Boston Globe advertising: What's wrong with this picture?

Today, the "A" section of the Sept. 27, 2009 Boston Sunday Globe contained 14.5 pages worth of ads, out of 25 pages total. Of those ad pages:

• 4 were placed by car companies.
• 2 were placed by department stores (or actually a single store, Macy's)
• 1.75 were placed by telcos.
• 1.5 pages were placed by banks.
• 1 was placed by the Boston Globe itself -- three separate "house ads" for Boston Globe services or programs.
• The remainder were placed by various stores, events, brands, or charities.

The 12-page "B" section of the Globe (Metro) contained the equivalent of just over 2 pages of ads. One page was a large travel ad organized by the Globe with multiple vendors listed. A .5 page equivalent consisted of Globe house ads. The remainder: A bunch of small, education-related ads (Simmons, Massachusetts School of Law, etc.), a small ad for the Metro Credit Union, and some tiny legal notices in 6-point type on page B4

The 17-page Sports section was a desert: A single one-page Chrysler/Jeep ad, two quarter-page ads for Town Fair Tire and NTB, a miniscule ad for Buddy's Budget Tile, and, of course, a Boston Globe house ad to fill some space on page C13.

The Globe West section was far healthier -- about 6 ad page equivalents out of a 10-page section -- but a lot of that was tied into a special health supplement in the section as well as a crop of apple-picking advertisements.

Now, I didn't look through any other section except Money & Careers (mostly filled with job classifieds, plus larger health/corporate job postings, but no bank or other financial ads) or count the circulars, but you don't have to be a Madison Avenue quant to see that something is wrong.

But wait, there's more. Online, I couldn't check every page of the site, but I did check the front page of all the main sections listed in the navigation, plus several articles. Two things stood out:

• Only the cars front page appeared to have local ads, and only for car dealerships. Aside from those companies, I did not see a single print advertiser who concurrently had online ads running on Boston.com
• The front page of the site and every article page were filled with mostly scattershot ad networks, running everything from American Express Gold Card pitches to banner ads for World of Warcraft. There were a handful of exceptions -- tiny labels promoting Bentley University's business school, and a larger unit for King Richard's Faire. But these were rare.

Imagine you were a consultant -- either the McKinsey type, or just a common-sense manager looking at the revenue and client situation. What would be some obvious areas that need help?

"The Gates Unbarred" review, part II: Shinagel's views of distance education

(See part I of the review here) (Update: Richard at ClueHQ has responded in a blog post. The link to the post and my response to him is at the bottom of this entry) I've written extensively about distance education on my blogs, and have been critical of the Extension School's portrayal of distance education courses as being an acceptable substitute for in-class instruction. The missing elements? Dialogue with professors and students. The chance to raise your hand and get an instant reply or steer the discussion in a new way, and everyone in the class being aware of the debates. The idea that email, prerecorded lectures, and asynchronous message board exchanges can completely replace being in a room with your professor and classmates is ridiculous, yet that's exactly what the Extension School is promoting -- particularly for the undergraduate ALB and graduate ALM in IT degrees, both of which can be earned with upwards of 90% distance education credit (i.e., as little as a single semester or two seven-week summer sessions on campus).

I am not slighting the efforts of distance education students, some of whom put more efforts into their studies than their in-class counterparts. But I feel very strongly that the Extension School has failed to make a case that the current toolset and methodology can replace in-class instruction. I think that the Harvard Extension School's liberal credit policies for distance education are a mistake, and should be reevaluated as soon as possible.

That's my take, at least. But what about the perspectives of the Extension School administration? The Gates Unbarred presented a special opportunity for understanding the DCE administration's official views of distance education. And after reading what Dean Shinagel had to say about computer-based distance education, not all of my takeaways were negative. Two things were apparent:

First, it is clear from reading Shinagel’s account that The Extension School is a pioneer in this arena, and both he and several senior Harvard faculty deserve recognition for their efforts.

Second, even though the Extension School has failed to make a case that Web-based instruction is a suitable replacement for traditional face-to-face learning, at least a few people in the Extension School administration -- most notably Henry Leitner, Harvard's associate dean of information technology and CTO for the Division of Continuing Education -- are aware of some of the problems, are willing to experiment in an effort to improve the pedagogy, and, most importantly, are asking the right questions about how Web-based instruction might be improved.

Shinagel does not dwell on the limitations in The Gates Unbarred. He obviously sees the massive expansion of distance education as a remarkable success. Much of chapter XIII, "Extension Courses Go Online," is devoted to the history of computer-based distance education at the Extension School, which dates back some 25 years. The stories are very interesting, starting with the first "Teleteaching" experiments (using PCs with special software, telephones, and modems) in the mid-1980s. Leitner, who was then a senior computer science lecturer at Harvard, actually conducted a five-week class on artificial intelligence with students at Beijing Normal University in 1987, which was surely one of the first such international efforts involving U.S. and Chinese universities. By the late 1990s, the Extension School was teaching a number of math and computer science classes based on Mathematica software running on Apple computers. However, in 1998 the school decided to limit itself to CS classes on this platform "because of the problems involved supporting distance students’ need to deal with software installation," Shinagel writes.

Internet-based education started to get a boost at this time, but was hobbled by immature multimedia technologies and a lack of tools for Web-based learning. Remember, the Web was still in its infancy in the late 1990s. Leitner's solution? Build a dedicated Extension School platform for Web education. He enlisted one of his students, Antonio Aranda Eggermont, to lead the effort, and the result was "a system that would enable the Extension School to expand the number of courses available online," Shinagel writes. In the 1999-2000 school year, the dean’s annual report included a separate section on distance education, evidence of its growth and increasing stature.

As distance education expanded, many eyes were focused on the Extension School's experiments. Shinagel mentions reports that were supported by various University offices (including the Harvard Provost’s Office) that either evaluated the effectiveness of Harvard’s distance education efforts and/or recommended strategies for future expansion. It would have been helpful if the Extension School or the other participating departments posted them on the Web, but in the absence of the full reports, I only have Shinagel’s summaries and interpretation to go on. He said:

• "The initial findings and recommendations of the provost's grant study were on the whole encouraging and pedagogically useful." (185)
• "The findings illustrated strong support by faculty and their distance students and recommended a strategy of continued growth, especially focus on ‘hybrid courses,' whereby students had the option of attending class and reviewing the lecturers over the Internet." (184)
• "Other factors that emerged from the study supporting program expansion included offering more introductory-level courses and more technical courses for prospective distance students competent with computers." (184)
• "The motivation of students to enroll in a Harvard Extension School distance course, was predictably, the Harvard University image and reputation, which underscored the need for the program to live up to expectations of academic quality associated with the Harvard brand." (184-185)

But other sections hint at negative views and even resistance to Harvard's aggressive push into distance education:

• "... Teaching and learning in distance courses clearly were perceived as different, especially as faculty and students alike were experimenting on how best to create a sense of community in class and online with electronic communications. Distance students needed more supportive attention, particularly at the beginning, to ensure a good learning experience. Faculty also needed more support as they attempted innovations in their teaching styles when dealing with in-class and online students simultaneously. Teaching assistants required special training and support for their duties with websites, discussion groups, and bulletin boards because students demonstrated that they had different learning styles as they interacted with technologies associated with distance courses." (185)
• "Since distance courses inevitably involved more work for faculty, it was necessary to develop a system of incentives to induce them to put their courses online." (184)
• "... The challenge was to attract more of Harvard's senior faculty to participate in the distance program. ... Henry Leitner was feeling particularly frustrated by this situation, as the newly created Master of Liberal Arts in Information Technology Program was experiencing a dearth of involvement by his busy Harvard colleagues." (186)

Leitner and others came up with an interesting idea to address this last issue. Their solution: offer videotaped daytime classes as online-only courses for HES students. An experiment was proposed, using a Harvard College networking class taught by H.T. Kung and approved by Dean Harry Lewis of Harvard College and Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences Dean Venkatesh Narayanamurti (later the dean of SEAS).

Shinagel deemed the experiment a success, noting that the 13 HES students who completed the course (out of 18 who registered) had overall scores that were comparable to those of the more than 100 Harvard College students who took the same class during the day. He said that the experiment showed "faculty could teach simultaneously an in-class and online audience without cumbersome technology interfering in the teaching and learning processes."

But after reading this, I have to ask: If distance education technology is viewed as so cumbersome to instructors, then how does that affect the teaching and learning processes for the more than 70% of distance courses at the Extension School that are not based on the rebroadcast Harvard College classes?

There was also the issue of student involvement. In the experiment with Professor Kung’s class, any one of the Harvard College students could raise his or her hand to ask a question, or participate in spur-of-the-moment classroom discussions. What was the experience of the 13 HES students? Was there any opportunity to interact with the professor? If so, was the nature of that interaction emails or telephone calls that might only be experienced by a single student, or threaded discussions that involved the professor, TAs, and other members of the class, including the College students?

It’s great that the HES students who stuck with the class were able to prove themselves academically, but I am very concerned that they and other distance education students have been given a watered-down educational experience in terms of interaction with faculty and fellow students.

Indeed, on page 189, Shinagel mentions a separate research effort involving Leitner that addressed "how best to deal with the spontaneous ideas and contributions of distance students." So this issue was definitely on their radar screens. Leitner’s report elaborated, "one of the primary complaints about slides that were synchronized to streaming video and audio was the distance student’s inability to interrupt and ask questions ... Some students felt frustrated by the noninteractive nature of the presentation." The technological solution that was proposed in the report -- a "help" button and submission form tied to a data-mining application that helps identify potential "sources of miscomprehension" for teachers to review later -- hardly seems like an effective way to fix the noninteractive nature of the presentations, and relieve the students’ frustrations at not being able to raise their hands and get an immediate answer.

Nevertheless, the school pushed ahead with the expansion of distance education, nearly tripling the number of classes from 36 in the 2002-2003 school year to 100 just four years later. The implementation of formal credit policies around distance education took a few years to catch up. Shinagel does not address these policies, and in my opinion, it's not surprising why: Asynchronous online education has not been established as a replacement for in-class instruction, yet Extension School policies enable students in several disciplines (including the Extension School's main undergraduate program) to earn upwards of 90% of course credit over an Internet connection, with only a token presence on campus for the rest of the time. This is very questionable. Indeed, many people at Harvard have warned against regarding online communications as a replacement for classroom-based academic exchange:

"You can't replicate an entire Harvard education ... I'm not sure you'd want to."

-- Henry Leitner, Director of Academic Computing at Harvard's Division of Continuing Education (1999)

"No one should believe that electronic communication can be--or should be--a substitute for direct human contact. But the electronic process has some features that do permit an actual extension of the scope, continuity, and even the quality of certain forms of interaction, even though communication over the network lacks other absolutely essential aspects of 'real' conversations in the presence of 'real' people."

-- Neil L. Rudenstine, Pointing Our Thoughts. Harvard University Press (2001) from the text of a 1996 speech

These views are more than a decade old, but one doesn't have to look far to find more recent assessments that question Internet-based instruction, including Harvard faculty who are themselves active users of Internet and mobile technologies. Michael Sandel, who manages to have rich dialogues and debates with hundreds of Harvard College students taking his "Justice" class, told The Chronicle of Higher Education that "I don't believe that it's possible fully to replicate the in-person classroom experience using new technology", such as video and online resources. Another Chronicle article citing recent research into online education noted that nearly half of instructors who had taught online classes in the past felt that "learning outcomes" were inferior or somewhat inferior to face-to-face instruction, compared to 38% who felt that outcomes were the same (see report).

Another issue to consider: Why has no other school at Harvard embraced Internet education? It is no longer a futuristic concept -- in the past ten years, scores of Harvard faculty and hundreds of teaching assistants have taken part in the Extension School's online courses. They could easily be cross-pollination agents with Harvard's other schools, bringing enthusiasm, experience, and technology tools to their departments and colleagues. Yet aside from a few experiments (such as the Extension School's virtual reality classes, taught by faculty associated with the Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society) I am not aware of any other Harvard academic unit embracing Internet education, offering class credit for online courses, let alone granting degrees with only a bare minimum of time spent on campus. If the other schools don't see online education as an acceptable learning alternative or credit substitute for their students for even a single class, why is it OK for HES degree candidates?

At the end of The Gates Unbarred chapter on the history of distance education at the Extension School, Shinagel claims that HES "established a reputation for leadership, innovation and academic excellence in distance education." (197) I concur with the first two descriptions, and admire those distance students who have proved themselves capable of academic excellence. However, I strongly disagree with the notion that online forms asynchronous learning, teaching, and communication styles can serve as a substitute for in-class instruction -- at least with the current technology toolset, and to the degree that the Extension School now allows. That may change in the next five or ten years, but until it does, the Extension School should rethink its online credit policies.

(Richard at ClueHQ has responded to my views on distance education at Harvard in a blog post, "Distance Education and the Harvard Experience: A Response to Critics". At the bottom of his post, I have responded.)

Update: Since writing this review of The Gates Unbarred, I have taken an online math class for credit (not at the Extension School, but at a very well-regarded public university), and have this to say about the online education experience:

• My online math class: Convenience gets an 'A,' but at what cost?

Review: The Gates Unbarred: A History of University Extension at Harvard, 1910-2009

It took 100 years, but someone has finally written a book about the Harvard Extension School. The author of The Gates Unbarred: A History of University Extension at Harvard, 1910 - 2009, is none other than Dean Michael Shinagel, who has led Harvard's Division of Continuing Education since 1975. It's a very informative book that will mainly be of interest to people who want to better understand the development of the Extension School in the context of Harvard's own history. However, prospective students or people currently in the Extension School's degree programs will find little practical information concerning their studies or specific HES programs (if you are interested in how to overcome the various challenges related to earning an Extension School degree, I suggest reading my own blog about Harvard Extension, or visiting the ExtensionStudent.com discussion forum).

My review of the book is contained in the blog post below and in a separate post that covers Shinagel's descriptions of distance education at the Extension School. I would like to note at the outset that while I have many criticisms of the book and the Shinagel's views on distance education, I have also gained newfound respect for the Extension School and its expansion under the dean. Some of the programs he was directly responsible for establishing -- including the ALM/liberal arts degree and Harvard's Tuition Assistance Plan -- directly benefited thousands of students, including myself. I am extremely grateful for his efforts, and think the Extension School is a wonderful institution, but at the same time feel compelled to give an honest appraisal of the areas that I think deserve criticism or need improvement.

I'll start with the author's approach and biases. While Shinagel is extremely knowledgeable about the history of the Extension School (particularly the decades-long period he has served as dean) his insider status made it difficult for him to directly criticize the institution he inherited and helped grow. The chapters covering the last 15 years often read like marketing copy, describing in soaring tones the creation of various programs and how well they complement its community mission.

Some of his accomplishments certainly do deserve praise. For instance, the biotechnology ALM not only serves the University's expanded science focus, but was also developed with input from Boston's huge biotechnology industry. But to portray the ALM in Journalism program -- launched in 2005 for students "interested in pursuing careers in print journalism" -- as a sensible area of expansion for the Extension School seems questionable, considering the abundance of graduate journalism options in the Boston area (including the established programs operated by Boston University and Emerson), the Internet-driven death throes of the newspaper and magazine businesses, and the longstanding glut of journalism graduates. The Extension School's expansion into Internet-based distance education is also treated with kid gloves, despite low-key references to various challenges relating to the recruitment of Harvard faculty and the reliance on asynchronous modes of communication (more on this in part II of my review).

Furthermore, the book suffers from a top-down view of the school's history. Since the start of University Extension in 1909, something like half-a-million people have taken classes at the Extension School, and more than 10,000 have received degrees, yet we rarely hear from any of them. Rather, the voices mainly belong to a dozen or so men who have led the school as dean or were associated with its founding or funding (i.e., the Lowell family). In this sense, The Gates Unbarred follows the format commonly found in other Harvard histories such as Harvard Observed: An Illustrated History of the University in the Twentieth Century, in which history is seen through the lens of successive leaders' tenures. The views of students, alumni, professors, staff, and others hardly warrant a mention.

Nevertheless, The Gates Unbarred contains many interesting facts, stories, and personalities that will hold the reader's attention. I've written extensively about the Extension School (from 2005 to 2008 I published hundreds of blog posts about Harvard Extension on Harvard Extended), yet I was delighted to learn new things about current and past programs that are not described in the Extension School catalogues or even known to the staff and faculty at 51 Brattle St. Who knew the Extension School was involved in an educational partnership with the U.S. Navy in the 1960s, or that the first computer-based distance education classes predate the establishment of the World Wide Web by nearly 10 years? The history of these and other programs is described in a very engaging manner, and I could hardly put down the book.

I am not going to spoil the rest of The Gates Unbarred with a play-by-play review, but I will point to a few elements which I believe deserve more discussion:

A cooperative venture: One thing that's been overlooked in the Extension School's centennial is the fact that it was founded as a cooperative venture ("The Commission on Extension Courses") with other Boston-area teaching institutions, including MIT, Tufts, Simmons, Wellesley, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston College and Boston University. The idea was to attract people who were interested in college-level instruction or earning a degree (mostly teachers in the early days), and letting them gather credit from courses taught by the various member schools, initially at a very low price. Until the 1960s, the tuition was just $5 per course (The Lowell Institute provided additional support). For those few who were able to take enough courses, it was possible to earn an Associate in Arts degree from one of the member institutions. The Gates Unbarred was a little murky on the specifics of the arrangement with the other schools, and it was not clear how this cooperative venture was supposed to be maintained. At one point in the mid-1930s, only Harvard and Tufts continued to offer the degree, but in another section Shinagel writes that as late as the 1960s other member institutions were still providing faculty to teach courses. In any case, the commission's arrangement faded over time. Besides Harvard, Boston University (my undergraduate alma mater) appeared to be one of the major participants in the venture, while it was still active.

An emphasis on excellence: This will not be a shock to anyone who has completed the undergraduate liberal arts ALB or graduate ALM/liberal arts degrees, but Harvard has placed an emphasis on excellence at the Extension School from day one. I've read accounts from other recent graduates who have studied under luminaries such as Lawrence Lessig, but Shinagel's exploration of the early years of the Extension School reveal the names of well-known scholars from eras past. John Kenneth Galbraith (economics) and Oscar Handlin (history) caught my attention, but people with expertise in other fields will surely recognize names who taught at the Extension School 50, 75, or even 100 years ago. In most cases, writes Shinagel, the motivation for these eminent faculty to teach classes at night was not money, but rather a love of teaching and a chance to interact with students from varied backgrounds who had an earnest desire to learn.

Another point which proves the early emphasis on excellence was a survey which polled the first 150 Harvard AA recipients in 1938. Of the 91 people who responded, 64% had done graduate work (a figure which Shinagel notes was higher than that of Harvard College at the time) and 60 graduate degrees (mostly masters of arts or education, but also six PhDs and an MD) had been awarded. Fourteen others said they were pursuing a graduate degree at the time they answered the questionnaire.

History of the TAP program: I've long been aware of the benefits of Harvard's Tuition Assistance Plan (it's how I funded my HES studies for more than two years) but I didn't realize the role that Dean Shinagel played in getting it established. Since the late 1970s, it's been a boon to Harvard's employees, allowing them to take classes at the Extension School and several of Harvard's other professional schools for a fraction of the full tuition (I paid about $50 per class when I worked at Harvard, but had to pay about $2,000 per course after I left my Harvard job). If you work at Harvard and have not taken any classes using the TAP, you are missing out on one of the best benefits the University has to offer.

History of the graduate ALM/liberal arts degree: On pages 126-127, Shinagel describes the issues that led to the creation of the master's program in 1980. What I found most interesting was the ready support from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the University administration, with the exception of President Bok's concern over the impact on the Harvard Graduate School of Education. At the time, it was suffering from a "severely" constricted applicant pool. Bok wanted to delay the ALM from opening up to candidates, as he felt that the GSE "had to be protected from internal competition." Shinagel describes how he was able to work out a compromise that allowed the ALM to launch to ALB graduates and Harvard staff to make the program operational, and one year later it opened to everyone else who was qualified. However, I felt that his account failed to discuss how the ALM/liberal arts has evolved since 1980, in terms of new concentrations and improvements to the thesis process. The program has also graduated more masters' recipients than any of the professional ALM programs, yet The Gates Unbarred devotes far more attention to the latter, including most of chapters XII through XIV.

Extension School Health Careers program: I had heard good things about the Health Careers program before, but The Gates Unbarred really quantifies how successful it is at helping sponsored graduates -- many of whom come from non-science related backgrounds -- achieve their goals of getting into medical school. Shinagel writes that from its establishment around 1980 to the year 2000, 582 out of 615 sponsored students who passed the program requirements gained admittance to medical school -- a success rate that approaches 95%. Some are even accepted to Harvard Medical School.

Expansion of professional degree programs: It is apparent from the title of chapter XIV, "Harvard University in the 21st Century: New Professional Degree Programs", that Shinagel sees the future of the Extension School lying not in the liberal arts which has served as the foundation of University Extension for 100 years, but rather in disciplines which better reflect the needs of industry:

"Many segments of the labor market are now demanding professional degrees of their employees; the ALM is undergoing a natural evolution as it adapts to changes in demography and to new pressures of the labor market."

If there is any doubt that this is where the dean's interests and intentions lie, note that he has proposed (in a speech at the June 2009 alumni banquet) for the Extension School to be renamed "The Harvard School of Continuing and Professional Studies." This name reflects the Extension School's casual and professional constituencies very well, but in my opinion it turns its back on the liberal arts ALM and ALB students and the Extension School's long liberal arts history.

I also dispute several of Shinagel's assessments relating to the "new pressures of the labor market" quote:

• The demand for graduates of professional degree programs in certain fields is hardly new. Business degrees trace their origins to the Industrial Revolution, and the Harvard Business School was started in 1908. The Boston area has been a hub of computer innovation since the 1950s, and local universities have been teaching and training CS and IT professionals for the entire time.
• The demand for graduates in the various fields covered by the professional ALM programs is uneven. IT professionals and software engineers with masters degrees can certainly find work, but, as mentioned before, there is little demand for graduates of masters-level journalism programs, especially in print media (note that Shinagel says that the "popularity of the journalism concentration", when it was offered as a certificate program, prompted the Extension School to offer a master's degree in journalism.) And while there may be legitimate demand for graduates of the ALM/Mathematics for Teaching and ALM/Environmental Management degrees, the number of matriculated degree candidates in these fields remains low. Only a handful of people graduate from the ALM/Mathematics for Teaching program each year.
• An overwhelming majority of professional ALM students are associated with the information technology and management degrees. More than 200 people graduated with ALM/Management degrees in 2009, double the number of 2008 ALMM graduates.
• The ALM Management and ALM in IT degrees have a disproportionate number of students originating from outside of New England.

Based on these facts, I would therefore argue that the impetus for expanding the biggest professional graduate programs at the Extension School -- the ALM in Management and the ALM in IT -- has more to do with the explosion of distance education courses and the strong demand from distance students (many enamored with the Harvard name), as opposed to a sudden surge in industry demand.

Regardless, The Gates Unbarred is a good source for the history of the various professional ALM programs. The most interesting entry concerns the wildly popular ALM/Management degree. Shinagel describes the successful efforts to recruit emeritus faculty members from the Harvard Business School and how it recently hired Margaret Andrews, a former director of the MIT Sloan School of Management. But this section carefully avoids comparing the ALMM degree to a masters of business administration -- the acronym "MBA" doesn't even come up. Clearly, there is sensitivity over branding. My guess is this relates to the Division of Continuing Education wanting to tread very carefully in territory dominated by an extremely powerful University entity -- the Harvard Business School.

Unusual partnerships: I mentioned the Navy program before, which involved prerecorded lectures being shown on Navy ships to interested officers and crew in the 1960s. That effort grew out of the Extension School's use of broadcasting to distribute lectures to a wider audience in the Boston area (lectures delivered by radio started in 1949 and television in the 1950s, thanks to a partnership with WGBH). Unfortunately, the book does not really address why the broadcasting initiative tapered off, although any mass media approach will be limited by the one-way nature of the delivery system and the lack of interactivity and discussion.

But the most interesting partnership described by Shinagel involved an IT training institute in Bangalore that the Extension School helped get off the ground in the early 1990s. The school had good intentions, but the Indian Computer Academy rapidly turned into a failure. Shinagel readily acknowledges this, but he doesn't go far enough in describing the scope of the disaster. Simply put, the Extension School team neglected to conduct adequate due diligence, and somehow failed to understand that one of its main Indian partners viewed the academy as a for-profit venture. The problems of for-profit education is known in this country, thanks in large part to negative publicity surrounding the Apollo Group's University of Phoenix, but the snafus that sank the Indian IT institute included misappropriation of funds and fraud. If it happened here, there would almost certainly be a criminal investigation. As it were, the Extension School was able to cut the cords quickly, and with only a minimum of negative publicity.

The rest of my review of The Gates Unbarred continues in a separate blog post about Shinagel's appraisals of distance education at the Extension School.

1,000 tweets

I passed a Twitter milestone yesterday -- 1,000 tweets. It may seem impressive, but considering I've been a registered user since June of 2007 and there are many people out there with 10 times as many tweets, it hardly ranks as something very remarkable.

But Twitter has definitely grown on me. When I first started, I didn't appreciate it at all -- I remember telling some people during a panel discussion at Bentley that I liked to write "long," thanks in large part to blogging, and 140-character tweets didn't seem to be a very useful medium for communicating deep thoughts. I've come around to realize that Twitter is useful for communicating different types of thoughts, and now that I use it with my BlackBerry and iPod Touch, really appreciate its mobility -- you certainly can't blog that effectively using a cell phone!

Let's see how long it takes me to break the 2,000 tweet mark ...

Video: Japanese variety show

When I lived in Taiwan, it was possible to watch Japanese television -- including some of their wackier game shows -- on cable TV. Now that I am back in the United States, I can still watch them, thanks to YouTube.

Anyone with young school-aged kids will appreciate this. The goal is to get the boy out of bed and ready for school within 5 minutes. You'll see that a lot of it relates to multitasking. Watch the whole thing -- the mom does some incredible stuff toward the end:

WhoRunsGov uses "moderated" wikis to profile Washington's political elite

Despite all of the doom and gloom surrounding the newspaper industry, it's interesting to see how some of the more adventurous players are experimenting with online media. The Washington Post has been a leader in this regard, and this week launched WhoRunsGov.com as a "moderated wiki" to build profiles of Washington’s political power brokers and track their support for issues dominating the political and legislative agendas.

The key concept here is "moderated" – understandable when one considers the disaster that befell the LA Times "Wikitorial" after just one day online.

However, what I find to be really remarkable about the new WaPo effort is WhoRunsGov.com's open appeal to insiders to contribute to the wikis -- "Whether you're a policymaker, Hill staffer, or an interested citizen, share your knowledge by creating or adding to our profiles of over 700 people in the federal government," urges the site. Whether it results in real insider information, as opposed to loads of vitriol and K Street-style astroturfing and hot air, remains to be seen.

Sources: WhoRunsGov.com, The LA Times, CNet, Wikipedia, Washington Post Media press release

Webkinz loading problems? Join the club!

Longtime readers of the I, Lamont blog may remember an episode from a few years back, involving the Ganz Corporation's poorly planned and executed foray into virtual worlds. Our issues were eventually resolved, but many webkinz users were ripping mad over the technical problems.

But tonight we got another taste of Webkinz frustration, after attempting to log on following an interval of about 3 months. First, my child was greeted by a EULA about the length of the Constitution and equally impenetrable. Then, we watched the system get hung up on the "loading" screen. We waited for 10 minutes before I put her to bed, but I left it on longer, thinking it might need to reconfigure her "world" based on the long break since her last logon, or some other new introduced variable relating to the EULA, expired pets, or something else. I gave up another 20 minutes later.

I don't know if we will bother anymore. There are other online worlds for kids, or we can do something else -- board games or books.

Google News: Biased or broken?

Google News is the gold standard when it comes to algorithm-driven news aggregators. It's updated every few minutes, tracks breaking news across multiple topic areas, and is reasonably well integrated with Google's regular search engine.

It's also seriously biased ... or broken. I usually check it several times per day, and imagine my surprise when I saw this (click to see larger version of screenshot):

A made-up Onion story from last month, listed between real breaking news about swine flu vaccines and Canadian politics?

And a Wikipedia article, listed prominently as the background source for the Jaycee Lee Duggard kidnapping? I thought the Ivy League whiz kids at Google realized Wikipedia is a notoriously unreliable source for information about famous people and many other topics, and is frequently manipulated by spin doctors, SEO consultants, and vandals. I mean, that's one of the reasons Google created Knol, right?

But there's another problem with the results, one that's been nagging me for the past few months. Every single one of the top headlines for each of the topics comes from an old-school, traditional mainstream media organization -- 19th- and 20th-century print or broadcast news outfits, most backed by giant media conglomerates or billionaire founders. CNN, Reuters and the New York Times Co. don't have a monopoly on information or opinions, but with this kind of help from Google, they continue to preserve their dominant market positions in the new online playing field.

It's disappointing, but not entirely unexpected. Google News has had problems with its algorithm for years. For instance, unreliable foreign news sources used to be featured prominently on the site. Part of this related to an apparent desire to diversify sources of information to include non-Anglo-American media outlets (see my 2005 post about Xinhua's unlikely inclusion as a primary news source) as well as some foreign publications taking advantage of or manipulating Google News to get more traffic to their sites. Google has since tweaked the algorithm, but I fear it's been too far in the opposite direction. The same, tired old voices that one sees on newsstands and TV screens -- as well as a few quirky sources that should not be considered sources of "news" -- now take center stage on Google's automated news platform.