jeffreyharmon.net

Every week I receive 5 to 10 emails from my Religion class members saying. “Hey everyone, I missed class today, can you send me your notes?” It is important that I respond to these emails because I know that I am going to need others notes just as much as they need mine, but I thought there must be a better way. I decided that I would post all my notes on writely, an online word processer (there are several of these online word processors out there, from my experience, writely and zoho writer are the best of the bunch—I would use zoho but the backspace has issues), and then I sent out this email to everyone:

Hey yall’

There is a group of us using writely (just like Microsoft Word but by Google) so that anyone who wants to can be involved in collaborating notes for each lecture. Here is how it will work.

I post my notes each day on writely after class. Everyone else in the class can get on the same notes to read them, edit them, add to them, or share them with even more class members or others you think would like to see them. You can also view them if you miss class. We have collaborated like this in some other classes and it works great.

Just let me know if you want to be a part of our group and I will send you an email with a link to each days notes.

Thanks
Jeff Harmon

Within 30 seconds of sending this email out, I received 2 responses. In the next 16 hours I had more than 50 peers asking for links to collaborate(writely only allows 50)! Everyone LOVED the idea. I was blown away. By the time I got done inviting them all, I wished writely would connect straight into my Gmail groups so that I could just send invites to a group. It was a pain to copy all those emails in. Google should pay me for this. I not only just invited 50 users to writely, but I also just converted about three-quarters of those to get Gmail accounts (you have to have a Gmail account to use writely).

Talk about viral marketing.

Here are some other ways I have used writely:

1. I wrote my essay application to BYU on writely. At the same time I was writing the application, my sister-in-law in Oregon was editing it.
2. The other morning, 1 hour before my paper was due, my mom—850 miles away—collaborated with me to get a project done. We were on the phone talking while we both looked at the same document. I could see as she made corrections, ALL REAL TIME!
3. Yesterday, Daniel and I learned that we had to push out a, 700+ word, press release for iMemoryBook in less than a day. We had at least three people working on the document from two states. It was a synergistic experience. Theron, my brother helping to edit the document from Oregon, was talking to Daniel on the phone. New to writely, Theron asked, “So we can write on this at the exact same time?… wow, this like a wickipedia deathmatch!”
4. I have used writely for several group projects.

Collaboration is King

The power of writely and zoho writer is completely derived from cleanly executed collaboration. There are also spreadsheet collaboration systems from Zoho and Google (these are not near effective enough to replace Excel in most situations yet). Here at FamilyLearn we followed these principles and have created a powerful online collaboration system for families to create and print: wedding books, anniversary books, retirement books, teacher books, family histories, and all kinds of other books. It is called iMemoryBook (the internet memory book). Snapfish recently released sharing/collaboration online as well for creating their photo books. There are countless other collaborative project springing up each year. I think it was Paul Allen who told me that the original guys who started the internet had collaboration in mind as the internet’s primary purpose.

So… how long will it be before we can invite anyone we would like to collaborate with us in, an email document, or even a common blog entry, online photo sharing, family home video editing, and pretty much any thing else? In five years I could see a “collaborate” button as common as spell check on any rich text editing system. Just watch, it is too helpful to not happen.

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This semester I am taking Business Management. I feel like we are cattle all being herded around a single persona of learning, and then graded against each other on the curve. The class is sort of a general academic business class, and it has more than 200 students in the class, and it is quite a culture change being a newly transferred student from LDS Business College (a school with no more than 30 students per class). Andrew Holmes, our professor from Texas, is a very entertaining man, especially here at BYU. Regardless, I have found the class completely ineffective and very hard to stay alert in. When you get behind or lost in a lecture it takes a special kind of person to stop the class continually just to ask a single question that may, or may not, contribute to the overall lecture. I probably make as many comments and questions as any, but most are not this vocal (there wouldn’t be enough time in class if we all were this vocal).

A few days ago, Seth Godin, made a refreshing, short, remark about the effectiveness of learning in groups. Here is what he said:

Listen to this…

What’s the point of talking to a group?

I’m serious. We spend a lot of time in presentations, or at the United Nations, or sending our kids to school. We have orientation sessions and keynote speeches and long-winded oratory on the floor the Senate. Why?

One reason: to incite. To share emotion. To sell. And that’s never going to go out of fashion, as far as I can tell.

But most of the speeches I’m talking about don’t incite. I heard an excerpt on the radio the other day… someone at the EU going on at length about admitting Romania and Bulgaria to the EU. There was even a mention of food safety issues. Thousands of people listening to one person drone on about food safety. This wasn’t an emotional speech designed to sell us on an idea. Instead, it was designed to teach us.

To teach us the way a schoolteacher I heard recently teaches: by reading a text. She stands up at the front of the room, and along with a few web images, reads a text to the class.

Here’s my point: In our scan and skip world, in a world where technology makes it obvious that we can treat different people differently, how can we possibly justify teaching via a speech?

Speech is both linear and unpaceable. You can’t skip around and you can’t speed it up. When the speaker covers something you know, you are bored. When he quickly covers something you don’t understand, you are lost.

If marketing is the art of spreading ideas, then teaching is a kind of marketing. And teaching to groups verbally is broken, perhaps beyond repair. Consumers of information won’t stand for it. We’re learning less every time we are confronted with this technique, because we’ve been spoiled by the remote control and the web.

If you teach–teach anything–I think you need to start by acknowledging that there’s a need to sell your ideas emotionally. So you need to use whatever tools are available to you–an evocative powerpoint image, say, or a truly impassioned speech.

Then, and this is the hard part, if you’re teaching to a group of more than three people, you need to find a way to engage that is non-linear. Q&A doesn’t work for a large group, because only the questioner is engaged at any given moment (if you’re lucky, the questioner represents more than a few, but she rarely represents all).

If it’s worth teaching, it’s worth teaching well. If it’s worth investing the time of 30 or 230 or 3330 people, then it’s worth investing the effort to actually figure out how to get the message across. School is broken. Legislative politics are broken. Linear is broken. YouTube and Bloglines, on the other hand, are new platforms, platforms that enable the education of millions of people every day, quickly and for free.

I have decided that I am going to label this auditorium style education “Old School Education”. It is out dated and less effective. I think that if you are a student you know exactly what I am talking about. As my brother, Neal , said after he got his Masters Degree, “My education had a lot of fuzz in it.” Neal talks alot about education on his blog.

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Team FamilyLearn. I started to take notes today as Paul finished up Pay Per Click Marketing, then I realized the PowerPoint he had was so much better. The PowerPoint was made by one of Paul’s former students, Francisco. I think Francisco has something to do with webevident.com, a company that provides search engine optimization services and software. Paul spoke highly of him, and this PowerPoint with Pauls lecture made a fantastic presentation. My mind was spinning with ideas for how to help iMemoryBook reach those who are looking for a collaborative family book publishing system. Sorry I can’t get you the lecture with the PPT, but this PPT is loaded with great stuff. Just check it out:

Click here to learn How to manage pay per click campaigns.

Click here to learn more about search engine optimization.