Perry

Hewitt

Tag: moocs

Friday 5 — 3.25.2016
1. Scott Brinker has released the 2016 marketing technology landscape diagram, mapping 3,874 solutions into six capability categories (shows above). The slide shows that “one platform to rule them all” has not yet emerged — middleware is enabling greater integration among them.
2. When building a digital product, it’s easy for teams from marketing to development to get atomized and hyper-focused on local goals. This chapter from The User’s Journey: Storymapping Products that People Love offers guidance on storymapping tactics to get everyone aligned, and to achieve a great end result.
3. A new Pew report explores U.S. adults habits around personal and professional lifelong learning. How lifelong learning correlates with educational attainment and household income was not surprising. But 80% of adults having “not much awareness” of MOOCs was higher than I might have imagined.
4. Losing your phone is more than an inconvenience — it’s a potential security disaster. Ashley Carman shares lessons learned in her Mexican phone theft nightmare, as well as specific tips for us all. (#1 – Use a password manager.)
5. If you were working in tech in the Internet 1.0 era, you probably know that the pornography industry was instrumental in driving the video serving technology that made all video online possible. This week PornHub launched a new virtual reality (VR) channel to spur adoption, which will presumably in turn drive demand for more robust and lower cost VR infrastructure.
Weekend fun: In tamer video news, four sets of identical twins played a time travel prank on a New York subway. Mildly related: XKCD serves up the perils of estimating time.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.
March 25, 2016
Friday 5 — 7.3.2015
1. What does the White House’s new photography policy tell us about the opportunity for brand building? Read my new piece over at Harvard Business Review on the visual web’s latest victory: the White House selfie.
2. How does do Americans’ internet access and usage correlate with age? Pew has released a new report on Americans’ internet access 2000-2015. Notable findings include that a clear majority of 58% seniors now use the internet — while the overall percentage is lower, it’s rising quickly (see also: Facebook). Class and educational attainment remain access factors but are shrinking.
3. The first few years of widespread access to MOOCs have created a data trove for researchers. Ed tech thinker Justin Reich launched a series of posts on seven observations based on research during his time at HarvardX. The first one: MOOC students are diverse, but trend toward autodidacts.
4. Google released a real-time trends feature to provide live data on the 100 billion searches conducted each month. Scroll down to see the curated data sets Google has made available, and the visualizations created from them.
5. What’s the digital talent gap in marketing today? This post outlines the in-demand skills for the hybrid marketer, which include social, mobile, and data/analytics skills along with a deep understanding the role of content. With all the channels and technologies now available to B2C and B2B marketers, there’s need for a broad skillset that reflects head and heart, quantitative and creative portfolios.
Weekend fun: Don’t feel like braving the traffic this 4th of July weekend? Google Earth just turned 10, and launched some new features to help you explore the world online. Don’t miss this stunning gallery for a great escape.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.
July 3, 2015
Friday 5 — 5.22.2015
1. For those of you already planning your Memorial Day driving routes, Google Maps has released useful, new features alerting users to delays and detours as you enter your destination. Beyond the time estimate, new cards provide additional context about potential delays. Related trivia: Google Maps also released the top destinations from Memorial Day 2014.
2. Google is once again showing tweets in search results, starting with mobile. Now you can search for topics and hashtags directly within Google. At the same time, Twitter is rolling out its own more robust search, with new features for logged-out users. My guess is that Twitter native search will cater more to live Twitter consumption of breaking news or events.
3. More than just music — everyone’s favorite social playlist subscription service Spotify is diversifying into podcasts and programming.
4. Today’s workforce spans multiple generations, new economy and old economy roles, and various degrees of digital capability. Here’s why the expertise gap matters, and why the first step is acknowledging the problem.
5. The MOOC (Massively Open Online Course) hype cycle peaked in 2012, but educators are still trying to crack the right formula for effective, online learning. Read this explanation of why primacy of location and cost still matters to motivate learners in a world outside the autodidacts of Silicon Valley.
Weekend fun: It’s the long weekend — why not let loose with some street dancing to beatboxers. Bad weather where you are? Then pore through these examples of faux code in TV and movies.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.
May 22, 2015
Friday 5 — 10.31.2014
1. Benedict Evans demonstrates how mobile is eating the world. It’s worth reading for the astonishing growth metrics, like 80% of all adults in the world owning smartphones by 2020. One larger point is that tech is rapidly moving beyond the tech sector to transform all industries. And for now, that starts mobile first.
2. Product managers are critical in the software industry — and this discipline is spreading as every company develops a software capability. We need more ways to educate people into becoming product managers, as well as to provide ongoing professional development opportunities.
3. Reddit added a crowdfunding capability to allow community members to raise money and support causes they care about. Already an early adopter of cryptocurrencies, Redddit is expanding the suite of services that keep community members happy and engaged on the site.
4. Google now surfaces a sitelinks search box to branded search results — a box that allows you to search a website directly from the Google results page. Here’s how you can disable it.
5. MOOC 1.0 has emerged from its first hype cycle a little worse for wear. How can we ensure that next generation MOOCs will deliver effective and compelling online learning? Here’s a great roundup of lessons to be learned from other online experiences from commerce to social networking.
Weekend fun: Dancing with drones? Someone’s gotta do it, I guess.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.
October 31, 2014
Friday 5 — 10.04.2013
1. Have fun playing with bitly’s new Real Time Media Map, which visualizes how content from different media outlets is being consumed across the U.S. As you can see from the drilldown above, we read a lot of The Onion here in Massachusetts.
2. Next week Google Analytics opens its free, online Analytics Academy. Another example of MOOCs as the new marketing — and a great opportunity for anyone in digital looking to develop skills in a fast-growing segment.
3. Snapchat shifts focus from the fleeting to a full 24-hour window with its move into Snapchat Stories. Users can now construct chains of moments into stories which expire after a day.
4. Group messaging service What’sApp is being billed as another great threat to Facebook. Like WeChat, the service has strongholds in multiple markets outside the U.S.
5. Twitter disclosed its IPO plans to raise $1 billion revealing both lower than anticipated revenue, and 218 million active users/month. Most significantly, 65% of advertising revenue is now from mobile.
Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Please let me know what I’ve missed in the comments below.
October 4, 2013
Friday 5 — 07.12.2013
Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.
1. What would reddit be without GIFs? Buzzfeed asks if imgur is not-so-stealthily taking over reddit from the inside.
2. Coursera brought in $43 million in an allegedly oversubscribed round — raising their total VC funding to $66 million. Goals are to grow team, expand into mobile, and improve third party integration.
3. The Washington Post reports on new research on women leaders and the Goldilocks syndrome. Still a double bind between being assertive and acquiescent, but some progress in perception of the assertive.
4. For those of you obsessed with productivity hacks, IFTTT goes mobile with an iPhone app. Who knew back in sixth grade math that if-then statements would be an important part of daily life?
5. Hard to believe that it was only five years ago that Apple’s app store opened its virtual doors. Here’s a recap of some of the significant advances during that half-decade, like the creation of a $10 billion new industry, and impact of a mobile workforce on enterprise IT practices.
July 12, 2013
Friday 5 – 05.17.2013
Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.
1. Google celebrated I/O by dialing up the design, it seems. There are some sexy, new fast actions in Gmail and a flat, card-based Google+ re-launch that shows they’ve been doing plenty of pinning over in Mountain View.
2. David Carr on Snooping and the News Media: It’s a 2-Way Street. Best line about digital trails: “The absence of friction has led to a culture of transgression. Clearly, if it can be known, it will be known.”
3. Twitter buys some visualization skills so we have more ways to make sense of all those tweets.
4. Quartz takes a look at why iPhones still have the lion’s share of mobile data activity. “So while it is true that Android phones vastly outsell iPhones, Apple users seem to be getting a lot more out of their devices. For now, at least.”
5. There’s a lot of crisp thinking and beautiful writing going on in this elegant longform piece on MOOCs, Harvard, and higher education by Nathan Heller in The New Yorker.
May 17, 2013
College decision day

It’s May 1 — international workers’ day in many parts of the world — but for some anxious teens here in the U.S. it’s the day to decide where to go to college. And everyone, it seems, from family to college counselors to teachers to friends is eager to help them make the right decision. Even the boldface font of the New York Times blog on admissions sends a message: The Choice is a big deal, and you’d better make the right one.

Of course, there are better and worse choices. Students with a well-defined passion for Aramaic or a unique flavor of epidemiology will need to find the right scholars and research opportunities for their intellectual pursuits. And funding is an important factor to consider for nearly everyone (here are some harrowing charts on the student borrowing bubble).

But there are many students with general liberal arts interests who are seeking one definitive, correct answer: an answer that will lead to the right Sliding Doors style sequence of events. For these students, there are a frustrating number of good choices. A proliferation of PhDs means there are terrific faculty across the country (and of course, around the globe). The internet opens up access to library and museum materials previously segregated by geography and institution. And the precipitous rise of MOOCs means that anyone so inclined can expand their knowledge for no or relatively low cost.

This year, I’ve spoken to a number of students in the throes of the decision. Some are weighing two-year community college to state options; some are choosing among Ivies; most fall somewhere in between in terms of selective options. There are in every case tradeoffs, but no bad options — but the anxiety-provoking paradox of choice is in full effect for these teens.

When pressed for the right choice, I tell them that the best decision that they can make is to bet on themselves. Study hard. Challenge yourself. Get some quantitative skills. Make the most of wherever you go. The people who are struggling with their careers in their 20s and 30s don’t break down neatly along college selectivity lines or Fiske Guide entries. The common element is people who didn’t invest in the knowledge, skills, networks, or adaptive learning approach for today’s market ( this Tom Friedman column captures the shift precisely). And while there are better and worse college fits, there are remarkable number of excellent institutions where you can find all of the above.

So, congratulations to the Class of 2017. Whatever box you checked today — if you’ve committed yourself to learning, you’ve made the right choice.

May 1, 2013
3 tips for timelines
I can still remember the pain of drawing history report timelines during an analog childhood. The inevitable result was a shaky line of unequal width, with at least one or two skips on the ruler, and uneven pointed arrows each end. A career in draughtsmanship did not beckon.

Timelines seem like the kind of thing digital technology would solve easily. We’d all agree on a protocol and set of user experience conventions, and voilà — a customizable template for slider-enabled, scannable history of any topic. Sadly, that doesn’t seem to have happened. While there are some solid solutions out there, there’s still a wide variety in execution and no common user experience dominates. Here are three tips for designing and developing a timeline.
1. Think upfront about the content types/data points and the relationship among them. Will there be video? A slideshow? An infographic? When crafting the layout, let the content drive the design and not the reverse. It’s too easy to fall in love with a polished design experience to realize only too late that it won’t accommodate the information that will tell the story.
2. Build in substantial testing with real users to make sure that features are not too subtle to be useful. It’s easy to underestimate actual user frustration with fiddly fingers and a bouncing eye track.
3. Mobile views of the timeline are a requirement in a world where the Guardian reports record mobile traffic, and Buzzfeed, going after the bored-people-in-line market is up to 50% mobile. As devices and browsers proliferate, the user experience may need to degrade gracefully for some devices.
Here are two recent timeline examples with divergent approaches and effects. First, the Chronicle of Higher Education offers a timeline of MOOCs (massively open online courses). It’s a clean if clunky view, with a collapse feature that reduces the elements to headlines and a button to reverse the chronology. A vertical view may be easier for older users, but there’s no responsive for mobile. Best of all the timeline accommodates various content formats while keeping the layout clean.

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) launched a beta site last week (coverage here) with a timeline view of the assets. This timeline is elegant, with a sexier horizontal orientation and responsive for mobile (although not fully swipe-able). The biggest challenge posed here is the content — there’s a long historical timeframe but some screens with 0 items shown. The controls are also extremely sensitive, and you have to drag the slider rather than click on an individual year to jump back and forth.

Bottom line: timelines aren’t a universally solved problem or easy to get right — a successful outcome depends on balancing functionality with design and working with the content and timeframe you have.
April 26, 2013
Getting ready for the campus tsunami

The early Web radically democratized culture, but now in the media and elsewhere you’re seeing a flight to quality. The best American colleges should be able to establish a magnetic authoritative presence online.

David Brooks, The Campus Tsunami

May 4, 2012