While we don’t get there 100%, though, I would argue that my program at Babson College gets closer than most other schools:

• Unlike traditional programs organized around a semester system, Babson eschews stand-alone courses for integrated, just in time knowledge delivery. Our first year is organized to follow the life-cycle of an archetypal corporation: evaluating the opportunity, assembling the team, developing the plan, securing funding, expanding operations, and becoming global. Subject matter such as finance, operations, and law are combined.
• Real-world experience is explicitly integrated. Every first-year student is required to complete a year-long consulting project for a local company. Many (if not most) second year students engage in unpaid, for-credit work projects: managing teams of undergrads, consulting for area businesses, managing the school’s endowment, or starting a business in the school’s incubator.

Babson is the entrepreneurship school. Most students don’t start their own companies but the focus throughout our two years is on identifying and realizing opportunities. For employers who primarily want someone to do valuations, or design marketing plans, of do cost accounting, we might not be the best choice. But for the sorts of businesspeople Seth Godin imagines, Babson could be just the right program.

First, what are some problems facing students, teachers, and administrators could be solved through technology?

1. Students need help in document management and collaborative editing. Where’s the latest copy? What are the new changes? How do I combine everyone’s changes?
2. Faculty and administrators need to be able to change course schedules, syllabi, and assignments and be confident that students will see and understand those changes.
3. The career services office needs to inform students of new opportunities and upcoming  deadlines
4. Everyone needs to be able to hold conference calls and group chats.
5. No one wants to have to worry about the technology: “Do we all have the same IM client? Was that sent by email or posted on the bulletin board?”
6. Professors might want to have their lectures recorded, but limit viewing to students enrolled in the class, or to students with a documented disability or need.

Second, what sorts of functionality might be needed to solve those problems?

1. Asynchronous information distribution
• Text, like in a blog
• Audio or video of lectures, like with a podcast
2. Calendar information and schedule distribution
• Office hours for professors
• Campus and club events
• Job and internship application deadlines
• Free/busy information for rooms and resources
• Free/busy information for people
3. Document distribution and versioning
• Lecture notes and syllabi–how do you know if you have the latest version?
4. Address book and directory services
• Contact information: phone, email, postal, IM, websites, etc.
5. Real time communication
• Instant messaging and text messaging
• Voice chat
• Video chat
• Whiteboarding
• Document distribution
• Both one-on-one and group versions
• Transcripts and recordings available
6. Non-real time communication
• Emails
• Bulletin boards
• Voice mail
• Comments
7. Group editing
• Real time document editing
• Collecting and merging document changes
• Whiteboarding
• Wikis
8. Testing
9. Drop box for handing in assignments
10. Surveys, polling, and voting
11. Data analysis
• Summary statistics
• Pivot tables
• Data collection

Third, what are the restrictions and limitations placed on a technology solution:

1. Can a solution be branded or the appearance changed to match the institutions standards?
2. Will a solution be accessible?
3. Will users always know where to go for information or for a tool?
4. Will users be able to choose their client? Will Outlook be required? A specific browser? Some third-party tool?
5. Doe user access and role information need to be maintained?
6. What security needs exist?
7. How hard will end users need to work? How much education will they require to get started? How many steps or clicks will be needed to use the tools?
8. Where does the server need to be located?
9. Do the tools need to be accessible to people outside the domain or outside the firewall?

Finally, the development and deployment approach needs to be considered:

1. A monolithic or waterfall approach, where projects are properly scoped, spec’d, implemented, and tested before deployment
2. An iterative or agile approach where incomplete or inadequate tools are deployed to users as quickly as possible, and the users participate in frequent revisions and refinements.

While there are many reasons for the traditional waterfall approach, schools struggle because of their very high turnover (students change classes every semester and graduate after a few years). Furthermore, as schools can be extremely bureaucratic, an iterative approach also allows end users to feel more ownership over the product and might increase adoption.

So, what software? I’ve already begun a page on some free tools. But perhaps the best tools to use are the ones that you already own. Most people do not know how to use the collaborative editing features in MS Word: send for review and merge revisions. And most people don’t know how to use group calendars in Outlook.

In terms of easy ways to get your feet wet, it’s worth trying a blog system as a means of distributing information. Better than a news page, most blog software allows makes it easy to create items, to categorize items, and to have viewers subscribe. Not only is software like WordPress free, but there’s even software to easily manage multiple blogs. If you’re hosting the blog yourself, it should be no problem to include documents and multimedia files as enclosures, or you could use one of the many hosting services–some of which let you keep files private, are free, and have no size or bandwidth limits.

And there are lots more geeky tools. Google Calendar allows you to subscribe to calendars (such as class calendars, or club calendars) so there must be some way to do the same thing in Outlook. Developers have many options in version control software: there must be something that allows students to check in and check out documents and compare versions.

FolderShare, now owned by Microsoft, provides a P2P tool that shares and synchronizes files across multiple computers. For example, I have set up a set of “Babson” folders on my laptop and desktop and, after installing the free FolderShare software on each machine have nearly instantaneous replication and synchronization of the files and folder structure. Furthermore, folders can be shared with other registered FolderShare users. The rights of these users can be controlled: read only, read and update, add documents, add and delete documents, and manage user rights are all options. I’m working on a project with a friend, and rather than email files back and forth, we’ve used FolderShare to mirror the documents. FolderShare has a number of advantages over online file sharing tools: you don’t need to be online to access files, local files are fast and responsive, all Windows Explorer and OS/X Finder (yeah, there’s a Mac version of the client) functionality is maintained, and post-installation everything works quickly and automatically. There are, however, some disadvantages: FolderShare doesn’t handle collisions (copies are created with new names) or versioning, and deletions are more or less propagated to all machines. Therefore, it might be worthwhile to use FolderShare in conjunction with some backup or archiving software (we’re using CVS for that).

37Signals has a great product called Campfire. It’s a web-based chat application, allowing groups of users to easily talk and share files. Apparently, it’s fantastic. Unfortunately, it’s not free. I wanted to allow my entire section (all 65 or so of us) to potentially talk at the same time. Roomsays.com provides all that functionality, for free. Right now we’re using it to prep for a test tomorrow. People can ask and answer questions without sending out a group email, and we can post our cheat sheets in there, too. A few minor quibbles with the software: even if you’re already logged in to the site, you still need to reenter your password if you join a room as a registered user. Also, when you enter a room, you don’t see any of the earlier messages. But, honestly, how can you argue with free?

It’s not really software, but sometimes you need to be able to talk, not just IM. My groups have tried Skype, but having a real number to dial is sometimes easier. There are a number of similar services, but LifeOffice’s free teleconferencing worked well, didn’t require any personal information or credit card, and the sound quality is great. Combining conferencing with group text chat should work pretty well.

If you’re using Microsoft Word, the 2002 (XP) and later versions allow you send a document for review by email, and automatically merge the changes back in once you’ve received the updates. If you’re tired of trying to figure out who has the latest copy, it’s worth trying this tool.

Finally, for straight up general communication and document sharing there’s the myriad of blog tools. My wife has set up a private group blog for her PhD classmates on WordPress.com. Since they only meet once a week it’s been a great bonding tool and a handy way to share information.

You’ll note there are no Wikis and none of the purpose-built student applications. To be honest, they’re too geeky and too complicated. I have been using a combination of ScheduleWorld and the Funambol Outlook SyncML client to synchronize my Outlook/Exchange and Google calendars. Here’s where I learned to make it work. Totally geeky, but the upshot is you can all look here and see how busy I am.

For the next few weeks, I’m studying communications, strategy, data analysis, ethics, finance, law, economics, and marketing and we share cases across all the subjects. It’s pretty cool.

View from the top:

View at the bottom:

Plenty of runoff from the top:

Crazy knocked-down tree:

The colors were crazy. This is looking south, towards central Massachusetts:

Closeup of the colors:

The soup was great. Very strong chicken flavor, not off tastes at all–even better than home made.. The ingredients are chicken meat, chicken broth, carrots, noodles, and celery. There was a generous amount of whole chicken (white and dark meat). The pasta was pretty soft, but overall, a quart could have easily been a meal for my wife and I. If they sold just the broth, I’d buy that as well.

Owen’s Poultry Farm
585 Central Ave
Needham, MA 02494
(781) 444-1861

But if you look at most successful entrepreneurs, they exhibit many of these characteristics too. They can’t focus on anything for long periods of time, but they lunge into new stuff with a voracious appetite to figure it out.

I don’t know about the clinical side of this disorder. I am sure that there are many cases where the disorder is terribly disabling. But I really wonder if a moderate amount of ADD is a bad thing. I think it may in fact be a good thing. It’s certainly a trait I have come to know and love in entrepreneurs.

This is good news for me! I wouldn’t mind having to ask Fred for money one day, or a job, and if bringing along an official diagnosis can help, so much the better.

But the ADD has a dangerous and scary side. Our first term at Babson just ended and we had to write a short paper – 6 pages – reflecting on our experience and the process of learning. Or we could hand in something creative. I had five perfectly good pages typed out last night before bed. This morning I scrapped it all in favor of a slide show/presentation. Is it better now? More expressive? More passionate? Sure! Will it meet my professor’s expectations? We’ll see….