Adam Gee, Channel 4's Cross-Platform Commissioner for Factual, last week helped bring together one of the most bizarre, insightful and exhilarating learning experiences I think I've ever taken part in on television: watch a surgeon perform his art/science live on television and ask him questions direct through Twitter.
We will not hold up the cup and the milk and the cake and the fish on a rake, but as the Cat in the Hat said, we know some new tricks and your mother will not mind (unless she’s etherised upon a table, as that other cat-lover said). The plan is to tip our hat (red and white striped topper or whatever) to that increasingly common behaviour of Twittering whilst watching TV and encourage people to tweet away during the live operations, sharing their thoughts and asking questions. The big difference here is that this is live TV and you can make an impact with your tweet on the TV editorial. The best questions tweeted will be fed through to the presenter, arch-Twitterer Krishnan Guru-Murthy of Channel 4 News, who will swiftly pose them to the surgeon at work. So a matter of seconds between tweet and the question being uttered on live TV.
There were, of course, thousands of questions put through to the programme, helping the Surgery Live hashtag #slive hit the 3rd, then 2nd then 1st position on Twitter's trending, but there was also a great deal of conversation about the live operation between complete strangers who had found each other through the commonality of the hashtag, and their shared experience of learning what goes on inside our hearts/brains/stomachs.
In more formal education circles there have been attempts this year to engage audiences across education districts in, for example, live dissections of animals, where students are encouraged to put forward their questions. I think the Channel 4 Twitter experiment reveals some different behaviours that can only be encouraged in these more formal learning situations:
1. Twitter offers a certain degree of anonymity, which can be incredibly helpful in illiciting honest, high value questions from an audience (think other Channel 4 examples like Sexperience and Embarrassing Teenage Bodies, and my forthcoming You Booze You Lose). Where people know who you are, it can be inhibiting ("is my question stupid?", "should I know the answer to this?", "oh, I'll just wikipedia it afterwards"...)
2. The restrictions in place around a 140 character question or message mean that people cut to the chase and avoid the redundant language that clutters thinking in classrooms (and blog posts, VLEs, bulletin boards...). This is something found by the UT Dallas experiment highlighted in Derek Wenmoth this week.
3. Twitter helps you bump into people outside your learning/social circle, which in turn helps you emphathise, and see an issue from someone else's (very different) perspective. The one challenge with any Virtual Learning Environment in a school or country is that you are, more or less, sharing like thought with like thought, shaped by the culture and curriculum around it. When you take the questioning and answering global, you have an almost infinite number of conflicting perspectives to challenge your thinking.
At 4iP my colleague Lucy Würstlin took Twitter to a more entertainment-based medium (Big Brother) with her new product, Hashdash. The Hashdash Big Brother 10 launch night might have seemed pure entertainment, but it indeed helped a number of new Twitterers find their voice by educating the masses in Twitter etiquette, how to use hashdashes to have your message seen by more people with the same passion (in this case, #BB10).
Of course, at 4iP we have bigger plans afoot for this baby to help more people learn how the anonymity of Twitter can improve their learning (and their entertainment) with each other.
Me'colleague Andy Pipes at Channel 4 has published some of the results of in-depth research carried out for the Channel into how young people relate to the web, gaming, the telly and each other. It's got some insights that would dispel some of the myth mongering that will take place in this summer's education conference circuit. Prepare your bullshit bingo cards now...
"Yet despite living such a ‘connected’ life, kids these days still find technology a means to an end - primarily meeting up with their friends, watching television and listening to music. Above all, youth’s obsession with technology is around communication. The average person surveyed was doing 5 simultaneous actions whilst they watched television these days; and the majority of those actions involved communicating at some level. One young teenage girl admitted “I talk to my friend and MSN (instant message) her at the same time.” In fact, a full 34% of those asked said that they texted friends they were with at the time..."
"The TV is still young people’s most popular way to consume media, though in terms of time spent, TV time is pipped to the post by spending time on the internet."
I'm pleased to see that former colleagues in Learning and Teaching Scotland have managed to get their LTS iTunes U site opened, following our friends at the Open University. Scotland heads out as the first iTunes U provider of professional development material podcasts for those working with 3-18 year olds.
It's not been an easy journey. In 2005, on joining LTS to head up their Modern Languages work, I challenged the organisation to get podcasting (audio) the entire Scottish Learning Festival contents, and video as much as possible. Four years on we're still not able to access good quality recordings of everything, despite the costs of doing so being derisory and the long-tail interest being high - just take a look at the figures viewing what might be conceived as obscure education topics on the Slideshare site I created for the event.
We also had a challenge getting more audio and video material out in subsequent years through the now-defunkt Connected Live site, intended to be an evolution of the print magazine with media-rich addition to the limits of the atom presented by the magazine. Arguably, as with all social media projects in the large, it took two years for the culture to change sufficiently for blogging one's experiences to be seen as part and parcel of one's work, not a geeky pass-time. Mike Coulter along with Saint Andrew of Brown and others have continued to develop that culture slowly and successfully over the past year. We now have an education agency with elements that have moved the organisation from its glossy corporate sheen, to a more 'honest', approachable voice.
LTS's involvement with iTunes U is part of that evolution, and signifies a small victory for those of us who had been pushing for some more budget and effort to be spent on bite-sized professional development designed for small mobile screens, at a time when there was no YouTube or video podcast device.
The organisation's biggest challenge is to make sure it does not become the voice of the marketer or a self-referential poster-child for the politics of education, but a place where grassroots honesty and constructive reflection on our teaching and learning practice can be amplified.
Guy Kawasaki came to Edinburgh to help 100s of students, startups and investors understand better how to make the world a better place through startups.
1. Make meaning
The great tech companies did much more than make money. They made the world a better place, they brought meaning to people. If you want to make a great startup make sure that you are and that you surround yourself with people who want to make changes to the world - this is why an MBA is the worst possible member of your startup management team.
Efficacy, power and liberation is the message we get from cotton, leather and rubber, via Nike. What's the message we get from you about your startup or big idea?
Ice 1.0
Ice harvesters of the 1900s ran an explosive business gathering ice. Later, ice factories produced mass quantities of ice for people. Then refrigerator companies destroyed both businesses. The ice factories were not started by the ice gatherers; the refrigerator companies were not started by the ice factory people. Most people, most startups, fail to jump the curve - they think they'll just carry on without change. They think of the product they make, rather than what they provide (and then coming up with different, ever-changing products to achieve that provision better).
2. Make mantra
Find meaning for your mission, but don't make a mission statement. Delete anything that would qualify for a bullshit bingo competition: partnership, collaboration, cooperation. These are givens. A mantra should be repeatable by everyone in the company, and everyone in the company should be able to make decisions based on that: Do It First, Inspire Change, Make Trouble.
3. Get going
Think different - don't be another ice harvester
Polarise people - have the courage to create the product or service that you would want to use. Some people will hate it and some people will love it. If you try to make something that makes everyone happy then you'll make something mediocre.
Find a few soul mates - genius does not happen alone. You need someone to bounce ideas around with.
4. Define a business
Keep it simple - paradigm-shifting, patent-pending technologies are not going to tempt most people. Most folk want something that can be made, sold and collect money. Keep your business model simple.
Ask women what they think of your business model - Guy believes that men, deep in their DNA, have a deep disposition to kill things: people, animals, plants... the competition. Killing the competition is a bad business model in and of itself. Don't count on that to convince people.
5. Milestones, Assumptions, Tasks - Weave a MAT
Milestones are things you would brag about to your friends: "we finished the design", "we produced our product"; "we shipped today". It's not "we made a logo".
Assumptions are based on, say, getting a tiny percentage out of a huge market: there are 1.2bn on the net, and we only need 0.1% on our service to become zilloinnaires.
Define the tasks required to open up your potential: hire a sales person.
6. Work out your ability to provide a unique product or service
What is unique and valuable about your idea?
7. Follow the 10/20/30 rule
Every pitch a VC (or Commissioner) hears is unique, paradigm-shifting, patent-pending, with a proven management team who are experts in what they do, who only need a small part of a huge market to make loads of money (conservatively speaking). Less is more. Tell us:
More on what goes in these over on Guy's blog.
8. Hire infected people
If you get a great horse then any idiot can ride it to the finish line. But were they responsible for getting it there?
Ignore the irrelevant, the lack of their 'perfect' background for the job and, instead, concentrate on those who "get it".
Hire people, surround yourself with people who are passionate about changing the world with your stuff. Hire people who are better than you - the hardest part of the startup is not the engineering. Marketing and sales, CEO-ing, community-building are just as hard and you need to work out what you're not good at, and get in people are are good at it.
9. Lower the barriers to adoption
The learning curve for startups' products is often too complex. People need to be able to fire up and go for it. If they need a manual or training for your stuff, then it's too complex. Lower the barriers to adoption. In Edinburgh, the one o'clock gun goes off at precisely one o'clock so that you can set your watch. It doesn't go off at noon because they'd have to fire twelve times and the users wouldn't know whether to set at the beginning or the end of the 12 chimes.
Don't ask people to do something that you wouldn't.
Embrace your evangelists. Those customers or users who love what you do need to be thanked, embraced, give them information, give them the ability to help new people into the fold.
10. Seed the clouds
Sales fixes everything. Your investors are probably facing 90% of their portfolio not making money, so if you're in that successful (even vaguely successful) 10% they'll not bother you.
Let a hundred flowers blossom. When "the wrong people" are using your service don't freak out, don't tell them how it's not their service to use - take their money and embrace them. Apple made spreadsheets, but Aldus Pagemaker was the "wrong product" but turned Apple into a media-making-enabler company.
Enable people to test drive your product. People need to be able to be playing before paying. Find the key influencers in your community and give them the product for free.
11. Don't let the Bozos grind you down
Get yourself immunised against Bozosity:
On the flip side, it's not the case that we should be writing off anyone who says no. People who say no can sometimes be right - take on their advice and work out if you can ignore it.