I expect that they will all cast tabs well. If that is the case, and one of them has a decent keyboard and screen, I will use it in my den for watching video and in my Chromecast-equipped office for work.

The Pixel was a proof of concept and the new Chromebooks are the first production machines. I will still use laptop and desktop machines, but the Chromebook will get plenty of use.
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Update 11/26/2013

Acer announced a $300 touch screen Chromebook today. (I believe the only other one is the expensive Google Pixel).  This sounds really cool, but it only has 2GB of RAM.  I keep a lot of tabs open so suspect that would be a performance constraint.

A terrific article on the development of the iPhone

The New York Times magazine published an article by Fred Vogelstein on the development and announcement of the iPhone: And Then Steve Said, "Let There Be an iPhone."

The article describes an enormous challenge with 80-hour weeks and frayed tempers, the risks they took, the secrecy around the project and a fascinating behind the scenes look at the preparation for the risky on-stage demo Steve Jobs did at the product introduction (starting at 21m 3s -- watch at least through 24m 30s):




Here are a few quotes from the New York Times article to pique your interest:

It’s hard to overstate the gamble Jobs took when he decided to unveil the iPhone back in January 2007. Not only was he introducing a new kind of phone — something Apple had never made before — he was doing so with a prototype that barely worked.

Very rarely did I see him become completely unglued — it happened, but mostly he just looked at you and very directly said in a very loud and stern voice, ‘You are [expletive] up my company,’ or, ‘If we fail, it will be because of you.’

But every time Jobs and his executives examined the idea in detail, it seemed like a suicide mission. Phone chips and bandwidth were too slow for anyone to want to surf the Internet and download music or video over a cellphone connection.

Above all, Jobs didn’t want to partner with any of the wireless carriers.

Apple designed and built not one but three different early versions of the iPhone in 2005 and 2006.

No one had ever put a multitouch screen in a mainstream consumer product before

Jon Rubinstein, Apple’s top hardware executive at the time, says there were even long discussions about how big the phone would be.

The iPhone project was so complex that it occasionally threatened to derail the entire corporation. Many top engineers in the company were being sucked into the project, forcing slowdowns in the timetables of other work.

Big companies like Marvell, which made the Wi-Fi radio chip, and CSR, which provided the Bluetooth radio chip, hadn’t been told they were going to be in a new phone. They thought they were going to be in a new iPod. “We actually had fake schematics and fake industrial designs,” the engineer says.

Even people within the project itself couldn’t talk to one another.

User interface design -- fad or function?

Microsoft started with the flat Metro interface of Windows 8. Apple flattened iOS 7 and now Google has flattened their logo.

Is this based on human-computer interface research or is it style and fad? Years ago, I taught an HCI course in which we read about controlled studies in making user interface design choices. Google is said to be engineering driven, researching everything from the optimal number of seats at cafeteria tables to the number of pixels devoted to a particular icon on the screen.

But, I have the feeling that the rush to simple, flat user interfaces is driven by fad as much as function. My wife uses an iPhone and an iPad. She is probably a typical non-geek user -- using relatively few apps and features. Our daughter was all excited when iOS 7 came out -- she grabbed my wife's iPad and iPhone and installed it the next day.

After using iOS 7 for a few days my wife says she sees no advantage for her usage mix -- the only change is that she has to learn how to do what she always did in slightly different ways. She also likes 3-D buttons that are obviously clickable and give feedback when you click on them.

My wife thinks it is fad, not function and it reminds me of the Pantone's annual fashion color palette and their color of the year:

If these changes were driven by functional considerations, I'd love to see the old-fashioned HCI research that led to them. If not, fads tend to be cyclical, so we can look forward to a return to 3-D skeuomorphism in a few years. As you see below, the designers are already working on them.

(You can make your own goofy logos at http://createfunnylogo.com/).

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Update 9/29/2013

This child was even more upset than my wife with iOS 7:

Purdue Signals -- giving students feedback on how they are doing

I give my students feedback as to how they are doing relative to the class on assignments and quizzes throughout the semester. I also do informal, anonymous surveys to give them feedback on their relative level of effort, for example asking how many many actually watched a video that had been assigned or how long they spent studying a module or doing an assignment. These low-tech surveys take only a few minutes to administer and tabulate. My goal is to put information, and therefore responsibility for the outcome, in their hands.

Purdue University has a more ambitious effort for monitoring student progress and giving them feedback during the term. Since 2007, they have used Signals, a system that mines student data to predict their success in a course. They look at demographic, help-seeking and performance variables to judge how well a student is doing as the term progresses. Student feedback includes a red/green/yellow signal to indicate their overall progress as well as "canned" emails from their instructors and suggestions as to how to improve and where to get help.

Purdue reports that graduation rate, retention rate and grades have improved for students taking Signals courses. For example, Signals students got better grades in these courses:

This and the other results reported by the Signals team are encouraging, but there are many confounding variables. For example, professors choose whether or not to use Signals in their courses and those who choose to do so may be more more committed to teaching than those who don't.

If this sounds interesting, you can visit the Signals home page, read this short report on the project, read this discussion of ethical considerations in mining student data in this manner or watch these one minute videos.

Explanation of Signals for students:



Comments from two faculty members:



I am not sure whether I would use Signals if it were available to me as a teacher, but my low-tech approach to feedback on relative performance and effort is simple and I can do it on my own.

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Update 9/28/2013

Andrew Stewart suggest that we look at JISC's work in this area, writing:

Some interested findings emerging from Jisc's Assessment and Feedback programme around this area. As a distance learning student myself I'd love to have this kind of information at my fingertips.

Chromecast -- the $35 decision support room in your office

In an earlier post, I discovered that my old laptop was too slow to cast video to my TV set, but it worked well when displaying still images like a PowerPoint presentation on a TV set equipped with Google Chromecast.

It not only works for a presentation by one person to an audience -- several people in a room can actively share a heads-up display. Augmented meeting rooms in which participants have connected computers at their fingertips, were invented by Doug Engelbart in the 1960s envisioned and invented much of what we use today during the 1960s.

In the 1980s, local area networks became common, and the University of Arizona, Xerox Palo Alto Research center and others began experimenting with augmented meeting rooms with shared displays. Meeting participants could brainstorm ideas, rearrange document outlines, edit documents, vote and conduct polls, etc. and companies like Groupsystems marketed upscale decision support rooms like this one.

Those rooms cost a fortune and were used as corporate boardrooms, but interest in them has waned.

A large TV set with a Chromecast dongle is not as powerful or opulent as a decision support room, but for $35 it might become the decision support room for (small groups of) the rest of us. Below you see a simple test in which two users are editing the same Google Drive document with the result displayed on a TV set.

This sort of setup would allow several people in a room to share a heads-up display. I tested it with a simple Google doc, but one can imagine using it with the kinds of software found in expensive decision support rooms -- software with modules for voting, brainstorming, outlining, writing, etc. and features like selective anonymity and podium passing. We may find Chromecast displays next to those whiteboards in our offices in the future.

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Update 10/2/2013

Commenter Martyn Williams noted that the Chromecast will work with an HDMI-equipped projector, which would enable larger displays in your office or conference room.

Commenter Roger Jennings suggested that the Chromecast could save bandwith in casting pages if it had more "intelligence" -- for example being able to display PDF, Excel, Powerpoint, and Word files.

Together, these comments suggest a future where we have dumb displays with upgradeable, external intelligence. I have changed the TV set in my den 3 times in the last 35 years, but change computers every couple of years. I don't want a smart TV set, I want a dumb display with an upgradeable "chromecast."