Microsoft vs Google: Office 365 will be free for K-university education

WDPC machine room

This sounds like a major battle between Google Docs/Plus/Groups/Hangouts and Microsoft for the hearts and minds of students.

The free Office 365 for Education plan includes the online version of Office 2010, called Office Web Apps, instant messaging and conferencing via Lync Online, collaboration capabilities via SharePoint Online, email and calendar via Exchange Online, antivirus and anti-spam protection and individual storage.

For an additional $2.50 per student per month, and $4.50 per faculty/staff per month you get all that plus the full-featured desktop version of Office 2010 Professional Plus and voice mail. For $3 per month per student and $6 per month per faculty/staff, you can add voice communication.

Initial WDPC participating institutions

This "get them while they are young" strategy reminds me of the old days when I worked for IBM. We gave universities an 80% educational discount on computers and went further at times. At UCLA, we built the Western Data Processing Center (WDPC), which had office space for UCLA and IBM employees, and we installed the largest mainframe computers of the time. Universities in the western states could submit jobs remotely -- using high speed paper tape. Students at UCLA and those schools all learned to program and use IBM computers, giving us a competitive advantage over other manufacturers.

Google to offer a MOOC with certification

Google will offer a MOOC on becoming a power searcher starting in July. The course will consist of six 50-minute classes with interactive activities.

The topic may sound mundane and self-serving, but there are two interesting aspects that make this course worth watching.

Students will use Google Plus, Groups and Hangouts to form learning communities and help each other out. These assets might give Google a strategic advantage in online education, and it will be interesitng to see how students and the course faculty end up using them.

It will also be interesting to see how the certificates of completion are used by others. For example, an undergraduate might be required to complete this MOOC as part of a digital literacy course or as a pre-requisite for a more advanced course.

I'm curious enough to sign up and see for myself.

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The course is now complete and you can take it at your leisure. The six 50-minute classes are at:
http://www.powersearchingwithgoogle.com/course

Can we use automated test essay graders as writing tutors?

Massive online classes are a hot topic -- they may disrupt and democratize education. Large classes offer economies of scale in the cost of developing and delivering teaching material, but grading does not scale as well. Multiple choice questions and simple computer algorithms can be graded automatically, but grading essays and other forms of assessment is labor intensive.

Might we automate essay scoring?

Kaggle is a company that organizes contests where teams of data analysts -- data miners -- are given a training data set, which they use to develop a predictive algorithm. In a recent contest, teams were given 16,000 student essays that had been graded by humans. The essays were responses to questions on state standardized tests. The contestants used this data to develop scoring algorithms that were then used on another set of test essays.

Randall Stross, writing in the New York Times, says the winning predictive algorithms were "eerily accurate" compared to human graders.

This $100,000 contest was sponsored by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and is part of a broader program on automated grading. They recently published an analysis of the efficacy of commercial essay grading programs and a Kaggle blog post says they will run a second contest for grading of short-answer questions this summer. Three additional automated grading studies are in development.

Whether they are graded by humans spending a couple of minutes each or computers, the short-essay questions on standardized tests are not terrific indicators of writing ability.

Giving students feedback on rough drafts as they write would be a better application of this sort of technology. Writing online is increasingly important, and I have developed teaching modules on several types of writing, including short documents like these essays. I urge students to use spelling and grammar checkers, but that is rather shallow. Could short-essay grading algorithms be turned on their heads to give students feedback on the quality of their drafts while they are writing?

Virgin Mobile gets the iPhone -- is the wireless oligopoly starting to fade?

AT&T has articulated its vision of a concentrated wireless market with few carriers that control a lot of spectrum. They foresee a gradual, controlled shift from voice minutes to all-data during the next few years, and hope to charge enough for that data to maintain carrier revenue and profit.

But one of those carriers, Sprint, seems to be doing something radical -- competing.

Sprint is competing by partnering with mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) that sell access to the Sprint network. Users have to buy their phones up front, without subsidy, but they get flexible, cheap voice and data plans in return. The MVNO gets less revenue per user than AT&T or Verizon charge, but I assmue they and Sprint are profiting or they would not do it.

The net result is that wireless is cheaper and customer bills more accurately reflect the fact that voice calls, text messages and data are all bits.

Since the user pays full price for a phone, the MVNOs do not require two year contracts, but they lock you in by insisting that you buy your phone from them -- you cannot bring your own. Phone portability should improve with market pressure and the widespread adoption of fourth generation cellular technology.

MVNO phone selection is limited, but that may be breaking down. Sprint recently picked up the iPhone and today they announced that Virgin Mobile, one of their MVNOs, would also get the iPhone. I suspect that eventually Sprint MVNOs will offer all Sprint phones.

Virgin is not Sprint's only MVNO. One, Ting, has effectively done away with the concept of tiered service -- you pay for what you use. Virgin and Ting are early, but there will be others. One that is in beta, Republic Wireless, hopes to charge even less by automatically substituting WiFi for cellular connectivity whenever possible.

AT&T has their ideal vision of the future, and I have mine -- the ability to own my own phone, use it on anyone's network and only pay for the bits I send and receive.

Cyberwarfare is in the air and it is frightening

Cyberwar is a trending topic. I just Googled "cyberwar caution" and got 604 news links and 2.6 million Web links. Here are a few examples:

• Recommendation to elevate cyber warfare to combatant command status
• Drones
• US and Israel's role in Stuxnet
• DARPA's $110 million Plan X research program
• Autonomous robots
• Caution from security entreprenuer and expert Eugene Kaspersky
• Christopher Mims on Obama's naivette

I understand why people feel we have to transition our cyberwar effort from defense to offense (combatant command) and I also understand why others urge caution.

We have been fighting the spread of capital intensive nuclear arms that require large, visible facilities and tests for seventy years, with mixed results. How quickly will relatively cheap cyber weapons spread? What nation will not be able to afford them?

I have no bright ideas on this topic, only a sad feeling. When I was a graduate student, I was in the research directorate of the Systems Development Corporation and my work was funded by ARPA, but posters like the one shown here were all over the building.

What posters will be on the walls at Plan X sites?

How AT&T sees the wireless future

I listened to a 52 minute interview of AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson while at the gym yesterday.  He predicted that they would be offering data only plans for multiple devices within 24 months and "reverse billing," in which data from a content provider who pays AT&T a fee will not count against the user's data cap within 12 months. He also talked about spectrum ownership. He forsees industry consolidation believes the "most efficient" use of spectrum occurs when it is owned by the operator.

Here are a few notes I jotted down while listening. (Some with snarky comments in parenthesis).

• He said that any student of basic economics would have understood that scarce bandwidth would have been used more efficiently if AT&T and T-Mobile had been allowed to merge.  (I don't know where he took his basic economics class, but he must have been absent the day they talked about the efficiency of competitive markets).
• Within 12 months, we will see "reverse billing," in which the content provider would pay a fee to AT&T so their data would not count against the user's cap -- like toll free 800 numbers. (As long as the market is an oligopoly or less, he and his competitors will be able to raise the rates and tighten the caps on those data-only plans, favoring large, established content providers that can afford reverse billing).
• AT&T has done a "good job" of getting people used to usage-based pricing, i. e., getting rid of unlimited data plans and moving to caps, tiered service and throttling.  (Now they can raise rates -- the reverse billing folks will love that).
• Full ownership and control of spectrum has "proven over time to be the best model" for efficiency and call connection quality.  (What else has been tried "over time?" All I can think of off hand is WiFi and that has worked out pretty well).
• Full ownership of spectrum drives innovation and investment.
• There will be data-only accounts within 24 months.  (He can Google "MVNO" if he wants to see data-only accounts today).
• LTE will improve spectrum efficiencey by 30-40%.  (I've heard higher estimates, but he has a vested interest in convincing us that spectrum is scarce).
• With LTE and HTML5, content and applications will move to the cloud and phone features and operating systems will be less important.
• AT&T will make up for falling voice revenue with new data applications in connected homes, cars and enterprises as well as financial transactions. (And higher prices for data)?
• The charge for text messages is now nominal because most people have unlimited accounts.  (Unlimited messaging is $20 per month, which will buy you a gigabyte at Ting.com -- a lot of messages).
• "Breakage" -- the unused capacity due to people not reaching their tier limits each month -- is "evaporating pretty quickly."  (It's already totally evaporated at Ting.com).
• Regulators are like "sand in the gears." They are stopping things like the T-Mobile merger, being able to sell off the land line business in small chuncks and the forced sale of unused spectrum ("use it or lose it") to companies like AT&T.  (Beneficial for who)?
• Federal spectrum sharing is OK, but non-governmental spectrum sharing is a bad idea.
• The economy and employment outlook for 2012 is poor. (I guess we could fix that and curb those gritty regulators by voting for Romney).

I had the feeling that his ideal version of the efficient future would be a single company owning all the spectrum and delivering all the wireless connectivity -- what's good for AT&T is good for the nation.

Can anything stop this juggernaut and create competition? Regulation? MVNOs? Success of the spectrum sharing trials recently urged by PCAST? All three?

Global online education is taking off

Education cost and consumer prices

As shown here, the cost of education (in the US) is rising faster than general inflation. At the same time, voters are cutting spending on public education. As a result, online schools are springing up all over. There are many variations on the theme, and it will be fascinating to see which models survive. Here are some examples:

• Calstate online: Charge tuition and grant degrees. Self-sustaining, non-profit.
• edX: Free for now, but will they one day offer certificates for a fee? Large cash endowment, but what happens when that runs out?
• The Khan Academy: Free forever? Contract with school districts? Foundation support.
• Udacity and Coursera: Venture backed university spin offs are free for now, but investors will want income in the future.
• NPTEL, the National Program on Technology Enhanced Learning: Produced by the Indian Institutes of Technology. Government funded and free.
• Open University: Grants degrees and charges tuition (discount for UK students).
• Open University Learning Space: Free online courses from 1-20 hours long from the Open University and the BBC.

Venture capital comes to education

There are also students with different goals:

• Young people seeking a degree or certification at the beginning of their careers
• Working people seeking a degree or certificate in order to improve their positions
• Working people seeking training in a specific job skill
• Curious people who want to learn about a subject as an end in itself
• Curious people who want to acquire a skill as an end in itself

To make matters even more interesting, while US entries in the online education have been getting a lot of attention, this is a global phenomenon. We see offerings from the US, UK, India, Namibia and many other nations. Needless to say, there are also online students in every nation.

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Update 4/10/2013

UK Universities Minister David Willetts urged university leaders to invest in the "historic opportunity" presented by global online education.  The BBC article covering his talk also summarizes current online education efforts in the UK and places them in a global context.

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Update 4/25/2013

Coursera has launched its first international course, Science, Technology, and Society in China I: Basic Concepts, from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

According to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, 17,000 students registered for the three-week course -- around 60 percent of them from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and other rich nations, with the rest from countries like Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, and middle-income countries in Asia.  The article continues with an interesting discussion of the opportunity and barriers presented by the Chinese market for online education.  Will it be open or dominated by Chinese companies and universities?  Will Chinese universities and faculty be allowed to use Coursera and other platforms or will China erect a "walled campus?"  This course is in English -- will Coursera offer classes in Mandarin?

Other posts on MOOC globalization.

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Update 7/8/2013

The Chronicle of Higher Education profiles five international MOOC providers:

• Schoo (Japan)
  
• Open2Study (Australia)
  
• Veduca (Brazil)
  
• FutureLearn (Britain)
  
• iversity (Germany)

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Update 10/3/2013

Futurelearn, a coalition of universities in the United Kingdom, announced their first round of courses recently and now Udacity, with support from Google, has announced an effort to translate their existing courses. You can see an example here, with closed captions available in a variety of languages. Will English with sub-titles be sufficient or will students prefer native language presentation?

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Update 10/12/1013

list of MOOC providers They say it is up to date as of September 27 th.

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Update 10/16/2013

Two European MOOC providers, iversity and Futurelearn, are launching 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.

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Update 11/4/2013

Global competition is heating up. Coursera is establishing "learning hubs" around the world and has found a Chinese parnter, NetEase.

Coursera learning hubs

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Update 1/17/2014


Two thirds of all MOOC users live abroad in countries like Rwanda, Kenya, China, and Brazil according to this post by David Blake.

His post includes links to these MOOC providers:

ALISON (Ireland), Ewant (China), FutureLearn (United Kingdom), iVersity (Germany), Open2Study (Australia), Rwaq (Saudi Arabia), Schoo (Japan), UniMOOC (Spain), Veduca (Brazil), and XuetangX (China).

PCAST presentation on spectrum policy and technology -- attention Obama and Romney

As shown here, demand for mobile connectivity is exploding. It can not be satisfied using existing spectrum allocation policy and technology.

People have been experimenting with various forms of smart radio technology for many years, and a shift to sharing spectrum in new, dynamic, highly local ways seems inevitable.

That shift will cost incumbent spectrum owners, but pay large dividends for the economy as a whole.

The companies and nations that lead the innovation and establish the new policies and technical standards will reap large benefits. (As did the companies and nation that invented the Internet).

The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) will soon issue a report calling for the use of smart radios in sharing federal spectrum.

The report is not yet out, but you can see a 23 minute video presentation (followed by 21 minutes of good questions and anwers) on the forthcoming report with specific recommendations for policies and pilot studies. You can also download a copy of the presentation slides.

The presentation, by PCAST member and venture capitalist Mark Gorenberg, reviews the situation, makes policy recommendations and calls for pilot studies using spectrum that is currently allocated to federal agencies.

(I found one thing weird -- they advocate giving agencies budget increases as an incentive to participate. Those agencies are owned by the American public -- why should we pay them to do the right thing on our behalf?).

During the question and answer period, Gorenberg estimated that modern technology could increase wireless capacity by as much as 40,000 times and he stated that the US is in a world-wide race to lead in this technology.

One hopes this report will be taken seriously -- Obama and Romney should be pinned down on this issue.

Update, July 2012:

The report was issued: http://1.usa.gov/10kJk9B

Update, May 14, 2003:

Tom Wheeler, an Invited Expert on the report, was appointed Chairman of the FCC (http://bit.ly/13IS7R8).

Kimiko Ishizaka's novel, replicable business model for an open Bach score and recording

Check out pianist Kimiko Ishizaka's recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations. The recording and digital score are in the public domain, under a Creative Commons Zero license. Feel free to listen to, download and share the music and tweek the score.

Excellent -- but how does one fund such a project? It began as a Kickstarter project that started with a $15,000 goal and raised $23,748. The funds were used to create the new score and produce a studio recording.

The recordings are now in the public domain, and Ms. Ishizaka has a Web site which lists her forthcoming concerts. No doubt her concert income will increase as a result of this project. She is also publicizing the recording by offering a free double CD to anyone who will write a thoughtful and honest review of the recording and publish it on their blog, in a music forum, on a public Facebook page, etc.

The score is also online and open. You can download it, modify it, or "play" it on the site, as shown here.

Appropriately, the score was produced using the open source MuseScore notation software from Musescore.org.

I am not a musician -- not even a great lover of music -- but I find this project and the Musescore tools and community totally exciting!

Ms. Ishizaka is experimenting with new ways to make a living as a musician in the Internet era. (Her effort reminds me of Louis CK, who marketed a recording of his comedy concert direct to the consumer). One can imagine 1,000 scores and recordings. Kickstarter cannot provide funding for all of them, but universities, foundations and organizations like the National Endowment for the Arts and its world-wide counterparts surely could.

Google's storage pricing model combines the self-serving features of cell phone and ISP pricing

Here is Google's report of my storage utilization. It says I've not used any of my Picasa storage, but when I go to Picasaweb, I am told that I've used 84% of my one gigabyte. (I like the first result best, but I really have used most of my allocated gigabyte).

But, that reporting discrepancy is a minor bug. A more fundamental problem is that Google differentiates between my storing images and video (Picasa), email messages with attachments (Gmail) and arbitrary files (Google Drive).

That makes as much sense to me as differentiating between voice bits, data bits and text message bits on your cell phone bill. It's all bits.

(I am waiting for the water company to begin charging me different rates for my drinking, showering and car-washing water).

But, wait, there's more. Checking Google's storage pricing policy, we learn that pictures and videos you upload from Google Plus do not count against your Picasa limit and Google docs do not count against your Google Drive limit. Etc. (I said "etc.," because I got tired of reading the fine print).

That reminds me of Comcast not counting their own video material against download caps.

Google -- this seems a bit evil -- please unify your storage policy.

Screen sharing during on-air hangouts works, but could be better

Some friends and I do a weekly podcast called Yet Another Tech Show (YATS). We're streaming the podcasts using Google's "on-air" hangouts, and last Wednesday, we experimented with screen sharing during the podcast.

In the middle of the podcast, we talked about the simplicity of deploying servers and applications in the Amazon cloud and demonstrated a virtual server on a shared screen. The discussion went smoothly -- we could easily participate and collaborate -- but, as you see in this screen shot, the video quality was not perfect. You would not want to stream a fine print contract at this level of quality.

In the best of circumstances, real time screen sharing is difficult. A lot of data has to be moved quickly and a lot of processing is required to reconstruct and render the data as it arrives. It gets even rougher when the screens have different sizes, aspect ratios or resolutions. If I share my 1,920 by 1,200 desktop and you are viewing it in a 400 by 400 window, we have a problem.

After our podcast, I played around a bit more with screen sharing. I started an on-air hangout between two computers sharing the same Internet connection -- my laptop and my wife's iMac.

Both machines have 1,920 by 1,200 pixel displays. My laptop has a 3.06 Ghz dual core CPU, 4GB memory and is running 64-bit Windows and the iMac has a 2.8 Ghz core 2 CPU with 2GB memory and is runnng OS X. Google hangouts was the only application running on either machine.

First I shared the Mac's properties screen. It showed up quickly on the laptop, but as you see here, it was blurry. The image gradually sharpened until after around three seconds, it was easily readable, though, as you see, still imperfect. While the screen was easily legible, the rendering delay may have hindered a conversation.

Next I made Word documents with screens full of words on both machines and shared both screens. Again, rendering and "focusing" the pages took around 3 seconds on either machine. Character quality on the laptop was better than that on the Mac (shown here).

Cursor movement on a remote screen was jerky, but it was less than a second behind. The delay in selecting a single word then deleting it was well under a second whether working on the Mac or PC. The delay in deleting a paragraph was more noticable -- about a second.

The delays were caused by some combination of the speed of the computers and communication time. The CPU utilization on both machines varied significantly while screen sharing, even if there was no change on the screens. (At times it was over 90 percent on the laptop). When other applications were running, performance deteriorated noticeably.

While imperfect, hangouts on air was good enough for our demo and conversation to run smoothly. This is version 1 and Google will improve their sharing and rendering algorithms -- version 2 will be better. Communication link speed is controlled by business interests, not technology, so it will be a more persistent constraint in the US.

The video of the YATS session is shown below -- the screen sharing segment starts at just after the 30 minute mark.

Is college's stone age is about to end?

Mark C. Taylor, chairman of the department of religion at Columbia University, asks whether college's stone age is about to end in a three part article on the university in the Internet era.

The three parts are at:

• How competition is killing higher education
• Is college's stone age about to end?
• College crackup and the online future

Here are a few quotes and paraphrases:

• We produce too many unemployable PhDs.
• Is one paying for education or certification when attending college?
• Some subjects can be outsourced; for example, let one college have a strong French department and another a strong German department.
• Online education will be modular.
• There will be online winners and losers.
• Financial pressure and improved technology have reached the point where much education will soon go online.
• The networking of higher education will transform how teachers teach and what students learn.
• Disciplines will need to be reconfigured -- departments can be transformed or abolished.
• Faculty will increasingly serve as academic counselors who advise students on designing classes and integrating programs at different institutions.
• Excessive competition and overspecialization are the plagues of higher education.

Developing and deploying applications on the Internet is getting easier

There have been several major changes in the way we develop and deliver IT applications. We began with batch processing in the 1950s and progressed to time sharing, personal computers and now the Internet.  With each new platform, application development has become easier.

To develop an application in the days of batch processing, you had to be a nerd -- a professional programmer.  We used to keypunch assembly language programs then hand the card decks to operators who fed them to the computer in batches.  It typically took a couple of hours to get your results back.  Timesharing shortened the turnaround time, but professional programmers were still needed, and applications took months or years to build.

The personal computer enabled users to develop applications like newsletters, simple accounting systems, small databases and so forth using productivity software.  Today one can develop a complex application like a blog, database, wiki or social network on the Internet with little effort.

But, what if you want to run your own applications on your own server? That is also getting easier and cheaper.

In the early days, you needed a computer to run the service and a connection to the Internet.  It might have been a personal computer in your bedroom or on a shelf in a server room.

If the load grew, you could afford denser server blades in racks, but you were still responsible for maintenance and connectivity.

You could take care of the connectivity by moving your server into a data center, but it was still your server.

As personal computer power increased, we were able to borrow a page out of the mainframe book and partition a single physical server into several virtual servers.  Then Amazon and others took it one step further -- taking care of scaling and connectivity by offering virtual servers in their data centers, but it still took a nerd to configure and manage them.

Today, companies like Bitnami are raising the abstraction level and lowering the nerd bar, making it possible to deploy a server with installed applications in just a few minutes.

To demonstrate the ease of deploying applications, I created a virtual machine on the Amazon cloud and installed Web, wiki and blog servers.  You can visit the server and check the three applications here.  Go there and you will see three fully operational applications.

I am not a system administrator or network engineer, but I was able to create the virtual server in the Amazon cloud and install and deploy the three applications in about ten minutes using Bitnami. (You can see the step-by-step installation here).

Bitnami and others like it are raising the abstraction level. Soon we may be able to describe a virtual machine – its speed, memory and storage – and deploy it and its applications using a form like the one shown here.

In addition to specifying the server and its applications, this hypothetical form allows one to select cloud vendors.  Today, Bitnami is tied to Amazon’s cloud, but one can easily imagine them offering a choice of cloud vendors.

If we were to dynamically allocate the resources needed to run an application -- changing them automatically when some performance thresholds was crossed -- one could just pick a vendor, select the applications to deploy and click submit.

When that happens, your grandmother can be her own system administrator.

The online education market is global

There has been a lot of talk about and investment in open online classes from elite US universities like MIT, Harvard and Stanford, but let's not lose sight of the fact that online education is a global market -- on both the supply and demand sides.

Excellent universities in other nations than the US are offering classes, certificates and degrees online. There are Big Names like the Inidan Institutes of Technology, Cambridge, and Oxford and not-so-big names like the University of Namibia. Universities big and small in every language group are thinking about distance education today -- we can look forward to a lot of competition and choice.

The student population is also global. Stanford's AI course had students from 190 countries.  The class was also free, and the most exciting promise of open online education is that it can reach the disenfranchised.

One is reminded of the story of the young mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan rising to fame after writing Professor G.H. Hardy at Cambridge from his village in Southern India. (His first two letters to Hardy are said to have been returned unopened). Tomorrow's Ramanujan will have a much easier time getting the attention of his tutors. How many Ramanujans will we find enrolled online and what will be their contribution to humanity?

I can't leave this post without pointing out the irony that Springer publishes a math journal named after Ramanujan. The print version of Ramanujan is $719 per year plus $67.50 shipping and handling and the electronic version is $590. Ramanujan could not have afforded it -- but the disruption of academic publishing is a different post.

Google goes beyond text search with their Knowledge Graph

Soon after he created the World Wide Web, Tim Berners Lee turned his attention to the semantic Web -- a Web of data rather than documents. Google is now rolling out their first step in that direction, the Knowledge Graph.

Google's 2010 purchase of Freebase and Metaweb, the system used to create it, was a key step toward Knowledge Graph. Freebase is a semantic database, which knows the attributes of entities and the relationships between them. For example, Freebase knows that Larry Press is a person and the value of his city of birth attribute is Pasadena, California (not Pasadena Texas).

Google started with the Freebase concept and added data to create the Knowledge Graph database, which now contains 500 million entities with 3.5 billion attributes and connections.

Let's look at an example. I started with a vanity search for myself, and the following profile was displayed on the right hand side of the screen:

Note that it did not know the value of any of my attributes, it just returned a link to my Google Plus profile and the first few sentences of my most recent posts. I guess I am not one of the 500 million entities included in Google's Knowledge Graph.

Next I searched for George Washington, who is a bit better known than me, and is included among Google's 500 million entities.

In this case, it knows his nicknames, date of birth, etc. Since he is not just a person, but a president, he also has a vice president attribute.  It also knows that he died at Mount Vernon, which is another entity that is included in Google's Knowledge Graph:

While the Knowledge Graph was developed using the Freebase tools, Google did not import the user-contributed Freebase data. (I am in Freebase, but not in the Knowledge Graph). That says Google is abandoning the Wikipedia-like openess of Freebase, in which users could add entities and change the values of their attributes, for a database that is currated in house. That will limit its growth and its "Internetness."

This is an interesting announcement, but Google is not the only player in the Web of data game.

Apple has attracted a lot of attention with Siri, a speech-driven application that answers questions by querying Wolframalpha, another semantic database system. Knowledge Graph gives Google an answer to Siri and Wolframalpha. (Wolframalpha goes further, incorporating a powerful symbolic math engine).

Microsoft is also working on the semanticly rich Web of data. They characterize Bing as an "answer engine" rather than a "search engine," and Microsoft Research has a Semantic Computing Intitative. Microsoft will no doubt incorporate their work into Bing.

The Web is getting smarter -- we may move from today's Web of documents to a Web of data and eventually a Web of knowledge (an ill-defined wannabe buzz word I've heard).  It makes you wonder what it will be like in fifty years.

John Boyer's massive face-to-face class at Virginia Tech

There has been a lot of talk about massive, open, online classes (MOOCs) like those taught at Stanford earlier this year.  But what about massive face-face classes?

Last year I saw John Boyer give a presentation on his 2,670 student, face-to-face World Regions geography class at Virginia Tech.

Boyer teaching his class

The class typically had 50-70 students when Boyer began teaching it in 1998. As the word got out, enrollment grew and the class moved from a classroom to a lecture hall to a large auditorium.

The weekly class meets for four hours, with a one hour dinner break. He has students interact with each other during the class, and also conducts Skype interviews on stage. His most famous interview was with Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi.

He and his class invited her to do the interview in a short (1:36) video clip. Check it out and you will see his trademark plaid jacket and get a feel for his style. You will also see nearly 3,000 cheering students.

Aung San Suu Kyi interview

She accepted their invitation and you can see the interview (33:37) in which students ask questions below. Be sure to watch the last couple of minutes.

As you see, Boyer is a flamboyant teacher who takes plenty of risks and they seem to pay off.

He holds his office hours online and the class uses the hashtag #wrvt. For his office hours, textbook, weekly news and more, go to his Web site.

Boyer concluded the presentation I attended with a few of the things he has learned teaching this large class:

• A class this large needs less structure, not more. For example, he provides a menu of activities and allows students to select what they will do to accumulate points toward a grade.
• A class this large cannot work unless students communicate with and help other students.
• The teacher knows a lot about the topic, but the students collectively know a lot he does not know. (Michal Wesch, who teaches anthropology says the same thing).

Office hours

I did not get around to writing this post when I saw Boyer last year, but was reminded of him by an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education today. Check it out and see his student's comments here.

Finally, I saw Boyer's presentation at the Campus Technology Forum.  I've been to three of them, and they were all excellent learning experiences.

Requiem for the textbook

At first, new media mimic old media. Early movies were made by filming stage plays with a stationary camera. We still see a few movies based on stage plays, but they are uncommon today.
Early television shows often had performers acting in play-like sets or standing on a stage reminiscent of vaudeville.
Books followed a similar pattern. Johannes Gutenberg’s 1455 bible was the first book printed using movable metal type. The Gutenberg Bible resembled the hand written manuscripts on which it was based. It did not have punctuation or paragraphs, the pages were around 12 by 17.5 inches and its illustrations were added for beauty and feeling, not clarification. It was like the hand copied books that preceded it -- a religious book suitable for contemplative reading in a library. Gutenberg’s breakthrough was in production, not format or content.
Fifty years after Gutenberg, Aldus improved production by printing eight pages on a single sheet. This led to smaller, portable books that could be carried or placed in a saddle bag. Aldus also introduced punctuation like the commas, periods and semicolons shown here, and italic type, which fit more letters on a page. But, like Gutenberg, Aldus would be surprised by the variety of punctuation and typography in today’s textbooks as well as innovations like chapters, callouts, indices, tables, diagrams, tables of contents and images with captions.
Textbooks today are at the “Gutenberg bible” stage. Textbook publishers have digitized their books, making them available online in various formats. Many maintain the notion of a book-sized page and often preserve the page numbering of the print version. These e-books look better than PDF documents, but they are constrained by the previous format. Like Aldus, they have gone somewhat beyond their predecessor, but remain tied to the notion that the course is contained in a book of pages.
Many universities are offering online classes, but these also emulate the past. They typically offer the "same" course online as they teach in the classroom. They may record lectures, use digital textbooks, and substitute threaded discussion for in-class discussion and administer assignments and tests using a course management system, but the course and teaching material are not radically changed.
There is a lot of institutional inertia. Textbook publishers want to stay with their old, profitable business models. Faculty are used to adopting a single textbook with ancillary material like PowerPoint slides and test banks. Adopting the same textbook year after year is expedient. They have investments in familiarity with a given textbook, prepared lectures, course outlines, and so forth.  School administrators are also slow to change. For example, little or no consideration is given to time spent developing new teaching materials during faculty evaluation.
We don't know the future of teaching and teaching material, but it won't center on digital textbooks, learning management systems and recorded lectures. We will have things like modular teaching material, peer teaching, open source and subscription models rather than book purchases, very large classes and things yet to be dreamed up. Teaching material will be fine grained and narrowly focused on a specific concept or skill and will be used by faculty, students and self-learners.
Change will come faster than in Gutenberg's time or the era of movies and television. The cost of experimentation is greatly reduced in the Internet era, and as we see here, there is an attractive economic incentive. The textbook industry is an oligopoly and textbook prices have risen faster than inflation for many years.
Faculty members at every university are creating and experimenting with new teaching materials. There are many non-profit and publicly-funded experiments in creating and curating teaching and leaning material. And, as we see here, the private sector has noticed the opportunity provided by the price gap shown above.
The Internet has disrupted many industries and organizations. Will the university be next? For example, what would happen if massive classes with hundreds of thousands of students turn out to be good alternatives for, say, half of the undergraduate curriculum? Which will look better on your resume – a certificate of completion from Stanford or MIT or a bachelors degree from California State University, Dominguez Hills?  Will schools that focus on teaching survive?  Will universities be able to fund research?  Will a better educated work force improve the overall economy?
For more information, see this teaching module.

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Update 7/3/2013

The first shoe drops as Cengage files for Chapter 11 protection That is what happens when you mix the greed of a private equity fund with falling market demand for print textbooks.

Some faculty will have to revise their courses (shudder) if they drop unprofitable print textbooks.

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Update 8/18/2013

Google has joined Amazon in selling electronic text books.

For more on the decline of the textbook, click here.

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Update 8/30/2014

The Economist reports that US textbook prices have risen much faster than general consumer prices. (ITextbook prices increased over fifteenfold since 1970, three times the rate of inflation).

Prices increase because the students who purchase the books are not the customers of the textbook publishers -- textbooks are sold to professors who adopt them for their classes. Professors are very busy (and some are lazy) so they like textbook packages which include PowerPoint slides, ancillary material, test banks, etc. It's also easiest for them to teach using a new edition of last year's textbook.

Textbooks are still with us, but these price increases cannot be sustained.

The Public Interest Research Group reports that 65% of college students have opted not to purchase the textbook for a class and 94% of them think it has hurt them academically. (That makes me wonder about the 6% who feel fine without the textbook).

Students have alternatives to the purchase of print textbooks -- e-textbooks, open educational resources, library reserve copies, textbook rentals and, most important, a variety of online courses and materials.

The print textbook market is beginning to crack.