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Lindsey’s experience and work with Gen Y caused me to reminisce about my work with college students who were using Agilix and Blackboard software. It’s a fun demographic. I miss the energy, fast change, and fresh insight.

Also, if you’re interested in a good book on a historical viewpoint of generations, check out the books from Neil Howe and William Strauss. They’ve also done some good stuff on Gen Y that I’ve read — Millenials Rising.

Update: the interview was added below.

Congrats to my many friends with an MBA from BYU. Congrats to my friends who teach at BYU’s Marriott School.

Now Microsoft is is begging students to pay just $59.95. That’s a $620 discount off the retail price of $680 or a 91% savings. That throws out the standard pricing models the rest of the software industry use to calculate value. And what’s included in this “Ultimate Package:”

* Word
* Excel
* PowerPoint
* Oulook (with Business Contact Manager)
* Accounting Express
* Publisher
* Access
* Infopath
* Groove
* OneNote

Is this another sign that the monopolistic power in Redmond is nervous about Google’s and others web-based apps that allow today’s students to collaborate and work on any computer at any location on or off campus — or even on mobile devices like the iPhone? Maybe so.

I first met Chris when he asked the question of Steve Ballmer at the Utah Information Technology Association Hall of Fame award for Kim Kajiya: How are you working with government to increase the number of students in science and engineering programs.

Well, I’m putting a plug in for anyone interested in attending the University of Utah where they can use computer imaging to solve big and real-world problems in medicine and science. I’d totally dig it if I were in a point where I could restart my career and do some good for the world.

Listen to the podcast on Rocky  Mountain Voices.

Podcasting was recognized as the top technology to improve learning (see page 84, Table 6.4). 23 percent of students said Podcasts improved their learning. This is more than double the benefit of course management systems (like Blackboard). Podcasts ranked higher than instant messaging, blogs, social networking services, email, PowerPoint presentations, and more.

Unfortunately, the number of students who are using podcasts is still low. This is probably due to two issues:

1. MP3 device use is growing, along with computers (the report shows MP3 players have grown from 28 to 59 percent of student population in 2 years)
2. The number of universities distributing lectures in podcast is still low (again, the report shows growth here with leading universities integrating MP3 technology directly into the curriculum)

It was cool to hang with the early west-coast podcasting experts at Podcamp West in San Francisco. There was a lot of media and entertainment representation at the event (music, movies, reviews, etc.). Interesting for me was the age of the audience. It was filled with more 30-40 somethings than the younger hipset. I got the impression that the people with content ideas and artists were the driving the west coast podcasting movement.Victor Podcast, the lead organizer and podcaster behind Hot from Silicon Valley, and his recruits did a lot of work to pull off this UnConference. Thanks for all your work.

It was fun to connect with Doug Kaye, the original IT Conversations podcaster, one of the first podcast subscriptions. It was even more cool to hear that he had listened to my Podango podcast that was syndicated on PodTech. Doug and I spoke with Michael Geoghegan, CEO or GigaVox and co-author of “Podcast Solutions,” about working with Phil Windley, the current Executive Producer of IT Conversations, to pull off a Podcast Academy event at BYU.

I hooked up with a few of the PodTech team that attended. Robert Scoble arrived with video camera in tow.

Also connected with Steve Sloan from San Jose State University who teaches a course on new media. Steve was an early podcaster (circ 2004). We discussed educational use of podcasts and course management systems like Blackboard and WebCT.

I would have like to spend time on Sunday listening to more of the experiences of others. It’s still a new frontier. Tech challenges like RSS feed management are common concerns. Pretty much everyone uses a different production model (some record directly in GarageBand–others use Audacity–still others use some “other” recording equipment). However, I made some good contacts with whom I can share best practices.

Until next time.

Technorati Tags: Podcasting, PodCamp

I must disclose that much of my thinking and influence comes from the work of William Strauss and Neil Howe, the authors of Generations and the Fourth Turning. If you want to get a picture of the cyclical regeneration witnessed in human nature across hundreds of years, Strauss and Howe’s work is pretty insightful.

I couldn’t help but think of this when I read the article in the USA Today last week on Millenials. They are active. They are vocal. They are driven to make a difference. In my opinion, they WILL be the drivers of the next societal revolution for human rights, equality, global education, world peace, and overcoming poverty.

This is all framing up and being supported by technology. Think of the way technology is reaching across the youth culture, regardless of geographic boundary:

• U2 requests and gets hundreds of thousands of concert goers to send a text message to support the One Campaign, an effort to rally Americans to fight the emergency of global AIDS and extreme poverty.
• Students reach out through MySpace to share insights into “their personality” (Harrison Group poll estimates 58 percent of American teens have a profile on MySpace).
• Groups on social networking sites like Facebook and Friendster have linked together active social and civic-minded students on individual campuses and across the world.
• Instant Messaging services like AIM, Yahoo, Windows Messenger allow for a new method of “presence detection” as an increasing percentage of the population spends more time in front of their computer — which they do because the computer is their portal to the Internet.
• Personal blogs provide an outlet for sharing opinions, feelings, and beliefs.
• Real-time journalism through camera phones. For example, the 911 hijacking and terrorist plot was first reported by passengers on board the planes. Also, the London train bombing of 2005 was reported in “first person” by passengers with camera phones, long before CNN, BBC, or other news outlets could arrive.
• Live blogging at conferences. This was an amazing eye opener to me as I was able to “experience” the MacWorld event thanks to Engadget insta-blogging what they were hearing and learning. All this was near real-time to me and far earlier than the “day-old” posts to the news sites.
• Free Voice over IP (VoIP) services like Skype that let people connect across vast geographic boundaries and free of the heavy telecom tolls in Europe and Asia.
• Real Simple Syndication (RSS) makes it easier than ever to let topics from blog authors or like-minded individual across the Internet come to you, creating a very “informed” audience (of both positive and negative positions).
• Podcasts on thousands of subjects and topics, from both professional, academic, and individuals, make it possible to stay current on topics from experts in their fields.
• And of course, wireless phones and data networks. Just walk across any high-school or college campus. They’re all on their phones talking to friends.

Yes, to those of us who are watching, we’re seeing the beginning of a revolution that will be driven by the power and new world-wide-reach of communication technology. The old AT&T ad copy tagline, “Reach Out and Touch Someone,” has an entirely new meaning when you consider all the possibilities offered today.

Technorati Tags: Education, Facebook, Gen Y, Millenials, MySpace, Software

Today, the Wall Street Journal offered a look into what’s happening with page views and new member sign-ups. With the world watching, there is a lot of pressure to continue the rapid growth. And as I’ve predicted, it just doesn’t seem like this younger audience wants to be part of this scene once it’s determined the sites are “the thing.”

“Both MySpace and Facebook lost visitors in September, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, a Web-tracking service. The number of unique U.S. visitors at MySpace fell 4% to 47.2 million from 49.2 million in August, and the number of visitors to Facebook fell 12% to 7.8 million from 8.9 million.”

Meanwhile, there’s the internal vs. external number debate:

“Facebook spokeswoman Melanie Deitch says the Palo Alto, Calif., company’s own numbers show that the number of registered Facebook users rose 9% to 11 million in September, while the number of individual page views rose 40% to 16.5 billion.”

Facebook’s adding adults and other audiences was a mistake–well maybe not the high school students. Their new services have also been unpopular with their core audience. They should have stayed exclusively a college-student solution and tightened, not opened their service to new audiences.

Here’s to that BILLION dollar Yahoo! acquisition turning into into just hundreds of millions!

Technorati Tags: Education, Facebook, Social Media

The service also provides a way for you to select a geography to get a quick view of the news in your area.