Thinking Digital

“New York - Just like I pictured it - skyscrapers and everything” Neneh Cherry, Inna City Mama

I could live here. I love New York. It's still the capital of the world.

Understandably, I received a wee bit of pushback on my post on incentives because I didn't clarify what I meant by incentives. While reading the latest issue of Good Magazine, it became utterly clear that there are incentives offered up towards reaching positive goals that are incredibly damaging.

In the feature article entitled School Wars, Gary Stager describes the birth of 'No Child Left Behind' (NCLB):

(George) Bush (Sr.) thought business leaders might be able to help fix public schools by running them more like businesses. So in 1989, he asked the Business Roundtable (300 CEOs and governors) to try to reform education, since governors and CEOs–administrators allshare similar temperaments and a desire to impose top-down policies. Armed with corporate war chests and support from governors, the Roundtable's influence met little resistance.

Uninterested in the complexities associated with teaching and learning, the Business Roundtable demanded that state legislatures impose “outcome-based education,” “high expectations for all children,” “rewards and penalties for individual schools,” and “greater school-based decision making.” In order to enforce and measure these voluminous imperatives, standardized testing would be required.

The way that NCLB works is this: there are standardized tests that schools and teachers are incentivized to do well on. The incentives trickle down. If a school's test scores are poor, their funding is in jeopardy. If a school's test scores are high, they get more funding. If a school has more funding, the teachers get paid more. If a school has a cut in funding, teachers may lose their jobs and classroom sizes go up. And the incentives for students? Not great, really, other than if you don't pass by your final year, you don't graduate. Students who fail the test in earlier grades get extra attention, helping them pass the test by their graduating year.

So, yes, these are incentives meant to improve quality of education. However, the incentives do the opposite. As Stager states, “It's hard to argue against raising educational standards, but imposing uniform curricula and teaching practices leads to a paradoxical lowering of standards.” NCLB exemplifies the type of incentivizing that does way more damage than would doing nothing at all.

Although it is personally baffling that anyone thought this idea would lead to a stronger system of education, I see where the designers behind NCLB could have imagined this would work logically. Standardized testing allows for a uniform metric of success. Rewarding for higher test scores should incentivize teachers to make smarter students. If A=B and B=C, then A must equal C. Right? Of course, if we were dealing with machine produced calculations. But we aren't. We are dealing with a diversity of learning styles, socio-economic realities, interests, hopes and dreams and an ever-changing economy where the standardized tests just aren't matching up to reality. And being the mother of a child who is being taught to those tests is really eye-opening.

Of course, there needs to be a bit of a measuring stick to determine the success of individual programs, but going back to what you measure matters, I'd propose a better measurement to be a decrease in drop-outs and a higher level of engagement (made up of metrics like kids getting involved in extra-curricular activities, collaborative things like fundraisers, student plays, science fairs, student websites and yearbooks, parents getting involved and engagement with the wider community).

I would also change the incentives for schools and teachers. Decreasing funding for a school in crisis doesn't seem to fit the situation. I know it works in business - a department is slacking off…kill the funds - but a learning environment is different. I am only guessing, but I assume that the schools that lose funding are those in areas that need it the most. These are the schools with kids from poor families whose parents aren't there (or aren't able to be there) to sit and help their kids with their homework. These schools need more funding, not less. Meanwhile, as the article reports, people who can afford to, remove their children from these schools to home school or send to private schools, leaving a raging Red Zone (Naomi Klein's work on disaster capitalism).

Incentivizing performance with money leads to “juking the stats” (a term used in The Wire to describe manipulation of stats to reflect the desired outcome) because, for some schools, it's the only chance they have for survival. NCLB disregards the fact that all schools aren't created equal - there isn't a level playing field to measure from. For any critical measurement, within science AND business, the conditions or environment between test subjects need to be controlled and, if they are different, the conditions need to be taken into account. So 'what is measured' is not the only part of the equation that is flawed, but the results of that measurement is also flawed.

Therefore, A=B C=D E=F, which cannot logically lead to A being equivalent to anything else but B. And the equations are seemingly endless because I have only talked about one particular dimension of the diversity here.

So incentivizing, just like any other tool, has a deeply negative side to it and needs to be connected to a diversity of factors in order to lead to positive ends.

Literally just landed in NYC and saw this following tweets about it airing on NBC. What do you think?

(hat tip to SarahinTampa and Steve Rubel)

UPDATE – full Silverlight higher res version at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/

A few of us lucky Microsoft UK bloggers won awards for our efforts recently courtesy of Computer Weekly. However, we're just the tip of the Microsoft UK bloggers iceberg. See below for a comprehensive list – oh and if you're not on here and blog from Microsoft in the UK, please add your blog in the comments section and I'll add you to the list. I'll also update soon with a brief note about who these folks are and what they post about. If you're on the list and wanna leave some notes to help me that'd be cool :)

UPDATED SEPT 9th

• Marc Holmes - Architect Evangelist and demoer extraordinaire
• Matt McSpirit - Mr Virtualization
• Georgina Mitcham  - my favourite girk geek
• Eileen Brown - Management, Messaging, Mobility and Real Time Collaboration
• James O'Neill - - Windows Platform for starters, Virtualization, RTC & Photography
• Andrew Fryer - SQL Server
• Darren Strange - Office Product Manager
• John Westworth - Sharepoint and more
• Jerry Fishenden - Microosft UK Nattional Technology Officer
• James Senior - Silverlight, Virtual Earth and more
• Arvindra Sehmi – architectural patterns and practices
• Brett Johnson – Exchange guru
• Julian Datta – Exchange and Unified Comms
• David Overton – Small Business Server and ISV's
• Bruce Lynn – management and more
• Clive Watson  - Virtualization
• Ewan Dalton – Exchange and more
• Tony Cocks – technology and more
• Mark Harrison - SharePoint - Office - Windows - Live - XBox
• Ed Gibson – Chief Security Office, Ed the Fed  
• Office Language Interface Pack
• Paolo Barone  - Developer Evangelist
• Mike Ormond -  - developer tech
• Alex Smith – web developers and agencies
• Matt Pilgrim - web developers and agencies 
• Viral Tarpara – developer evangelist
• John Breakwell – MSMQ
• Peter Ferry – Microsoft Scotland's blogger and general fine chap
• Mel Carson – Microsoft Advertising
• Eric Nelson - .NET Framework
• Paul Foster – robotics and more
• Ian Moulster – Windows Live Product
• Mark Johnston – student evangelist
• Teachers
• David Gristwood – developer stuff
• Jane Lewis - Platforms, Active Directory,Administration
• Justin Zarb – virtualization
• Ben Pearce - Premier Field Engineer
• Richard Macdonald- Virtualization
• Mark Empsom - Platforms and Active Directory Resources
• Schools
• Ed Dunhill – Microsoft for students
• UK Academic Team
• Further Education
• Higher Education
• UK Education Partners

I've been using Live Mesh a lot since it launched – generally for two things: simple file sharing between PC's in my house and sharing a few folder on my PC with work colleagues. With a little more time on my hands recently I've starting looking at a few additional uses – notably keeping music and photos in sync around the house but even more useful, keeping my favourites in sync across my PC's and my blog post drafts (I use Windows Live Writer) stored in the cloud and synced across my several PC's – allowing me to edit and post them anywhere.

I ended up stumbling across the Live Mesh Scenarios Directory with these and some other great scenarios by gurus such as Chris from Liveside. Well worth a look.

Last week I went to the London Girl Geek Dinner 3rd birthday party and saw a few familiar faces and a many new ones. The highlight of the night for me wasn't the speakers or even bumping in to my Irish based comrade Martha Rotter – it was chatting with a couple of start-ups and getting their candid feedback on why the weren't using Microsoft products to run their businesses.

Both the guys I spoke with had built their web applications using Ruby and ran on Sun. The often cited reason I hear for start-ups not using Microsoft software is cost compared to LAMP. This wasn't the reason these guys had – it was really down to these things:

1. Familiarity with using Sun and editors like vi at University meant that's what they wanted to use the same stuff in business
2. Their experience with Windows on the desktop had clouded their view of it's ability in the datacenter
3. They really didn't think Microsoft played in the start-up arena and didn't have much to offer

It just left me thinking WOW…we have a mountain to climb to meet change perceptions. It means lots of grassroots work, work with education and helping people understand our interoperability approach and stuff like Ruby running on IIS.  Our Port 25 site and blogs like Stephen McGibbon's are now on my own feed list as I need to get closer to this stuff and have better answers for guys like the ones I met last week.

It's going to be a long journey but we have some exciting announcements this year that I think will help and also my old chum Karl is working on this stuff in Redmond so we're in safe hands :)

We've all done it – that's what the recycle bin is for right? But deleting a whole “cloud”?

You have to hand it to The Register for their headlines alone - Engineer accidentally deletes cloud. To be fair to XCalibre they held their hands up and admitted the mistake which some of the larger cloud computing players can learn from – transparency is going to be crucial to build the reputation of the cloud as a way to do business. As are lots of data centers!

On the former, credit to Google for doing as they said they would given recent Google Apps downtime – giving SLA credits. Whether that is what customers want is another question but in the transparency front, they also promised to create a dashboard to allow customers to monitor incidents and their estimated times of resolution.

We all have lots to learn as this new computing shift takes hold.

Hat tip to Mark T

Wow…beautiful ad but they missed an opportunity here – notice I had to go find this on YouTube to share it with you? Like many other big corporate they didn't have “embed video” code on their own site where this video resides. Crazy….if you have cool stuff, the #1 rule on the web is help people share it for you. That's what makes a viral video, not a “share” link that only allows me to spam my friends with an email link to your site.

10/10 for the ad, 1/10 for the ability to share.