Send your comments, letters to the editor, and related articles to seltzer@samizdat.com For information on who we are check www.samizdat.com/who.html
To access other issues, go to www.samizdat.com/ioad.html. The full text of all issues is available for free, with hypertext links to the sites referenced. (Please keep in mind that URLs frequently change. We will attempt to update the information in this on-line edition, but don't expect perfection.)
For plain-text books on CD ROM, a library for the price of a book, visit our online store at http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat
You can now receive Internet-on-a-Disk by email, by signing up at Yahoo Groups. Either send email to subscribe-ioad@yahoogroups.com , or register at the Web site http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ioad. You can also use that group to discuss related matters and share insights with other readers and with me (Richard Seltzer seltzer@samizdat.com).
Off-the-wall ideas
Europe has been split, making it far more unlikely that the European Union will develop closer ties and become a strong competitor of the US.
The Middle East will be destabilized, the site of ethnic and religious civil-war conflicts for years to come, with the US military in place as the only source of security.
Imagine someone like the Emperor in Star Wars were setting this situation up, delighted at the outcome.
Not very likely, but scary...
He noted that that doesn't seem to make sense. We don't have a cure for the common cold. If we did have a cure, then you'd expect, through the process of evolution, to see the spread of mutations that survive despite the defenses. But we don't have a cure. The common cold is caused by an extremely successful virus, that thrives worldwide. So why are we seeing such a mutation?
He asked if it could have been genetically engineered.
I pooh-poohed that idea, mentioning that this illness first appeared in China, probably in November; and there doesn't seem to be any reason to suspect a terrorist connection.
Then it dawned on me -- in general, computer viruses are created by people who do it for the thrill of it, to prove that they can, not for profit or political purposes, and not to deliberately cause damage. This could conceivably be the work of a biological hacker...
I can't help but wonder if governments couldn't be run like businesses. I'd like to see them charge for services, and consider citizens as shareholders rather than as taxpayers. I'd like to see citizens paid dividends by the state, rather than paying taxes to the state. How can we get from here to there?
I occasionally send them devil's-advocate-style messages, trying to get them to focus on what I perceive to be the main problems.
The challenge of arriving at decisions through online discussion
The solution and the process to arrive at the solution should have much
in common. The process for finding new "simple" solutions for society's
problems should, in itself, be an important part of the solution. In other
words, we need a system whereby large numbers of ordinary people can become
actively involved in those aspects of government that matter to
them. And our method for arriving at such a system should involve the
participation of large numbers of ordinary people.
Hence how you decide to conduct online discussions is crucial.
I believe that the question of how to manage the discussion and arrive
at decisions is central to the whole enterprise. The solution is not trivial.
In fact, the solution to that is at the core of any really workable overall
solution. That issue is far more important than recruiting experts with
particular skills. You need a workable method for them to interact with
one
another, just as you'll need such a method for the citizenry to interact
with one another and with government.
Look for the "ideal" in the "real"
It finally occurred to me why I sometimes have strong negative reactions to >Simple Society messages --
I tend to be more aristotelian than platonic.
Instead of focusing on ideal end states and debating about what is "ideal", I prefer to look at the potential that is inherent in today's reality.
I guess I'm more interested in simple tools to fix a complex society, than dreams of a simple society.
What are the hot spots, the presssure points, the control points, where
a small change could make an enormous difference, unleasing positive potential?
(Cf. the prinicple behind the transistor). This might be a rule, a law,
or a common practice that can and should be changed. Or it might be a simple
alternative technology (like inexpensive solar cookers for use in
third world countries).
And what simple inexpensive communication tools are available for us to discuss such matters and reach decisions and then to publicize what we've decided and persuade others to get involved and add their insights and do what is necessary to make those changes happen? For examples of such "tools", see an attached article of mine [included in this issue].
In other words, I would like to see two parallel and interrelated efforts.
1) identifying a few small practical changes that could make a critical difference, and that could also serve as examples of what's possible.Miscellaneous thoughts/advice
2) poking around to see what combination of communication tools works best at low cost both for discussion/decision-making and for broad publicity/persuasion.
I believe that the major challenge you face is
1) arriving at preliminary decisionsI have grave doubts about the viability of direct democracy, where individuals decide on issues. I strongly believe that representative democracy works much better, because ordinary individuals are rarely well-enough informed to make decisions on issues, but they can and should decide on who they trust to represent them.
2) publicizing those decisions
3) arriving at second stage deicisons through interactive discussion, then publicizing, arriving at higher stage, publicizing, etc.
I'm also very suspicious of decision-making processes that are based on multiple choice or yes and no. In that case, those who decide which few choices will be put before the electorate are the ones with true power.
Effective democracy requires full disclosure of alternate viewpoints and of the judgements and abilities of candidates in an informed context.
What could I do to help?
I publish books on CD ROM. Have you checked my store? http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat
One category is "World Awareness". That includes "Your World on CD ROM" which consists of UN and NATO documents, "The Middle East: Context for Conflict", Africa, etc.
It would be possible for me to create another category of CDs, such as "Simple Society Issues", with CDs on health care, etc., which would consist of government documents on those topics and the texts of related legislation and related bills in process (available through thomas.gov), and other public domain information about legistators who are on related committees; plus contemporary works that Simple Society gets the rights to publish (e.g., position papers and articles by board members etc.); plus official position statements of Simple Society. I could sell these through my store, etc., and pay royalties to Simple Society. And I could continually update these CDs as new material becomes available. At first, volume of sales would probably be very small; but samples of such CDs could be useful in helping you to spread the word.
At some point, also, it might make sense to hold online discussions/debates
in a text-chat environment. I could help host/moderate such discussions,
and could (when appropriate) convert the raw transcripts to edited transcripts,
and sometimes to articles -- generating additional unique content for the
CDs, while pioneering an important element in the new
decision-making/publicizing process.
Once we get involved in e-learning we often end up over-emphasizing the "e." Because advanced technology can do so much, it's easy to lose sight of what the simplest tools can do if combined in interesting ways. We sometimes go overboard with enthusiasm for all-encompassing, totally integrated solutions—super platforms that can do everything for everyone—when we’d get better results more quickly and cheaply by kludging together tools that everyone already owns and understands. We should remind ourselves that though the Internet is a useful tool, and a good way to connect people to people, it’s just one of many tools that can be combined to get just the right mix and accomplish our educational goals while keeping costs to a minimum.
Each fall, people involved in distance learning around the world connect with one another on Global Learn Day to share their progress and discuss recent challenges. John Hibbs of the Benjamin Franklin Institute of Global Learning (www.bfranklin.edu) and his team reach a broad worldwide audience by using multiple diverse means to deliver this event—Web, text chat, voiceover IP, telephone, and even radio. For instance, for delivery in countries such as India, the Web-based streaming audio signal is picked up and broadcast by traditional radio stations to reach a much wider audience.
Rather than leasing satellite time or paying for access to an existing worldwide network, the Global Learn Day team sets up an ad hoc, volunteer-based network which is "multi-media" in the true sense of the term: meaning not just voice and video, but rather many different modes of communication. Their efforts are a prototype for delivering educational events to large worldwide audiences. The team takes advantage of free and low-cost media to facilitate discussion, thereby moving beyond the corporate-dominated world of traditional mass communication.
Similarly, many businesses (but surprisingly few schools) deliver training by telephone conference calls known as "teleseminars." They use the Internet as a supplement—a way to deliver related materials, give participants a way to ask questions or comment, and offer follow-up discussions. Some of these teleseminars are really marketing events—a way to get people to sign up for expensive face-to-face events by giving them a foretaste of the content the scheduled speakers have to offer. In other cases, the teleseminar is the main delivery mechanism for a paid series of lessons.
In other words, simple applications, like email and instant messaging, used in coordination with an ordinary telephone concall, can produce very interesting results.
If you run a school or an e-learning business, you may want to encourage your customers to interact with one another as part of a community. Or you may want to showcase your teaching staff, giving potential students a foretaste of classes they might want to enroll in. For those purposes and also for online delivery of actual courses, you may be tempted to use full-blown educational platforms, with real-time video and audio, PowerPoint presentations, etc. But it's quite possible that simple text chat will serve just as well at far less cost and with far less hassle.
Under the umbrella of "Business on the Web," I've held regular chat sessions for nearly seven years (on Thursdays, from noon to 1 PM Eastern Time). I schedule volunteer experts with interesting topics, and I act as host. If few people show up for the live chat session, the discussion takes the form of an interview. If half a dozen or more active participants show up, then the discussion can go in valuable and unexpected directions. Sometimes the best contributions come from the experienced and knowledgeable audience rather than the expert. In either case, the transcript then serves as raw material from which to generate interesting content for a Web site or a newsletter. And I do all this using plain old text chat—no fancy platform with video and audio. The same approach would work just as well with your teaching staff as guests, using chat to market your school and courses. And those marketing chat sessions would also be an opportunity to wake your staff up to the potential of text chat as an instructional tool.
Often our habits lead us to seek high-tech, high-priced automated solutions to our business problems, and we lament the fact that budget constraints prevent us from doing all that we wish. But the most important barrier we face isn't a limited budget, but a limited imagination. We need to focus on our objectives, rather than getting too enamoured of the flashy high-tech e-means that tempt us. We need the open-mindedness, the humility, and the courage to seriously consider the bare bones, labor-intensive approaches to education.
For more information about teleseminars, check my recent article http://www.samizdat.com/teleseminars.html
With just about everybody connected to the Internet, it's tempting go overboard and presume that everything that could be done over the Internet should be done that way. We need to keep reminding ourselves that the Internet is a useful tool, a good way to connect people to people, but just one of a variety of tools that can and should be combined to get just the right mix to serve customers quickly and easily and keep costs to a minimum.
That came through loud and clear in last week's chat session with Jenny Hamby and Preston Campbell as our expert guests talking about "teleseminars."
When I first scheduled them for the program, I presumed that "teleseminars" meant seminars delivered at a distance, over the Internet. But no, for them the prefix "tele" is short for telephone. And they actually mean delivering learning-type content through concalls with anywhere from two to over 200 callers. They use the Internet, sometimes, not always, as a supplement -- a way to deliver related materials or to have followup discussions, or as an aid to the concall, giving participants a way to indicate that they want to ask questions or comment, or letting them visit websites to see examples of what's being talked about. They also share notes and presentation materials by emailing them in advance or by sending people to a website to download them. Jenny and Preston agree that the optimum length for a teleseminar is about an hour, followed by up to 30 minutes of questions and answers.
Some companies charge their teleseminar participants. Others offer teleseminars for free, using them for promotion, for instance driving up participation in high-priced face-to-face events. Often the teleseminars that Jenny produces are a way to "get people in seats, by giving them a taste of what's to come at the live event." The face-to-face seminar that's being promoted might cost thousands of dollars in entry fees, plus travel costs. Giving prospects a sample of what the speakers have to say helps make the sale -- especially in times when money is tight.
She notes that other companies use teleseminars to train customers on how to use products, to answer frequently asked questions from customers, and to hold meetings with employees.
Preston Campbell, who has written a book called "Teleseminar Success Secrets", notes that he often uses them for group meetings, holding regular coaching sessions with his sales team. As he says, "Conversation is probably the most efficient form of communication ... since you can do them for free why not just make the calls." He points out that through a company named FreeConferencecall.com, you can do a teleseminar for free for up to 96 people. Their URL is www.freeconferencecall.com. Anyone can go to that site and set up a conference line (phone number and pin) that they can use over and over at any time. He points out that they make their money through add-on enhancements to their basic service, such as operator assistance, larger calls, webcasting, etc. Webcasting means using the teleconference service to broadcast your presentation to all the viewers through a website.
So how do you manage a concall with a hundred or more people connected? It's hard enough managing a text chat session with just a dozen active participants.
Preston claims that teleseminars are easy to manage. He says that the key is setting the right rules and providing the right kind of instructions up front, so everyone understands the norms of behavior in this medium. He also relies on standard concall capabilities, like the ability for the person running the session to selectively mute other participants or give them the right to talk. . With many services, participants can mute themselves by pressing *6. He makes it sound easy. "You toggle the mute on and off; you can take a question, mute, answer, unmute, take another one, etc."
Jenny adds that you need to explain etiquette, for instance the importance of minimizing background noise, and the need to introduce yourself at the beginning. That includes avoiding cell phone and cordless phones and speaker phones, all of which generate too much noise. She prefers to give the presentation first, then open the lines for questions toward the end. That approach lets you deliver your content without interruptions.
Preston adds that you can use email or an Internet chat session or an instant messaging service to let people submit questions while their phones are muted. If you do that, you should have a second person deal with it so you can focus on talking.
Jenny points out that most people are shy about asking questions. So even if hundreds of people are connected to the concall, you are likely to have just a couple of people fighting to speak, not dozens. Preston adds that, in fact, you usually have to stimulate people to ask the host questions. That element of human nature helps make these concalls manageable.
Preston typically has his sessions recorded. The teleconference service charges about $25 per hour for recording; and a transcriptionist usually charges $50 to $80 for an hour call. He can then make the audio (streaming or download) and/or the text transcript available over the Internet.
I could imagine using teleseminar concalls as a decision-making mechanism. I've seen many instances of groups trying to use the Internet as a substitute for face-to-face discussion, where just a couple people post and post and post; and the rest lose track of what's going on or lose interest, and it takes forever to come to decisions, and then many people don't feel committed to the decisions because they weren't deeply involved. I'd think that a wrap-up concall session might be a way of moving beyond that. In other words, you could use the Internet for preliminary discussion, then have everyone connect by concall to firm up details, arrive at decisions, and make commitments. In other words, instead of the teleseminar being the warmup for a face-to-face event, have the Internet be the warmup, and the concall serve for decision-making.
In any case, this chat session made it clear to me that simple applications, like email and instant messaging, used in coordination with an ordinary telephone concall can produce very interesting results. You don't really need a be-all and do-all super application or service to build a very effective and profitable service.
You can contact the experts at:
For many years, at most institutions, professors have been able to supplement their main income with writing and consulting, so long as these activities didn't take so much time as to interfere with their teaching responsibilities.
We might have expected that Internet technology would enable the transformation of traditional education. As teaching at a distance became practical and cost-effective, it would have been natural for universities to consider online teaching activities as "consulting", to allow their own professors to teach at institutions other than their "home" university, and to seek out the best and brightest from everywhere in the world to bolster their "virtual" faculty. In that ideal environment, we might have expected that universities to go out of their way to attract "brand name" professors who prefer to operate without a "home" university, teaching online for multiple institutions, and who are so good and so well-known that the best students seek them out.
Instead, today universities often interpret contractual terms literally and inflexibly in this new environment that wasn't forseen when the rules were written, and even add strict new terms aimed at online teaching and related intellectual property.
The conflict of Arthur Miller with the Harvard Law School is typical of the attempts of universities to interpret old contractual terms in new ways. Well-known in the areas of court procedure, copyright, and unfair competition, Professor Miller has been with the Harvard Law School since 1971. Over the years, he has, in accord with the University's contract provisions, done consulting and made TV appearances on the side. He even served as legal editor of ABC's "Good Morning America." Such activities helped to enhance his prestige both nationally and within the university. And he kept them within the contractual limit of 20% of his professional time.
Then during one summer vacation, he videotaped a series of lectures for an online university -- the Concord University School of Law, which is backed by backed by the Washington Post Company's Kaplan Educational Centers. Concord posted these lectures online and integrated them into their course offerings, with their regular faculty leading discussions and in other ways interacting with students. Professor Miller's contribution was just the taping of the lectures, and lending his reputation to the online venture as a "supplementary" lecturer. Apparently, the administration of the Harvard Law School objected that this kind of activity constituted a "conflict of interest" that put his tenure at risk. Miller, with his legal expertise, has so far been able to defend his position well. But others faced with a similar challenge might well back down to administrative intimidation.
Suffolk University in Boston is typical of institutions imposing new rules on faculty for online instruction. Suffolk's main offerings, with lots of night courses, cater to the needs of students who go to school while working fulltime. So moving to online teaching would seem to be a natural evolution, and an important supplement to their traditional business. But instead, the administration has imposed new rules by which when a professor agrees to teach for Suffolk online, all the materials written by that professor that are posted online for that course become the intellectual property of the university. That effectively prevents the professor from teaching the same course online for multiple schools. It also means that many people who in the past served as adjunct faculty, bringing with them a wealth of practical work experience in industry and business, would not even consider working for them in their online program. And, ironically, it means that people the school sought out as potential teachers because of their published books can't teach for them because the school's teaching contract conflicts with their publishing contracts.
For such universities, the glass is half empty, instead of half full -- they are frightened of the competitive dangers of the new online educational environment, rather than enthused about the new opportunities. But their rigid defensive responses magnify their risks, leaving enormous opportunities wide open for newcomers.
One of the most successful of the newcomers, the University of Phoenix, founded in 1976 and accredited since 1978, now boasts over 125,000 students from 117 campuses, including their online campus. They offer bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in such fields as business, technology, management, education, nursing, counseling, and criminal justice. Their faculty "is composed of accomplished working professionals with advanced degrees in their respective fields," teaching "at night what they do during the day." The flexibility of the U. of Phoenix contractual terms allows their faculty to teach and work elsewhere, which means they can recruit excellent people with unique experience and credentials.
Over time, market forces will probably force traditional universities to give their faculty far greater flexibility than today. But why wait for competitive economic pain to reach critical levels before making the necessary changes? Why not take advantage of new opportunities immediately -- creatively reinventing education for the benefit all today?
If we could move beyond traditional views of the role and limitations of the teacher, "educational outsourcing" would be possible. Professors as well as departments could mix and match to build/enhance online courses: focus on what they do best and "outsource" the rest. And at the same time, colleges could offer the online services of their faculty to other institutions, with prices determined by demand, which depends on reputation. Then cross-institutional online teaching could become a source of additional revenue for the faculty's home institution as well as for the teachers. And cross-institutional teaching work could help build the national and global reputations of professors and of the schools they work for.
From: "Ralph Katz" <ralph.katz@rcn.com>
Sent: Friday, March 07, 2003 4:19 PM
Richard -- Enjoyed hearing your talk [at IP495 in Hopkinton] and chatting
with you again. You mentioned in passing that only alta vista had
the "link:" feature, but I just discoverd that Google has it too, same
syntax. Just thought you'd
like to know!
From: Richard Seltzer, To: Ralph Katz
As you point out, Google now allows the command link: Thanks for letting me know. But I still wouldn't use their site to find out what sites/pages and how many of them link to my pages. The reason is that they do not allow exclusion and inclusion. So when I do that search, I just get a list of my own pages -- which isn't very useful.
At AltaVista, I search for
+link:samizdat.com -host:samizdat.com
and get exactly what I want.
Best wishes.
Richard
My
Internet: a Personal View of Internet Business Opportunities
by Richard Seltzer, on CD, includes four books, 162 articles, and 49 newsletter
issues that will inspire you and provide the practical information you
need to build your own personal Web site or Internet-based business, helping
you to become a player in this new business environment.
Web
Business Boot Camp: Hands-on Internet lessons for manager, entrepreneurs,
and professionals by Richard Seltzer (Wiley, 2002).
No-nonsense guide targets activities that anyone can perform to achieve
online business
success.
Reviews.
A
library for the price of a book.
This site is
Published by Samizdat Express, 213 Deerfield Lane, Orange, CT 06477. (203) 553-9925. seltzer@samizdat.com
.
<