Many professions in the developed world measure competency through a degree program from an accredited university and some sort of licensing exam. If a person successfully graduates from college and/or graduate school and passes the exam, then they are competent to practice in their field. This basic process covers a range of professions from engineering to medicine.

Many in these professions would admit that this isn’t the best way to measure competency. Accredited degrees are really limited by the student’s effort. Some students learn a lot and others just skate through. A similar thing can be said about licensing exams. Many students use the exam as an opportunity to consolidate what they’ve learned. Others, however, just learn to  *take* the test. They are less concerned with internalizing the material and are more concerned with passing the test.

I’m wondering what kind of new ways of measuring competency might arise in the late-developing world where the degree/licensing exam model hasn’t yet crystallized. I think assessment has to be a key part of this; however, I’m not sure that accredited degree programs have to play such a central role. Many countries simply do not have the educational resources or accrediting bodies that other countries have. There is a lot of room here for people to innovate and proactively define competency for their fields.

Janet Clarey and Mike Caulfield recently posted on the dead shark problem. They reference Woody Allen’s Annie Hall:

“A relationship, I think, is like a shark. You know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.”-Annie Hall, 1977

The gist is that online communities sometimes die. They don’t seem to grow at a fast enough clip or their users lose interest and they eventually become stagnant and then die. I think some online communities die as a natural part of their process. They serve a specific purpose and after that purpose has been met, they die.

Successful communities, on the other hand, thrive because people are intrinsically driven to keep them alive. There is some kind of value that people find in using the site, so they continue to use it. Facebook and MySpace have proven to be incredible value drivers. People spend an average of 16 minutes a day on these sites, uploading pics, poking people, commenting etc. I think a fair amount of the value here can fall under the construct of identity or impression management. People are doing these things to manage how other people see and experience them.

LinkedIn seems to be a bit different. This is more of a business social network. Sure, people definitely do impression management on LinkedIn, but it seems less so. There are specific questions you can ask your network. You can post jobs. You can find contacts to help you solve problems. LinkedIn seems to offer a different type of value and one that seems more functional and quantifiable. People seem to go on LinkedIn with a specific goal or action in mind, whereas facebook or MySpace seems to draw more of a meandering sort of engagement.

We at NIXTY believe that education is a huge and compelling value for institutions, educators, and learners. Institutions often keep learning communities alive because it is at the core of what they do (think of any academic institution[k-12, college, university]). I’m using learning community here broadly, so any sort of LMS/CMS would be considered a learning network or community. According to our research (mostly qualitative interviews), educators find value in networking with other teachers, sharing learning materials, and finding tips/hints from more experienced teachers. Educators, of course, also love to teach. Learners are compelled to learn for a variety of reasons. Some of the core reasons include: mastering a new skill, connecting with other students (homeschoolers), gaining CEUs, test-prep, and keeping brains active and young.

Our goal at NIXTY is to provide an educational platform so that institutions, educators, and learners can easily add value/content and also use the system to meet their intrinsic goals. We are in the midst of testing this out. If you share this interest, and/or are interested in using the NIXTY platform, then please sign up for our beta and help us reach this intrinsic goal.

There is an amazing wave of openness that is crashing on the academy today. The MIT faculty are largely responsible for starting this trend by pushing for OpenCourseWare (OCW). OCW is free course content. MITs professors have published an amazing 1800 free courses that anyone can download. This is a tremendous act of benevolence that I see as the tipping point for much of what will unfold in the years to come. The Harvard faculty, not be be outdone by their neighbor, recently launched OpenAccess. OpenAccess provides free access to scholarly, peer-reviewed journal articles that are normally confined to either the print or digital versions of the journals in which they are published. Subscriptions to journals are very, very, very expensive, so this move dramatically disrupts the monopoly journals have on scholarship. This is also a major milestone and adds to the cascading wave of openness that is disrupting the university.

What is the next step in this progression of openness? If the content is free and the papers, or journal articles are free, then what comes next? I think the next dramatic step…wait, better…LEAP forward will come when a university steps up and offers what I’m tentatively calling OpenTeach. Now, this idea might already have come to pass and I could very well have overlooked it; if I have, then please state so in the comments and I’ll change this post. So…what is OpenTeach? OpenTeach empowers professors to teach others for FREE. It enables them to step outside of the boundaries of their university and teach other students, hopefully less privileged, for free. I think this step is coming and I look very forward to that day arriving. Imagine if people could take courses from some of the most brilliant people on the planet. Imagine if these professors were supported by their institutions (given actual faculty loading) to teach students that are not a part of their institution. Imagine the amount of goodwill that this would provide for the bold institution that embraced this concept.

Now, of course, this issue has a boatload of issues that would have to be addressed before it could take off. First, for FERPA purposes, I don’t think that the non-enrolled student would be able to join the course that the professor offers at their university. Rather, the professor would have to teach the course outside of their university. That means the prof would have to teach a course for students that are not currently enrolled at their college. Would a professor do this? I think many professors would gladly do this. However, I’ve learned to never underestimate the power of incentives. I think many professors would actually do this if they were supported to do so by their academic chair. The outside course would have to be part of their loading. I don’t think this is something that any college or university can do. Rather, I think this is something that only colleges with considerable resources (huge endowments) can do. MIT has stepped up. Harvard has stepped up. Who’s next?

Google’s OpenSocial is an API that allows programmers to develop applications that can be used across different social Websites. In the past, programmers would have to create applications for individual sites. For example, they would have to write code for Site A, then write a different program for Site B, and yet an entirely new program for Site C. This was a major disincentive for programmers. Now, however, with OpenSocial, a programmer can create an application that can be used across multiple sites; ONE program can be developed that can then be used on Site A, Site B, and Site C with no additional modification. This, of course, is a huge incentive for programmers.

NIXTY is OpenSocial compliant. We plan to deliberately support programmers and provide resources, so that social-learning applications can be developed. As a community, we should begin to put some serious thought into what those social learning applications might look like. We might start with identifying some basic goals.

One goal would be to create applications that intrinsically motivate people to learn and teach others. Something that immediately comes to mind is the idea of educational games or serious games. We certainly seem to be much more motivated to learn when there is a sense of fun or competition added to the mix. Think back to your primary education days when the teacher would divide the class into 2 teams to review for an exam. The teacher would ask a question and the 2 students would battle each other to answer the question first. Contrast that with the idea of sitting at home doing homework. One is natural, fun, engaging, social, and very stimulating. The other is pretty boring and lonely.

At NIXTY, we are in the conceptual phase of mapping out a few social games that we think will really help people engage with one another and learn. It’d be wonderful if these games, and others, could utilize OpenSocial, so that learning games could be used across social sites. I think there are a great number of games that could be created that would bring a tremendous amount of value to students and lifelong learners. Please join us in this process. You don’t have to be a hacker to play this game. You can simply start thinking of how a game might be used to create learning via relationships. I’m confident that we will be able to work together and create some innovative games by the fall of 2008.

What does it mean? We had originally joked that NIXTY meant “Connected Learning” in a different language. Actually, NIXTY doesn’t really mean anything yet, but it should mean a whole lot in the very near future.

The process of naming the company was a lot of fun. We brainstormed and came up with about 100 names. We used different URL domain name generators, lived on godaddy.com for months, polled all of our friends and families, and had non-stop dreams about the *right* name for months on end. We finally decided we had the best name, so we bought the URL and were finally satisfied…but…then we realized we hadn’t done a trademark search yet. Turns out it was trademarked, so we had to let it go.

Paul Sanders, one of our co-founders, had come up with NIXTY. One of the benefits of a name that doesn’t necessarily mean anything is that it becomes paired or associated with whatever the service the name represents. For example, Exxon is now synonymous with energy. The other main benefit is that it isn’t trademarked!

People seem to generally like the name and the logo. We’d love to hear your thoughts. The general feel we were hoping to communicate is: collaborative, strong, hip, and community.