Archive for June, 2008

Facebook is the educational uber-panacea for all ills! While Wikipedia creates dunces!

Published by Ben Kepes on June 30, 2008 in IT, Society and Web x.0. 5 Comments

Eureka! - a study just published tells us that Facebook (and other social networking sites) have a significant educational benefit. The crux of the findings are that low decile students, those formerly found to be at the lower end of the digital divide (statistically speaking) are leveraging their quality time spent Facebook-ing and are thus equalizing with their more fortunate peers.

Sorry - but this sounds like namby pamby, bleeding hearted liberal speak here and yet another retreat from effective education. Specific questions I have;

  • If there is any educational benefit to be gained from the use of social media - surely all users gain the same benefit thus the technological chasm between higher and lower deciles (if it exists) should remain the same?
  • Apparently respondents mentioned a creativity gain to be achieved from using Facebook - sorry but FunPoke does not equate to War and Peace and neither does DrawWall (or whatever it is mindlessly called) equate to DaVinci’s Mona Lisa
  • Teachers are being encouraged to increase students use of social media in order to extend these gains - in a time constrained educational system does this mean they’ll no longer be taught to read (oops they’re not anymore anyway)?

These researchers seem to confuse using technology with learning how to create technology. Sorry but using Facebook doth not another Zuckerberg create. And in the same vein listening to Eminem ad nauseum is hardly likely to create Le Quattro Stagioni for our times.

Or is it?

And then again, conflicting reports out of Scotland say that the reasons students are failing (!) is because they are relying too much on a Wikipedia resource which is “riddled with inaccuracies”. The Scotsman is somewhat more realistic when it says;

(it is) easier to blame Wikipedia than the fact that you’re poor parents and your children are out partying or playing video games.
Inaccuracies are found in standard encyclopedias (and newspapers) too. And besides, don’t your schools provide textbooks?

So… a few things here;

  • Wikipedia is just one resource among many, it’s defining attribute however, that of citizen creation, arguably makes it a candidate for more inaccuracy than traditional encyclopedias (more here)
  • Any teacher or parent who relies on only one resource is crazy (or stupid or both)
  • Just as Facebook doth not a Neanderthal create, Wikipedia doth not an Einstein make
  • Test scores fall, test scores rise - chief among the reasons are parental guidance and values, and the presence or otherwise of good educationalists
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Unlimited Potential function…

Published by Ben Kepes on June 29, 2008 in Business, Collaboration, Economic Development, IT, New Zealand, New business and Strategy. 1 Comment

Unlimited Potential is a network based in Wellington, New Zealand. It aims to connect ICT professionals and let them leverage the power of community. Start-Up is a media rich site aiming to connect tech start-ups and their entrepreneurs with good quality resources from all over the place. Silicon Welly is a community of Wellington based, and New Zealand owned, technology and creative businesses, individuals and organisations who together are making Wellington a high quality global hi-tech hub.

Clearly there is significant overlap between these three organisation, and they’re all getting together to celebrate the latest issue of Start-Up magazine (published by Unlimited Magazine which I write for) and to general celebrate all that is young, vibrant, creative and tech in New Zealand.

The event will be held on July 10th at 6pm in Wellington, I’m planning on making the trip up for it and I’d recommend anyone with an interest in tech, entrepreneurship, web community and the creative industries to head along - looking forward to seeing some of you there!

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Sometimes SaaS and the clouds are scary….

Published by Ben Kepes on June 29, 2008 in Business, Design, IT, SaaS and Strategy. 3 Comments

A little while ago I posted asking the question “can you really trust a bootstrapped startup”. I received a number of comments on the post, most of which came from the perspective that trust isn’t an attribute that results from how a business is funded, it’s something built through actions, professionalism and design.

The most scary comment cam from Dan, his tale of woe went thus;

Check out this excerpt from an email I received from a very well funded high profile startup (who shall remain nameless…)

“Yesterday morning we had a major server outage affecting our 1.0 customers. We completely lost one of our database servers. The day was spent rebuilding and restoring everything we possibly could.

There were a handful of accounts that the restore completely failed on. Yours was one of those accounts. We have exhausted all available avenues for restoring the account data with no positive results.”

This proves that even well-funded startups can make the most basic and fatal of mistakes.

Dan’s perception was that, given his experience, it’s not about trusting a bootstrapped start-up or not - it’s about trusting any start-up.

But let’s look at the extension of this which is, of course, that the real problem is trusting something that sits anywhere other than on your premises. We already know that enterprise has real concerns about a move to SaaS, in part this is due to concerns about data security - sure we never here about the good stories, only the vary rare occasions when things go wrong (as in Dan’s example above), and sure most data losses happen on poorly configured and maintained machines sitting on site.

There’s no easy answer to the perception of security issues - the entire SaaS industry needs to get together to ensure all entrants play by a common set of rules around data portability and security. In a nascent industry such as SaaS, all players will gain from a higher aggregate level of execution.

Perhaps the time has come for a neutral and universal set of standards for web based hosting and storage to ensure that we protect the entire industry from the threat posed by poor execution on the par of a few.

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Brusilovsky - Visionary or puppet?

Published by Ben Kepes on June 28, 2008 in Business, IT, New business and SocialMedia. 5 Comments

I came across an interview over on GigaOm with teen entrepreneur Daniel Brusilovsky. Seems Daniel is the 15 year old founder and CEO of TeensInTech, a social media site for, not surprisingly given the name, teenagers. He’s got Loic Le’Muer and Robert Scoble on his board, and has picked up a plum role as evangeliser for Qik.

Check out the video below, I came away thinking that Daniel is a nice guy, but I was also a little uncomfortable - I get a bit of a sense that Daniel is being manipulated rather than helped by his apparent mentors. He spoke all the right start-up words, but his patter seemed a little scripted to me.

I think the concept of a teen entrepreneur is great, but I wonder if Robert and Loic would be anywhere near him if he weren’t a teen? I can’t help but think that TeensInTech is a concept not unlike iYomu (Diversity coverage here) - which never would have got backing from anyone actually in the know about Web 2.0.

What do others think?