Facebook and Wikipedia's Lovechild

I'm biased but Jack did make a nice video for us:

It's like a library, except everyone is talking

Carmun (of which I am a founder, etc.) is getting set to launch v2.0 of its student connective wisdom, yin to the Facebook yang, product. I believe that the web presents an opportunity for businesses to take fresh looks at processes, and then create value for users from outside the traditional parameters of those processes. Education, advertising, social media are just a few of the areas where many of these opportunities exist.

I met Jon Bischke of Edu Rev last week and we were discussing how technology and connectivity (between people and ideas) are just now beginning to be applied in creative ways to learning and knowledge sharing. His company and Carmun are just two of a number that are trying to use the web to change that. We'll see what happens soon.

Restructuring Education

I found some great thoughts at elearnspace:

Restructuring Education

Love this quote by Clay Shirky: "The hallmark of revolution is that the goals of the revolutionaries cannot be contained by the institutional structure of the society they live in. As a result, either the revolutionaries are put down, or some of those institutions are transmogrified, replaced, or simply destroyed. We are plainly witnessing a restructuring of the music and newspaper businesses, but their suffering isn’t unique, it’s prophetic. All businesses are media businesses, because whatever else they do, all businesses rely on the managing of information for two audiences — employees and the world. The increase in the power of both individuals and groups, outside traditional organizational structures, is epochal. Many institutions we rely on today will not survive this change without radical alteration." (via Mark Oehlert).

In my mind, there is little doubt that we are at the initial stages of tremendous change to our educational structures. The way in which we interact with knowledge - co-creation, commenting, amateur peer-evaluation, openness, etc. - is strongly at odds with traditional education. Classrooms have been conceived as comprising a single prominent node (the teacher). Our daily interactions are multi-nodal. Our experience with information in multi-perspective. The question that remains for me is whether education can evolve on it's own...or whether it will be transformed/revolutionized by outside forces.

(emphasis mine).

The "evolution" of education, like the evolution of most markets (and I do consider education a market), will be driven by outside forces. I don't think, however, that those outside forces will come from companies, service providers, thinkers, etc. instead, the evolution will be derive from the students themselves. In this way, education actually won't be transformed by outside forces per se. But in the same way the students today, in their individual and social lives, co-create, comment, peer-socialize, etc. -- in the ways people are already multi-modal -- those shifts will alter education irrevocably because students will implicitly require that it happens. That transformation promises to not only create many new opportunities, but also to be extremely interesting as well.

Carmun Links

Some comments on Carmun from around the world today:

Networking aims beyond facebooks: Boston Globe

New Resource Rating and Sharing site: Out of the Jungle

Carmun: Helpful Student Tool or Evil Conspiracy -- Connecting the Dots

The search war is over, Google has won, and I couldn't be happier

It's being widely reported that Google's share of the U.S. search market has climbed yet again.

This data is consistent with two points I've recently found. On the quantitative side, 6 weeks into the initial launch of Carmun, we' see that about 60% of the initial traffic has come from search engines, and of that search traffic close to 95% was delivered from Google search. On the qualitative side, prior to March we conducted numerous formal and informal focus groups at NYU, Tufts and Columbia. Overwhelmingly the students told us that Google was their starting point for Internet discovery. And by overwhelmingly I mean over 95% of these kids used Google exclusively for discovery.

I therefore declare the U.S. search war to be over. Google has won and it is becoming the sole starting point for the delivery of web content and services. It won because it works really well for users and and incremental advances will not matter to users -- those doing to searching.

I'm totally thrilled with this development. This makes it that much easier to develop and deliver interesting web services. Google does an amazing job of searching through the raw data that is the web (the web as the database). However it is they do it, they are the best ever at providing relevance to search.

But Google does not provide context to search. And that is a vast, huge opportunity, because I believe the next stage of search innovation is about providing context on top of and utilizing Google's dominance relevance. Kind of like adding an application layer called Context on top of Google.

For example, in searching for a hotel in Puerto Rico, one of the top results is from tripadvisor, which delivers ratings, reviews, deals and related information to that search. In other words, it provides a layer of context on top of the original Google search.

Similarly, searching for Mud Coffee in New York (the best coffee there is), brings me results from yelp, 23 reviews, maps and a community. Again, context.

Finally, someone interested in Arthurian legends who searches for a summary of Lancelot and Guinevere might find their way to this project list on Carmun, where a user has put together their own compendium of 38 works related to this subject, with ratings, reviews, groups and a way to locate a work at a university library.

These three examples of context on top of Google results are powerful because they demonstrate the richness and variety that web applications can add to raw indexed data. Having one provider who excels at indexing that data and making it searchable, and having that provider deliver the vast majority of searches, actually makes it easier and more efficient for us service providers to add innovation -- context -- on top of the search.

For that reason I am thrilled that Google has won the search war.

Outside In Services

In reading the recent Piper Jaffray Internet Advertising report, I was struck by what the report lists as trend number three in the "Media World Order:"

Indeed, I think the implications of this concept are greater than as relates to a strict definition of the media world.

Maybe we should start to call these things "Outside In Services" -- those services that begin their conception of value creation from outside the confines of what is traditionally considered areas where value, control and distribution lie. Services which create new ways of looking at data and people and content, using the actors (or customers, or users) involved with the data and content as the focal point, and not necessarily the distributor or publisher or even service provider. Such actors have generally been considered, at least by publishers, as passive recipients. Audiences, if you will. Similarly, value has traditionally been considered to lie with the content or services delivered to those actors.

By viewing actors as being the locus of activity enables radically new ways of creating businesses to serve those actors/customers/users. These services are Outside In because, while they serve a user base, their functionality and utility derive from the actors, not from the content. Thus, they create value from outside the system (starting with the users), pointing in (towards the content or publisher or service provider). The actors to these services do not necessarily have to be generating the content themselves (and so this applies to a much broader base than "user generated content"), although that is an easy starting point and a radical evolution in and of itself. Outside In Services start with a premise (philosophical, almost, and different, definitely) of where and how services can/should be delivered. Then they use that thinking to create new ways of doing business.

Outside.in is a good example and not just because their name applies specifically to this concept. This business starts with the proposition that, when it comes to information about neighborhoods, or localities, there is indeed no good center or publisher to work with. Thus, value here can best come from (and amplified and be promoted) the outside, from distributed postings, content, comments and listings. In a way, Outside.in is remaking itself as a new kind of center. This has lots of implications, take politics as an example. It's also been noted that maybe the inside-out, opposite approach to this market is too hard to scale and grow. More interesting commentary from some investors in this service.

Aggregate Knowledge is another good case study -- helping drive ecommerce, for example, not using products as the center, but again by considering users' interactions with products to drive data, sales and relevancy. The actors at the center of retail is how I think about this one.

Interestingly, Dapper looks at the issue by considering the content, or the data associated with a website, to be the actor itself, and then they provide services to push that data, those actions, form the inside to the outside, where they can then be utilized for even more services.

I'm also lucky to be involved in two other companies that are taking outside in approaches to business. Lotame is spinning the advertising and analytics business on its head by looking at that industry from the perspective of content users, viewers and audiences. Lotame looks at these actors and their actions and interests in digesting web content as the basis for providing value-added marketing services to publishers. Thus, for Lotame what's less relevant is web content qua content, and what matters MUCH more is what people are doing to that content and what they exhibit as interests.

Finally, Carmun is attempting to redefine educational or learning value by allowing learners and students to create connections and insights themselves outside of a school or other institution, and then use those connections or insights in old or new ways.

There are many more examples of Outside In Services and thinking. For example, take a look at Jay Gould's framework for creating an online business and see how many of his criteria are focused on criteria outside the content or service (all of them).

Outside in learning

In looking at what I wrote are the top 10 interesting learning technology applications currently available, one common theme is that they are all "outside in" services. In other words, they don't start with the proposition that learning, or education, begins with an institution. Indeed, they all explicitly or implicitly reject that proposition and instead posit that the student, the learner, can also be at the core of education and learning.

Thus, while I do find some learning, or course, management systems to to be useful (and even necessary) applications, they are less interesting examples of leveraging technology to fundamentally shift the learning and educational paradigms.

As edugator writes:

Curration and editorial control are the two key ingredients in the secret sauce that turn information into knowledge. This is the much-overlooked other side of the Web 2.0 coin: who filters the signal from the noise? Traditional publishers who accept the paradigm shift and make their materials accessible online in new ways will continue to wield strong advantages based on well-earned reputation and competency. Meanwhile, an enormous opportunity has opened for others to step and provide context to the clutter.

Indeed, real innovation will come from doing alot more than making materials accessible online -- it will come from making connections, in a data-accessible way -- by and among information and people. It will come from giving those tools (and the control that comes from it) directly to consumers themselves in, as some have suggested, a DIY fashion. That is a paradigm shift that my top-10 list attempts to get at.

Finally, my partner Jonathan Edson recently wrote about a macro level view of this and what we are trying to do with Carmun in the context of what he calls "Intellectual Enfranchisement:"

At Carmun, we hope to build a virtual community that provides access for any and all people to that same kind of intellectual foment. If we are successfully, perhaps one day, people will feel that the education you receive has to do with what you put into it and not what institution you are lucky to attend.

Why Carmun?

Over the past five years, I've seen an abundance of web-based innovation centered around structuring data and different data-types.

Many interesting applications have been developed to address a similar problem: how to manage data-types in an always-connected, Internet-centric environment. Some of these data types are new and digital (digital music and photography, for example), and some are old and analog but are now being delivered and consumed in a digital world (news and information and search).

Thus, we've seen applications such as Flickr to manipulate the data type digital images. iTunes and Last.fm to manipulate digital sound data. YouTube for more streaming moving images media. Wikipedia for "objective" information. Google for search. Facebook and MySpace for social community. Huffington Post for the news. Delicious for web pages. Etc.

What I find common is that these categories of applications all solve the same problem: how to structure, categorize and manipulate different types of data in a digital presentation and application environment.

Additionally, they all use common techniques to achieve their result and bring utility to users. Namely, collaborative filtering, user generated content for creation and sharing, interoperability.

Carmun is an attempt to bring these phenomena to education. Whereas applications called social networks seem to exist to help improve one's social life, Carmun's mission is to help improve academic experience and outputs. Thus, the "data-type" Carmun attempts to help organize, share and manipulate is research: books, articles and more generally sources. It's goal is to transform the way people share, use and generate knowledge, thereby making academic tasks easier and enabling powerful new communities of learning. It will contain tools and community to achieve that.

It's a large, complicated task that solves a few problems: existing tools are expensive and not connected; the nature of education can inhibit collaboration; existing communities don't improve the academic experience. In essence, we're attempting to build a tools and collaboration "application layer" on top of education. Clarence Fischer explained it as: "Share what you know. Tear down the walls." C. Elizabeth Thomas has mixed feelings but kindly wrote that "I’m wondering why I have mixed feelings and am beginning to think it’s my paradigm shifting…." Other comments are here and here.

Education and technology

I am working on a longer post about Carmun (http://www.carmun.com/) for sometime in the next week. Needless to say, my post, and this business I founded in general, are about utilizing technology in new ways to enhance learning, connections, and learning connections.

Thus, I regularly read the work of Clarence Fisher, a teacher who writes wonderfully interesting materials on his site called Remote Access, about technology and learning. His thoughts are particularly insightful because he is a practitioner, an educator, and can therefore speak from firsthand experience.

On his site today he wrote about the familiar concept of signal vs noise, but applied to learning:

"When students are aggregating streams of content in many forms, from many sources each day, the ability to lift out certain pieces from that stream to examine them further, or to simply tag them as important to their understanding of an issue is a skill to consider. It is essential information management that has yet to make it into classrooms in any wide spread form. Understanding that a picture from flickr goes with that blog post, which built on a podcast from last week and a comment before that is a difficult, mature understanding of how content is created, distributed, and built upon."

While my longer exposition here is being written, I would also like to suggest that the tools and applications to manage this type of "information management" (the ability to take disparate, and multiplied sources of info, and make connections among them efficiently and appropriately) , in the context of education and learning, have only begun to emerge. I believe that those tools, in turn, will help spread information management into many areas, classroom included.

Carmun, Education

[M]etabrain [E]ntry [L]og:

So far we've predominantly been discovering better ways of representing standard course materials on webpages. This corresponds to the first phase of a new form of media: that of a new way to do old things. "Cell phones are like landlines without cords." At some point a paradigm shift occurs, and the new form of media isn't "Old Media With Feature X" but a separate thing in its own right, and gets used in apps that weren't even on the radar before; smartphones, SMS, and location-based messaging, for example. The two phenomena snowball into each other, and soon enough the world is chang'd, at least in some small way.

We're seeing the beginnings of a transformation for education as seen through the internet corresponding to just this kind of shift, where we move beyond the "put the old class material on html" and into... what? I don't know, but here are three trends I've got my eyes on; ambient information, communities of apprenticeship, and public reflection. I'll cover each of these in a separate post later on, with the disclaimer (courtesy of my friend David) that it's tough to predict a horizon that's shrinking towards you; a few years from now we'll probably look at these posts and laugh.

In the meantime, take a peek at Carmun. It's a web 2.0 startup designed to help students track and share reference lists - for instance, if I'm taking a course in educational theory, I can put articles and books from class in Carmun and they'll be there for seamless referencing and bibliography creation later on when I'm writing my final paper. Better yet, if you take the same course next semester and ask me about good books to read on the subject, I can send you my reference list via Carmun (with links to the original papers and everything) instead of copy-pasting my pdf's endnotes into an email (where you'd have to laboriously re-search for each article in JSTOR anyway). You can write notes on papers and books, rate and tag them, and generally use it as an all-purpose reading list for whatever you're interested in learning.

Carmun

Carmun is a wonderful service (where I am a founder/investor) with alot of potential. Call it social networking for brainiacs, the yin to the Facebook yang, whatever . . . but its goal is to create an online community for college and grad students by making the task of doing academic work easier. A nice social purpose, with a profit motive of course.

Cesar Brea wrote a nice post about Carmun, wherein he wrote:

Carmun is (my words) "social citation search", principally for academics,
but also for anyone trying to find (good) books or journal articles on a
topic (like school kids and college students).

Carmun helps you find good materials on your subject by crawling the Library of Congress index, and parsing out citations from footnotes and bibliographies into a structured data format (is there an RSS extension that makes sense here?). Search is "social" in that it relies on ratings by users to help filter results.

Nice description. Thanks Cesar.

I'm starting to see more rich services and applications that can loosely be defined as part of a new education/web services ecosystem, such as LibriVox, Microsoft's Live Search Books, NotePods and Shakespeare Searched.