Tuesday, July 19, 2011

iBrain Chapter 5 - Friends, Guns and Money

Chapter 5 seemed to obvious. I'm also taking a class on Intergovernmental Relations. Readings for that class explored the loss of tax revenues by various levels of government due to on-line shopping. While this may sound good to the private citizens, it has a cumulative affect spread out over the entire population of a jurisdiction and the course of year that can reap havoc on public budgets. It made me, for the first time, start questioning some of the "free web" ideas. I also heard on radio financial programing that Google is facing some challenges monetizing some of their newer features and applications. They company has great ideas but there is a fundamental economic strategy to keep producing new products as long as marginal revenues are greater or equal than the marginal costs of that product, if new products are costing more than they generate, there is no incentive to keep them in place.

4 comments:

  1. This argument was there when Netscape / Google first started. In the end it all settled out with them figuring out how to work ad. On buying stuff on the internet and lose of revenue I would point it is not an end sum game. You don't just lose revenue but gain as well. For example, competition means prices become lower. If your customer can purchase that item anywhere in the world on line it means you have to be competitive. I wonder how education would change if we had to compete rather then have monopoly?

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  2. Isn't competition in education what charter schools are creating? It would be interesting to see what would happen if teachers had to compete for students. But I can see some problems there as well. Might students want teachers who were easy graders? Would a quality educators have the most students? I'd like to think that they would.

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  3. Cathy,

    I think they would because ultimately it shouldn't be the student's decision, but the parents and they would (presumably) make a more informed decision. I think having to compete wouldn't be a bad thing, and having a transparent classroom could certainly get you support from parents would could see your program in action.

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  4. I think a little competition is good for people. In today's world where everyone gets a trophy leads to an overinflated sense of entitlement. If you are rewarded for whatever level of effort you put in, then there is no incentive to work harder. Why nor make school more into a game? Instead of grades, it is about earning points and beating levels and just like in video games, you can repeat the level over and over until you get it right. You can earn bonus points by doing extra activities. Instead of tests, you have tournaments, where students compete for high scores and prizes. Graduating is beating the game. I bet if schools were done more in this fashion that kids would work a lot harder.

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