Technology Teacher

If you want a heaping dose of inspiration for the day, view Steve Job's keynote address at yesterday's introduction of the new Apple iPad. This revolutionary computer will connect to the Internet through the 3G (cell phone) network and also through WiFI, greatly expanding the availability of Internet access. It is a well-planned and functional tablet computer, with Apple's marvelous touch-screen technology and new applications built to work with it. Apple didn't design a device to work with existing applications, but instead built the device first and then designed new applications to work on it.

The Apple engineers seem to think of everything, as usual, which gave me a revelation . . . Apple's success is closely tied to its willingness or rather its insistence on creating products that people want and then designing applications to work with the product--not building a product that will work with existing applications. When you think about it, much of our current economic woes and difficulties in business are enmeshed in our unwillingness to change and admit that some of our current applications or ways of running businesses just don't work anymore.

Why am I writing about this? Because I think it is time for Idaho adopt Apple's model for success and design programs its citizens want--online degree programs they can take from an online university in Idaho. If people from Idaho were given the choice (and the price was right!) they would probably choose an Idaho online university rather than an online university from another state.

How important is online education? Well, read this latest report from the Sloan Consortium, the College Board, and the Babson Survey Research Group, "Learning on Demand: Online Education in the United States, 2009." In this report you will find out that more than 4.6 million college and university students took at least one course online in 2008, more than a quarter of all post-secondary students in the U.S. This number represents a 17% growth increase over the previous year and outpaces higher education's overall growth rate of 1.2% in the same period. Two-thirds of the institutions interviewed for this report said that they have experienced increased demand for new programs. NEW PROGRAMS!

"Online education continues to establish itself as demand remains strong and new applications materialize, such as contingency planning for campus emergencies," said Frank Mayadas, special advisor for the  Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which funded the study. "We believe demand will fuel sustained growth especially within public universities and community colleges, raising the need to share research, optimal methods for faculty training, and other best practices to new levels of importance."

Sustained growth? Who wouldn't want that in Idaho? How do we get there? Here is my plan:

Create an Idaho Virtual University, created and shared by all Idaho institutions of higher learning. Faculty members can share their expertise and teach at this centralized online university, which can offer needed and innovative degree programs, certificates, and other courses throughout the state and beyond. The revenues from this Idaho Virtual University (I even have a cute title for it: IVU, pronounced "I-View," which could symbolize a student's ability to view a bright future and more) could be shared among the state institutions of higher learning, adding to their revenues, while also adding to state revenues in both direct and indirect ways--additional taxes generated, more jobs created in building the infrastructure of the IVU and administration, and more jobs created through a more highly skilled workforce.

But here's the best part: It would simplify the offering and sharing of courses among universities. No fee sharing, no sharing of student records, no complicated procedures for students to follow, (remember, each institution may have different start/stop dates, different due dates for grades), no additional administrative procedures. It would be simple, geared toward student needs, and move Idaho into the competitive yet promising field of online learning. The State Board of Education could sanction this new online university and it could start immediately, designating degree programs, designing and offering courses, and get Idaho moving forward in online education.

Can universities follow Apple's business model for innovation, vision, and meeting the customer's needs? Sure we can, and Idaho Virtual University could be a great start.
 

Image by jlori via Flickr

I must admit that the excitement of first getting a Google Wave account quickly evaporated when I couldn't figure out what it could do for me. Is Google Wave hype or hip? I'll tell you more about Google Wave first and then give you my answer.

First of all, if you've never used Google Wave, you will need to apply for an invitation. You can sign up for it here: https://services.google.com/fb/forms/wavesignup And if you don't know what Google Wave is, start with this really creative video:

I'm guessing that you will get an invitation pretty quickly, since Google Wave has been out for some time now. However, if you know someone who has invitations to hand out, that seems to be a quicker way to obtain a Google Wave account.

How does Google Wave compare to email?
First of all, it's live and alive. You communicate in real time and don't have to wait for email to arrive. If you are discussing an important issue and want to keep track of your communication by adding new people to the wave as needed, it's a snap with Google Wave.

New waves are in bold and move to the top of your inbox (like email).

If one of your contacts is online, a small green dot will show up on the bottom right hand corner on his/her icon.

If you install Google Gears (a Firefox extension), you can easily add all sorts of rich multimedia content to your wave, such as YouTube videos, images, Google maps, or anything else that a gadget enables. And all of your waves can be saved, organized into folders, and can be formatted for printing and presentation in many different ways.

Unlike email, you can reply to an entire wave or reply to just parts of a wave inline. You can annotate the wave and also decide if you want the comments to be private or public.

If you've entered a wave later in the game, you can view how the wave began and progressed by clicking the play button at the top of the wave. You can tag a wave, easily drag files from your desktop, conduct searches, create folders, and use many of the wave extensions (gadgets and robots) to make your wave more useful.

One of the things that is really missing from Google Wave is the ability to then download a wave into Google docs or save a wave as a document. The collaboration and creation involved in a wave needs to be able to be easily transferred to another format.

Google Wave gadget and robots (bots)
You can find a great list of featured extensions for Google Wave at this site:
http://wave.google.com/help/wave/extensions.html

I'm particularly excited about the Ribbit conference gadget. Once you add it to a wave and add participants, everyone adds their phone number. You can conduct a phone conference this way, talking on the phone while you collaborate on a wave.

Robots are different from gadgets. These are actually email addresses that you add to your contact list. Here's a list of available Google Wave bots: http://www.chaaps.com/list-of-google-wave-robots-add-bots-as-a-contact-in-wave.html

Bots add specific services to your Google Wave and can do all sorts of things. For instance, the Bloggy bot (blog-wave@appspot.com) can publish your wave to a Blogger blog. Want to create instant polls on your wave? Use Polly the Pollster bog (polly-wave@appspot.com) to create an instant poll for all of your wave participants.

So, is Google Wave hype or hip?
I say Google Wave is hip, for these reasons:

• collaborate in real time,
• annotate and edit waves,
• drag and drop images, videos, and other rich media into you wave,
• add other participants at any time who can quickly get up to speed on what is happening, and
• save a ton of time you would traditionally waste using email.

Simply stated, Google Wave can provide a more efficient and productive way to communicate. Problem-solving, brainstorming, group writing, note taking, live feedback, conference calling--a whole slew of rich features makes Google Wave very attractive. The main drawback right now is that not everyone has a Google Wave account. So, get a Google Wave account today and see how much time you've been wasting using email for many daily tasks. Then, let me know what YOU think.