Author: Nick Booth

Got an idea about the web and learning? Here's $1.8 million dollars of help.

digital media and learning competition header

Beth Kanter has been in touch to ask me to spread the word about an American competition which this year is open to applicants from the UK. The Digital Media in Learning Competition has a deadline of October 15th and allows bids from $30,000 to $250,000.

The 2008 Digital Media and Learning Competition theme is Participatory Learning. Participatory Learning includes the many ways that learners (of any age) use new technologies to participate in virtual communities where they share ideas, comment upon one another’s projects, and plan, design, advance, implement, or simply discuss their goals and ideas together.

It’s funded by the Macarthur foundation, who’s spotlight blog falls short of some of he principles it is trying to encourage (no trackback – lots of hurdles to joining the conversation). Having said that the MacArthur Foundation has been working long, hard, patiently and  intelligently at pulling together the threads of how we must understand digital media and learning.

It’s a brilliant opportunity, so whether you are the School of Everything or the North Birmingham Social Enterprise – go Britain, get the dosh.  Quickly mind, no faffing.

This is a no brainer for the UK.

Free Debates is an important democratic movement. They are demanding that a condition of a network getting to screen presidential debates is that they make the material available with open source/creative commons licensing, so it can be rehashed and mashed etc.

It is a great idea and any public sector broadcaster like channel 4, ITV, BBC  here in the uk should be delighted to make the resources available for what could be a blossoming of political engagement. So David Cameron, Gordon Brown and Nick Clegg just imagine citzenship lessons where people are mashing video of political debates.

This is their open letter to Barack Obama and John McCain:

Dear Senator McCain and Senator Obama,

We are a coalition of people and organizations across the ideological spectrum asking you to make this year’s presidential debates more “of the people” than ever before by bringing them more fully into the Internet age.

Specifically, we ask you to embrace these two “open debate” principles for the 2008 debates:

  1. The presidential debates are for the benefit of the public. Therefore, the right to speak about the debates ought to be “owned” by the public, not controlled by the media.

    2. During the primaries, a large coalition asked that media companies release rights to presidential debate video to ensure that key moments can be legally blogged about, shared on YouTube, or otherwise shared without fear of legal repercussion.CNN, ABC, and NBC agreed to release video rights. But one media company threatened legal action against Senator McCain for using a debate clip to spread a message. Such control over political speech is inconsistent with our democracy.

    We therefore call upon both candidates to commit to a principle that whenever you debate publicly, the raw footage of that debate will be dedicated to the public domain. Those in charge of the video feed should be directed to make it free for anyone to use.

  2. “Town hall” Internet questions should be chosen by the people, not solely by the media.

    3. The two campaigns recently said of the October 7 debate, “In the spirit of the Town Hall, all questions will come from the audience (or Internet), and not the moderator.” We agree with the spirit of this statement. In order to ensure that the Internet portion of this debate is true bottom-up democracy, the format needs to allow the public to help select the questions in addition to asking them.This cycle’s YouTube debates were a milestone for Internet participation in presidential debates. But they put too much discretion in the hands of gatekeepers. Many of the questions chosen by TV producers were considered gimmicky and not hard-hitting enough, and never would have bubbled up on their own.

    This “bubble up” idea is the essence of the Internet as we know it. The best ideas rise to the top, and the wisdom of crowds prevails. We’d propose debate organizers utilize existing bubble-up voting technology and choose Internet questions from the top 25 that bubbled up. We ask you to instruct the October 7 debate planners to use bubble-up technology in this fashion.

    This is a historic election. The signers of this letter don’t agree on every issue. But we do agree that in order for Americans to make the best decision for president, we need open debates that are “of the people” in the ways described above. You have the power to make that happen, and we ask you to do so.

    Thank you for your willingness to take these ideas to heart. If you have any questions, please contact: OpenDebateCoalition@gmail.com

    Sincerely,

    Lawrence Lessig; Professor, Stanford Law School, Founder, Center for Internet and Society

    Glenn Reynolds; Professor, University of Tennessee Law, and founder of Instapundit.com blog

    Craig Newmark; Founder, Craigslist

    Jimmy Wales; Founder, Wikipedia

    David Kralik; Director of Internet Strategy, Newt Gingrich’s American Solutions

    Eli Pariser; Executive Director, MoveOn.org Political Action

    Adam Green; Director of Strategic Campaigns, MoveOn.org Political Action

    Mindy Finn; Republican strategist, former Mitt Romney Online Director

    Patrick Ruffini; Republican consultant, Former Republican National Committee eCampaign Director

    Arianna Huffington; Founder, Huffington Post

    Markos Moulitsas; Founder, DailyKos.com

    Jon Henke; New media consultant, including for Fred Thompson, George Allen, and Senate Republican Caucus

    Mike Krempasky; Co-Founder of RedState.com

    Matt Stoller; Founder/Editor, OpenLeft.com

    James Rucker; Executive Director, ColorOfChange.org

    Robert Greenwald; President, BraveNewFilms

    Kim Gandy; President, National Organization for Women

    Carl Pope; Executive Director, Sierra Club

    Micah Sifry; Co-Founder, Personal Democracy Forum and TechPresident.com

    Shari Steele; Executive Director, Electronic Frontier Foundation

    Josh Silver; Executive Director, Free Press

    Carl Malamud; Founder, Public.Resource.Org

    Roger Hickey; Co-Director, Campaign for America’s Future

Do you Strip?

Courtesy of Dr Craig on Flickr

If you want to people on side and working together, less is always more.

Tom Steinberg knows that. He runs MySociety, the very successful charity which punches above it weight using the internet to help people collaborate to improve civil society.  Among tips on how to build websites for social good he includes this one:

Take whatever your first website plan is and remove 90% of the features you want. Then build it and launch it and your users will tell you which features they actually wanted instead. Build them and bask in the warm glow of appreciation.

It is easier for people to add than for them to take away. Provide a solid platform and others can innovate on it. Not only that, they all have a clear sense of shared aims.  Offer endless choice or demands and we get confused and wonder off to pastures more edifying.

Bob Sutton also knows this.  Here he describes in some detail how a small charity again used clarity and simplicity to achieve far beyond what we might expect of them.  I’ll quote at length.

We analyze an astounding effort by a small non-profit in Boston called The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) to lead a campaign to reduce medical errors in U.S. hospitals.  Their goal was to stop over 100,000 preventable deaths in hospitals over a one year period. And, although there is some controversy about the campaign’s effects, it appears that they ultimately involved hospitals that included over 75% of the beds in the U.S. and exceed their goal by about 20,000 lives.

You can get the article here at the McKinsey website (it is free, you just have to register) or here is the pdf:

Download the_ergonomics_of_innovation.pdf

Even if you get the pdf here, I suggest poking around the McKinsey site as they have lots of great free stuff.

We call this article “the ergonomics of innovation” because the IHI staff did such a brilliant job of designing the campaign so that it reduced the cognitive and emotional load on their tiny staff (about 100 people) and, especially, on the thousands of hospital staff members who participated in the campaign.  For example, IHI focused everyone’s efforts on six relatively simple behaviors that had been shown to be big causes of preventable deaths in prior research.  They developed very concrete guidelines that hospitals could use to stop these causes — which reduced load on everyone because, although the list could have contained hundreds of evidence-based practices, instead, it helped people focus their efforts and also made it more efficient for hospitals to share what they had learned because they were working on a limited numbers of problems.

Of course the whole article is worth reading.  This is about putting in effort early to make good decisions about what is needed.  The rest is a question of clear communication and naturally enough, stripping.

Image courtesy of Dr Craig. Hat Tip for thought son MySociety and also the wonderful neologism of decrementalism Public Strategy. I first published this over on the Caret blog.

Birmingham Conservation Trust's new website

Birmingham Conservation Trust logoThanks to a lot of work from Jon Bounds, new visuals from Citrus Frog  and some input from myself,  the Birmingham Conservation Trust has a new website.

You may not be surprised to know that it is built entirely on WordPress. Please have a look around and let me know what’s right/wrong etc. The aim is to make better use of the social web to connect better with the many of you I know care about the buildings in our city.

I’ve been a trustee for BCT for about 5 years.  If you’re not sure why you might have heard of us we rescued and restored the Back to Backs  before handing them over to the National Trust. Currently we are working on the Newman Brothers Coffin Works in Fleet Street.

If you have a passion or curiosity for Birmingham’s building please tag your youtube films or flickr pics birminghamct – they’ll appear on our front page and may even inspire me to blog about what you’re doing. If you’ve got a story or a link you think we should be sharing please e-mail me nick.booth (at) podnosh.com. Likewise if you fancy writing a few blog posts for the trust.

A simple way to support the trust is to also have a good look at our online affiliate shop here. You sign up to Sky we get £70, buy a book on Amazon and we’re more likely to net 7p. Last year our wider family’s xmas shopping raised about £40 for the charity, without us spending anything extra.

Thanks for looking, comments please.