Ipso Facto

I was saddened to learn of the death of Professor Thomas O’Connor, one of the great historians of Boston’s modern history. I took a class with Prof. O’Connor at the Harvard Extension School in 2005 — his last, as it turned out. On the final day of classes Dean Shinagel came into the lecture hall with a small marching band to present an award.

O’Connor absolutely deserved it. He was a marvelous instructor who had an innate grasp of the life of the city from Colonial times to the present, and really explained the commercial/political/social forces that shaped the modern city. He was a great storyteller, and brought Boston politics from the early 20th century to life with interesting anecdotes and asides. He was also a witness to many of the historical trends he discussed. He grew up in South Boston, and saw urban renewal, the bussing crisis, and the terms of many important mayors, including Mayor White and I believe Mayor Curley.

Worth sharing is this quote in the preface of The Hub:

“By eventually adapting to change and accommodating itself to modern ways — although at times grudgingly, often angrily, and almost always slowly — Boston has continued to be a live, functioning urban community that has not given into the nostalgic impulses that can so often turn a once-famous city into a lifeless historical shrine. …

The most serious challenge Boston faces in the future, however, is not longer confined to the construction of high-rise buildings, multilane highways, or extravagant commercial developments. The current challenge is the extent to which Boston will be able to retain its own distinctive identity as a city whose moral standards, civic virtues, and intellectual accomplishments once inspired a nation.”

(2001)

Over on the Invantory blog, I’ve written about the scandal engulfing 38 Studios, the game studio founded by Red Sox great Curt Schilling. The short story: 38 Studios recently failed to make a scheduled loan fee to the State of Rhode Island, which generously gave loan guarantees totaling $75 million back in 2010. My angle concerned government incentives for high-tech ventures. But a more interesting question is raising its head, now that the company can’t even pay its employees. Where was the company’s board of directors and CEO when the Rhode Island deal was negotiated, and more recently when it became clear that the cost/revenue structure was not sustainable?

It’s rare that a scandal simultaneously touches the New England tech, political, and sports scenes, and the local and national press has been all over it. The media has been playing up the sexiest angle — a sports hero at the helm of a struggling company. But Schilling isn’t alone. He had a CEO, Jennifer MacLean (who just started maternity leave), an experienced CFO, Rick Wester, and an operations guru, Bill Thomas. And he had a board. At first I was unable to find it, because it had been taken offline, but I found a cached copy. Here it is:

Schilling had a solid board. Besides MacLean and Thomas, these were people with decades of experience in finance, new ventures, and the games and technology industries. Here’s how their board bios described them:

Martha Crowninshield

Ms. Crowninshield is a general partner emerita of Boston Ventures, an internationally recognized private equity firm with more than $2.5 billion in raised capital spanning seven limited partnership funds. Since 1985, she was principally involved in investing in the entertainment and leisure markets. Her track record of success includes such recognized names as Motown Record Company, Six Flags Entertainment Corporation, Billboard Publications, Inc, and USA Cinemas (now Loews). She is a member of the Board of Fellows at Harvard Medical School and Founding Co-Chair of the Harvard NeuroDiscovery Center council. Her financial support and business advice are credited at Harvard Medical School as critical for the launch of the International MS Genetics Consortium where she serves on its Board of Directors. Ms. Crowninshield also has brought her business and leadership skill to her considerable efforts as a philanthropist. She was a driving force with the United Way in encouraging large individual donors to support targeted initiatives for programs including economic literacy and entrepreneurship for girls. As an overseer of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Huntington Theater Company in Boston, her work was focused on introducing the arts into the broader community with a special focus on education and participation for children. She also is involved in national and international initiatives to improve access to capital — both intellectual and financial — for women and people of color. A former member of the Executive Committee of the Simmons College Corporation and the Executive Committee of C200, she has received many local and national awards of recognition for her business and philanthropic leadership. Ms. Crowninshield received her MBA from Simmons College Graduate School of Business, and currently serves as Chair of Indaba Music.

Kevin Roche

Mr. Roche has 26 years of experience in investment banking, private equity and leveraged finance. From 2001 to 2006, Mr. Roche was Head of Investment Banking at Wachovia Corporation with responsibility for ten Corporate Finance industry coverage groups, Mergers and Acquisitions, Financial Sponsors Group, and Principal Investing. He held leadership responsibility for over $2.0 billion of revenue, a $40 billion loan portfolio and a $2.0 billion principal investing portfolio. During Mr. Roche’s five year tenure, Wachovia quadrupled its market share of investment banking fee-based revenue. Prior to being Head of Investment Banking, Mr. Roche was Co-Head of Leveraged Finance at Wachovia Corporation from 2000 to 2001 with responsibility for the Loan Syndications; High Yield Origination, Sales and Trading; Leveraged Capital; and Leveraged Finance Underwriting groups. From 1988 to 1999, Mr. Roche was a Managing Partner at Wachovia Capital Partners with a leadership role in founding this private equity investing business and in the successful growth and development of a $2 billion principal investing portfolio. Mr. Roche was previously a Vice President at Kidder, Peabody & Co. Incorporated, where he worked from 1980 to 1982 and 1984 to 1988. Mr. Roche holds a B.A. in Economics, magna cum laude, from Duke University and a M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.

Jim Halpin

Mr. Halpin is the President and owner of River Bend Inc., a private investment company. Prior to starting his own firm in 2000, Mr. Halpin served as President and CEO of CompUSA for seven years. During his tenure at CompUSA, he was named one of the “top 25 managers in the world” by Business Week in 1998. Mr. Halpin also served as President of HomeBase and BJ’s Wholesale Club. Mr. Halpin was also a director of Marvel Entertainment and Life Time Fitness. He was Chairman of the Compensation Committees at both Marvel and Life Time Fitness. In addition, he was a member of the Strategic Planning Committee at Marvel and the Finance Committee at Life Time Fitness. Mr. Halpin formerly served on the boards of Access and Posse, nonprofit organizations offering educational assistance to urban youth. Mr. Halpin has guest lectured at Harvard Business School, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Babson, Columbia and Wharton.

Doug Macrae

Mr. Macrae began his career in videogames in 1981 when he founded General Computer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Within a few years the company grew to over a hundred employees designing arcade and home games for Atari and Bally / Midway. Between original games and arcade conversion to home systems, General Computer was responsible for versions of Ms. Pac-Man, Centipede, Galaxians, Galaga, Asteroids, Joust, Robotron, Pole Position, Jungle Hunt, Xevious, Berserk, Desert Falcon, Dig Dug, Ballblazer, Jr. Pac-Man, Kangaroo, Moon Patrol, Food Fight, Phoenix, Quantum, Rubik’s Cube, Realsports Tennis, Track & Field, and Vanguard. In 1993, he founded a new company, VideoGuide, to design interactive program guides. In 1996, VideoGuide was merged into Gemstar; in 2000 Gemstar acquired TV Guide. Doug became President of TV Guide Consumer Electronics with offices in Boston, Los Angeles, London, Luxemburg, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. After retiring in 2005, Mr. Macrae became an avid World of Warcraft player, spending many hours of quality time with his sons. Desiring to get back into the videogame world, Doug, co-created the Azeroth Advisor, a personalized newsletter for players of Blizzard’s World of Warcraft game.

Sundar Subramaniam

Mr. Subramaniam is Chairman of IBCC whose holdings include Cambridge Technology Enterprises (CTE.NS), Knome, where he is Chairman, MTPV, Cambridge Energy Resources and DNSstuff, where he serves as director, CEO of Sialix and General Partner at Higher Moment Capital. He previously served as Chairman of I-Cube, C-bridge, Open Environment Corporation, and OneWave – all of which completed IPO’s, WorldStreet Corporation, Integrated Computing Engines, and as Managing Partner of Cambridge Samsung Partners, a Venture Capital firm. Mr. Subramaniam graduated from Brandeis University with a major in Computer Science and Economics, has an MBA from MIT and an MS from HST (Harvard-MIT Health Science and Technology).

The bio for the other board member, Tom Zaccagnino, was removed from the site at the time of this posting, but his cached bio reads:

Mr. Zaccagnino is currently Co-Managing Director at Wellesley Advisors Corporation, an institutional private equity real estate investment company. He is also a director at 1921 Realty Incorporated, a Real Estate Investment Trust and at Indaba Music, an international digital media company. Prior to these positions, Mr. Zaccagnino was a high-tech entrepreneur at Cambridge Technology Enterprises, holding various executive positions and directorships with portfolio companies. He has transacted business in over 25 countries on 5 continents, and has extensive experience in private equity, M&A, and private and public offerings. Mr. Zaccagnino is also an active early-stage investor and is a member of the Urban Land Institute and the Boston Real Estate Finance Association. He also serves as Chairman of the Yale Alumni Real Estate Association of New England and is a member of the Yale Alumni Schools Committee. Mr. Zaccagnino earned a Bachelor of Arts from Yale College. In addition to being a 38 Studios director, he currently serves as the Chairman of the Finance Committee and is a member of the Audit Committee.

As I said before, this is a solid board. These are qualified and experienced individuals who provided oversight to 38 Studios. They could not only advise Schilling and the senior management team, but had a fiduciary responsibility to help 38 Studios avoid financial crises. What happened? The story is still unfolding, but I think a lot more attention needs to be paid to the actions of the management team and board, not just Schilling.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a great two-part feature, “Did anyone ask the students?” It’s an absolutely relevant question that is missing in almost all discussions of the future of higher education (for evidence of this, look no further than last week’s Harvard’s edX announcement and related coverage, which featured lots of administrators and experts talking, but not a single student.)

Anyway, back to the Chron article. The writer, Jeff Selingo, went out and talked with hundreds of students at all kinds of colleges (SNHU, Georgetown, Arizona State, the University of Central Florida, Valencia College, Franklin & Marshall College) and asked them what they thought of the technological revolution that’s blossoming across higher education. He got some surprising answers, particularly concerning the value of online education. Although the students have grown up in an online, mobile world, and have these technologies deeply integrated into their lives, they see huge value in the face-to-face educational experience:

Face-to-face education matters even more now. Because these students see the world through screens (mobile, tablet, and laptop), I expected them to embrace the idea of online education. Just the opposite. They want to engage with a professor and with their classmates, they crave the serendipity of classroom discussions, and they want the discipline of going to class. Even the adult students I met preferred a physical classroom. Online “you’re pretty much paying to teach yourself,” a Valencia student told me. “It’s like text messages. There’s no tone of voice.”

That doesn’t mean these students like everything about traditional higher ed. They’re over the lecture, they like the idea of “flipping the classroom,” and they do seek out online resources to brush up on certain subjects. “A lot of professors are petrified by online classes,” one Georgetown student said. “They really want to improve the classroom experience.”

However, there is some sample bias here. The students Jeff talked with are already talking f2f classes. Talking to online students, some different perspectives come up. I have written extensively about online education at the Harvard Extension School. Some students lament the lack of contact and interaction with Harvard professors and their classmates. But others who put more of an emphasis on convenience, such as this ALM in IT student who didn’t see much value in attending Extension School classes in person:

The [Harvard Extension School] doesn’t offer an internet degree yet, to Kendra Kratkiewicz’s regret. This semester, she’s forced to make the long drive from Billerica to Cambridge as she toils toward her master’s degree. Nothing would please her more than a chance to complete her Harvard education without having to show up at Harvard.

Over the past month on Invantory.com, I’ve written a series of blog posts about schemes hatched by various Craigslist criminals to separate buyers from their money. The first was about Craigslist rental scams. Housing scams are ubiquitous on Craigslist. Every week I get a Google alert based on published news reports, and rental scams easily make up half of the reports that are published.

One of my discoveries concerns the ongoing foreclosure crisis. It seems to have made the rental scam situation even worse, by adding masses of unoccupied homes to local markets which bogus landlords “rent” to unsuspecting tenants (sometimes the landlords are actually former tenants who still have copies of the keys!). The new tenant hands over a deposit and the first month’s rent, but soon discovers that someone else (typically a bank) owns the property.

Today, I wrote about another profitable area for thieves — concert and sporting event tickets. The post is entitled Craigslist ticket scams: Five red flags to look for. Like rental scams, ticket cons are driven by people working remotely (a huge red flag!) who use convincing, compelling stories to get victims to wire money. But unlike rental scams or the trade of bogus/stolen cell phones, Craigslist ticket scams exploit other dimensions unique to the events business. They include rapidly approaching deadlines (which puts more urgency into the deal), the ease of creating fake tickets, and the presence of scalpers operating on the fringe of the concert/sporting events business.

Shaquille O’Neal received his doctoral degree in education last week. It wasn’t an honorary award — he earned it from Barry University, a private Catholic institution in Florida. It’s an admirable achievement that required lots of hard work, both on campus and off — he took many courses through distance education, but also had presentations and other activities on campus, as in the photo provided by Barry (the other person in the photo is David M. Kopp, Chair of the Organizational Learning and Leadership and Human Resource Development Programs).

But I noticed an interesting thread in the Gawker story about Shaq’s graduation. The entertainer and former basketball star received a master’s degree from the University of Phoenix prior to getting his doctorate from Barry. The Gawker story only mentioned the UoP degree in passing, but it brought out a lot of spirited comments, many of them highly critical of University of Phoenix degrees.

MicMutt started off the thread with this comment:

Does “a Master’s degree from University of Phoenix” even mean anything?

A bunch of sarcastic comments followed (“It means your check to the University of Phoenix cleared”, “I hope so, that’s where I received my MD. Surgery rotation was cake”, etc.). But there was a serious response, too:

aaxan:

Lots of companies (and government agencies) pay for their employees to return to school for MBAs and such, and a substantial number of those people end up at UoP. It’s one of the top destinations because a lot of the time the employee just needs those extra letters behind his/her name, and the curriculum isn’t really that different from any other program.

However, one UoP supporter fired back at MicMutt with this:

You know what, if I ran a business I would take a UofP MBA over a BC/Columbia MBA every day of the week. Usually the people taking online classes are doing so because they are already out in the workforce, not everyone had daddy paying their tuition.

From there the conversation turned into a bitter war about privilege, ability, standards, and whether or not UoP degrees are legit. Example:

You know what? I do run a business and, as MicMutt said, a UoP MBA counts for very little. Traditional public and private not-for-profit universities offer online programs, and there are only two reasons someone would choose UoP:
1. Couldn’t get accepted to a program with legitimate admissions criteria;
2. Not sophisticated enough to realize that UoP is among the most expensive choices and has among the worst reputations.
This is not the sort of person I am interested in hiring for anything other than low-level grunt work.

These comments are cruel and unfair to students who put in a lot of work to earn their degrees. However, they do reflect real problems with UoP standards (which are affected by its for-profit mission) and perception in the marketplace. I wrote about this issue six years ago on another blog, and the post attracted more than 100 comments from UoP supporters and critics.

The presidents of MIT and Harvard had a major announcement this morning regarding EdX, a non-profit venture to make certain Harvard and MIT courses freely available to anyone with an Internet connection. Unlike MIT’s decades-old OpenCourseWare initiative, which basically involved posting course curricula and problem sets online along with a few videos, edX goes much further. MITx and soon HarvardX has more video, structure, community, and even testing mechanisms to students can track their progress. EdX will be an independent umbrella organization to help run the two programs and share certain resources.

EdX is not really news for MIT. MITx was announced late last year, and made a huge impact. Hundreds of thousands of students have signed up to take MIT’s science and engineering classes. MIT even announced that people completing a set of courses would receive some sort of non-degree certification. MITx (and Khan Academy) made a lot of universities wake up to the possibilities of supplemental learning for society at large. Harvard was apparently starting to feel left behind; a source told the Boston Globe that Harvard felt “we didn’t want to look like we were playing catch-up.” Indeed, while MITx is already operational and serving its mission, HarvardX won’t offer any classes until later this year.

In addition, I noticed something peculiar about the HarvardX side of the venture. Harvard has been running Internet-based distance education continually since the 1990s through the Harvard Extension School. The announcement said that EdX would be separate from this and other existing distance education offerings through the Harvard Business School and Harvard Medical School. In the press conference, Harvard’s provost briefly mentioned the expertise that the Extension School had developed, but it looks like there is no connection between edX and the Extension School.

Indeed, I am wondering if the free Harvard offerings from edX will compete with the Extension School’s own desire to get paying students to “sample” Harvard courses online. If casual students see that they can sample Harvard courses for free via edX, why should they pay thousands of dollars to take an Extension School class online? The Extension School can say that they offer credit for online courses. But to casual students paying $2000 or more for educational credit that will probably never be used, this doesn’t seem like a good value considering Harvard-branded knowledge can be obtained elsewhere for free.

You may also be interested in my earlier posts about distance education at Harvard and a review of The Gates Unbarred, the official history of the Extension School.

The startup company I cofounded, Invantory, has a big announcement this week: Version 1.0 of our free Craigslist iPhone app was released to the Apple App Store. The response so far has been outstanding. You can see some of the reviews on the iTunes download page, but of the best reviews was mailed to me by a big Craigslist fan:

“You really hit the mark with this. It is now my Craigslist browser of choice.”

We have some big features planned for May, including the ability to post Craigslist ads. Facebook integration and other services that aren’t even available on Craigslist are planned for later this year.

Download the app here!

I just posted a comment on a Chronicle of Education column by Kevin Carey about an online education experiment at Stanford. The experiment, involving an AI class taught by computer scientist Sebastian Thrun, was an incredible success — more than 100,000 people took it. It’s also proof of the effectiveness of online education to spread knowledge to people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to attend the class in person. I’ve been a big fan of Khan Academy for years, and fully support what MIT is doing with MITx.

But what I object to is when people falsely equate online and in-classroom education. As I have said repeatedly on this blog and elsewhere, the online experience is not the same. It may be more convenient, but it fails in several key respects. After Carey made the claim that the online students in the Stanford class “were experiencing exactly what the Stanford students were experiencing”, I responded with this comment:

No they weren’t.

They couldn’t raise their hands or participate in any spontaneous exchange of ideas with the instructor and each other.

They couldn’t approach the professor after class at the podium to ask follow-up questions.

They were watching the lecture on a small video screen. The in-class students were getting a full-resolution, high fidelity experience.

Did they have advantages over the in-class students? Certainly — being able to rewind the video or study from their comfort of your home is incredibly liberating. And many of those students were certainly more dedicated than the in-class students who fell asleep.

But the claim that the online experience is “exactly” the same is false. The idea that it’s “better” is also debatable, although that depends a lot on the values individuals assign to face-to-face educational interaction, convenience, and other factors.

What do you think?

For years, I’ve found the best way to illustrate what’s going on at the Harvard Extension School is to talk about the students and their experiences. Through interviews, personal blogs, emails, and message board postings I have been able to highlight both the good and the bad using voices that are totally authentic. For instance, several years ago I spotted this blog post by a student who had just finished the Harvard ALB program. He was ecstatic about his experience learning under some of Harvard’s renowned faculty:

Overall I feel that I received the best undergraduate education possible. It was a great honor to study and then be a TA under Tom Hayes and run the Physics 123 lab — I think it’s entirely possible that Tom is the best introductory circuit design teacher in the world, and I know I am in great company. It was also a great honor to study cyberlaw at the Berkman center of Harvard law — as an undergraduate, I was able to take more IP, patent, copyright and digital law classes than are available at most law schools, including Larry Lessig’s former class “The Technology and Politics of Control”. I also learned Spanish with Professora Zetterstrand, studied the history of Boston under Robert Allison, and of course studied number theory, probability, topology, calculus, linear algebra, group theory, graph theory, etc. under professors Martinez, Boller, Winters, Bamberg, Towne. Astronomy at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Physics in the science center… comparative religious ethics and modern/contemporary American fiction in Harvard Hall. Museum studies with Mary Malloy (and the future directors of a couple dozen museums in the museum studies program), game theory with Neugeboren (who himself studied under Schelling, whose son Robert is also a close personal friend), psychology under Fersch, and the history of electronic music with Marshall all were brilliant courses also. So many of these professors were the best at what they do — leaders in their fields, the ones who wrote the books. And even though this was a “night school” program, Harvard refused to lower the bar and never failed to challenge me; many of the professors talked about how the curriculum in the college vs. night school was exactly the same, and in a number of cases the student projects and work in the night school exceeded that produced by the day students.

It’s through other user stories that I’ve been able to understand the problems with distance education at the Harvard Extension School. A group of students commenting on their distance education experience lamented the lack of interaction with their professors, despite the Extension School’s promise of “Harvard faculty and rigorous academics.”

For my startup, I am now starting to illustrate some of the user stories that helped my co-founder and I understand the problems with classified marketplaces. The first post on our blog is titled Craigslist iPhone app, meet Donna, and discusses how a power user has struggled to overcome the limitations of the online marketplace with her “hacks” to make it easier. The stories are compelling; I will be highlighting more of them in the months to come as people start to use the app and tell us about their experiences.

Over the weekend, I took a look at Craigslist terms, which have recently been updated. I am not lawyer and surely missed many of the subtle legal distinctions in the new text, but there were some notable changes. They include:

Removal of specific prohibitions, in favor of broad prohibitions. For instance, pornography was described in detail in the old version, but in the new version it hardly warrants a mention. But there are new sections on posts by dealers, which were not clearly addressed before the February 14 update (Valentine’s Day — any significance?)

I will write an additional post about some changes to Section 4C of the terms, which deal with “flagging” — perhaps the most frustrating aspect of Craigslist for sellers. There is also room to talk about how overly restrictive the terms are, particularly considering the service was founded by Craig Newmark in the 1990s as an embodiment of the open spirit of the early Internet.