Apple has sued Psystar, the marketers of the Open Computer, according to Jorge Espinoza’s article, Apple Goes After Clone Maker Psystar, and ZDnet. Apple seems to have a solid case, as Psystar modified Apple’s software as part of the Florida company’s product offerings. The original name of the Psystar product was the OpenMac, which didn’t please Apple, either.
The high cost of gasoline has created a surge in demand for online and hybrid courses. In a fully online course, the student doesn’t have to visit a campus or a classroom. In hybrid courses, students visit the classroom less frequently than in a traditional course.
This New York Times article called High Cost of Driving Ignites Online Classes Boom offers some striking examples from students and academic administrators. No faculty members were interviewed for the article, even though administrators said they were assigning more faculty to teach online courses.
I started teaching online courses in 2006, and I was posting web content for my courses back in 2003. I’ve found that an online course takes me about twice as much effort to develop and prepare as a F2F course. I can walk to my university office from my home, so I don’t really save any money by teaching online.
Universities should provide instructional design and technology support staff and resources to help instructors develop and publish successful course materials in an online environment. This doesn’t mean that the staff are teaching the courses.
I started developing web sites back in 1995, but most faculty members in my generation are ill-equipped to develop their own sites. Most of us learned how to teach in classrooms, not on the web. The first time I ever used a Web browser was in 1994, a year after I earned my doctorate.
They have to rely on whatever resources their university provides for online learning. Newly minted doctoral students and retrained faculty have a better chance of succeeding in an online teaching environment.
Image courtesy of Cali2Okie through a Creative Commons license.
Tags: economy, faculty, fuel, gas, online, professor, studentAndrew Grove, a co-founder of Intel and the man who coined one of my favorite concepts, the strategic inflection point (SIP), is rallying corporate and government support for electric cars in the US. He realizes that Americans are reluctant to buy an all-electric vehicle, however:
While car makers have been developing plug-ins, Grove says the nation should consider ways of retrofitting the 80 million low-mileage pickups, sport utility vehicles and vans on the road to make them capable of running on both gasoline and electric power.
Giving these vehicles “dual fuel” functions would be similar to changes made in other technologies. DVD players, for example, were often combined with VCR tape players when they were first introduced to help consumers make the transition.
See this Associated Press article titled Ex-Intel head pushes electric cars for more details.
US drivers can’t understand fuel efficiency - at least when it is measured in miles per gallon (MPG). When I was growing up in the early 1970s, MPG became a national buzzword as gasoline prices soared.
But when fuel economy figures are presented in gallons per mile (GPM), more drivers were able to compare fuel efficiency between vehicles, partly because the GPM figure can be directly multiplied by the pump price. An owner can calculate the total gallons she will use in a week, month or year, along with the cost.
It’s a handy metric to remember, especially as some drivers wrap their cars with advertising decals to subsidize their commute.
If you’ve filled up your tank, and you know how many miles you’ve driven since the last time you added fuel, just divide the gallons purchased by miles driven to obtain GPM.
To make the GPM figure more understandable, researchers Richard Larrick and Jack Soll presented the figures as gallons per 100 miles (GPCM).
To calculate GPCM, multiply the GPM figure by 100, or divide 10000 by MPG.
The chart below compares MPG (left axis and the blue line) against GPCM (bottom axis and the red line). To use the chart, just find the figure you want to compare, and trace a vertical line up or down to find the conversion:
As I was writing this article, I was pleased to discover that Rich Larrick and I both graduated from the College of William and Mary in Virginia in 1986.
See Reuters, the New York Times, Consumerist, the MPG Illusion site at the Fuqua School of Business, and the original article in Science.
Updated 23 June 2008 738 HST: Rick sent me these comments about my blog post:
“GPM is useful when deciding about buying a new car, deciding between cars, etc. It guarantees that people see that improving from 10 to 11 MPG, 16 to 20 MPG, and 33 to 50 MPG all save the same amount of gas over some distance — 1 gallon over a 100 miles or 100 gallons over 10,000 miles. Without GPM, people expect larger linear improvements in MPG to yield more savings (that’s the illusion).”
I don’t want to get on a rant here, but I’m just someone born very late in the baby boom. Frankly, I have more in common with Generation Y than with Generation X. But both generations have their faults. I saw this yesterday, while I attended Peter Kay’s presentation on crowd sourcing at the May 2008 HTCA meeting. Peter kept asking the audience what web services they had used. The number of hands got smaller with each service he named. Everyone had used Wikipedia. A few people knew about Twitter. Peter mentioned a few sites I had never used, like InTrade and IdeaScale.
I was the only person who raised his hand for Ning, the social networking portal that hosts TechHui and Peter’s latest project, HawaiiConCon.org. The Honolulu Advertiser’s article about the site is available here. and I mentioned TechHui in my billso.com post on 31 March 2008.
The generation gap
A few members of the audience got nervous when Peter discussed corporate wikis. I have heard and read similar questions as managers and academics struggle to keep up with the digital generation.
Tammy Erickson has a top 10 list on Business Week with some excellent comments about generational conflicts in the workplace.
More of the precious little snowflakes - and they’re so many of them in Gen X (the generation born between 1965 and 1982) and Gen Y (those born between 1983 and 1997) - need to wake up and smell the coffee.
It’s not Starbucks coffee.
It’s not even a maple nut crunch latte from the 7-11.
It’s Maxwell House scooped from the big blue can, brewed in a vat, simmered to the consistency of loose mud and served in a tiny styrofoam cup.
If you’re lucky, you get a little red plastic stir stick and some Coffeemate. Denis Leary would be proud of this coffee-flavored coffee.
And if you’re really lucky, someone made some Sanka because you can’t handle the caffeine.
Life sucks and it’s not fair
Many Gen Xers are hitting the ceiling in in their climb up the corporate ladder. There’s fewer CXO spots than there are Gen Xers. It’s not fair, but those stubborn folks in Generation Jones (born between 1954 and 1964) got there first. Their heroes are folks like Bill Gates, who would blow off his Harvard courses and try to make up the study time with end-of-the-term all-nighters.
It’s bad timing as the children of Generations X and Jones are going on to college and getting jobs. Members of Generation Y have feelings of entitlement and privilege that crash against a wall of indifference and disbelief in the real world.
The heroes of Generation Y are people like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who has bragged about skipping most of his Harvard art history course while he built a Facebook prototype. Zuckerberg passed that class after he built an online study guide that his classmates poured their notes and content into during the end of term reading period. Zuckerberg and Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard, but Zuckerberg got rich much faster. See this New York Times article for more details.
Helicopter parents
Gen Xers hate how the Generation Y calls their parents to ask advice about everything from class schedules to work responsibilities. It’s awkward when a college student’s helicopter parent calls a professor to intervene on their child’s behalf. It’s dumbfounding when this happens in the workplace. This 2006 MSNBC article about helicopter parents who manage their childrens’ job searches is a great example.
The current recession only makes matters worse for all involved. The home equity line is tapped out. No one wants to buy that piece of investment property that looked like a sweet deal 3 years ago. Bonuses aren’t as common at work anymore. This year’s vacation became next year’s vacation, and that’s just a maybe.
And yes, they’re buying Maxwell House and brewing their coffee at home.
Escape - if you can
There is hope. A few Gen Xers escape from corporate jobs to start their own small businesses. But many of the Xers are uncomfortable with modern technology. Text messaging and social networking are too much to handle. They can deal with their Netflix queue, but email is more their speed.
Members of Generation Y have kept up with the changes. Some Gen Xers are jealous that their younger Generation Y can navigate the Internet so easily and use online services to find new opportunities.
Some members of Generation Y are overwhelmed with communications options. Just read their blogs and feel their pain as they realize that everyday life is hard. ReadWriteWeb has a great collection of Generation Y links and RSS feeds, along with a video and some additional discussion.
But as I mentioned on 19 May 2008 in this billso.com article, many Americans don’t read blogs or send emails. To them, all of this conflict between generations may mean very little at all.
Images courtesy of Roadside Pictures and mark_the_legend_foster through a Creative Commons license.
Tags: communication, economy, entitlement, generation, generation-x, generation-y, management, rant, Starbucks, student, university, USA
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