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Consumption and Brand

Posted August 12th, 2010 by Bill

I read three posts over the course of today; had I encountered them individually, I probably would have passed over all of them. However, collectively, they do a decent job illustrating some of the themes and threads running through what passes for discourse about improving education.

The first post comes from Joshua Kim at Inside Higher Ed, who describes his growing disillusionment with Delicious.

From the post:

Nowadays I consume most content on my iPad or Touch, using apps such as the one from the NYTimes. The app may restrict where I go, meaning less variety but a higher quality consumption experience. I imagine that over time more of the magazines and journals I read will morph into apps, providing high quality multimedia reading and viewing experiences on portable devices. Reading the NYTimes on my Touch or iPad is better than through a browser because I'm in "lean back" consuming mode. If I'm on my browser it means that I'm on my computer, with all the attention pulls from e-mail and writing projects.

From a technical place, this is woefully inaccurate. With webkit-based browsers now available on most mobile platforms, designing web sites for the mobile web (which works cross platform) is a far more efficient way of reaching audiences regardless of how they access the web than building a separate app for each different device.

From the perspective of actually learning anything, reading the NY Times would have netted some great reporting by Judith Miller about the Iraq War; some beautiful stories by Jayson Blair, and the transformation of waterboarding into an enhanced interrogation technique.

Thank goodness we can just lean back and be in "consuming" mode, tucked away from those distracting tools on a computer that could allow us to search and question ideas which we encounter.

The point here is not to single out the Times for some of its more memorable assaults against reality; rather, we should never forget that a single perspective or source provides a limited view of what is actually occurring. Additionally, consumption without reflection leads to ignorance.

Next, over at FastCompany, Anya Kamenetz describes how TED is "creating a new Harvard -- the first new top-prestige education brand in more than 100 years."

There are a few problems with this formulation, but let's start with the basics. Some schools are also brands. Education is an experience that happens; for most of us, some form of education happens when we are affiliated with a brand. This reality, however, doesn't require that we have a brand driving education. This is a dated understanding of both education and brand; the fact that they have been hand in glove for a while doesn't mean that they actually need to continue in this way. The notion of an educational experience - or really, any experience - requiring a brand to give it identity is the kind of prattle that marketers tell themselves as they fall asleep at night. It makes for a good dream, and some people even believe it when they are awake, but it's not actually real.

But moving on to the new Harvard: Chris Anderson speaks of "radical openness" in connection with TED. But you can't claim to espouse "radical openness" when your signature event (and even your spinoff events) foster exclusivity and are beyond the reach of most people - or when you can't really take things that fall outside your opinion of what is worthy of being discussed in a radically open way.

In the FastCompany piece, Kamenetz notes that Anderson "has started licensing the TED name and video content to anyone who wants them -- for free."

This loose usage of the term "free" - combined with the equally loose usage of the word "open" - is not borne out by the restrictions placed on how people conduct any TED-branded events. For example, the conditions for running a TED branded event set up some requirements around what is actually programmed at the event. Moreover, you are required to video the entire presentation, but you are not allowed to replay that videotape after the event; that right remains with TED, who publishes (all? some?) the talks on the TED web site. So, while the license is granted at no cost, the conditions are time consuming, the event is essentially free advertising for TED, and TED retains rights to all the content. It resembles intellectual Amway.

Moreover, the TED experience for many people is limited to watching videos - or, as discussed above, going into "consuming" mode and digesting the thoughts and opinions of others. Watching videos - even great videos - is a feeble substitute for anything that resembles education. It can be a great starting point, as some videos provide a good foundation. But sometimes TED speakers are misinformed, or underinformed, or just plain wrong, and in the absence of a community of learners, you won't hear an opposing perspective. So if given a choice between TED, my dinner table, Harvard, a local community college, and/or the local pub, TED would probably fall somewhere in the middle, depending on the day.

For a change of pace, I would love to see writing about education in non-technical venues that discussed educational improvement through the lens of improving how people can demonstrate their skills, rather than streamlining how people can be fed content.

The final post is from Mashable, where we are treated to a piece about Why Online Education Needs to Get Social. The piece, of course, never really gets into any of the social aspects of learning. Instead, it talks about the internet as a "real time medium."

The web, as a real-time medium, is begging us to build innovative courses that can be used for the rapid delivery of education designed in a way that integrates current news, information, insights and research about topics like the oil spill and thousands of other current issues.

Just to emphasize, whenever anyone talks about "delivering" education, the implication is that learning is a passive activity that can be brought to people - in other words, getting us back into "consuming" mode.

This is a common conceit among many of the edupreneurial class; I understand their desire to have an educational system built around content delivery, as that aligns nicely with their business models, but unfortunately it's not that easy. The internet makes both content and delivery cheap, and brand, while a potent motivator, is not sufficient to deliver a lasting educational experience.

But, the real payoff on the Mashable piece comes in the comments. Over half of the comments at Mashable are spammers (or are they edupreneurs?) hawking their new "learning systems" - or maybe they are just extending the reach of their brand.

The Myth of the Edupreneur

Posted June 20th, 2010 by Bill

In many of the conversations around changing the current educational system, the rhetoric and approaches borrow heavily from the corporate world. In many cases, processes and strategies that have been used with inconclusive outcomes in corporate America are touted as solutions that will fix the problems that plague education: a short list includes merit pay (which worked really well among hedge fund managers), performance management, corporate-style layoffs as a means to eliminate "underperformers," and streamlining the means to outsource school management to for-profit companies.

Instability creates opportunity, and the current state of public education is nothing if not unstable. As a result, businesses are getting increasingly interested. Where business goes, marketing is not far behind, which invariably nets us a new buzzword: the edupreneur. The narrative around the edupreneur combines the mythology of the entrepeneur as a financial cowboy, an individual with the grit to take chances, bend the rules, and buck authority; with the equally potent mythology of the socially conscious company - a business venture with the ethics to, occasionally, put principles above profits.

I came across an example of this type of edupreneurial venture recently in the form of an interview with the founders of Notehall, a company that serves as a marketplace for students that want to sell their class notes. It's remarkable only because it is such a common example of what passes for an idea in the space where people actually believe the world of education is bereft of any creative or generative thought.

The blog post that contains the interview starts with a video of the company founders on a show called Sharktank (as an aside, I had no idea this show existed, and I'm a little upset to have had my bubble burst). The video is included here for your viewing pleasure:

The actual interview that follows is the standard breathless prattle that most of these things are; basically, PR talking points masquerading as actual conversation. But one line really stands out:

Question: What do you think education entrepreneurs need at this moment in the industry to be successful? Marketing? A good idea? A network?

Response: Mentorship/Network. A good team with an average idea will eventually discover a successful business if the right hands are helping guide them and see opportunities.

In a world where solutions are valued primarily for their ability to enrich a select few, and secondarily for their ability to benefit an undefined many, this philosophy defines what people consider innovative. In other words, a "good" innovation allows a company to find an unexploited niche and profit from it - the quality of the innovation is defined by the size of the profit.

To be absolutely clear, there is nothing wrong from profiting from your work. And, if you have an idea, a dream, a vision, or a talent that you want to expand into a company, by all means, follow the dream. But bring your A game. Don't delude yourself that the educational world needs another mediocre idea with glossy marketing copy. If people want that, they can trawl the vendor floor at ISTE. But classrooms deserve better.

However, when a company gets too invested in a single solution - or worse yet, a single technological intervention - to a complex problem, much money can be wasted.

This problem can be compounded in companies heavily funded by venture capital money. An interview in FastCompany between Anya Kamenetz and Phoenix Wang alludes to the financial pressures at play; this quotation is from the second page:

There are $600 billion in public dollar investments in education around schools. But there's a disconnect between the school districts who make the purchases and the students who are supposed to use it. So oftentimes what gets pushed down to students is not really aligned with their interests.

At the same time, private and institutional investors are really interested in emerging products, but they're constrained by institutional purchasing. VCs need big exits, so they end up taking less risk.

You generally will not find much argument about the need for learning being a lifelong need. None of us ever reach a point where we can afford to stop learning, growing, or expanding.

However, the needs of people interested in profiting off the process of our learning are completely dissimilar: they want the biggest return possible, over the shortest time period. This cultural disconnect helps explain why the ideas of the business world clash with the ethos of the education world.

And, as the international financial markets still attempt to recover from the greed and excesses of the banking industry, maybe we have it backwards: perhaps education should step in and help protect these poor business folks from their own lack of understanding about the world in which we live.

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