27 August 2006
Information is owned by the few
Consider the history of manufactured items. At one time in United States history, the manufacturer in your neighborhood was the primary source of whatever it made. If Maytag had a plant in your city, you bought Maytag. There was almost no question of buying a competitor product in a distant city, with reasons ranging from the practical (delivery requirements) to the social (your family was employed there) to the unconscious (you heard about this company every day in the news). Manufacturers were king: they made, you bought (assuming you could afford), and no questions were asked.
Then came the middlemen, resellers like Sears, who discovered that if you brought a number of competing products into the same show room, customers came to that show room to make an educated decision. No longer convinced to buy from one manufacturer, you could shop among several models. This was how resellers made their money: providing you a service you'd pay extra money for. Products and manufacturers that failed to compete well in side-by-side arrangements were abolished in the face of consumer choice.
And finally came the Internet. The World Wide Web provided you with not only all the same information the resellers had, but much more: professional and amateur reviews, community-level and industry-specific emails filled with recommendations and warnings, and manufacturers' contact information in case you had questions. Now you could shop intelligently around the world. Much of the resale industry was demolished, now that their services paled in comparison to what consumers could do themselves. Look at the fate of independent bookstores, who all-but-vanished in a wired world where consumers read reviews and compare prices among Amazon.com, BN.com, and Borders.com, only to buy the book from an Internet-based reseller with massively discounted prices. Travel agents, too, disappeared in the face of Expedia.com and Travelocity.com.
It is thus believed, therefore, that the Internet has empowered the individual.
Not true. I'm sorry to say that it's all an illusion.
First of all, the online resellers are no better than the brick-and-mortar resellers. After browsing the options available at an online travel agency, it's often cheaper to then go to the airline site itself to buy your tickets. For example, if I want to fly from Boston to San Francisco, I'll plug my dates into a search engine at Expedia (and later, Travelocity), find the cheapest option at the best times, and then buy my ticket at Delta.com, Southwest.com, or another airline, or perhaps call a human travel agent after all at AAA and start again. As long as I have access to the source of that service or product -- the manufacturer, the service provider, etc. -- the reseller is a source of information without sale.
Second, the online resellers are limited in scope. Thanks to partnerships and other marketing choices, not all of my options are provided. For example, both Expedia and Travelocity tend to overlook small, unaffiliated airlines. Additionally, at one time (and perhaps still today) Expedia charged extra money if I wanted to buy a ticket for USAir flights, without telling me. The bottom line is that going through an online reseller is not necessary more comprehensive or cheaper than my other options.
But biggest of all, however, is that for me to perform ANY search these days, I'm going to have to use a search engine, like Google.
Without even getting into problems with spam, search engines are responsible for providing me with the information I'll need to do anything on the Web, if I don't already know precisely how and with whom to do it myself. Google is the next Sears. If I wanted to find some good choices for a boy's name, Google will provide me with so many choices that I'll inevitably stop after the first twenty (and more likely, stop after three). Google is filtering my search, valuing some choices above others just as my supermarket creates end-of-aisle displays to sell me things. The only difference is that I know the supermarket makes money from the sale. With search engines, you have no way of guaranteeing you're not clicking on a link the search engine company prefers.
Consider the unscrupulous used car salesman. Let's step through the process.
Let's compare this to a Google search for boys' names. I choose Google here because it's currently a very popular search engine that, people seem to believe, does an honest job in helping people search both online and offline content.
You see? No practical difference.
You might think this exercise was a bit silly, but I'm not wrong. The people, companies, or machines that control what you want are the same entities that control the process. The car salesman controls which cars you buy; even if you trust him, the process is his, not yours. He's just nice about it. The same is true with Google. Sure, we all tend to trust Google -- and what's not to trust or like -- but we do not own the information-seeking process. Google owns it. Here's why:
But we don't have a choice. There is too much information in the world. We must go through an information repackager if we're not going to do the work ourselves. (Librarians do the work themselves; the results are of excellent quality, of limited quantity, and of almost negligible relevance for our day-to-day needs of airline tickets and boys' names. Libraries have some excellent information with which we can arm ourselves -- like using Consumer Reports to choose a quality used car -- but in general we still have to take the final steps on our own.)
Regardless of their motives, search engines OWN the information access. Maybe that's good enough. Maybe you're comfortable performing your searches in ignorance of the engine's inner workings, generally satisfied with the results most of the time. But please, that doesn't make it a good thing. What if Google started charging you for some of your searches? What if Google integrated its sponsored links into the search engine (as other engines did or do)?
Here's a real-life, immediate example. Search for Pluto. There has been a ton of recent press regarding Pluto's demotion as a planet in our solar system. Where is all that news in the search results page? There's just a tiny news area that most people won't see because it looks different, and then there's a bunch of sponsored links. This is a branding decision; Google thinks "news" and "sites" are very different things and doesn't even combine their results.
Don't kid yourself. The power of the Internet has moved, but not to you.
Then came the middlemen, resellers like Sears, who discovered that if you brought a number of competing products into the same show room, customers came to that show room to make an educated decision. No longer convinced to buy from one manufacturer, you could shop among several models. This was how resellers made their money: providing you a service you'd pay extra money for. Products and manufacturers that failed to compete well in side-by-side arrangements were abolished in the face of consumer choice.
And finally came the Internet. The World Wide Web provided you with not only all the same information the resellers had, but much more: professional and amateur reviews, community-level and industry-specific emails filled with recommendations and warnings, and manufacturers' contact information in case you had questions. Now you could shop intelligently around the world. Much of the resale industry was demolished, now that their services paled in comparison to what consumers could do themselves. Look at the fate of independent bookstores, who all-but-vanished in a wired world where consumers read reviews and compare prices among Amazon.com, BN.com, and Borders.com, only to buy the book from an Internet-based reseller with massively discounted prices. Travel agents, too, disappeared in the face of Expedia.com and Travelocity.com.
It is thus believed, therefore, that the Internet has empowered the individual.
Not true. I'm sorry to say that it's all an illusion.
First of all, the online resellers are no better than the brick-and-mortar resellers. After browsing the options available at an online travel agency, it's often cheaper to then go to the airline site itself to buy your tickets. For example, if I want to fly from Boston to San Francisco, I'll plug my dates into a search engine at Expedia (and later, Travelocity), find the cheapest option at the best times, and then buy my ticket at Delta.com, Southwest.com, or another airline, or perhaps call a human travel agent after all at AAA and start again. As long as I have access to the source of that service or product -- the manufacturer, the service provider, etc. -- the reseller is a source of information without sale.
Second, the online resellers are limited in scope. Thanks to partnerships and other marketing choices, not all of my options are provided. For example, both Expedia and Travelocity tend to overlook small, unaffiliated airlines. Additionally, at one time (and perhaps still today) Expedia charged extra money if I wanted to buy a ticket for USAir flights, without telling me. The bottom line is that going through an online reseller is not necessary more comprehensive or cheaper than my other options.
But biggest of all, however, is that for me to perform ANY search these days, I'm going to have to use a search engine, like Google.
Without even getting into problems with spam, search engines are responsible for providing me with the information I'll need to do anything on the Web, if I don't already know precisely how and with whom to do it myself. Google is the next Sears. If I wanted to find some good choices for a boy's name, Google will provide me with so many choices that I'll inevitably stop after the first twenty (and more likely, stop after three). Google is filtering my search, valuing some choices above others just as my supermarket creates end-of-aisle displays to sell me things. The only difference is that I know the supermarket makes money from the sale. With search engines, you have no way of guaranteeing you're not clicking on a link the search engine company prefers.
Consider the unscrupulous used car salesman. Let's step through the process.
- I approach the salesman asking a simple question: "I want a reliable automobile for a good price."
- The salesman immediately points out a few models. The first one he shows me is way too expensive. The second one is terrible. In comparison, the third one he shows me seems wonderful at first glance, but then I ask more questions.
- The salesman doesn't give me precisely the information I want. Some of his answers sound ridiculous. He's reluctant to show me any more cars. But when I keep pushing, he finally gives in and shows me a fourth car, without much enthusiasm.
- Finally, I ask for specific kinds of cars, things I've heard rumors about. "What about a Toyota Sienna? Is there a good Ford minivan?" The salesman is completely unhelpful. Clearly this was a terrible place to come shopping. Maybe I'll visit some dealers, or talk to my neighbor.
Let's compare this to a Google search for boys' names. I choose Google here because it's currently a very popular search engine that, people seem to believe, does an honest job in helping people search both online and offline content.
- I start with a simple request: "I want to find a good boy's name." My query is "boys names."
- Google gives me some immediate results. Some of them are immediately terrible and can be skipped over, but it doesn't take long to find something promising. I visit the website and, although looks like what I want might be there, I have a hard time using it. I decide to give up and return to Google and its search result list.
- I try a second website, but I've lost confidence. Maybe it's not Google's fault in any obvious way, but none of these websites is helping me in the way I want to be helped.
- I decide to try some new queries. Maybe "boy names"? Do I need an apostrophe? Or perhaps, because I'm interested in a boy's name that isn't too ethnically different from the names I know in the United States, I should try a search like "American boy names." Unfortunately, my search choices are even worse. I give up. The Web is a terrible place to search for boy names. I'll try the bookstore.
You see? No practical difference.
You might think this exercise was a bit silly, but I'm not wrong. The people, companies, or machines that control what you want are the same entities that control the process. The car salesman controls which cars you buy; even if you trust him, the process is his, not yours. He's just nice about it. The same is true with Google. Sure, we all tend to trust Google -- and what's not to trust or like -- but we do not own the information-seeking process. Google owns it. Here's why:
- Not only doesn't Google find everything, it doesn't tell you there are things missing. The Google database isn't as up-to-date as the Web. Your search words don't match every relevant result in every relevant language. Sure, it looks as if there are 2,600,000 hits for you search, but that doesn't mean it found everything. What's more, you can't even see all 2,600,000 hits if you wanted to! Google shuts you out after only a few hundred.
- Google doesn't explain what it's doing, or why. The search algorithm is never explained; it's a patent secret. We know what kinds of ingredients go into the mix, but we don't know the precise details. And although sponsored links appear separate from search results -- something not all search engines do -- we have no certainty that there are some other sponsorships happening in there.
- If Google is biased, we have no way of knowing. I guarantee Google is biased, because its algorithm is based on how people use the Web. Google News collects stories more often from the AP Wire than the Boston Globe, and more often from the Globe than the Arlington Tab. That's well-intentioned bias. There are less favorable biases, too, like social biases. Because there are fewer computer users who are poor or homeless, the websites of interest to these people never show up at the tops of list. Because the Google default language in the United States is English, U.S.-based news articles are far favored over newspapers in other countries, even when the news takes place in those countries. And because most people have heard of large companies like Amazon.com, smaller companies like independent booksellers are pushed into obscurity. There are also language-based biases. It's easier to find websites related to money because this word is both singular and plural, whereas finance has a plural form. It's easier to search for words like mistress and misogyny, which exist, than for the nonexistent gender-opposite versions. And it's nearly impossible to find a company that sells windows because your search results will be overwhelmed by companies that sell [Microsoft] Windows.
But we don't have a choice. There is too much information in the world. We must go through an information repackager if we're not going to do the work ourselves. (Librarians do the work themselves; the results are of excellent quality, of limited quantity, and of almost negligible relevance for our day-to-day needs of airline tickets and boys' names. Libraries have some excellent information with which we can arm ourselves -- like using Consumer Reports to choose a quality used car -- but in general we still have to take the final steps on our own.)
Regardless of their motives, search engines OWN the information access. Maybe that's good enough. Maybe you're comfortable performing your searches in ignorance of the engine's inner workings, generally satisfied with the results most of the time. But please, that doesn't make it a good thing. What if Google started charging you for some of your searches? What if Google integrated its sponsored links into the search engine (as other engines did or do)?
Here's a real-life, immediate example. Search for Pluto. There has been a ton of recent press regarding Pluto's demotion as a planet in our solar system. Where is all that news in the search results page? There's just a tiny news area that most people won't see because it looks different, and then there's a bunch of sponsored links. This is a branding decision; Google thinks "news" and "sites" are very different things and doesn't even combine their results.
Don't kid yourself. The power of the Internet has moved, but not to you.
Labels: content management, Google, power of information, search engines
01 March 2006
College content management
If you thought online education was a growing industry, you underestimated. It's about to explode. That's because Congress is now allowing federal financial aid to students of colleges that teach more than half of their courses off-campus, including over the World Wide Web. (See "Online Colleges Receive a Boost From Congress," The New York Times, March 1 2006.)
Let me rephrase that. Colleges are going to explode. Like scambling an egg.
There are two types of courses that are likely to appear online at exponential speeds. First, you have the low-end requirement courses, like Calculus I and English 101, which are courses everyone has to take to earn a bachelor's degree. These courses are regularly populated with large numbers of students, and yet they are introductory-level, tried-and-true courses that are relatively simple to teach and grade. (In fact, graduate students usually teach these courses.) Instead of wasting valuable classroom space and valuable instructor time, these courses will appear online. For large universities, there's an even greater advantage: hundreds of students can be taught at once without that "giant lecture hall" atmosphere, and without having to create numerous sections (class segments) for advising lessons or grading purposes.
The other type of course that is going to end up online are the courses that professors are just climbing all over themselves to teach, either because it's a cutting-idea, the product of a personal info-lust or -peeve, or simply because it's so esoteric that their departments have never granted them the opportunity to teach something that almost no one will attend. These kinds of courses will prosper online because students from all over the world can attend. That sociology elective called "What License Plates Tell Us About Our Culture" won't get just one student any more, but tens of students, and that makes professors and universities happy. I'm an online instructor of a rather esoteric subject -- indexing -- and so being able to offer my indexing course over the Internet has enabled me to reach dozens of indexing professionals and enthusiasts from around the globe every year. Had I continued to teach only in person, the course might have been cancelled for lack of interest.
So suppose every college in the United States retools that Calculus I class into an online course. It's not easy building an online course, but talk about unnecessary redundancy! No, if department heads are smart, they'll team with the department heads from other colleges and share a course. For example, I can imagine a single English 101 course offered to every college student in Massachusetts. I'm not saying this is a perfect idea, but then again, neither is having 14538 of them.
This is a content management problem (which is why I'm blogging about this). Content management is about many things, including (a) avoiding redundancy in communication; (b) avoiding the communication of inaccurate, outdated, or contradictory things; and (c) providing the correct information for each audience subset, whether it's a single person (like "Welcome, Seth!") or a large group (like English speakers); and (d) communicating everything that needs to be said. Content management is a huge issue in the distribution of information, one that got even more obvious with database use and the Internet.
The magic question here is this: How many different Calculus I courses do we need? From a production standpoint, our goal is to have only one. In reality, however, there are many reason a student might prefer one version of this course over another: the instructor (charisma, ability to teach, ability to communicate, educational background, current interests, track record in past courses, reputation in the industry, etc.); the course materials (ability to relate to examples, quantity of independent and groups exercises, immediate relevance of exercises to students [e.g., local interest], ethical choices, strictness of prerequisite management, etc.); the course delivery (tools requirements, number of lectures, number of students, grading methods, student-to-teacher and student-to-student interactions, what percentage of the course is different from that in previous semesters); and the course environment (reputation of university, opportunity for real-time meetings [chat, voice, face-to-face], textbook requirements); and so on. As you can see, there are a lot of reasons one course might be "better" than another, for a particular student.
And so you have a battle: competition for students vs. need to teach the basic materials. Colleges and universities are already doing this at a macro level -- compare MIT to Bunker Hill Community College, as in the film Good Will Hunting -- but the competition at the lower level is going to be very interesting.
Further, if course development follows the path of computing, parts of courses are going to be delivered as if by subscription. Imagine some guy in his attic churning out math problems for fun. (Believe me, it's real.) Professors can subscribe to this guy in the same way you find those Sudoku puzzles. In computer parlance this is called distributed computing: where a bunch of computers are working together, but each is working on a separate problem. (It's sort of like wearing a wristwatch to tell the time, carrying an iPod to listen to music, and attaching a bottle opener to your keychain, instead of investing in a WatchPod Opener.)
Distributed education means the end of campus life as we know it! Professors moderate courses written by dozens of international specialists, students take courses moderated in other countries, and grades are applied to the diploma of your choice. Campuses become less about learning and more about community events, just as public libraries and shopping malls have been forced to evolve.
Congress has made the right choice, but is this country truly ready for college management?
Let me rephrase that. Colleges are going to explode. Like scambling an egg.
There are two types of courses that are likely to appear online at exponential speeds. First, you have the low-end requirement courses, like Calculus I and English 101, which are courses everyone has to take to earn a bachelor's degree. These courses are regularly populated with large numbers of students, and yet they are introductory-level, tried-and-true courses that are relatively simple to teach and grade. (In fact, graduate students usually teach these courses.) Instead of wasting valuable classroom space and valuable instructor time, these courses will appear online. For large universities, there's an even greater advantage: hundreds of students can be taught at once without that "giant lecture hall" atmosphere, and without having to create numerous sections (class segments) for advising lessons or grading purposes.
The other type of course that is going to end up online are the courses that professors are just climbing all over themselves to teach, either because it's a cutting-idea, the product of a personal info-lust or -peeve, or simply because it's so esoteric that their departments have never granted them the opportunity to teach something that almost no one will attend. These kinds of courses will prosper online because students from all over the world can attend. That sociology elective called "What License Plates Tell Us About Our Culture" won't get just one student any more, but tens of students, and that makes professors and universities happy. I'm an online instructor of a rather esoteric subject -- indexing -- and so being able to offer my indexing course over the Internet has enabled me to reach dozens of indexing professionals and enthusiasts from around the globe every year. Had I continued to teach only in person, the course might have been cancelled for lack of interest.
So suppose every college in the United States retools that Calculus I class into an online course. It's not easy building an online course, but talk about unnecessary redundancy! No, if department heads are smart, they'll team with the department heads from other colleges and share a course. For example, I can imagine a single English 101 course offered to every college student in Massachusetts. I'm not saying this is a perfect idea, but then again, neither is having 14538 of them.
This is a content management problem (which is why I'm blogging about this). Content management is about many things, including (a) avoiding redundancy in communication; (b) avoiding the communication of inaccurate, outdated, or contradictory things; and (c) providing the correct information for each audience subset, whether it's a single person (like "Welcome, Seth!") or a large group (like English speakers); and (d) communicating everything that needs to be said. Content management is a huge issue in the distribution of information, one that got even more obvious with database use and the Internet.
The magic question here is this: How many different Calculus I courses do we need? From a production standpoint, our goal is to have only one. In reality, however, there are many reason a student might prefer one version of this course over another: the instructor (charisma, ability to teach, ability to communicate, educational background, current interests, track record in past courses, reputation in the industry, etc.); the course materials (ability to relate to examples, quantity of independent and groups exercises, immediate relevance of exercises to students [e.g., local interest], ethical choices, strictness of prerequisite management, etc.); the course delivery (tools requirements, number of lectures, number of students, grading methods, student-to-teacher and student-to-student interactions, what percentage of the course is different from that in previous semesters); and the course environment (reputation of university, opportunity for real-time meetings [chat, voice, face-to-face], textbook requirements); and so on. As you can see, there are a lot of reasons one course might be "better" than another, for a particular student.
And so you have a battle: competition for students vs. need to teach the basic materials. Colleges and universities are already doing this at a macro level -- compare MIT to Bunker Hill Community College, as in the film Good Will Hunting -- but the competition at the lower level is going to be very interesting.
Further, if course development follows the path of computing, parts of courses are going to be delivered as if by subscription. Imagine some guy in his attic churning out math problems for fun. (Believe me, it's real.) Professors can subscribe to this guy in the same way you find those Sudoku puzzles. In computer parlance this is called distributed computing: where a bunch of computers are working together, but each is working on a separate problem. (It's sort of like wearing a wristwatch to tell the time, carrying an iPod to listen to music, and attaching a bottle opener to your keychain, instead of investing in a WatchPod Opener.)
Distributed education means the end of campus life as we know it! Professors moderate courses written by dozens of international specialists, students take courses moderated in other countries, and grades are applied to the diploma of your choice. Campuses become less about learning and more about community events, just as public libraries and shopping malls have been forced to evolve.
Congress has made the right choice, but is this country truly ready for college management?
Labels: content management
