What would Google Do?

As we read on the next section of the book "If Google Ruled the World", we felt like the book started to restate a lot of the information from the first part of the book. We realize that the author is applying his principles to specific areas of business though.

One area he talked about was publishing. What will the publishing world look like if it doesn't start to embrace the ideas that Google has developed and create a community around ideas, aritcles, books, and more? How can publishers and authors share the financial risk involved with printing and selling printed material? How can they work to share their information for free since that is a big part of the post Google world?

Another area he discussed was advertising and the need for a new approach here. Advertisers no longer have a large captive audience. How can they still reach customers using the Internet?

Our favorite part was on restaurants. We liked the idea of restaurants allowing people to rate their entrees for others, allowing people to help develop menus, and providing feedback. We felt that having suggestions " You might also like...." similar to iTunes or Amazon would be really awesome. What a way to connect people!

Last we wanted to share the author's blog on the book. He is using this to have readers build a community around his book!

Posted By Laura Schwiebert, Angela Hicks and Staci Tatum

What Would Google Do?

The last several chapters that we have read in our book have talked about giving people control to use things and figure out what needs to be changed to make these things better. If you don't listen to the people using your products, you will loose them. We think that this is also true in education. If students do not feel that they are a part of their learning process, you will loose them. It is important to ask students what they would like to learn and how they would like to learn it. This gives them a sense of ownership and they will make it their own.
Mistakes that are made are leaning opportunities. This is a message that we should be sending to our students. We do not expect them to be perfect-we are not. Everyday we make mistakes, sometime in front of our students, and do we expect them to not believe in us anymore because of those mistakes? No, that makes us human. Just like them.
One very interesting fact that we learned is that Google gives its technical employees the chance to use 20 percent of their time to work on new ideas, new products, and new business. Wow!! Can you imagine the amount of teaching and learning things that we could search for, find, and produce with 20 percent of our school year. We feel that is the greatest drawback to the teaching profession-no planning and preparation time. Everything must be done outside of the school day and by then you are exhausted from doing your job.
Google says that we should first find problems and then create the solutions to solve them. We think that the schools systems are trying to do this, but going at a snail's pace.

Group Member: Anglea Hick, Laura Schwiebert, and Staci Tatum

Gadget (Chapters 7&8) discussion

The next part of this book tries to address complex issues such as paying for creative bits of information instead of everything being free. The author references a time early in the 80’s, when the skeptics believed that there would be a small minority of people that would write online for others to access and read. How wrong the skeptics were, instead today we have a world of millions of active voices online. We liked the idea mentioned in the book that bits of information should have only one copy and that they should have value tied to the work. It went on to suggest that if people want to use other’s creative ideas they enter into a social contract and pay a reasonable fee. We discussed that personal input would have more value in this structure and we believe that as a result the information out there that does not have value would not get the attention it seems to get today. We wondered if the useless, tasteless information on the web would take a back seat, since a hopefully a small minority of people would be interested in investing in these bits of information.
This topic becomes very tricky. It seems if we structure a digital economy it may require some government intervention. Many are concerned that it would be a violation of freedom and more like socialism in nature. They mentioned other systems that run through the government that we all benefit from such as; currency, military and the court system. Another example listed was the “Do not call” list that seemed to serve a majority with great success. The book questions whether or not it is too late for us to move from “open copying to paid access”. We all agreed that this would have to be a system that had global universal buy in. It’s overwhelming to think of how could we get to this and who would regulate it??
We then discussed the ideas mentioned to help make a universal transition. The first idea mentioned is called “Telegigging”. We thought telegigging was very much like a pay per view type option. You could get high end, real time interactive media for a price. People that are very interested would pay a fee to access the information. We also discussed that prices could vary based on the type and demand of the information.
The next idea was called a songle, which would allow you to retrieve music or a song with a small piece of hardware that would plug into a computer. It mentioned that you might be able to attend a party with your songle necklace that would include the music you purchased that you want to hear. It sounds very much like what an IPOD like device accomplishes today. The difference might be that the songle would be a more universal device and not proprietary.
The last part of the sections we discussed in Chapters 7&8 was the concern that the newest generation can’t seem to dump old ideas for something new and fresh. The book compared Wikipedia to the old concept of an encyclopedia and that Linnux is nothing more than a stable and secure Unix platform. The book suggests the progress since the eighties has been pathetic. We discussed how the book thinks that the Web 2.0 world seems to stifle innovative creation. We all think and believe that the web 2.0 tools have enabled us to go places that we would have never gone in our classrooms. As users of the tools we have benefited (both students and teachers). So, I wonder if the availability and ease of obtaining these tools has put a lid on our creative and innovative ability or simply opened the door to our ability to be more innovative and creative?

What Would Google Do?

These next few chapters in our book talk mostly about organizing information. Examples are ways that Facebook organizes friends and Craigslist organizes items for sell. It is important that things are organized and easy to find. Often if items are hard to find we give up on them. Google's main purpose is to find things easily. It is easier for Google and other sites to track what customers want and are interested in than it is for a store like Walmart to keep track of this. Everything is online and organized. One fear is that jobs such as the "middle man" may go away. For example real estate agents may not be need anymore because people can look for their own houses on the internet. We think that even though some jobs may be in jeopardy, there will be other jobs created that we don't know about.

One question that my group had was is Google does all of these things for free, how do they make money?? How do they do so much for free??