How we fund schools determines how we learn, and the funding mechanism is way out of date.
This guet post by a long-time friend of mine, Ted Kraver, who has been an advocate for educational transformation for twenty years, suggests a legislative strategy to modernize K-12 education. You can contact him directly using the information at the end of the post, or you can comment here and I will alert him:-)

What is necessary for education in our century includes
Competency learning to complement the seat time system
Data driven reporting and decision support;
Broadband use by everyone;
Teacher transformation for the digital age;
Global digital curriculum access with effective application.

There are many objectives for student learning, but the one the State of Arizona pays for is student competency over a wide range of disciplines. Some courses of learning are prescribed, and some of these are backed with state standards. Others courses are elected by students in their specialized areas of interest.

Today we are not getting what we pay for.

The problem is that the current funding system has evolved to prevent competency in well over a third of the student population. The current system funds seat time based on a 100 day average daily attendance formula resulting in lockstep promotion by grade level. Struggling students are passed through the system and gifted students are turned off by lack of effective learning engagement. When this system was designed in the late 1800’s there were no data to drive decision support systems to enable individualized learning. The economy could only accommodate a small percentage of the graduates with full competency of the course materials in a K-12 education.

In 1896 my grandmother graduated high school with a full curriculum including geometry, Algebra, Greek and Latin. Her first job was teaching high school. Most of her classmates learned their numbers and letters in the lower grades and prospered in retail, factories or farms in the Cleveland area.

Thirty students to a class with a teacher and the agricultural annual cycle worked just fine in 1896. Relating funding to costs of running this lockstep 13 yearly cycles settled on seat time as an effective administrative means. With manual accounting systems, it was a simple way to forecast and allocate educational expenditures.

The financial administration of all other aspects of our society have changed in the past 120 years. The funding mechanism for K-12 education must also change.

Many national experts and leading Arizona advocacy organizations are promoting the complex method of basing school funding on student competency learning vs. the more easily administratively measured seat-time. There are many pilot programs supporting this system design. One example is the large publicly funded K-12 Florida Virtual Schools which works at the single student-course level.

Online-virtual education has an education structure and results that are not currently available in the traditional classroom. They provide individual education that is at each student’s natural learning pace. The teachers provide significant one-on-one support along with some group collaboration. The current implementations are mostly in the 7-12 grade levels. The academic performance results from a 2009 US Department of Education study of online and hybrid education show significant academic performance gains over legacy education. This means of learning will continue its compound growth. In a hybrid form it will become a disruptive innovation that transforms legacy classroom education.

One of the first things we need to implement is an enhanced State of Arizona K-12 funding system. The current system must be transformed to support not only the online and hybrid forms of eLearning but all aspects of eLearning. The means a systematic transformation of many of the administrative centered funding mechanisms to student centered mechanisms. This systemic transformation will take 7 to 10 years to implement. For starters Arizona can legislate student centered competency education funding as an alternative to seat time funding.

The following elements are suggested for 2010 legislative attention. Both have low startup cost and are the foundational to the systemic transformation.

1. Design, fund and implement a system that will provide a Personal Learning Plan (PLP) that is individualized each student. The PLP will be the center of the data driven decision support system used by the student, teacher and parents to guide the K-12 student’s academic career. Elements of this plan will be used to determine course completion competency/proficiency and to report individual student status and progress to school, district, parents and the state data system.

2. Provide funding and assign responsibility to an agency(s) to assess, plan, redesign and implement a transformation of one aspect of the K-12 financial system. This transformation will enable the funding of any public school, in whole or in part, based not on average daily attendance, but on individual student course completion measured by end of course testing for competency. The level of competency set for each course within each PLP will vary based on student learning ability and ambitions. The individual teacher-parent-student team will make these determinations. The range of competency levels will be bounded at the low end to meet Arizona academic standards and the upper end by student ability, motivation and ambition.

Theodore C. Kraver Ph.D. President
eLearning System for Arizona Teachers and Students Inc.
not-for-profit 501-c3 volunteer systems design and advocacy organization
tkraver@qwest.net 602-944-8557(direct) www.azelearning.org
225 West Orchid Lane Phoenix, AZ 85021

There’s no way not to love Ron Conway’s experience. Here at Crunchup, he’s talking about the startups he has invested in with John Borthwick from BetaWorks, Steve Gillmor, and Mike Arrington. He has made two fabulous points so far. The first is very general, but tells the story of the difference between Silicon Valley and other areas of the country that hope to be centers for entrepreneurship. :Here in Silicon Valley, we invent something first, see if there’s a market, and then monetize it.”

This is a very telling comment that presumes the availability of capital to support the new concept or technology until it is ready to be monetized. He said it with respect to Twitter, a product almost everyone is curious about. How will Twitter make money?

Here are the top ten, according to Ron, ways Twitter can be monetized. Although Arrington pushed him for his entire list of 30, which he said he summarized in an email to Evan Williams a while ago,(update: Arrington grabs the email out of his hand and finds out it’s really to Heather Hardie) he wouldn’t reveal the entire list, so there’s something even better in the cards. His Top Ten list includes
lead generation
coupons
analytics
crm
payments via real time web
commerce
user authentication
syndication of new ads
context sensitive ads
display ads, and
acquiring followers

This panel agrees that much is also happening outside Silicon Valley, especially as we begin to participate in real time communications on a large scale. John Borthwick of Betaworks says his company has just announced a $sm investment in Tweetdeck, which stores groups and search, and navigates and manages streams. Betaworks has also incubated bit.ly, which has gone in less than a year from incubation to 27 million decodes a day thru its partnership with Twitter. (Arrington pushing to know when bit.ly will sell to Twitter.)

Which brings me to the next point Ron makes that I loved: “real time stream” is the wrong term for what’s happening now, because it doesn’t take into account the social nature of these conversations. Instead, let’s call in something like “now media,” which makes more of the social interaction that takes place.

For me, the real time is not nearly as important as the social. Because I live in two cities, I have two sets of friends. There’d be no way I could stay in touch with both without the now-media-social-real-time-stream. I’m ecstatic that SIlicon Valley will invent things I can use without worrying how they will make money. And this is why, at the end of the recession, Silicon Valley will recover. It’s the people, stupid.

We all know social media is difficult to “control,” from a central corporate location. It has gone way beyond the marketing department, where it started as a means of listening to the customer and responding with carefully crafted “messages,” into a free-for-all in which digital natives come in to corporations with expectations about what they can say on their Facebook and Twitter pages, and what opinions they are entitled to express. Life isn’t always divided into home and enterprise, nor is the enterprise with its increasingly flattened management and instantaneous internal communications, separated into the former operations v. marketing silos.

At the same time, large companies, especially public companies, are still guided by SEC regulations. This leads the CEOs of many publicly traded companies to fear social media, which can be a valuable marketing and customer service tool, and shy away from it. The SEC, however, changed its rules to include blogs as a means of disclosure, so there’s a real reason to be proactive in the IR area, if only to create another arena beyond the Yahoo Finance boards that challeneged companies in previous decades. Sun Microsystems has been a pioneer here, and the National Invetor Relations Institute had a program about how Sun, whose CEO was one of the first CEO bloggers, evolved its IR portal. EBay went so far as to Tweet its earnings calls, which brought the company to the attention of the SEC and forced some guidelines.

But truthfully, IR is perilously close to marketing, and a perilously small part of any enterprise. The PR/IR people are the “controlled” bloggers and tweeters, who have absorbed the caveats and best practices of social media, and can probably (if they are good) get away with a fairly wide social media presence without running afould of rules.

It’s when we get into the employee guidelines for social media that we can get into trouble in the enterprise. Every company now needs policy guidelines as to what an employee can and cannot say on a social media platform, and those are probably best developed in conjunction with HR, and disseminated when the employee is hired as part of orientation. Policy guidelines could include how an employee represents the company outside the work environment, what the company policy is toward certain language, and certainly instruction on how to represent the company’s values and corporate culture. This will become increasingly necessary as ordinary employees begin to monitor sites like UserVoice and GetSatisfaction and participate in dialogues with customers around issues like product development, product roadmaps.

These are not simple questions, and this is an evolving arena. It’s complicated. I need your help here, especially the help of people who are in HR or legal at large corporations, or who have been on the employee end of some good policies. How is this evolving? How can it evolve? Are there any “best practices” that are enterprise-wide rather than just marketing-centric?

Please comment below, or let me know on Friendfeed or Twitter

Information. Sustainability initiatives can’t succeed unless you know where you are starting out, what you are doing, and where you are going. Especially if the Obama Administration’s cap-and-trade bill becomes law, which seems likely, companies will need good raw data, because that information will be translated into dollars on the carbon market.

If you were the person in charge of writing the Corporate Social Responsibility Report for your company, and you wanted to make sure you had accurate data on your carbon management, greenhouse gas emissions, and sustainability practices, where would you look in your organization: the ERP system, the EMS system, the BI application? Data from each individual facility? Probably all of those. And on somebody’s Excel spread sheets, too.

Enterprise software was sold in pieces, each piece promising that it would be a “total solution.” Ironically, only twenty years after the first adoptions are we realizing that we need to see across facilities, departments, and processes to figure out how to build sustainable businesses.

That mean building “bridges” between systems so they can talk to each other. IBM’s new Green Sigma(TM) initiative is the first time industry leaders are coming together to work collaboratively to address greenhouse gas and carbon management and sustainability enterprise-wide. Charter members of the Green Sigma™ Coalition are Johnson Controls, Honeywell Building Solutions, ABB, Eaton, ESS, Cisco, Siemens Building Technologies Division, Schneider Electric and SAP. The coalition members will work with IBM to integrate their products and services with IBM’s Green Sigma solution.

Robert Johnson, CEO of ESS, one of the charter members of Green Sigma, explained it simply: “In order to address GHG, carbon and sustainability across your company, you have to get all the data collected and rolled up. In the past, it’s been in silos, and companies have had difficulty getting it out of the different vendor systems.”

The Industry has evolved with vendors working in isolation doing their own thing, because companies have never had to collect and merge data before for any real purpose. The systems they have in place were bought by individual departments to handle certain situations, and were never designed to be integrated.

But things have changed with the increased emphasis on the environment. Green Sigma is a group of leaders, typically in corporate IT environments, who have decided to help clients by making it easier for systems to talk to each other. It is based on Lean Six Sigma, a business strategy for carefully analyzing operations to improve overall efficiency, lower costs, increase quality, and add, change or eliminate activities and processes to improve overall performance.

ESS is excited because it is the only small independent company on the charter founder roster. The next smallest company is over a billion in market cap. But Robert Johnson has been an evangelist on the subject of unified platforms for years, and ironically the company has had some big successes in China, where the US wants to sell its green products and services as it retools its own economy. ESS is already the environmental health and safety platform for China Light and Power, China National Petroleum, and PetroChina. If anyone can help the big guys pull together their disparate efforts into actionable information, it’s a small company.

I’ve been listening avidly to all the different points of view about health care reform, and the only conclusion I’ve come to is that almost anything is better than what we have.

On Bloomberg the other day, I heard a call for a systemic approach to the practice of medicine from Dr. Eliot Fisher, Director of the Center for Health Policy at Dartmouth. He said there are always better outcomes where groups of doctors collaborate and practice together, as in the Mayo Clinic, the Cleveland Clinic, or even less renowned group practices such as in Grand Junction, Colo. The efficiencies come when a group of physicians are all responsible for a patient’s continuity of care, and when they share information such as that possible with electronic health records (EHRs).

Dartmouth has studies that show these kinds of group practices cut costs, and yet we have relatively few of them in the US. Most physicians still practice in groups of four or less, usually four of the same specialty. And fewer than 20% of these small practices have EHRs. In fact, in Arizona, where EHR adoption took off after Gov. Janet Napolitano mandated it, another article just said doctors who had bone to EHRs were abandoning them because they were costly to support and impossible to learn. Your basic family practice guy or pediatrician, practicing what the docs call “Hamster Medicine,” where he/she has to see 60 patients a day for five minutes each just to support his office, does not have the time or money to shut the office down to train people on an EHR.

So I dread what will happen when these small practices are forced to implement a complex EHR like GE Centricity, which is both the market leader and the product with the worst user interface. GE has already started a lobbying campaign on behalf of its product, part of which consists of interest-free loans to physicians to install it.

The learning curve for Centricity is steep, especially for the bi-lingual staff of many medical offices, where wages are low and turnover is rampant. I have a physician friend who wrote an EHR himself, and then left that product with his old practice (where they love it) to move to another state. There, he found a group that had chosen Centricity not just for the single group, but for the entire region — and nobody could use it! They had abandoned entire parts of it because no one knew how it worked.

That’s shameful. That won’t lower costs. Lower costs will only come from software that works like Amazon.com or Yahoo — interfaces that make it simple for users to pile in mountains of data without even realizing they’re doing it. And to keep the costs down and the learning curve short, the data should be kept in the cloud.

This is, of course, horrifying to the privacy advocates, who have never run a medical office. Well I have, and I can tell you that when the doctor’s fax machine is overflowing with test results, they spill out on to the office floor or sit there in a pile, and anyone walking by can see them, until some harried front office person collects them and (perhaps) misfiles them in the wrong patient folder.

How do I know this? Because not only have I run a medical office, but I helped a group practice install an EHR, and one of their “pain”points and biggest reasons for going electronic was the loss of patient records due to misfiling or non-filing.

What other business runs as inefficiently as a medical office? None. What other business is more dependent on paper? None.

What other business could become 1/16 of the American economy without being forced into business process automation? None.

But forcing EHRs down the throats of sole practitioners isn’t the answer to reigning in costs. Collaboration is. Collaboration is also the answer to many medical errors and misdiagnoses. I’m not saying that we should “crowdsource” the practice of medicine–although that’s happening through various online Health 2.0 sites that consumers rely on when they have insufficient access to care — but I am saying it might be time to streamline these small practices, put them in groups, and allow them to talk to each other over lunch about the same patient. That way I wouldn’t have to tell my internist what my cardiologist said, or wait for the cardiologist to fax over my results to him.

Any kind of information exchange would help. And whose ox does this gore, unless it’s the commercial real estate companies who have been building small medical offices?

In November, we’ll be hosting the Fourth Annual Arizona Entrepreneurship Conference, with a roster of great participants, cool networking opportunities, and even good food. But a web site that doesn’t brand the conference or do it justice. I put it up last year i a hurry, and I looked at it this year and hated it. So I called Brent Spore.

Brent’s one of the most creative people I know, and he had just started a web show called Starving Designer. to harness the power of the social graph to improve design.

Now this isn’t the old form of design competition, where you ask people to submit designs and you choose one, thereby honoring one participant and disappointing all the rest. Rather, Brent is using each design as a teaching tool, and a way designers can learn from one another, or non-designers can learn what makes a good design. It’s collaborative, not competitive. It’s transparent, open, and real time. And you can participate as much or as little as you want. Everyone learns, and often no one gets paid, as these sites are often done pro bono or for very little.

You should probably watch the evolution of our design on Brent’s own site.

First, he held a live design session. Then he took all the comments, incorporated them, and began posting the results on Flickr and Twitter. People offered comments. He tried them and posted them, and took more comments. Because he got so many people who had been to the conference to participate, the comments were like a focus group.

You should read his post to see how he got from what you saw on top to what’s below:

I’m exceedingly happy with it; especially with all the community input. As soon as we get the copy moved over, it will launch. Remember, you saw it first here:-)

There is brilliance in the wisdom of ancients. Especially in India, I’ve found information that guides my life in the 21st century world of the Internet.

Last January, I was lucky enough to meet a Sanskrit scholar in Vrindavan, a town between Delhi and Agra. He is part of the Jiva Institute, an organization I’ve advised over the past ten years. Jiva Institute runs a public (private) school in Faridabad, a “chain” of Ayurvedic health clinics, and an ashram for the study and preservation of ancient Sanskrit and Vedic manuscripts. Their resident Sanskrit scholar, Dr. Satya Narayana Dasa (”Dr. SND”) is coming to Rutgers next month for a visiting professorship.

Just in time for his visit, here is a current paper of his on the principle of flow in life. Notice that flow comes in two “stages.” Also notice that the theory of flow is applicable to the recent Iranian elections, and also to the stalemate in Congress over issues like health care reform.

Flow and Wellness
-Dr. Satya Narayana Dasa, M.Tech., IIT Delhi, PhD (Sanskrit) Agra University
Cultural Director, Jiva Institute
Visiting Professor, Rutgers University

In essence, a human being can have three situations—a situation without flow, material flow and spiritual flow. The first situation is unhealthy. The second is good but only from the material perspective, and only if used as a steppingstone to spiritual flow. The third state is the state of perfection and supreme wellness.

Hey, Congress. Get with the flow! We have too many problems to keep on struggling.

Five more companies you may want to know about from Launch Silicon Valley. The general takeaway from this is the preponderance of peer-to-peer services as a way of lowering the cost of streaming content, and the general movement to the cloud.

Update: Here’s the second set of companies.

CellWand isn’t really next generation of Internet; it’s mobile voice apps accessed through abbreviated dialing codes (#taxi #home #pizza). It’s a pay per use app ($1.25-1.79 per call), partnered with carriers. They get big margins from loyal users, and use the wireless carriers, alcohol companies, and media partners for marketing. CellWand is live in Canada, and penetrates at 1 call per 250 mobile phone users. If they penetrate similarly in the US, that would be $1m/month revenue. They also use the carrier billing systems. They have locked up all the Canadian carriers

Surf Canyon – delivers relevant personalized search results. It re-ranks results according to what you might have clicked on from the first search — on the fly, in real time. Another Firefox add-on, also works on IE. And for good measure, it also personalizes the sponsored links. Works with Bing, Yahoo, Google.

Dacast, a product of Andolis LLC believes the future of TV is multicast. The company has a peer to peer system to cut the cost of live streaming and unite all the Dacast users in an ecosystem. That allows for more appropriate advertising to users. So Datacast is free for content owners, cheaper to stream, and more carefully targeted. The company projects profitability by end of 2010. Every player wins: Advertisers get more clicks, users get free content, content owners get more money.

Wowd – is now in private beta. It turns the wisdom of crowds into useful work finding content, tagging itself “the web you want.”
“Wowd connects people to a planet’s worth of content.”

YOICS “Your Own Internet Connected Stuff” Cloud IT services for the rest of us. Private bookmarks only available to you or people you are connecting to, using the internet as your own private LAN. This could also be used for security services, and you would be able to see it on any browser anywhere.

You can use it as a replacement for an FTP service. You can download the Yoics app, drag a file form your computer to it, and make it accessible to a selected group (like a graphic designer could do for clients).

It will be interesting watching these people get acquired by the already-existing companies in the internet space. I think none of them are really stand alones. Again, I’ve jumped to a conclusion here:-)

For many reasons, I’m interested in the next generation Internet. This morning, I’m at Launch SIlicon Valley, watching ten companies in this space present their concepts.

I haven’t finished listening, but I have already jumped to my conclusion. According to these presenters (who were quite good, by the way), the next generation of the internet solves problems created by the current generation of the Internet.

In other words, it’s full of refinements and improvements, rather than big technological jumps. A better process here, a better algorithm there, and lots of emphasis on smart phone apps or Firefox add-ons. The most interesting company by far was from China, which is definitely kicking our ass in next-gen internet stuff according to this presenter, the first Chinese company ever to present at this conference.

World’sLaw is a legal service. Its competitor is Legal Zoom, but these guys have attorneys, while Legal Zoom is only document preparation services.
By Jobi – a power search with saved search with timelines and keywords, language and location, domains and file types. It’s a power search built on top of Google
GazoPa- similar image search. Uses features such as color and shape to find images, and uses the image itself, not just keywords, as the search key.
The founder actually drew a watch on his computer, uploaded it, and got photos of watches back. Even now, it has an iPhone app to upload pictures from your iPhone and search images.
With current mage search engines, if large volume of data, can’t return images quickly. But for them, the more data they have, the better they can return
Gliider - manages travel for you. It holds on to your travel information, replacing bookmarks, cut and paste, printed documents. ‘There’s no good way to hold on to my travel info when I am planning a trip.” It’s now in private beta, and is a Firefox add-on.
Gamexiu. Games and social networks are two fastest growing segments in China. 16,000,000 games, growing at 17% a year. 200,000,000 users are on social networks in China, and the virtual goods business is a $4 billion business. Most users are single children under 25, using social gaming as the way of getting companionship.
It’s the world’s first 3-D Internet social gaming platform. Completely integrates into other social networks, so is also distributed. The avatars can go anywhere across the web, and the application itself can be embedded in other social networks.
They are a social world similar to Second Life. It looks easier to bring the user into an immersive life than SL, however. And the selling of virtual items is huge!

Credit cards have developed into very complicated financial products. As a result, even if they printed the disclosure in 18 point type, you wouldn’t know what was going to hit you from behind. I have been trying to get out of debt recently, so I’ve been studying the issue. I am now doubling my dose of blood pressure medication and tranquilizers, and practicing yoga so often that I can no longer be gainfully employed. You will need to know what I’ve found out about banks and credit card companies, especially if you are not making them the focus of your life.

1. You cannot close a credit card account. I paid off a balance to Citibank because they had raised my interest from 0%, which I had signed up for, to 29.9% because my payment was one day late due to Wells Fargo’s automated bill pay and the US mail. I asked to close the account. I got the following:

Dear FrancineHardaway: We recently received a request to close your Citi Platinum Select Mastercard account. For your protection, your account has been permanently closed. The closed account cannot be reopened. Please destroy all cards with this account number by cutting the cards in half. A new account number has been assigned to you, and a replacement card will be mailed to you the next business day.

Never mind that I didn’t ask for a replacement card.

2. The card companies don’t want you to pay off the principal. There’s something called a “sweat box” business model for credit cards now. The companies don’t want the principal back. They want the fees. They want to keep the consumer paying.

3. Reforms won’t work because the credit card companies will find a way around them. Every previous effort at reform has just unleashed further ingenuity.

4. Card issuers can make a profit because the interest rates and fees will be so high that they will offset loss of the principal. This is predatory lending: lending with conscious disregard for the consumer’s ability to pay.

5. If you pay too much, they get nervous. In the same mail, I got this notice:

We want to be your number one credit card. We noticed that you recently made a large payment to your Starbucks Card Duetto Visa account and want to make sure we’re not losing your business. That’s why we want to remind you again of these low-rate reasons to stay –it’s our way of showing you that your business is important to us. Enjoy APR’s as low as 0% with check numbers 2993 and 2994. 2.99% APR for 24 billing cycles with check numbers 2995, 2996, 2997. (BTW, there’s a 3% transaction fee to do any of this, and a billing cycle may no longer be a month.)

6.The interest rate on the card does not tell you what the total cost of revolving a balance on a card will be. There are late fees, over-limit fees, annual fees, foreign transaction fees, interchange fees that are charged to the merchant and passed through to the consumer.

7. Convenience checks are subject to the cash advance fee.

8. The new thing is double cycle billing: The balance on which interest accrues is not the balance on this billing cycle, but on this one and the previous one. And if you are late on another card, or perhaps your cable bill, your credit card interest rate will go up. And perhaps your car insurance.

9. There are tricks about when a payment is posted. After 2 PM might count as the next day, and you may pay interest.

10. And then, all this can influence your mortgage refinance or loan modification.

Aurora Loan Services has carefully reviewed your loan for home retention options. Aurora has determined that we are unable to continue pursuit of said options. A home retention workout on your loan has been denied for the following reason(s): Your finances indicate an inability to afford the monthly payments.

Never mind that I am current on every single payment, mortgage or credit card, despite being over $150,000 “under water” on my home. I have no equity and could have “walked” a year ago, but didn’t.

Notice the reinforcement I get for trying to stick with my home payments and pay down my debt, the Suze Orman recommendation.

Take a lesson. The banks own the government, and me, and you. I am finished with them. I am going to get out of debt asap and put my money under a mattress, where at least it somebody eats it, it will be Buppy the Puppy.