It was then that I realized that I had 111 Diggs!  I had three emails from friends congratulating me for getting on Lew Rockwell’s home page. Feeling rather embarrassed realizing that thousands of people had read my poorly written (I hadn’t even proofed it as I ran out the door to my date) blog entry, I some quick fixes.

I also want to thank the two of you who offered to donate a little to my school tuition. I didn’t intend to solicit donations to me, but thank you.

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I heard about Ron Paul from a coworker, Duane. For over a year I had watch Duane reading about Ron Paul. I figured Ron Paul was a loony, until one day Duane sent me and email entitled, “An important part of my life.” Duane explained how important the ideas of freedom are to him. It was then I saw that Duane—also a BYU student and a newlywed, bootstrapping a company—had donated over $200 to the cause. I deeply respect Duane so I decided I best pay attention.

Jumping on Youtube I found dozens of interesting videos of the debates. Initially I was bothered when Ron Paul would say that he wants the troops out of Iraq immediately. It wasn’t until after watching hours of Youtube debates on the war, and reading an article by my brother Neal about choosing between our fellow Mormon, Mitt Romney, and Ron Paul that I decided the war is unconstitutional and will never work to fulfill its purpose—to rid the world of terrorists (I will discuss my logic against the war in a later post)

on September 9, I saw this video:

When I clicked “submit” to my first meager $15 (ALOT for me in September) donation, that I realized, “I must really like this guy!”

I knew nothing about the 5th of November until the day of. I couldn’t donate because I didn’t have the money. Since the 5th, myself, three of my brothers, two of my sisters (I am a Mormon, we have a big family), my mom, my uncle, and several friends here at BYU have all been saving and proselytizing for Ron Paul. None of us donated on the 5th and only I have signed up at teaparty07. Looking at this tonight, I believe that is the way we are going to see all the records broken tomorrow.

When people take a minute and look past Ron Paul’s unpolitical image, they see truth and the correct principles of freedom. In Ron Paul I feel as though I can visualize the kind of men who founded this country. Just yesterday I showed my friend from Brazil a video on Ron Paul. When it got done he said, “I would vote for this man!” To bad he is not American.

Here is another video to leave you with:

Donate on the 16th, Tomorrow!

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One of my instructors at BYU, John Richards—a Utah Angel Investor, was talking about Facebook in a lecture series at BYU. He was asking us how Facebook has become so huge? He then explained that it was in part because they started with the College age students. This is what has given Facebook the coolness factor.

It is great to see Ruckus following in Facebook’s footsteps. I imagine that Ruckus was inspired almost entirely by Facebook’s stratagy and that they already have plans to release their music to the general public as some point down the road.

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I just keep thinking that between, Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, online news sources, YouTube, and a growing multitude of other fantastic educational sources online; we have all the keys needed to learn just about anything we want these days. From private schools, to home schooling, to the public school system, to our current advanced education system, there is an incredible need for better, less expensive (in tuition for private schools, but in the absurdly high taxes for public schools, and grants for college), educational recourses in this country. The business world is quickly latching onto the principles of the internet; but, now with this plethora of great online educational recourses in this world, how might we optimize education, give parents the time they desperately need with their children, and create a more competitive educational system?

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This guy (sorry, I didn’t write down his name) now has a complete monopoly. Yet, he is selling them all for $9.95 or less. Not only that, but there is a major scarcity! To maximize the leverage of supply and demand, I would create an Ebay store, and begin auctioning the movies off then I would drive traffic to the store by Pay-Per-Clicks and a couple of press releases on campuses, on the evening News, on KSL, pretty much everywhere I could. I know that if I was in a situation and there was only one edited: Gladiator, or Shawshank Redemption, or BraveHeart, or Last of the Mohicans, I would pay some significant cash for that movie. Add in the auctioning power of Ebay and you will multiply your revenues by 2 fold.

He was in our internet marketing class to find a couple of students who would like to manage his pay-per-click campaigns. He would pay the student until the campaign was over and he would give all the edited FREE movies we want! I almost jumped out of my chair. I had to calm myself down and remember that I am already so swamped with preparations to launch the new iMemoryBook system that I could never effectively add another item to my to do list. Dang…I remember thinking when I first saw the announcement of all these stores going out of business, “Man it would be smart to buy a bunch of these and resale them.” Although I never really seriously considered buying a bunch of these DVD’s I did consider investing a chunk of savings into Google’s IPO, and Vulcan’s IPO (all of these would be fantastic investments). I chickened out on each of them. The only time I have jumped at a great opportunity was when I jumped on with FamilyLearn, which I am certain will pay off sooner than later.

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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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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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Anyway, sorry for getting off on that tangent. Usually I listen to classical music with ear phones while I study. Today, Ben hooked his computer up to the surround sound. The sound quality is surprisingly fantastic. This means that we can have a dance party here at our flat with pandora as our DJ! Pandora Rocks.

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