Tsunami in #HigherEd: Social Media and Peer-to-peer

Posted on October 17, 2012 by Gary R Schirr

BTW: A post related to the ongoing discussion of the Tsunami in higher education was posted on my other blog:

Social Learning and Online #HigherEd

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Social Learning and Online #HigherEd

Posted on October 16, 2012 by Gary R Schirr

The past two days I enjoyed observing social learning at work in my classes.

Friday I gave my sales classes a midterm. I then allowed them to form groups to retake the tests to improve their individual scores. It was fun to watch them discuss issues I consider important and reach consensus within their groups. This simple technique (which I highly recommend),  turns the exam into a genuine learning activity! I have been doing this for several years: I have gotten some negative feedback (a couple students have cited the retest as proof that I am “easy”), but the process is an incredible improvement over the former professor-led test review.

Monday I decided to have my social media marketing class present their progress on their individual semester projects at the half-way point. I had intended it mostly to give them a push to get going. What a wonderful session! Students talked about what they have been working on and got feedback and ideas from other students. Great learning session, likely the best next to my great guest speakers!!!

Use of MOOCs

These two great examples of the power of social learning or peer-to-peer learning lead me to be skeptical of current MOOCs…

I freely admit that somewhere on planet earth there is likely someone who gives more engaging lectures on personal selling or social media. I also believe that lecturing is one of the least effective ways to learn, and that watching a 40 minute video of my lectures would suck. Unfortunately for the more  simplistic MOOCs I believe that watching a series of videotaped 40 minute lectures from the very best lecturer on earth would also suck – just a bit less.

Flipping, social learning and social media

Thus I think the best use of the much heralded MOOCs would be be to provide raw material to “flip” classes. (For example, instruct students to watch some of the lectures online if they can stand them and then apply the concepts in class by problems and discussion.) Ultimately, of course, lectures can be made more palatable by cutting them into 10 minute chunks and using animation to replace talking-head professors. [not cheap]

However the key to online learning success will be to bring my wonderful Friday and Monday classes online – online social learning. This will be a valuable application of social media. I have seen some evidence of social learning in Facebook groups and wikis in my classes. I expect the effort to mirror in person social learning via social media to be difficult, really difficult, but not in the end insurmountable.

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Going Broke by Degree – #Higher Ed Tsunami?

Posted on October 2, 2012 by Gary R Schirr

Jeffrey Phillips wrote a good post last week about his insights into HigherEd problems from his college tours with his daughters: HigherEd Insight from college tours 

Insights from his trips and discussions of college include the high costs from inefficient use of capital such as classrooms to meet capacity from 11 am till 3 pm eight months a year and spending on plush dorms, workout facilities and student unions. He also discussed whether the use of online course shouldn’t permit students to put together a combination of the best online courses with traditional courses – eventually forcing universities to allow packages similar to iPod music mixes.

I have been planning to post a series of articles on the “Tsunami in HigherEd”. I have written before about the problems with innovation in the business models of Universities, for example a post: HigherEd: Who is the Customer?

In my upcoming posts I plan to look at four big issues facing universities: (1) continuing ballooning costs, (2) a possible bubble due to loans, government policy, and high expected returns, (3) disruptive technology (online MOOCs), and (4) internal resistance to change.

One of the great things about working in academy is the change to talk with experts. I had the opportunity yesterday with a small group to have lunch with Richard K Vedder, who has been writing about HigherEd cost pressures and other risks for years in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Wall Street Journal and other outlets. I had read his book, Going Broke by Degree,some years ago.

I asked Dr. Vedder about the four forces I thought threatened HigherEd. He was in strong agreement and even added a fifth, (5) unfavorable demographics ahead as potential users decline and seniors argue for reallocation of government money to keep Medicare solvent. He agreed that another cost pressure was the growth of administrative overhead at universities (increase in “Ass Deans”) which had been discussed in another book, The Fall of Faculty (Meddle Management) .

Dr. Vedder questioned the usefulness of accreditors as well as administrators. Overall I found him to be more complacent about the future of higher education than I would have expected.

Outsourcing Football

A cool insight that I would have liked to hear more about was how my university benefited from being near a major football power without having to pay the incredible costs of such a program. (Our students go to the games, but the ludicrous coaching salaries, funds siphoned from academic programs, and legal problems from athletes – such a when a “student-athlete” decides to steal drugs at gunpoint – are borne by the school across the river.)

Dr. Vedder says he is looking into pairs of schools in similar situations…

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Can One Billion Facebook Users be wrong?

Posted on September 26, 2012 by Gary R Schirr

According to Wikipedia (note: don’t cite in my classes!) as of early summer the social platforms had the following number of users:

  1. Facebook         955 million (certainly 1 B by now)
  2. Twitter            500+ million
  3. LinkedIn          175 million

Am I the only one who thinks these numbers are skewed? Based on strictly anecdotal evidence I believe that there are a LOT of fake and duplicate FB accounts out there. My personal example – My wife and I between us have:

  • TWO LinkedIn accounts (and don’t know anyone with dups) and
  • FIVE Facebook accounts (and know many people with dups).

What do you think? Do you also have dup accounts? (I have one for old high school acquaintances and my dog has one that he really doesn’t post on.)

Does LinkedIn have both a more professional group and honest count?

 

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Flawed Tools – Focus groups and brainstorming for ideas

Posted on September 20, 2012 by Gary R Schirr

My article about group methods for ideation, including focus groups and brainstorming was published in the May issue of the Journal of Product Innovation and Management. Regular readers of this (irregular) blog will know the key findings about the use of groups to generate innovative ideas. Individual interviews with users as suggested by Abbie Griffin in “Voice of the Customer” will outperform group methods (even adjusted for time). Compared to the group brainstorming, individual ideation will generate:

  1. More ideas,
  2. Better ideas on average, and
  3. The most innovative ideas. (Trifecta!)

The full paper is here: Using focus groups and brainstorming for user ideas.

Osborn introduced Brainstorming in a book in 1957, claiming that he had empirical evidence that a group brainstorming by his four key rules—(1) criticism not welcome; (2) freewheeling welcome; (3) quantity of ideas welcome; and (4) combining/improving ideas welcome—could produce twice as many ideas as individuals brainstorming alone and also produce better ideas.

However within a year, Taylor et al. (1958) conducted experiments, finding that the combined results of individual brainstorming outperformed groups in terms of the number, quality, and uniqueness of the ideas generated. As noted, subsequent research has strongly supported the inferiority of group methods.

Why then are brainstorming and focus groups still so widely used for product innovation ideas? (That question is the second half of the paper…)

Any thoughts??

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What is your Klout score today?

Posted on September 13, 2012 by Gary R Schirr

Even after carefully reading Mark Schaefer’s excellent book Return on Influence, I am still one of those unrepentant Klout-bashers that Mark has referred to in several of his recent posts. I believe that a Klout score has little value and acts like an SEO-like force in motivating participants to game SM, thereby coarsening social media. See selected posts:

Last evening at the ribbon cutting for the beautiful new business building at Radford U. – Biz Building – an MBA student not in my SMM class came up to me and said “Your social media class has impacted everyone in the program. It seems the new greeting is ‘What is your Klout score today'”

AAAARRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!!

 

 

 

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Professor Klout

Posted on August 30, 2012 by Gary R Schirr

“…here is an inescapable fact. Many firms are sizing up college student’s Klout scores as a quantitative metric to use for job applicant screening. Therefore, I decided to create a class project in which the final grade earned is solely determined by a student’s Klout score.”

This is a quote from a post by Todd Bacile ( @toddbacile ), a new PhD from FSU on Mark Schaefer’s Blog http://www.businessesgrow.com/2012/08/26/florida-state-university-class-using-klout-to-determine-student-grades/

This blog post generated a bit of a storm in the comments on the Grow blog (my comment must have been screened out…) and on FB and other social media sites. Todd is likely now the most talked about marketing job candidate. USNews even ran a tepidly critical comment: http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/2012/08/29/professor-sparks-controversy-for-klout-based-grading?page=2

Todd’s curious wording – some readers interpreted “the final grade earned is solely determined” as meaning the class grade – and provocative use of “gaming” helped incite the ire. However his key premise that since some employers are using Klout scores to screen job candidates, Universities must teach students to achieve high scores is also widely criticized.

I am a fairly consistent Klout-basher. [For example see http://servicecocreation.com/2011/02/16/will-klout-kill-twitter/ ] I think the measure itself is faulty, even somewhat silly (and worse since the recent modifications – more later on this). More importantly I believe that the service becomes harmful to social media as participants game their scores under pressure from imbecile employers who screen with Klout or perhaps by professors who specify that a “final grade earned is solely determined” by the measure.

I think most social  media participants have already seen clear evidence of the coarsening of social media due to J0e Fernandez and his Klout henchmen in their Facebook stream. Why has there been an increase in:

  • Artificial or photo-shoped pics?
  • Vapid posts that sound like campaigns for Miss American? (Why can’t we have world peace?)
  • Exhortations to click “like” – Please “like” for world peace, Please “like” to support our veterans, please like if you love the Hokies (local).

Answer: Pumping up the K-score!!!

What should an academic do? Klout and its competitors do exist, try to measure something important, and are widely followed. I personally think Todd may have pushed too far…

BUT I do offer extra credit in my social media courses to the two or three students who over the course of the semester: (1) end the semester with the highest Klout score, (2) show the largest increase in their Kred and /or PeerIndex scores.

What is your opinion:

  1. Does Todd go too far in promoting Klout in his class?
  2. Do I go too far in promoting Kred, Klout and PeerIndex in mine?

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Wicked Commentary on Social Media

Posted on August 23, 2012 by Gary R Schirr

This “ad” for the iPhone 5 is also a wicked commentary on social media!

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New Klout – An Innovation Strategy?

Posted on August 17, 2012 by Gary R Schirr

“You have eyes: Plagiarize!”   – Product Development at Salomon Brothers (Liars Poker)

“Good artists copy, but great artists steal.” – Steve Jobs

Borrowing ideas from your competitors has a long and esteemed history in innovation, as noted in the quotes above. Therefore it should not necessarily negative to note that Klout’s ballyhooed new version and business model seems to be lifted entirely from a competitor, Kred.

When I summarized popular, retail influence-measuring services to my SMM class last semester I noted that Kred had created some buzz and excitement about its pledge of transparency and noted several differences from Klout including:

  1. Kred enhances transparency by clearly displaying events, called activities, that lead to Kred points,
  2. Kred goes back further to compute your score, up to 1000 days, so a temporary event such as going on holiday or celebrating a birthday on Facebook should not have as much impact,
  3. Participants can award each other +Kreds, which will contribute to a score, and
  4. Kred has an option to include evidence of real world influence “offline Kred” in your total score.

Of course differences remain, but substitute “moments” for activities, “90 days” for 1000, “+K” for +Kred, and “automatically” for has an “option” in these four former differences and you have the key innovations Klout just announced!

Kred seemed to be getting some traction, so Klout said “I can be like them.” Is this a winning innovation strategy??

In fairness, Facebook has been using this strategy successfully to thwart competition from Google+. However I am reminded of another example…

Coca-Cola reformulated its product, dropping the vanilla and adding sugar, to make it taste more like Pepsi in reaction to the Pepsi taste test promotions. The “New Coke” was a near disaster until management pivoted and went back to the historical formula.

Is Klout just tactically fending off Kred or is it endangering its service by introducing “New Klout” – what do you think?

[I will discuss my thoughts and your ideas in my next post…]

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Social Media used to Crowdsource a New Course!

Posted on August 2, 2012 by Gary R Schirr

A recording of a presentation at Social Slam 2012.
(Also posted at servicecocreation.com and youtube.)

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