Wednesday 24 October 2012

Tuesday 23 October 2012

Coffee at the school

Thats the result of limitless freedom in combination with almost for free high-tech gadgets.  a forumal for saturated boredom in an the age of superabundance.


Thursday 11 October 2012

Humor at SBE

I found it in a meetinghall and found it worth sharing.


SBE Rolls Out New Newsletter System in November

With ekiosk gone a new system was introduced six months ago to replace the SBE weekly newsletter editions. The draw backs of ekiosk where its disability to automatically subscribe and unsubscribe users. The content form was not properly functioning and inflexible due to the setup of the system. Ekiosk also did not allow for simple analytic and looked awful in GMAIL, Yahoo and GMX mail clients. The price was fair but the overall product just could not stood the test of time.

The new newsletter system is for free. It offers advanced analytic and ability to integrate social media gadgets. It displays the newsletters even on mobile devices with excellent results and offers an intuitive user interface. The costs are modeled wither on a subscriber or time base and are as flexible as it can get.

Everything starts with a pilot here in the feudal dungeon. The results of it are summarized in the report. From next month onwards the system is operational. 

Tuesday 9 October 2012

Lessons learnd from FT

Although the humor past technological romance it triggers giggles in some faculty members even today. The Financial Times cartoonist seems to be either an extraterrestrial observer of patterns or an embedded battle field trooper. But either way he is not wrong in assuming that effects precede causes by humor.  

Sunday 7 October 2012

Appendix: The legal question for the ItunesU project

To propose an easy solution to the question the leading in learning proposal triggered I share this little document in the hope of some feedback. Best to be read with this as background music.
Here download the appendix.






Tuesday 2 October 2012

The know-how of know-what in iTunesU and beyond


It took less than one week for people to realize the fraud. A secretary's naive comment in a monthly meeting caused the bureaucratic machinery of Iron Mountain to recover from its state of permanent tranquility. Nothing less than a rip-off of personal integrity and identity unleashes debates and discussions misinformed by fear and ignorance. How dare somebody proposes the Obvious!

Complexity is often used to hide reality. The balancing act between teaching and researching leaves ample room for break-through as much as break-downs. The UM was rewarded with being the best specialist university in times when most employers look for all-rounders. Young knowledge-worker who are flexible and ambiguous, ready to accept that the only constant factor in employment is employ-ability (in form of temporary contracts by business and in form of abandoning full employment by the government) are held accountable for their "Performance" in acquiring specialized skills outdated at the time they are "ready" to face the market. In this do-it-yourself mufti-billion service environments the idea of the "cottage economy" is resurrected as romantic ideal in Entrepreneurship courses. Did Google not start in a garage? Did not We invent youtube in your study? And while Océ's R&D department produced one break-down after another until Canon felt pity and bought up the misfortunate boy everything else is effectively blocked or confined into "Trials" and "Pilot projects". As if online peer to peer learning, interactive eBooks, online lectures, tablets, mobile high speed internet etc. are in the same stage of development in which the airplane was when the Wright Brothers where around. Only two years ago a faculty presented proudly the "sad" results of its blogging pilot. Five students could use web blogs to share their research results in a closed environment. The hopes and aspirations of its members got tamed by the fact that nobody used it. Well, but we do our best !


There is little to nothing that cannot be avoided if one is prepared to pay attention to what’s happening. On fear expressed by those who think that it is easy to tell the difference between Master A and Master B is that students will not show up on their lectures when available online. Indeed evidences have been found that this is the case for lectures that take place 8:30 Monday morning. But the same methodology in a different setting found no statistically significant in- or decrease in attendance. It is important to note that this fear goes very deep to the point of the rip-off. When people have the feeling they are obsolete an institute has to take action. There was certainly a time when a monopoly of knowledge could be justified by structural indifference to environmental changes. And even more so by using a rear-view mirror approach to mask the attacks concerted by the electronic environment on peoples integrity and identity. But I doubt that such approaches will be successful. And there is enough evidence that a semi-automated system does the trick. Ask the industrial slaughter house floor manager if the click of a pin takes away the fear of instantaneous dead more efficient than the sleight of hand of the butcher? The result is the same. Everyone with a distaste for being produced in this way should look at the process first. It is there the solution to this problem is found!

Another related question asked by those who are afraid that some evil minded person will "remix" recorded lectures is of equal importance. Intellectual property rights! Aha...Uhu....Style-guide! If Susana cooks a soup she owns it. Really? Wow. Can it be so simple? Yes it can but if Susana is hired by Tom who is the owner of the restaurant which sells soup to homeless people in return for government subsidies the situation gets very complicated. No, really? Very complicated. But ... but what about the recipes? She does not own the recipes? I am not claiming to be an expert on this but since the debate about the property rights is a contagious issue which takes many highly paid people hours to tackle I propose the following: Susana gets her paycheck in return for her “cooking” performance (rights). Tom takes a good share of the government subsidies to buy ingredients like potatoes, salt and pepper and chairs for the homeless. The rest is for Tom. His unemployed wife and kids who study at Maastricht University something he does not really understand are happily living ever since. Susana is happy because she has a job. Homeless are happy because they get good soup and as long as the definition of government includes the word "citizen" and  "taxes" the scheme is watertight. At this point somebody asked about the recipes of which a simple answer is provided by pointing out that recipes like instructions or manuals are not protected under intellectual property rights scheme. Otherwise we would have to pay loyalty fees for cooking potato soup all the time! Even the best of all chefs - Jamie Oliver does not own the receipts in the way some faculty members “own” their performance.

So what i propose is to use a simple licensing scheme known as "Creative Commons". It is a licenses scheme that can be applied to any work and provides a standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their work. Like Susana gives up her performance rights in exchange for her salary so everybody at the university gives up his/her performance rights in exchange for a salary. For support staff this is nothing new! It is part of the contract every employee signs! But for faculty members it means giving up something they already lost in return to reach out to 900 million people. Because that is the promise of  recording lectures and sharing them with the world. They are given the means to be in the pockets, screens and houses of millions of knowledge hungry kids for free! The license regulates that commercial use of the recording is prohibited which effectively mean that only the university (Tom) is profiting if at all. It also regulates if people can share the recordings and on what terms. The license I propose allows everybody to share the lecture recordings under the condition of acknowledging performer (Susana) and owner (Tom) as well as leaving the recording unchanged as a whole. The "remix" dream of some becomes a nightmare for non. It is as naive to propose laws that cannot be implement as it is to implement features nobody uses.

Sometimes people seem to confuse performance rights with "educational purpose". When those people talk with me they believe that I can trademark a term or copyright a receipt. But this is nonsense. By "educational purposes" it is meant that the lecture is free of charge. It is in stark opposition to "commercial purpose" since most lectures do not fit the category "Entertainment" by whatever fuzzy standards one wishes to apply this term to the situation. If the PVV uses a recording at their hundred anniversary party it could be seen as propaganda but only under very narrow circumstances. And also here it can be argued that education is not what the recording brings to the audience but the mistake they brings to the anniversary.  

What about the motives for putting lectures online? One can cite the "performance agreement" signed by Gerald Mols and the Dutch Ministry of Education. It grants conditional access to funds depending on UM's performance in lowering the drop-out rate among first year students and the rate of long-time students among others. Similar performance agreements have been installed throughout the state-funded formal higher education establishment in Europe. And while in the Netherlands the installment faces minimal resistance and mere compliance to trends pushed to extremes f.e. in Greece where government subsidies are reduced by more than 50% and university funds evaporated as part of the ongoing recession, any attempt to use new technologies and proven concepts to valorize existing educational content needs to be justified.

Improving student-learning as measured by questionnaires and test results fit the liberal concept of education exemplified by a John Dewey. ROA even conducts surveys on how young, flexible knowledge workers are perceived by the labor market and measure their performance versus income level happily announcing "great results". Value-For-Money studies are on vogue where efficiency masters all obstacles to success. Whatever measurement stick one applies to an educational ideal it is put to the test of its means. And it cannot be denied to those adhering to a Dewey ideal that online video adds ads. There were people in the 70s who hailed TV as "a supreme tool for learning" which will make "universities obsolete in a decade" who wrote books. So there is nothing inconceivable in the idea that online video adds to Problem Based Learning what TV added to the old lecture based educational paradigm. But the money spend in the vague attempts does not justify the studies that are conducted to prove or disprove tiny shifts in the macroscopic level in the lives of cosmic youths. The learning environment outside the classroom was never more potent than now.