MOOC road test

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales was quoted on the BBC today saying that traditional bricks and mortar universities would lose out if they didn't find a convincing way to respond to the new wave of online courses (sometimes called MOOCs - massive online open courses).

"The really interesting challenge for big-brand universities is whether they are going to move into that space. If we thought of universities as normal businesses we would say, 'Will they be able to adapt to the PC revolution?' It's that kind of question. Will Harvard or MIT, Oxford or Cambridge, be able to adapt? Or will Microsoft come out of nowhere? "It's going to be really fascinating to see it unfold."

 I must say I have been having very similar thoughts. A few weeks ago I signed up for an MOOC being hosted by Coursera and organised by Dan Ariely of Duke University. The course, on behavioural economics, is a real eye opener. It is six weeks long (I'm just entering the sixth and final week) and involves video lectures, in-video quizzes, recommended and compulsory reading assignments, reading quizzes and a writing assignment. There are also guest lecturer appearances on video (with some lecturers from some pretty impressive institutions) and a comprehensive set of forums where the thousands of participants can ask questions and offer mutual support. 

Flickr picture courtesy missy and the universe

Other innovations which I thought really interesting were the weekly session with Dan Ariely (one hour long video q&a) where he answered questions submitted by the students, and the chance to participate in behavioural experiments - either through questionnaires  or in one case an interactive online person to person version of the Ultimatum Game where I was matched at random with another fellow student.

So far, I have found it extremely rich and rewarding. It isn't the same as a university experience, obviously, and the one clear disadvantage of MOOCs is their lack of ability to award credible qualifications which would (currently?) be acceptable to employers. However, this may change and in the future employers may actually be more impressed by self-motivated self-learners who accumulate credits from this kind of offering, perhaps even valuing them more than qualifications from at least some more conventional universities - who knows. 

However, I agree with Jimmy Wales that, based on my limited experience, the universities are going to have to adopt at least some of these techniques if they are not to be challenged by new players with much more powerful and relevant learning experiences. 

The second half of the chessboard

I've just come across a very interesting concept in a podcast of Peter Day interviewing Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, the authors of The Race Against the Machine. 

They mentioned the famous legend about the origin of chess: When the inventor of the game showed it to the emperor of India, the emperor was so impressed by the new game, that he said to the man: "Name your reward." The man responded that he was a humble man with simple wishes: "Give me one grain of rice for the first square of the chessboard, two grains for the next square, four for the next, eight for the next and so on for all 64 squares, with each square having double the number of grains as the square before." The emperor agreed, amazed that the man had asked for such a small reward - or so he thought. After a week, his treasurer came back and informed him that the reward would add up to an astronomical sum, far greater than all the rice that could conceivably be produced in many many centuries. 

In fact, according to Wikipedia, the total number of grains would equal 18,446,744,073,709,551,615, which is "a much higher number than most people intuitively expect".

Brynjolfsson and McAfee point out that the effect in the second half of the chessboard is much more dramatic than the first: in the 32nd square the amount of rice is still relatively manageable. But after that each square doubles an already large number and quickly this outstrips human intuition. 

Brynjolfsson and McAfee say this same effect is happening with technology. Moore's Law says technology power will double every 18 months or so and the effect of this again gets very much more significant "in the second half of the chessboard". They calculate that we've had around 32 "squares" of exponential growth in technology and that now the 18 month advances are very much more dramatic than previously and this effect will increase dramatically (dramatic squared, if you like!). 

This is the reason behind the really quite remarkable advances in computing and robotics which is having the effect described in their book. "How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy", as the subtitle puts it. 

Sensing context

Sensors are a real mega-trend. Modern smart phones are packed with sensors including cameras, compasses, GPS, accelerometers, ambient light sensors, gyroscopes and proximity sensors. The latest S4 phone from Samsung pushes the boundaries even more with the inclusion of temperature and humidity sensors, according to this article from The Verge. Samsung are using these sensors to power their new S Health app:

 The phone features a built-in pedometer for tracking the number of steps you take — or run — during the day, much like Fitbit's line of devices. However, sensors in the phone also allow it to measure the ambient temperature and humidity of the room you're, all of which feeds into the S Health app itself.

In fact health apps powered by sensors are an extremely hot category with the aforementioned Fitbit, Nike's Fuelband  and the Jawbone Up competing to help us all get healthy by measuring everything we do and encouraging us to do more of the good stuff.

But the sensor mega-trend doesn't stop there: it will usher in a new age of context, says Robert Scoble, who, together with Shel Israel, is writing a book on the subject (he describes it here.)  He has been doing research for this book for some time and has numerous video interviews with companies he believe are in the vanguard of this trend, including, for example, Plantronics, whose headsets now come packed with sensors.  A good example of the context trend can be seen with the way Google Now is trying to anticipate your needs by understanding the time of day and location, coupled with your calendar and providing useful information (such as weather for flight status) before you need to search for it.

The growing commercial relevance of context will guarantee the explosion in sensors and the data they produce continue at speed.

Data comes into its own

It is axiomatic that we are now drowning in data. Google's chairman Eric Schmidt famously said we now create as much data is two days as we did from the dawn of humanity to 2003.  And there is now a big business in providing tools to help us deal with this avalanche.

But it turns out there is a big prize for companies that master their own data and put it at the heart of their decision-making. +Steve Lohr The New York Times recently reported on new research setting out to quantify the effect:

The data explosion is also an enormous opportunity. In a modern economy, information should be the prime asset — the raw material of new products and services, smarter decisions, competitive advantage for companies, and greater growth and productivity.

The central distinction, says the WSJ piece, is between decisions based mainly on “data and analysis” and on the traditional management arts of “experience and intuition.”

Those that adopted “data-driven decision making” achieved productivity that was 5 to 6 percent higher than could be explained by other factors, including how much the companies invested in technology.

But becoming a data-driven company is hard. Many organisations are built on the belief in the wisdom of the senior team and their "experts". Experience and gut-instinct still hold a lot of sway. Take Apple - Steve Jobs' profound intuition and almost supernatural sense of what makes a good product produced legendary results. Now he's no longer there the risk is that the vacuum will be filled by people with less than superpowers and poor decisions will be taken (the maps fiasco may have been the first).

Contrast that with Google - the epitome of a data-driven company, perhaps. My favour supporting anecdote, which I have blogged about in the past,  is the story that the company doesn't put down any paths until the grass between new campus buildings is worn down, thus ensuring the tarmac gets laid where the Googlers actually do walk. A great example of data-driven decision making in action.

The Lean Startup's powerful idea

Like the rest of the world I have been reading the Lean Startup, the new book from serial entrepreneur Eric Ries. There is a lot of good advice in the book, which focuses on developing products which solve real problems and doing it in the most efficient way.

But one idea really stood out for me: cohort analysis.

This is one if the most important tools of startup analytics. Although it sounds complex it's based on a simple premise. Instead of looking at cumulative totals or gross numbers such as total revenue or total number of customers, one looks at the performance of each group of customers that comes into contact with the product independently.

This is a powerful idea. Often there is a lag in the behaviour you would like to see (such as signing up for a free trial) and this is very hard to detect in a mass of other numbers, which may all be going up. By concentrating on one group at a time, Ries argues, you can really tell if the key behaviours you need to see are really happening - and if you are getting better or worse over time.

If you are interested the key section starts on page 123 of the book, or you can find out more from his site. More on cohort analysis here.

Our technological future: dystopia or utopia?

What will the world of the future be like given the inevitable march of technology? This is a question which pops up, unsurprisingly, quite a lot. Last Sunday the Observer became exercised enough about the question to devote a lengthy op-ed piece about it. And their take was decidedly pessimistic.

The outline that's emerging is a troubling one. Computing and its associated technologies are becoming so powerful that we are having to rethink decades-old assumptions about what machines can and cannot do. Ten years ago, the idea of self-driving cars would have been regarded as fanciful. Ten years from now, they might be on our roads – and insurance companies may rate them as lower risk than human-controlled vehicles. The advantages of the technology are obvious: fewer deaths and injuries, more efficient use of roads and junctions, less time wasted driving to work and so on.
Less obvious – but just as real – are the potential downsides. In particular, what happens to the millions of people who currently earn a living from driving? The prevailing narrative regards them as the casualties of progress, the victims of the destructive side of Schumpeter's wave.

However, there is another more optimistic take on the possibilities of automation. Father and son writing team Robert and Edward Skidelsky argue in their book that leisure time should increase with automation and wealth creation.

"In the 1930s Keynes asked the question: what will life be like in 100 years time. Given the march of technology and the economy he predicted that we would be four or five times as rich as we were then. And because that amount of production would be obtainable as a very small fraction of the effort which was then being employed, because of automation and things, he thought that we wouldn't have to work more than 15 hours a week." 

Edward Skidelsky says in a Royal Society of Arts talk on the subject that Keynes was almost exactly right about growth. But he was entirely wrong about working hours. Why is this? Firstly, wants are not finite. Wants are insatiable and the reason they are insatiable is because they are relative. Secondly pressure to consume, largely because of advertising, has become overwhelming.

Capitalism is failing, he says, because it is not supporting the Aristolean notion of the "good life" - basically stopping the continual drive to have more once a comfortable state has been attained. If we could overcome the urge to continue increasing consumption indefinitely then things such as job sharing to reduce hours worked and increase the quality of our rapidly automating  life could become a reality, he says.

The Observer isn't convinced.

Delicious omelettes cannot be made without the breaking of eggs. Anxieties about the impact of automation are not new and, in the past, automation has often led to economic growth and increases in employment. But there are worrying signs that this time things might be different. The new capabilities of machines enable them to replace not just human muscle and dexterity, but even some aspects of human cognition. Jobs that were hitherto not at risk, including many white-collar occupations, are now becoming vulnerable to computing. Or as the economist Paul Krugman puts it: "Smart machines will end up devaluing the contribution of workers, including highly skilled workers whose skills suddenly become redundant."

But does it need to be that way? What about spending our time in other ways? Take the development of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses).  Perhaps people with more time on their hands could spend it in continuous education - for the sake of it, rather than for specific career enhancement, for instance?

It is incredibly difficult to predict the outcome of technologies we can't even anticipate. As Ben Hammersley illustrated perfectly in another recent RSA lecture Moore's Law makes it impossible to understand the technology that is coming. It is popular to say that there is more computing power in the phone in your pocket than in the computers that took the Apollo mission to the moon. In fact, he says, there is more computing power in your washing machine!

He recounts how he has been advising Ministry of Defence planners looking at the implications of the technology which will be around in 2045 - a hopeless task.  "The computing power you will have in your pocket will be 2.42bn times as powerful as the phone you have in your pocket today." This will lead inevitably for the first time in history to "a future where we will be surrounded by technology which we cannot imagine."

http://www.flickr.com/photos/albertfreeman/

Perhaps the dystopian vision of the future outlined by the Observer will instead by replaced by one more like the Culture, as described by Iain M Banks where superintelligent "minds" do all the hard stuff, leaving human(oid)s to get on with whatever takes their fancy? Let's hope so.

The brave new world of gestures

We've had phones you pinch and poke for years and it is now commonplace to wave at your games console to make it do things, but we may be about to enter a world where gestures are going too far. Mashable reports today that LG are to launch a phone where the video stops if you look away.

With Smart Video, the phone will recognize the position of your eyes, and automatically play or stop a video based on whether or not you’re looking at the screen. So, if you get distracted while watching the latest "Harlem Shake" video, it will stop; when your eyes return to the monitor, however, it will pick up right where you left off.

This follows hard on the heels of rumours that the new Samsung Galaxy S4 (launching today) will have a feature which allows you to scroll the screen by tracking your eyes as you read.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/isriya/

I can't help thinking that this may be a step too far. Effective technology recedes into the background letting you get on with the job in hand - reading, watching video, whatever. And this is clearly the motivation for these developments in the hyper-competitive smartphone space. But it is not hard to imagine consumers getting more and more frustrated with phone which scroll just because your eyes get distracted or by video which stops every time you momentarily look away. Time will tell, but these two developments may just be a step too far.