Here’s another stab at getting rid of grades, at least in present form.

Remember my previous post about researchers finding a negative connection between facebook use and grades – students heavily into facebook studied less and receiver lower grades?

Or my post about blogarazzi-bummer Chris Avenir, the Canadian student who faced a threat of expulsion after having invited his facebook friends to solve his home assignment?

I argued that the students are not the problem, the grading system is.

Well, now, at least, a small step has been taken. In British Gloucestershire College, a principal decision was made to use facebook in the education. Why? Because, as things were, students skipped homework to a much too large extent, or skipped school or even dropped out altogether. Clear symptoms of lack of faith and perceived value of the school’s education.

Enter facebook, where students are encouraged to find solutions together, set their schedules and goals, in what form and time suits them.

Result – significant increases in assigment completions and reductions in drop-outs.

I have to bounce this one on you. I recently did an interview for a magazine targeted at schools and teachers. We talked about (small surprise) the future. On the subjects of education, one of my main points were that the present grading system is obsolete. Maybe, the entire notion of grading is obsolete.

My first concern was that grades still have to much to do with intake and storing, which are the least necessary things to know nowadays. Anything is within reach of your sticky fingers and available at a click, taking in has never been easier. And even governor Schwarzenegger has realized that text books are becoming redundant with the storage capacity to any information online. Why memorize?

My second concern was that grading, in the end, is all about achieving set goals. And, as you know, I keep arguing that only very short-term set goals can really ever be productive in the warp-speed revolving world we now live in.

Guess – do you think I stirred a lot of outrage?

So, now I’m asking you smart people – what do you think?

It’s tougher than ever to be the coach of a sports team.

In the world of any, anyone, anywhere, can make their voice heard and complain (or do something worse) directly to the coach, it’s impossible to hide, your address, phone number, whereabouts are always somewhere to be found.

Or, the coach can be rendered useless altogether. As I wrote here in an earlier post (please scroll back to late last fall and refresh your memory if you’ve forgotten), British soccer team Ebbsfleet United managed to win the FA Trophy last year without a coach, all decisions being made by the fans voting online.

Or, the players can take charge, even without knowing it. Earlier this fall, Swedish top league soccer team Örebro was on a winning streak. Until one of their players did not make the cut. In frustration, he discussed the wrongfulness of the coach’s top secret play tactics for the next few games on his facebook page. Small surprise to the readers of the blog, the team’s winning streak ended immediately. In the world of any, anybody could get their sticky fingers on the information on the facebook page, not the least the team’s opponents. Blogarazzi-bummer.

It’s tougher than ever to be the coach of a sports team.

Even if you’ve slept under a rock the last couple of years, you must be aware that the media industry is struggling when it comes to news. Newspapers are down on their knees, as nobody seems to be willing to pay for news anymore. After all, in the world of any, anyone can get their sticky fingers on the latest news, anytime, anywhere. Once it is produced, that is.

Once the news is produced, it is by definition old news. Like so many other things in our magnificent Expectations society. As any reader of this blog has witnessed through numerous cases, value often shifts to pre-production, or pre-launch. The value becomes skewed toward the next rather than the existing.

What happens when one views news this way? Spot.us happens. On Spot.us, anyone, anywhere, can submit tips on what could make interesting news, and journalists pitch news stories based on these tips. Anyone can read the pitch, and if they like it, they can fund it, buy a stake in it. If enough money is raised, the journalist gets to work, producing the news story. Once it’s done, having become existing news, it’s free for anyone. Except for other news organisations – if they buy the story and syndicate it, the people who funded the news get a dividend on their stake.

Media and news consumers thus become investors, investing in future news for their own curiosity, and possibly even for a financial return.

Last white-coat report for a while.

So people are provided information about all these different kinds of products, some being informed that the product exist now, some that the product will materialize in the future (e.g., a year from now).

Next, they are asked to rate the company’s other, actual, existing products and their inclination to buy them. What happens?

Guessed it again?

When shown information about a new product, those who were informed that it would exist in the future (rather than now) rated the company’s actual, existing products higher and were more inclined to buy them. That little piece of information (future vs. now) made all the difference, the touted new products were identical in all other respects. Nextopia rubs off.

It’s all good as long as it’s good later

Here’s another quickie, research in progress:

Same experiment as yesterday. People receive information about different products that are either currently available or forthcoming in the future. Product tests have rated a number of different (positive or negative) product attributes. Half of the attributes are abstract (e.g., the mineral water is luxurious, or scientifically tested) or concrete (e.g., look and feel of the bottle, salt balance, flavours).

What information do people use when forming their evaluations of the products?

You probably guessed it again.

When the very same product is presented as a current product, people put greater emphasis on the concrete product attributes – if the look and feel of the bottle is wrong, or the salt balance is off, they don’t want the mineral water. Regardless how luxurious and scientific it is. If the mineral water is to be launched in the  future, however, they’d be happy to treat themselves to a luxurious and scientific mineral water, regardless of the look and feel of the bottle and the salt balance.

In nextopia, it’s all good as long as it’s fuzzy.

Here’s a short one just after getting back from today’s events (I promised myself to post even when it’s extremely short and spur of the moment). I’ve crunched some nextopia experiments in the last few days. Really fun:

Provide a few thousand people with descriptions of different products, ranging from mineral water to cell phones. The descriptions outline a number of different features that have been rated either positive or negative in product tests.

Tell half of the people that the product is ready for launch now, and tell the other half that the product will be released some time in the future (e.g., in three months’ time).

Which product features do you think the first vs. second group of people focus on when evaluating the product?

You guessed it. The first group was fairly likely to focus on the negative features (“is this current product really better than the rest?”), whereas the second group was most likely o focus on the positive features (“of course, this future product is better than the rest, how?”

This was regardless of what the features actually were. We rotated the negative and positive ratings between all the different features (coming up with 32 different descriptions per product and group…). If, for example, battery time was rated negative (tests show it does not last long), it became rather important for the current cell phone and rather unimportant for the future cell phone. And if the battery time was rated positive (tests show it lasts long), it became less important when people rated the current phone and more important when people rated the future phone.

In nextopia, it’s all good as long as it’s good.

November is closing in, that’s when Sir John Sawers is supposed to start his reign as chief of the British MI6. You’ve probably heard of MI6 (most people seem to think of James Bond), but you probably don’t know that much about it. That’s because you’re not supposed to know much about it, it’s an organisation for international espionage.

The question is, whether Sir John is really suited for the job. Being chief of one of the world’s leading secret services, it might not be too good if the world knows too much about one’s person, family, and whereabouts. With more than 80,000 google hits to his name, John Sawer would not really be your typical secret chief.

Most of these hits came about around early July, when rumour of Mrs. Sawers highly candid, frequently updated, facebook account circled around the globe. Soon, anyone, anywhere, could see where and when the Sawers family did what with whom from day-to-day. We were even fed pictures of the chief in swim trunks.

Blogarazzi-bummer.

Then again, Sir John might just be yet another 15-microseconds-of-famer (check out the very narrow, peaky, search stats curve), whom everyone’s forgotten long about since.

He’s back. Just as we were starting to forget about him, just as he was transforming (degrading?) from nextopian expectity to is-been (the Expectations society equivalent of the yestermillennium term has-been), just as he was plummeting in approval ratings. Barack Obama’s is-been status is beautifully illustrated with this google trend graph. After the great election peak and the (naturally much smaller) inauguration peak, he’s vanished into oblivion. Gone, baby, gone.

Then the Nobel Peace Prize committee manifests its position in the Expectations society. Awarding Barack Obama the Peace Prize for the job and the effects they expect from him.

Welcome back to the future, President Obama!

Ever heard of Google Wave? Probably not two months ago. But most certainly now, everybody talks about it. Just like the case with Voddler, the demand for Google Wave has exploded in the last few weeks. Still not launched, a hundred thousand or so invites have been traded at up to 500 dollars on Ebay during this time.

Google have done it again, co-creators of the world of any, where anything, anywhere is available anytime (just google it), they are masters of the Expectations society. Just like the G1 android (scroll back to my post on it almost exactly the same time last year), the Wave has managed to create two powerful waves:

The entire Google stock has seen two surges in demand and value in the last six months, in May and late September. Those surges matching perfectly with the peaks in “google wave” keyword searches.

Nextopia is a billion dollar business.