Blackboard - New Facebook app, acquisition

Interesting Blackboard news in the Washington Business Journal lately:

New free Blackboard application for Facebook (link)

Blackboard Inc. is helping students hit the books while logged on to the famed social networking site... [they] announced today its first Facebook application, Blackboard Sync, which lets students access their assignments, grades, messages, and other course materials from Blackboard while socializing on Facebook.

Blackboard buys Angel Learning (link)

Education software maker Blackboard Inc. is expanding its offerings by acquiring fellow educational software maker Angel Learning Inc. for $95 million in cash and stock... The combined company will have more than 5,800 schools, government agencies and corporate customers.

Three principles for asynchronous e-learning

Great article at ASTD.org about Designing Asynchronous E-Learning that gives a few principles to keep in mind when designing e-learning. Asynchronous e-learning has some unique challenges, as there is no instructor to motivate the learner and adjust the training on the fly.

Main points:

• Motivate the learner to learn
  
• Focus on behavioral outcomes
  
• Create meaningful experiences
  

Nice.

REALLY small tasks - crowdsourcing for mobile users

Read a great article this morning that reminded me about an idea I had awhile back to bring Mechanical Turk to the iPhone. It looks like the txteagle group is already thinking along these lines.

From the article in Technology Review (Crowd-Sourcing the World):

Nathan Eagle, a research fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, in New Mexico, is launching a project similar to Amazon's Mechanical Turk but that distributes tasks via cell phones. The goal of his project, called txteagle, is to leverage an underused work force in some of the poorest parts of the world.

Amazing stuff. People in developing countries can use their cell phones and make as much as $3/hour. Tasks include transcription, journalism, localization, surveys and more. And I thought the small task outsourcing on sites like SerebraConnect were small!

Crowdsourcing and the virtual workplace

A friend sent this link - How the Virtual Workforce is Changing Everything. It's a good article talking about how telecommuting and outsourcing has morphed into this greater concept of crowdsourcing, also referred to as the Virtual Workplace. From the article:

Companies should not view this new work style [crowdsourcing] as a cost-saving, short-term measure, as there are start-up costs involved.

A big distinguishing factor of this model is that it is a call for work. Many people will reply. Many of them may have a full time job doing other things.

"I don't know if it will ever become the replacement for an employer and an employee in the traditional sense -- but this work style is now a part of the ecosystem. It's sort of a third way," he [Jeff Howe, contributing editor for Wired Magazine] said. 

It is interesting how it warns companies not to crowdsourcing and telecommuting it as a short term solution but also lets them know that this, to some extent, is here whether we like it or not.

Serebra Connect on New York Times blog

The freelancing site SerebraConnect recently received an article on a New York Times blog - Outsource Your Chores — And Feel Good While You’re At It. It positions SerebraConnect as an eLance with a twist:

It’s a similar model to the popular freelance marketplace Elance — but with a feel-good twist. Most of the people bidding on the jobs are students in developing countries who have taken a course.

Even more interesting are the comments, calling easy outsourcing evil and "shameful". That seems a bit excessive, but in industries that are seeing their work outsourced it must be a scary concept.

Also mentioned in the comments, it would be nice if outsourcing sites like this found specific ways to help people in N. America as well - there is certainly an ample supply of workers that will work for cheap even on this side of the world!

Online Customer Support portal

This is a neat customer support option that is becoming popular with many Web2.0 companies like Twitter, Mozilla and Cisco - GetSatisfaction.com .

It's a great idea - build an online community, safe and distanced from the company that you want to get support from, but allow the company to have a presence there as well.

There are a couple outsourcing sites on there, such as Elance, oDesk and cebufreelancer.com. Not very many online learning companies though.

Lifehacker - how to find freelance work

Great article on lifehacker about finding freelance work - Choose a Booming (or Crashing) Industry to Find Freelance Work. Interesting angle on picking an industry to work in.

20 industries that are better bets for any full- or part-time freelancers looking to pick up new clients than cold-canvassing.

The comments are full of references to online freelance websites.