BlogU

  • A Google / Microsoft Educational Content Platform?

    By Joshua Kim June 3, 2010 9:49 pm EDT

    The marvelous Barbara Fister writes in our discussion yesterday about my argument that Google should provide a syllabus platform:

    "…..I am bothered by the idea that Google should do it for us. We're getting awfully dependent on Uncle Google, and he's a little creepy. He goes through our pockets and looks at our e-mail so he can tell advertisers what we're interested in. It may be better than hiring Blackboard to be our expensive and bossy Jeeves, but it's not that hard to publish to the web."

    Barbara's feedback got me thinking about why I am so willing to turn over so much of our "academic" life to Google. And is it just Google? Would I respond equally positively if Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, or SunGard wanted to provide us with a platform to host, distribute, and discover educational materials such as syllabi? No doubt that this issue touches on much larger questions about the role of for-profit companies inserting themselves in the educational process, and the degree to which we have become dependent on these companies.

    Unlike Barbara, my gut seems to be fine with Google providing a platform for exchanging and sharing educational materials. Perhaps because I'm already using Google for my e-mail, documents, and videos (through YouTube), the extension to syllabi and other educational materials feels manageable I trust that Google would do a good job of securely hosting the content. I believe they will be around in the future. I'm fine leaving the expertise in search and online storage to Google, so I can concentrate on writing and sharing my syllabus (and searching for colleagues work to learn from). Google has already aggregated the audience and built the network that would allow such a platform to become truly useful. Educational content sharing relies on network effects to be successful, the larger network the better the service. I am not bothered by Google funding this operation by placing relevant (and discrete) text ads next to the syllabi or other educational content in their database. Monetizing the content will incent Google to invest in the features of the educational content sharing platform, expanding the content range, building community around the content, and making the content easier to access and utilize.

    I don't want to be too Google-centric. The key is that this sort of service be offered by a company that I believe will be in the game for the long haul, and has already aggregated the audience, and built a robust technical platform. Microsoft could do this if they were serious about disrupting the higher education market by providing a platform for educational content sharing and discovery. Perhaps some of the other companies I mentioned above could do it as well….although at this point Google and Microsoft are the best positioned.

    The other reason that I'm advocating for either Google or Microsoft (or maybe someone else) to leverage their cloud investment to provide higher ed with free (ad supported) educational materials for sharing and discovery is that I believe they would do a better job than we would. Just like I'm happy to have my e-mail sit in the cloud as opposed to on my campus servers, I'd be pleased if the infrastructure of open educational content migrated to the consumer cloud as well. This is partly an argument for scale - sharing is better with big populations - and partly an argument for technology. Google and Microsoft can move much faster than colleges and universities, where it is appropriate we should leverage this speed and scale for our own benefits. The fact that this is a win / win (higher ed / Google, Microsoft) situation should not dissuade us, as technology can help us escape from zero sum thinking.

    The question for me is how to get the attention of someone at Google or Microsoft (or some other large company that has similar levels of trust, scale and technology) to try this out? A sharing and discovery platform for digital learning content (including syllabi, but also PowerPoints etc.) would be technically easy to build and deploy. Community tagging and rating would greatly assist in assuring that the best quality content rose to the top in any search. This platform would not be expensive to build, and it would be heavily utilized by educators. Does anybody have any ideas how a conversation with Google, Microsoft or another company could be started?

    But first … what do you think about this idea? Is Barbara correct?

Go to comments (5) »
Advertisement
Open Job?

Comments on A Google / Microsoft Educational Content Platform?

  • Google as the one and only cloud
  • Posted by Kathryn Phillips , Librarian at Smithsonian Institution on June 4, 2010 at 9:30am EDT

  • I agree with Barbara Fister that "… We're getting awfully dependent on Uncle Google..." but I'm less concerned about his pocket and e-mail searches than I am troubled by Google being such a large cloud in the sky. The phrase, "too big to fail" comes to mind when I think of storing large quantities of educational and cultural materials on Google servers.

  • Many providers, federated results
  • Posted by Dr. Pepper , Academic-in-Training on June 4, 2010 at 12:00pm EDT

  • I must admit that I missed the "google provides solution" bit yesterday. Personally I think that it would be much better if there were many providers providing syllabus hosting/indexing services and then search engines like google and bing can provide search results, in a similar way that they do for academic/peer reviewed articles.

    Google isn't hosting these articles, but they sure make it easy to find them, and retrieve them if they are part of your local library's subscriptions. I certainly agree that we shouldn't have one provider - too big to fail indeed! They may not fail, but why take the risk?

  • Partly Cloudy
  • Posted by The Marvelous Barbara Fister on June 4, 2010 at 12:45pm EDT

  • Thank you for the compliment. I may have to change my business cards now.

    I think my suspicion of Google (though I do depend on them - which may another reason to be nervous) is two-fold.

    First, librarians in the US have always felt privacy is important. It's not important in itself, necessarily, but without privacy it's hard to protect intellectual freedom. In order to let people be free to read whatever they want, it has to be impossible to get a list of what they've read that could be used as evidence against them. People now find that a little quaint and are irritated when a library catalog can't recommend books, remind them of what they've already read, or provide a parent with a list of books a forgetful teen checked out and then lost in the Great Mire of their bedroom. But when you need to read something that may make others draw conclusions about what you think or what you might do, you need to be able to read and think without fear of consequences. (And if you then do something illegal, that's a crime that can be prosecuted; thinking or reading should not be a crime.) So for that reason the whole edifice of "free" services that are actually paid for with micropayments of personal information (as Greg Conti put it) is worrying.

    I also am concerned that Google is a single large company that may not be evil but is certainly interested in making money. Nothing wrong with that, but putting our non-profit public goods in the hands of a single company that needs to make shareholders happy feels risky to me. (I am setting aside the whole argument that what we do is private intellectual property that should be either hoarded or monetized.) The beauty of the Internet has always been its fundamental design that we don't have everything in one place. Something goes down, it doesn't take everything with it. That's both a technical and a philosophical map for diversity and resilience that seems healthier than one server farm to rule them all.

    And though open source software may be tricky to handle at the local level, it offers a kind of freedom to experiment, improve, localize, and share that is appealing and somehow organic.

  • already possible
  • Posted by Doug Holton , Assistant prof at Utah State University on June 7, 2010 at 1:00pm EDT

  • Again, what would this new tool provide that can't already be done.

    I can already find any online syllabus using the google search engine. That's how I found other related courses while preparing my own course.
    I can post any syllabus online using google sites, google docs, blogger (owned by google), etc.

    There are already a lot of repositories for course materials (like youtube edu, curriki, NSDL, etc., and other OER sites)

  • Google LMS
  • Posted by Larry MacPhee , e-Learning at Northern Arizona Univ. on June 14, 2010 at 6:00pm EDT

  • I would love to see Google enter the LMS market...they already have almost all the pieces in place and this is a huge market...iGoogle is the portal page, Google Docs is the collaborative workspace, GMail is the communication system for messages and chat. Sites for course content, and wave for, well, whatever the heck wave is supposed to do. They've even got the social side covered with that Buzz thing...maybe that would give it the Network Effects jolt it needs to dislodge Facebook from the throne? About the only piece they don't already have is a roster tool/gradebook, but that's similar enough to the spreadsheet in Docs that it's probably not much work. So how about it Google? Will you answer the call?

Print
© Copyright 2011 Inside Higher Ed