So Twitter. You know what it is… right? Of course you do it is that web thing that everyone is talking about. The thing that Zuckerburg was pining after, before he realized Twitter and Facebook solve different needs. The thing that John Mayer was all about before he switched to Tumblr. It’s a public bulletin board / web messaging system / chat room for people to tell the world about the things they do and do not care for, the things they eat, the places they go, the people they meet, break news stories, and talk about sex and everything in between. A year ago we were asking: Do we need this? Do people care about what people are sharing here? Today, those questions are about as meaningless as that poor sap who asked Thomas Edison if we needed the lightbulb. People are using it… but not just using it, they are flocking to it. In April of 2009, Twitter had around 14 million unique visitors per month… a year later that number is closer to 180 million. 

How did Twitter achieve this feat? Well basically by not trying to achieve it. Just think about what makes a tweet work. How do you connect one individual’s opinion, state of mind, or current state of doing to another’s? How do you join a conversation or bring topics together?  You use a #hashtag. Funny thing is, Twitter didn’t actually introduce the hashtag. It was introduced by Twitter’s enterprising early adopters. But it was Twitter’s own open system… its focus on simplicity, and its user centric experience that enabled it to became what it is today.

So in case you missed my point. Twitter is relevant now. Deal with it. The question now is what has it become and where will it go?

My opinion… Twitter is at the very least the megaphone of the web (and yes probably so much more than that). People see something that they like, or read something that intrigues them, or find something that grosses them out, and they tweet about it. A short comment about that thing with a hashtag thrown somewhere in the middle. It is a public messaging system. A BBS… where one can post shout outs, ideas, inane observations. It is a place where communities can form spontaneously and simutaneously around topics of interest thanks to the power of #JustinBeiber #Gaga #Obama etc. Comments (tweets) about Justin Beiber alone monopolize 3% of Twitter’s server. This magnitude of comments isn’t happening on Youtube’s Justin Beiber videos. They aren’t happening on his official fan page. They aren’t happening on Google Sidewiki or Disqus. They are happening on Twitter. And they are happening for thousands and thousands of other topics. I think this is one of the best things about Twitter. People don’t have to go search the web for a place to put their comments. They don’t have to gain entrance to a community first before they can make there voices heard. They don’t even have to know that such a community exists. All they need is a Twitter account, an opinion, and a hashtag.

Anyway assuming that I am right… that what Twitter has become is largely a megaphone for the world, what does that mean? We have heard about Twitter breaking news stories like the Hudson River plane crash, being used as an instrument of protest against authoritarian regimes. Brands have begun to realize the importance of having a presence on Twitter in order to help them manage customer relationships. Marketers and advertisers have noticed and begun exploiting the viral power of the retweet. But what about outside of Twitter? How are tweets being used in third party applications and websites? Well they are primarily being used in blogs where tweets are included to extend their existing commenting mechanisms or websites to distribute their content through an individuals Twitter network. But how else can Twitter be used? How else should it be used?

This is where I think things get interesting, and a topic that I have not seen talked about very much.

When tweets are integrated into blogs and sites as they are right now, tweets are being treated as individual units. The focus of the blog or site is first and foremost their own content. Showing tweets (like comments) is a way for them to gauge how engaged people are with the content that is being displayed, and to encourage others to engage with them. This is good, but it isn’t the only way one can use tweets.

What if we step back and adopt a more holistic view. Remove the blog, the site, the content from the picture. What is a tweet? Well part of that definition I already mentioned. It is an individual’s expression of sentiment and action. But it is much more that it. A tweet does not exist alone. It is an individuals public thought, self organized by hashtag, time, and location. Aggregate it vertically (i.e. the individuals Twitter stream) and you have a good idea of what a person is interested in. Aggregate it horizontally and you have an ever-morphing timeline on any particular topic/event, ranging from the MTV movie awards to conversations with Obama, and the ability to predict the future

A tweet is more than just a tweet. It is an exploration of thoughts and attitudes from millions of individuals of different persuasions. It is a single node of web, a way to navigate, explore, and discover new thoughts, new content, and develop new insights. 

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Thanks to ??? (@josanku) of KT, I had the opportunity to play with an iPad today while hanging out at COUP (pictures below). I didn’t have a chance to play with it for long, but my first impression is that it’s a nice device… but not all that. It won’t replace your laptop, and it won’t replace your smartphone, but if you have money to spare, I can see how it could be a fun toy.

Personally, though, I will wait for the Notion Ink Adam. Same form factor, but none of the limitations of the iPad… plus it has the awesome Pixel Qi display.

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Late 1990s were the haydays of the Korean internet because we had broadband infrastructure that was unrivaled anywhere else. Cyworld, Dialpad, digital goods and other web services and ideas emerged here long before they did in the west.

Korea, China, Japan are the big economies in the east. In regards to the economy their is not that much of a discrepency but in regards to landsize it is very small. If China was a watermelon, and Japan was a strawberry, then Korea would be a pea… actually half a pea.

There are 48 million people in a very small land area. This is bad… until you look at connectivity and broadband penetration. 94 percent broadband penetration in Korea.

Koreans are a homogenous group of people. Things / ideas spread very quickly because of this.

Tehran Valley is the equivalent of Silicon Valley in the US.

Cyworld preceded Facebook by 5 years.

Korea leads the worlds in many areas including how much time ppl spend online.

11 million went to gaming sites. 13 times/ month

Usage is here. But innovation seems to have stopped. Why?

Walled gardens. Portals have lots of traffic coming in but little being sent out. Also mono-culture for browsers… only uses Internet Explorer

Many types of phone plans in Korea but no unlimited data plan in Korea. Korean companies are not giving consumers what they want.

47% of all internet users in Korea illegally downloaded 55 movies per year.

Korean used to be innovators in internet web service but seems to be going backward now.

Mobile data usage is very low too because of the cost.

Entrepreneurs are here. But VCs need to support them.

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Today’s talk will be focused on changes of the web due to technological development and the emergence of the social web.

Our world is like Jampong (a combination korean chinese noodle soup dish).

The future of the web. The next web. What is it? Instead of the PC being the node… people will be the node. Our conversations, pictures, and the stuff generated by us will be the future of the web.

Action Potential – In the brain… neurons need a sort of critical mass to do something.

For the web this is also true. The old web is the data web. The focus was on the structure and connections, not the energy that was created.

Today it is evolving. Take for example Twitter… most tweets and comments get lost. But certain tweets / videos / conversations pick up enough steam that they achieve critical mass. They have action potential.

Twitter party example in Korea – create an event in Korea where Korean twitters can meet each other. It was a success. Got me curious about creating a social action event… so I looked for an example and I found Twistival

I have been using Twitter to test ideas. I throw an idea out there and if people like it… it gets picked up and it snowballs. Large amounts of energy can be gathered and focused in a short time thanks to these new technologies like Twitter.

The brain works similar to this. Brain connections that are not used are pruned away.

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Presentation is paraphrased:

Design is a natural innate human ability that is waiting to be released. By educating everyone in design thinking… it is possible to change the world.

Hosted many design thinking workshops and the results are always exciting. People who attend are from all fields and ages.

Participants build mockups at these workshops.

Three part process to get people to design:

1. Provide the opportunity and enviroment (encouragement) to solve real world problems
2. Materials and coaching to build their solutions
3. Show creative results at the end

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The first speakers are Seungbum Kim and Haejin Jung – both practicing general physicians

We have a cafe attached to their medical office to bring some humanity back into medicine… so rather than making the doctor office a sterile scary experience… we try to bring some warmth back into the situation. So we are focused on creating a human oriented medical experience using medical design.

Something as simple as hiding a stethoscope in the doll can make listening to the heartbeat of a baby a much more enjoyable experience than it otherwise would be. And putting candy on a tongue depressor makes sticking that piece of wood in your mouth pleasant… who would have thought?

Enhancing communication between doctors and patients begins with looking at the way the space around a doctor and patient is organized. In a typical doctor/patient consulation a desk and all the stuff on it sits between the doctor and the patient. How can we overcome this?

In a conversation between the doctor and patient, also lose the story that the patient tells. In an effort to capture the symptoms that the patient in complaining about, the doctor focuses on distilling the patients story to a few keywords… headache, vomiting, shortness of breath etc. The patients story in the end is lost.

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The line up of speakers is quite impressive, from a former Apple lead designer to the Founder of Tattertools (Korean version of the WordPress blogging service). For speakers who present in Korean, they even have headsets so that us Hangul inepts can understand what is going on. Not to mention the Microsoft Surface sitting outside the conference room to play with… also a first for me.

The event host is this guy…. didn’t catch his name

Here is a list of the speakers:

Jaram Lee – a traditional Korean music performer
Dongwon Hong – designer and founder of Typomedia (Geulsee Media in Korean)
Hwang Doo Jin – Architect fusing traditional Korean and modern western design sensibilities
Jihoon Jeong – Medical engineer
Bill Dresselhaus – former designer at Apple and founder of a design consultancy the Dresselhaus Group
Eungyul Lee – world class magician
Seungbum Kim and Haejin Jung – General physician
Yeonho Oh – Journalist
Chang Kim – founder of Tattertools and blogger at Web20asia
Chibok Song – Copywriter for among other things ex-president of Korea Roh Moo-Hyun

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If you have 15 minutes or so to spare from your day, the video is well worth the time. Dan Pink is an engaging speaker and the information he presents  uproots the long accepted belief that motivation using cash incentives works.  It doesn’t.

To summarize: The ideas on motivation that held true during the process oriented do-as-you-are-told methodology of the industrial era, no longer holds true in an age where mechanical processes (manufacturing, inventory management, etc) are being delegated to machines, and creativity and outside-the-box thinking drive the economy. Believe it or not, using money as the primary tool for motivation is counter-productive when you are trying to encourage creativity.

When linear thinking is necessary, money still works. But when you need to think laterally, productivity drops as the monetary reward goes up, i.e. we get less creative so it takes longer to solve the problem.

The solution to  encouraging creative thinking and increasing productivity is not money, it is the freedom to act. The best way to encourage creativity is to stop treating employees like a dog you can train and start acknowledging that they are independent agents capable of much more than you give them credit for. As employees, it is important for us to believe that what we do or what we are trying to do has some sort of intrinsic value.

Now Dan Pink was speaking from a business perspective, but this idea got me thinking. What about education, both from a student’s perspective and a teacher’s perspective?

From a student’s perspective, grades would look a lot like monetary incentives. The higher you score on this test, the more you participate in class, or the more homework you complete… the higher a reward (grade) you get. We are trapping our children in the same do-as-your-told processes that has dominated business for so long. And in doing so we do them a grave disservice.

Those standardized tests that we as a world have put so much emphasis on as the way to measure our ‘ability’ are a perfect example of what is wrong with our education system. Those tests claim to measure intelligence, but all they really measure is how well you can take a test. Walk into any Princeton, Kaplan, or any other test prep center and they teach you the same thing. They teach you how to recognize patterns and types of questions. In essence they teach you how to game the system. And to compound the problem, these test prep course cost a lot of money, so in most cases it is only the wealthy that can take full advantage of this service.

So now what of the teachers? A few weeks ago, Obama suggested implementing a pay-for-performance plan for teachers, where seniority and tenure are de-emphasized as the means for determining pay and merit is elevated. One of the problems with this, as I wrote in my last post, is that merit is a difficult quality to categorize and measure. And if we set our standards for merit wrong, we could easily do more harm than good.

In that post, I didn’t explain what I meant by that, because, to be honest, I didn’t really know how. To me it just seemed intuitive. But listening to Dan Park brought me back to that problem. And now I think I can explain what I meant.

If we measure merit based on how well a student performs in our current system of education, then we are only going to end up magnifying the problems that exist in the system. More focus on grades and standardized tests will result in more subject oriented and do-as-you-are-told teaching. We get more of the same when what we need is a change.

To make a pay-for-performance plan work, we need to first change the system so that we de-emphasize grades and test scores and grant teachers more freedom on how to teach, so that teachers can focus on instilling in our children that which is really important: a life long love for learning.

There is no easy solution to this problem, but the acknowledging and acting on the ideas that Dan Pink presents and others like him argue are the first steps toward solving this problem.

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What is interesting about this article is that it seems to supports what Obama is proposing to do about teacher pay… perhaps not directly but some of the authors complaints would be addressed by the proposed de-emphasis on tenure and seniority, and a stronger emphasis on merit. The question that this raises of course is “How do you effectively measure merit?” And of course the consequences could be tragic if the answer to that question is not carefully thought out. But that is a conversation for another time and place. First we must identify the problem, and the argument below is a compelling one. Enjoy.

It’s easy to blame inner-city kids for the problems with inner-city schools. They come from dysfunctional homes, people tell themselves, have careless parents and bad attitudes. They are doomed from the start. But the children I see starting kindergarten at my school in the South Bronx are just as bright and inquisitive as the ones at the elite private school a few blocks away. The problem isn’t the kids. The system is the problem.

Understaffed, disorganized, and chaotic, most inner-city schools are obstacle courses only the most resilient student can overcome.

I offer this viewpoint as a newly “excessed” teacher, which means that due to budget cuts and an antiquated seniority system, I have essentially been let go by my school. In my three years of teaching, I have helped non-readers in September to become chapter book-readers in May, and only three of my 72 students have ever failed either the state math or language arts exams. I am the kind of teacher who gives up her lunch period to provide extra help to students, stays late to talk to parents, and walks into the school each morning with a smile. Next year, I will be replaced by a “veteran teacher” who has been pushing papers for the past four years, is outwardly upset about being “forced back into the classroom,” and has a reputation for skirting responsibility (i.e., failing to tutor students who she has been assigned to tutor).

…

Who loses there? Well, good teachers are out of a job. But far more important, the students become lame ducks, stuck in a school with teachers who don’t want to be there and in a system that doesn’t think they’re worth as much as the ones up the block.

…

The problem is systemic. The problem is fixable. And our kids deserve a solution.

Check out The Stimulist for the full article

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Clay Burrell at the Change.org blog pointed the relevant passage  out first, which I have placed below. (Bolding courtesy of Clay Burrell)

Asia is pouring money into higher education. But Asian universities will not become the world’s leading centers of learning and research anytime soon. None of the world’s top 10 universities is located in Asia, and only the University of Tokyo ranks among the world’s top 20. In the last 30 years, only eight Asians, seven of them Japanese, have won a Nobel Prize in the sciences. The region’s hierarchical culture, centralized bureaucracy, weak private universities, and emphasis on rote learning and test-taking will continue to hobble its efforts to clone the United States’ finest research institutions.

Even Asia’s much-touted numerical advantage is less than it seems. China supposedly graduates 600,000 engineering majors each year, India another 350,000. The United States trails with only 70,000 engineering graduates annually. Although these numbers suggest an Asian edge in generating brainpower, they are thoroughly misleading. Half of China’s engineering graduates and two thirds of India’s have associate degrees. Once quality is factored in, Asia’s lead disappears altogether. A much-cited 2005 McKinsey Global Institute study reports that human resource managers in multinational companies consider only 10 percent of Chinese engineers and 25 percent of Indian engineers as even “employable,” compared with 81 percent of American engineers.

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