Een projectvoorstel voor een Leraar-on-demand

De laatste tijd ben ik bezig geweest met een idee om een leraar-on-demand systeem voor het middelbaar onderwijs te bouwen. Een bericht over de Universiteit Wageningen heeft me een oppepper gegeven en hierbij zet ik het projectvoorstel online.

Voorstel

Kern van het voorstel is om het enthousiasme van leraren, oud-leraren en anderen zodanig te vangen dat deze beschikbaar komt voor alle leerlingen op het middelbaar onderwijs. Het voorstel bevat daarvoor drie deelvoorstellen die afzonderlijk al tot een versterking van het middelbaar onderwijs kunnen zorgen, maar gezamenlijk zijn ze een combinatie die het onderwijs naar een hoger niveau kunnen brengen.

Eerste deelproject: Voor elke leermethode, elk scholingsniveau en elk studiejaar, worden een of twee enthousiaste leraren een jaar lang tijdens hun lessen gevolgd met een camera. Deze lesuren worden bewerkt en in hapklare filmpjes per onderwerp op het internet aangeboden. Gedurende en na dit jaar kunnen leerlingen van alle Nederlandse scholen profiteren van de uitleg van deze enthousiaste leraren. Hiermee kunnen ze de gaten in hun geheugen vullen en het enthousiasme voor het vak krijgen dat ze met een uur les en zelfstudie niet of minder hadden gehad.

Tweede deelproject: Er wordt een website ingericht waar leraren onderling additionele uitleg, opgaven, verdiepingsstof, tips, lesmethoden etc. kunnen uitwisselen. Hierdoor kunnen leraren leren van elkaars ideeën, deze aanvullen en verbeteren. Het resultaat is dat het algemene niveau van het onderwijs door de leraren omhoog gaat en dat goede ideeën niet beperkt blijven tot een kleine groep, maar verspreid worden over alle leraren in een bepaald vak.

Derde deelproject: Het derde deelproject is een website waar leerlingen additionele uitleg, opgaven, verdiepingsstof, tips etc. kunnen bestuderen. Deze website is gekoppeld aan de inhoud van het eerste deelproject en wordt (mede) gevoed door de content die gemaakt wordt op de website van de leraren.

Vragen aan de lezer:
Graag hoor ik uw mening over de volgende vragen.

- Wat zijn vergelijkbare initatieven die een deel of de gehele functionaliteit al bieden?
- Kloppen de uitgangspunten?
- Welke verbeterpunten zijn er nog voor het projectplan?
- Wie zouden dit plan tot uitvoering kunnen brengen in Nederland?
- Welke partijen moeten dit plan ondersteunen om dit tot uitvoer te kunnen brengen? Hoe moeten deze partijen benaderd worden?
- Wie zou dit plan kunnen/moeten financieren om het tot een succes te maken?
- Wat zijn de reeële kosten van dit plan?
- Gaat dit echt voordelen opleveren voor de BV Nederland?
- Waarom zou het een verspilling van tijd, geld en moeite zijn om tijd erin te steken om dit plan te proberen te realiseren?

Reaction to Susan Crawford's post on Telstra

Susan Crawford wrote a great entry on Telstra on her blog. I replied and changed my reply a bit. In short. There are parties trying to compete with Telstra in Australia. Telstra, the incumbent telco, is a very mean dog to fight with. They are as anti-competitive as it comes. Telstra's plans to roll out a new network, but threatens they will only do this if they are allowed a regulatory holiday (Just like Deutsche Telekom). The competing parties will still need access to Telstra's copper for the last couple of hundred meters.

I first thought that Telstra was going to do FTTH, but they are going the VDSL2+ route if I interpret this article by Stephen Bartholemeusz correctly, however the economics remain the same. Stephen has the right conclusions, except one: there is no reason to assume that wireless will ever be a real competitor to broadband. An addition it will be, but not a replacement. But he is right there is no reason to assume that Telstra's competitors will be able to build a viable network to compete wit Telstra's. This discussion is however not unique to Australia, but also appears in Germany, The Netherlands, the UK and everywhere else where VDSL2+ is rolled out. LLU just isn't possible with VDSL2+. You need to be 450meters away from the customer and that is just too much fiber for normal companies to pay.

The fundamental problem behind Net Neutrality, behind regulation etc. is: Who is going to pay for the (ftth-)network. The economics of a ftth-network are such that one set of fibers provides infinite bandwidth. Economics predicts in dynamic models that if two people invest in a large sunk costs, low marginal costs business that are indistinguishable from eachother, that the result will be a race to the bottom. The parties will sell at marginal costs and not at full costs. The result will be with fiber that one network is doomed to go bankrupt. However since the network can easily be bought and reused by someone else, the buyer can run it for minimal costs from bankruptcy. A good example was 360networks, who invested 875 million in trans-atlantic fiber. They went bankrupt and were bought for 18 million and have operational costs of 10 million. Now imagine how their competitors in transatlantic fiber felt. They must have been gutted, because all of the sudden somebody on the market had only paid 18 million and all of them paid 875 million. Well we know where that ended.

The trouble for Australia is, that it will cost a couple of billion to build a nation spanning fiber network. 3 billion for FTTN and 3-4 times as much probably for FTTH. With two networks chances are one of them will go bankrupt. If that network is bought by an outsider, that outsider will have a better base to compete on. (40x cheaper for the buyer of 360 networks) This will probably kill off the other competitor too in the "long run". Unless both parties agree to a cease fire, but that is a cartel and it would mean that the new entrant can reap enormous profits from the network.

Some might say: That is capitalism at its best and in the end the consumers will have two networks working at marginal costs. How great. They forget that somebody needs to invest in those networks. That somebody is quite often a pension fund. Those are the loosing parties. Many pensioners paid for the current bandwidth glut. Smart investors know that and therefore don't invest in ftth, because if you get a competitor, well it's mutually assured destruction.

So what to do. You can roll out a fiber network for 1500dollar/subscriber maximum. On top of that network you can build Wimax, UMTS, Wifi and anything else you like. All for 32 dollars a month/subscriber. That network pays itself back in ten years with 10% interest. But, there is an enormous but, it would mean governments accepting that layer one is not the layer there will be any competition at. It is just bad business to compete at layer one.

So regulate it and demand wholesale broadband access. Create chinese walls or even split it. It's cynical, but its true.

Thoughts on Wetpaint

Frank of Frankwatching read what I wrote previously on Socialtext and Jotspot and asked me what my opinion was on Wetpaint. He runs a very popular Dutch blog on digital trends, like blogs, wiki's and Web 2.0. He named Wetpaint his favorite wiki a while ago because of its usability. So I went to their site and sandbox and it is amazing how userfriendly it is. The boys/girls from Jotspot, Socialtext and the Wikipedia can learn something from it! However it is more for use on the internet then on the corporate intranet, since it comes in short there. It also seems they don't want to be in that arena, but try to make it easy for people to have their own wiki's on various subjects and make money from ads on those pages. So here are my thoughts on Wetpaint.

The Good
- Easy user interface. You can explain this to anyone. Wysiwyg done right
- The user interface for uploading pictures is exactly how people would expect it. It works with a popup box that lets you select the picture from your harddisk, upload it and put it in the page.
- Usage of tags can provide valuable meta-information. This is great with large wiki's
- The 'Page Toolbox' gives a good overview of what you can do with a page eg: send, print, edit etc.
- Excellent user page that shows who the user is, with user provided information, their edits etc. This was the one thing I really missed in both Jotspot and Socialtext.
- Nice design of the site and it seems it can be skinned and changed to fit the content. I saw one site on the tv-series Lost that really caught a vibe.

The Bad
- The editing box is too small. It should be page size to encourage people to enter text. If you want to share knowledge you don't want people to feel guilty that they use up more space.
- There are no tables in the wiki. Tables are practical and you can't do without in a corporate environment
- There is no possibility to send e-mail to a page, thereby immediately loosing my vote for the corporate environment. In the corporate environment an e-mail to a page can cut down the e-mail clutter and will be instant sharing of the contents of that mail with the entire company instead of three co-workers.
- It can only be used as a hosted service and there is no possibility to shield it off from the rest of the world. This is logical in their business model, but they could beat a lot of the standard wiki's by offering it in different ways.
- There is no possibility to edit HTML. Now I'm all for ease of use and shielding the normal user from the technical details. However, when there are powerusers, you want to give them the possibility to use the powers they have to improve what they are entering into the wiki. So where I criticized Socialtext for needing to go to advanced (HTML)-mode, I am critiquing these guys for not having one. It should be this way: you should never need it, but should be able to use it.

Socialtext versus Jotspot

Well I worked with both Socialtext and Jotspot. Both systems are Enterprise Wiki's. They have suprised me and buying either one I think is a good idea. There is no reason why I would want to use a primitive wiki like Mediawiki in the organisation. Mediawiki has only one edge over the Jotspot and Socialtext and that is that you have a good centralized user page, where a user can get an overview of what he has done, what has changed and inform others of who he is. Both Socialtext and Jotspot don't have someting like that.

Enterprise wiki's are great because:

• They center work on a topic around a group of webpages
• They are easy to use. Socialtext is just a double click on a page
• They open up information to the entire organization through simple searches
• Information entered into them for the benefit of the project group is immediately also of benefit to others. So when doing my job, I unintended also help others
• They enable sending e-mail to and from pages, enabling e-mail repositories and lists of useful links on the relevant page.
  
• By sending an e-mail to the relevant project page, you add both metadata to the page and to the e-mail.
  
• They are free form, but can be structured
• If one co-worker doesn't update his page, because of time constraints or just being dead, others can.
  
• They can be about such highly critical information as: Best restaurants in Berlin, travel suggestions to Kiev, the latest law and its implications, biographies of important people, a list of insultants, the next project meeting or the office Christmas party, without requiring a central command and control structure.
  
• They don't assume where knowledge is in the organization.
  

The way I tested was. Getting an account, fiddling with them for a week or two and then letting them be for 3 weeks and then fiddling some more and come up with a conclusion. Socialtext was the wiki I showed to colleagues who didn't know what a wiki was and why they would want one. Jotspot was the one I used for colleagues who knew wat a wiki was, but wondered if it was versatile enough. Jotspot was the one that kept me most thinking about what I could do more with it, what kind of apps I would like to develop etc. Socialtext was really the wiki where I thought I would need no formal training for colleagues.

All in all, I would choose Jotspot. But if I would have to buy it for 2000 people, I would seriously request some changes in the software. However if you choose Socialtext you'll be happy to know that for the most part you won't need to think of implementation or user education.

Thoughts on Jotspot

Well, the previous post was on Socialtext and as promised, this one is on Jotspot. A while ago I posted something on knowledge management in organizations. In that last post I already indicate that wiki's seem to solve most of the problems. In my opinion Jotspot is the best solution for an enterprise wiki at the moment, though Socialtext wins on ease of use, which is a very important point too. However, the problems of Jotspot are easily fixed. But lets start with the good and end with the bad

The Good
- Easy to use, uncluttered user interface with a good WYSIWYG editing tool. Not as easy as Socialtext, but still.
- The editing tool has a good arrangement of functions including tools for tables. This makes that editing is as straight forward as in Word
- You can easily add new applications to your wiki, like knowledge management tools, weblogs, company directory, spreadsheets, photogallery's, forums, bug reporters, project management tools etc. It is only a click away.
- You can even add and build your own applications in Jotspot.
- You can send e-mail to the pages and add attachments to pages. It is even sophisticated enough that you can import Word and Excel including pictures right into the pages.
- You can right click text and format the text the way you want it.
- It has RSS feeds of entire wiki's and specific pages
- Administration allows for easy editing of user privileges with regards to pages.
- Good pricing plan. You can use it over the web and you can buy an appliance.
- Seems very flexible, with scripts, XML and other features. It really looks like the platform hasn't reached the end of its potential for a long while.

The Bad
Some of the problems I had with Socialtext show up here too.
- Attaching images to pages is done through adding a URL. So you first need to attach a picture and then link, or find it on the net. Should be just a little dialog box and an upload feature.
- When you want to mail to a page you need to add a code to the page. In company situations you really don't want that. It requires explaining and explaining is bad.
- No integration with corporate LDAP or Active Directory.
- (Same as Socialtext) Every unique user should have a unique users page. On the one hand it should allow him/her to make an introduction, contact details, to link to pages they have edited, their weblog, projects they are on, tasks they have to do and links to the project pages. It should be the homebase for the user for much of its editing and also a place for others to find out what you're working on. (For an example, see wikipedia) This last gripe is one of my major ones, together with the next one. For Jotspot it would allow a great integration of all the various applications with a central place for the user to get his information.
- it could help structure projects etc with some pre-structured workspaces and pages. People should just be able to click buttons that say: Start new project. Start new workspace. start new informational page etc.
- E-mails at the bottom of the page should be threaded and collapsible.
- Just having a left windowpane leaves an uncluttered view, but also wastes screenspace that could be used for more information.
- Looking at the bugs pages of Jotspot doesn't give me a warm feeling someone is working on the bugs. No comments, no status updates etc.
- Many of the applications could use a smoother user interface and sometimes feel rough at the edges, like they haven't been really finished yet.
- Sometimes it feels slower than socialtext.
- Really bad is that internal links aren't done by a simple button, but by a complicated one looking like a W. It is called Toggle WikiWords. No idea what it meant until I started using it. I can't expect a 49 year old computerphobe to understand this in the first look --> They should look at Socialtext.
- Focus on Wikiwords while linking internally and new pages. WikiWords are two or more words joined with no spaces and capitals for each word like this: WikiWordsAreNotEasyForNewbies. It should just be a selection of a couple of words and than a click of a button. Turns out it can work that way, even with spaces. But it isn't explained like that and it doesn't follow from the user interface.
- I still haven't found out what Anchors are. (if you edit text anchors show up like green blocks around text, if you go out of edit mode, nothing shows up).

Conclusion
Great system, lots of potential, lots of possibilities. It is sometime rough around the edges. It makes me worried that co-workers wouldn't really understand everything and would need coaching and training to introduce them to the system. But lots of the ajaxie widgets give me the idea that every 6 months there will be a new app that will make some colleagues work easier. I do think I would choose it over Socialtext because of this.

Thoughts on Socialtext

As said in a previous post, I'm looking into wiki's to support knowledge management and just the general work within my organisation. One of the wiki's I'm looking into is Socialtext another one that I will write about later is Jotspot. Socialtext offers a nice free trial version online. So you can look at it yourself and always do, because I might have missed something, or your needs might be different.

The Good
- The best thing of Socialtext is its double click editing. It just can't get easier. You double click, the page turns yellow where you can edit it and it shows an editing toolbar, like you know from Word
- The toolbar is very straight forward and user friendly
- The way it deals with links is very easy to use. It has an icon for an (internal) link, an external link, link to an attachment and one to include an image however the image one is under bad.
- You can send e-mail to pages
- In the side bar, you get a good view af what you've done recently
- There are instant weblogs
- Links to non-existant pages have dotted line under them. This way you know there is nothing there yet and you can easily edit it yourself.
- It supports RSS. Now if only Internet Explorer would support it.
- you can organize your pages in Workspaces. So for each project a workspace.
- pricing is affordable and you can either get it as an appliance or through the net.
All in All it has all the main features and several more I would want in a proper enterprise wiki.

The Bad (or some improvements I would like to see
- There is a simple mode for editing and an advanced mode. Advanced Mode is HTML-like in syntax and therefore not straightforward. Some things can only be done in advance mode.
- the image and attachment function is only available in advance mode and because of its HTML-like syntax probably unusable for normal people. It should preferably open up a dialogue box, ask for the picture to be inserted, upload it and show it.
- E-mail to pages requires the name of the page to be in the subject field of the mail. Should be in the adress, before the @-sign. It now uses the name of the workspace before the @ sign, but not a securitycode like jotspot. If you give every page an e-mail adress, users will not have to think of writing the name of the page correctly in the subject field. Furthermore they can more easily cc a page as a central repository of mail.
- E-mail to pages shows up at the bottom of the page, without a possibility to collapse the mails, sort them into threads , so with potentially tens of e-mails, the page could get a long tail.
- it is not easy to see at first how to start a new workspace --> this is done in the Settings page
- it is unclear if you can close viewing of a page to a selected group of people. Sometimes this could be very handy. (Say you're organizing a party for the company and people are not allowed to know the secret progams)
- Every unique user should have a unique users page. On the one hand it should allow him/her to make an introduction, contact details, to link to pages they have edited, their weblog, projects they are on, tasks they have to do and links to the project pages. It should be the homebase for the user for much of its editing and also a place for others to find out what you're working on. (For an example, see wikipedia) This last gripe is one of my major ones, together with the next one.
- it could help structure projects etc with some pre-structured workspaces and pages. People should just be able to click buttons that say: Start new project. Start new workspace. start new informational page etc.

Conclusion
Definitely worth considering. Tough to make a choice between Socialtext and Jotspot. Though at the moment I would choose Jotspot because it has more features and I like some of them alot. More about Jotspot in a later post.

Aansteken AGPO NEV124 CV-ketel

Heb je een AGPO Nev 124 CV-ketel en lukt het je niet om het ding aangestoken te krijgen? Dan volgt hier de niet officiële, negeer de officiële instructie, geheel op je eigen risico, het werkte bij mij wel, handleiding.

- De handleidingsticker zegt dat het de stekker van het apparaat uit het stopcontact moet. FOUT. Stekker erin
- Warm water kraan open of Thermostaat op allerhoogst, zodat ie aanslaat
- Grijze knop van het gas, conform handleiding 20 seconden indrukken.
- Na 20 seconden vonk knop indrukken... TACK, TACK, TACK etc. Presto. Bij mij binnen 4 TACKS was het ding weer aan.
- 30 seconden ingedrukt houden, want anders gaat ie weer uit.

Oh ja, dit is op eigen risico. Het slimste is natuurlijk om de storingsdienst te bellen. Gaat er iets stuk als gevolg van het volgen van dit advies, dan moet je weten dat ik ambtenaar ben. Die vertrouw je nooit, vertrouw mij dan nu ook niet. Voor verwarmingszaken bel je een verwarmingsmonteur. Dus nog een keer: Eigen risico, eigen schuld. Ik ben niet verantwoordelijk


Met dank aan ahhing en nino

Knowledge management problems in a large organization.

I've been thinking about knowledge management lately. I thought I share some of the ideas I have.

Organization
The intended use is in the organization I work for. It is a large government ministry. The personnel consists mostly of academics, together with support staff functions, like finance, personnel and IT. We mostly make policies and laws, but don't execute them. (Others have to work with the mess we create) So all in all it is not too different from what you would see in the private sector in think tanks, consultancies etc.

Work revolves around the processing of information. There are developments in government, politics, society, courts, etc. to which we react. Reactions consist mostly out of rules, regulations, information campaigns, subsidies, taxes. The actual execution of those is mostly the work of other organizations. So my work consists of projects (that can run indefinitely) and going concern issues, which can linger dormant for a while, until somebody in parliament sees an item on the news. Information in, information out.

The problem
Big problem in an organization like ours is getting access and distributing information that exists in one part to other parts. It is amazing how hard it is to first of all find out who is responsible for certain topics. Of course we have lists, who does what, but finding them is not always easy. Some departments publish them on the corporate intranet and with the new Google Search Appliance, we can actually find them. But finding out what their projects entail, the intended output, project plans, drafts, introductions into the subject, is quite simply impossible.

E-mail is the tool of choice
Work in projects is done through mail. Recently for a project I made summaries of the opinions of various stakeholders. All the project members mailed the summaries to each other, but how other people should get access to it? I don't know. Could it be of interest to others? Probably. Same goes for a list of all the research conducted financed by the ministry etc. All this information is somewhere, but getting it depends on finding the right colleague at the right moment. The hundreds of professionals create so much information on so many topics and so often they explain the same thing, multiple times, it is almost amazing we get any work done.

One would think that if e-mail is the tool of choice, it would be easy to find that one e-mail that contains the required information. Of course not! First of all we use Outlook. Microsoft should be beaten over the head for not properly letting people search quickly in all their mailboxes. The IT-department makes things worse by requiring people to have a maximum mailbox size of 150 megabytes. Amnesia by regulation! Desktop search programs (Lookout and Google) are only used by a very limited pilot group to whom I belong fortunately. It has been a blessing, it has made searching 3 years of mail for e-mail relevant to a court case a breeze. Instead of performing a regular lobotomy, it lets the memory grow manageable.

Why is e-mail such a success? Isaac Garcia gave the following reasons and I agree with him:

• Email is Easy To Understand
• Email is Universal
• Email is Accessible from Anywhere
• Email can be Personalized
• Email is Manageable/Configurable
• Email is Searchable
• Email is In Your Face
• Email Just Works

The Solution
So now I'm looking for the solution. The solution would ideally be the following. It would have to be a tool that facilitates collaboration and as a result of that collaboration yield information that is available and relevant to other people. So a collaboration tool that has a byproduct knowledge management.

Document Management Systems?
The solution is not Document Management systems. I've been trying to use a Document Management System now for some months. It has been pushed from the top down into the organization. It is supposed to replace the group directories on a central disk. It is wrong in so many ways, both the product and the implementation, just read and cry:

• It's not easy
  
• Everything requires multiple steps.
• The dictated structure doesn't follow users expectations
• Only the archivists are allowed to change the tree. Every change is certainly one e-mail. Sometimes more.
  
• It supports the archivists, not the policy advisors.
  
• Just dropping stuff in it doesn't work. Every item you put into it requires a description, a location and a name. Average time certainly a minute. Try archiving just the important e-mails of a day (that adds up to at least 30 minutes a day).
  
• Structure comes through a tree hierarchy, not a weblike structure.
  
• The servers underperformed, breaking search and more
• The way it works is different for each application of the MSoffice suite.
  
• There are no direct bonuses in storing information in this system.
• It doesn't encourage people to store everything in it. It only encourages to store official documents, that need an official number.
  
• Collaboration is quicker done through sending an e-mail and later editing manually than through using the system.
  

Basically it is only useful to archive important documents There were three good design decisions:

• Everything is open to all.
  
• There are multiple ways of working with the software: Outlook, stand alone and through "Save as.."-dialogues in Office applications
• All incoming physical mail is scanned into the system.
  

Intranets are for staff, not for line.
The intranet is stale and not up to date. This is a common complaint for many corporate intranets. The main reason the professionals don't update the intranet are:

• It is extra work. The information is not the result of me doing my work, it is the result of me doing extra work.
  
• It is something you do for the rest of the organization; not for your project, not for your direct colleagues, but for the 'others'.
  
• There is no return for doing it. It is an investment where all the returns seem to fall somewhere else and you hardly if ever get something back for it.
  
• The medium is the message, so you try to tune your message for the medium. It's not a simple cut and paste operation.
• It is made hard, because you have to jump through many hoops to get the right to edit pages and the structure you can edit is rigid. (example: a diary (blog) I wrote during one week I wrote in Word. I sent it to a secretary, she published it.)
• The person that is supposed to update the page is dead, gone, overworked, ill, retired, uninterested or all of the above.
  
• It is not an intranet, it is a corporate almanac. So all the troubles of publishing a paper almanac apply.
  

So all in all the professionals whose work the intranet should support are not using it to support their work, nor to support the work of others. The only ones that do make use of the intranet are the staff departments. They publish information so that the professionals don't bother them for every small thing like forms, personnel information etc.

Online collaboration tools
I have very great misgivings against these tools, though it has been years since I have actually used them. They are all very task oriented and generally very hierarchical. Furthermore they often exhibit very cumbersome and clumsy interfaces. Worse still, they generally shield all information in the workspace from the rest of the organization, requiring extra work to publish the information.

Wiki's???
My current hope is in Wiki's like Socialtext and Jotspot. I have been fiddling with free trial accounts now for these and I hope to post some first impressions later on. But here are my reasons to think of these wiki's:

• They center work on a topic around a group of webpages
• They are easy to use. Socialtext is just a double click on a page
• They open up information to the entire organization through simple searches
• Information entered into them for the benefit of the project group is immediately also of benefit to others. So when doing my job, I unintended also help others
• They enable sending e-mail to and from pages, enabling e-mail repositories and lists of useful links on the relevant page.
  
• By sending an e-mail to the relevant project page, you add both metadata to the page and to the e-mail.
  
• They are free form, but can be structured
• If one co-worker doesn't update his page, because of time constraints or just being dead, others can.
  
• They can be about such highly critical information as: Best restaurants in Berlin, travel suggestions to Kiev, the latest law and its implications, biographies of important people, a list of insultants, the next project meeting or the office Christmas party, without requiring a central command and control structure.
  
• They don't assume where knowledge is in the organization.
  

Later on I will post some impressions of Wiki like software for these purposes. Current ideas are Socialtext: cool and easy, but expensive. Jotspot: cool, loads of features, cheap. Confluence: interesting, bit techy. Plain standard Wiki: Too primitive, too much like an intranet that anybody can edit.