e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Facebook

  • Please Welcome Guest Blogger Michael Staton

    Michael is the CEO of a company called Inigral, the company that produces the Facebook Courses application. You may have seen his earlier guest post for the On the Horizon. I have been talking a fair bit with Michael lately because my team at Oracle has been working with his company on integration through the IMS Learning Information Services specification. (Again, more on this real soon when we release our product.) We’re entering a new era with Web 2.0 where the university (with the students’ permission) may want to share data with outside applications for specific educational purposes. These new software configurations lead to new kinds of business partnerships, where the university’s relationship with the vendor is quite different than the traditional model. This is all in addition to the basic question of how these Web 2.0 capabilities should fit with and influence the unversity’s approaches to teaching and learning with technology.

    Michael is grappling with all of these issues right now, so I’ve invited him to come and think out loud with us here about them here on e-Literate.

  • Perspectives from a Geek with a Startup

    This is a guest post by Michael Staton for the On the Horizon series on distributed learning environments. Michael studied poverty alleviation for his BA and MA at Clark University, where he developed a lifelong commitment to education and entrepreneurship. He then spent 3 years as a high school educator and was thrust into internet start ups in the education space. Seeing Facebook Platform as a disruptive opportunity, he co-founded Inigral, Inc as a consumer internet company set out accelerate real world relationships in an academic context using the product “Courses on Facebook.” Courses quickly gained traction in the Fall of 2007 and Founders’ Fund, an investor in Facebook, made a Series A investment. Inigral is also about to release a product to help K-12 educators cope with the pressures of the accountability movement. Michael is also the author of the Edumorphology and College Readiness for the 21st Century weblogs.

    I spend most of my time in the midst of internet entrepreneurs. I work in an office with four other internet companies, go to beta launches in San Francisco, and attend panel discussions in Silicon Valley. Something that is conspicuously evident is that I’m one of the few entrepreneurs trying to solve problems in education. Another thing that’s evident, as ironic as it sounds, is that many internet entrepreneurs have given the problems in education considerable thought, many have even tried to contribute to or build a product to address needs in education at some point.

    Start-ups in education are rare, but it’s not for lack of desire to work in the space. Venture Capital appreciates the education market size: it’s huge. Everyone gets an education, and mind-numbing amounts of money are spent to that end. Entrepreneurs tend to be young risk takers, and their first-hand knowledge of problems in the education sector is ripe. However, very few go-getters can convince an Angel Investor or VC that their product for the education market is worth an investment. To boot, older entrepreneurs advise young ones to stay away from the space. Why the reluctance? The market barriers.

    In my paper, I comprehensively address barriers to market entry into the education market and propose some easy solutions. I focus on a set of interdependent forces particularly destructive to outside innovation; there is a causal relationship between public rhetoric and legal protections based on misunderstandings of internet use and political decision making, creating a risk-averse, zero sum purchasing process that requires an abnormally large and unhealthy investment in sales and support efforts.

    (more…)

  • The Creepy Treehouse

    There’s an article in NC State’s campus newspaper about Blackboard’s Facebook integration. I’m always interested to hear what actual students think about all the Web 2.0 for education stuff we tend to hyperventilate about. There isn’t a lot of new information in the piece, but I did love this classic piece of snarkiness:

    Blackboard won’t be the last education company attempting to break into Facebook’s user pool. It’s a phenomenon that [Associate Provost Lou] Harrison called the ‘creepy tree house effect,’ defined by technological education experts as an online environment created by instructors or institutions that mimics an established and trusted environment.

    The term arises from the concept that children can identify a ‘creepy tree house’ that adults built and will avoid it. Perhaps it explains why, when this issue went to press, Blackboard Sync had only 161 daily active users.

  • Teaching with Facebook

    Update: The link is fixed now.

    Michael Staton has posted a good presentation on tips and tricks for teaching with Facebook. There’s nothing earth-shattering here, but for a guy like me who is still finding his way around the platform, there were some tips that I found to be very helpful.

  • Facebook as a Tool for Global Activism

    I don’t really have much to say on this subject, but I’m really interested in the articles that are starting to emerge about how Facebook and similar social networking sites are being used for political activism in places like the Middle East and Columbia. When you couple these with phenomena in our more immediate experience, such as candidates raising $7 million from small donors in a couple of days over the internet or educators rallying to assemble a list of prior art against an edupatent, I think there are real signs that the activism is beginning to enter a new era with new rules.

  • Two More Blogs to Read

    Michael Staton, one of the principals behind the Facebook Courses app, has a couple of blogs that are worth reading. The first, Edumorphology, is probably the most immediately relevant for e-Literate readers. But the second one, College Readiness for the 21st Century, is also worth reading. (Among other things, Michael has been a high school teacher.)

  • Is Obama's Victory Partially Driven by Facebook?

    Here’s an interesting tidbit from BlueMassGroup:

    David reported about a year ago, and again in February, that Obama’s FaceBook organizing efforts dwarfed those of his competitors. I think we can all agree that most FaceBook users are under 44. By May, the largest Obama group on Facebook had 323,899 members, compared with 2,089 for the largest Clinton group (and 58,982 for the largest anti-Clinton group). The Obama group has now grown to 411,631 members. Indeed, the Obama campaign even has its own application on FaceBook that keeps supporters constantly updated with news and events related to the candidate. Several thousand people have installed it in their accounts.

    Is this the first Facebook election (just as, perhaps, 2004 was the first MeetUp election — that functionality now subsumed into most campaign websites)? Perhaps Saturday’s Facebook/ABC News debate will tell us more.

    I don’t want to take anything away from Obama, but given the unprecedented turnout of young voters–turnout that U.S. Democrats have tried to achieve election after election with significantly less success–it’s worth looking around to see what factors in addition to the candidate himself might be driving the change. I’d be really interested to hear first-hand accounts by young Iowa caucus-goers about what role Facebook and similar social networking sites may have played in helping them to become more politically invested.