Wow, these Maine higher-ups are QUICK!

After sending out an exploratory email to Barbara Greenstone and Kelly Arsenault of the Maine Learning Technology Initiative, I got very quick responses from both.

My letter to the pair is posted here back on May 25, if you haven't seen it or are curious as to how I phrased my exploration.

Here are there responses:

Kelly -

Hi Seth,
Let me see if I can address some of your questions:

>a gap between
>the educational community and computer technology, as
>well as research on what educators and administrators
>see as the potential benefits of computer technology
>and the internet.

> First, I was wondering if there stood any documented
>research on (or related to) the above topics that I
>might peruse that you're aware of.

I know there is a lot of research out there. One person that comes to
mind that has done a lot of research on this is Saul Rockman. His website is
at http://rockman.com/. In general, as I said, there is a lot out there.
One thing to keep in mind, though, is that a lot of research on the use of
technology in schools doesn't approach one to one classroom
application.

Also, Maine's approach has been unique as far as large scale
initiatives go and utilizing teachers as leaders rather than focusing on the
technology coordinators. Mike Muir, of the University of Maine at
Farmington has written a paper or two on this. In fact, we'll be
presenting at NECC next month. I think if you do an search on MLTI, the
Maine Learning Technology Initiative, you may come up with other links
directed at this project as far as research goes.

Go to our website, MaineLearns, at www.mainelearns.org. Click on "About
Us" on the lower left hand tool bar, scroll to the bottom of the page
and there are links to research commissioned by the state legislature
specifically on MLTI. Note- when on our pages you'll notice a small
folder to the right of each section title. Click on this folder to get
the full list of resources under each heading.

> Second, in the coming months, might I be able to
>pick either or both of your brains for
>information/experience related to these topics?
Sure..email is the best way to reach me.
>
> And I guess finally, I'm also seeing if you're aware
>of any other people that may be willing and
>knowledgeable resources on the subject.
See above and I'll start thinking on this. Ask specific questions and I
can probably direct you to specific people.
>
> Thanks for both of your times, and I appreciate any
>help you may be able to offer me in this project.
> SBK

No problem. Happy to help.

Kelly

Kelly A. Arsenault
Maine Learning Technology Initiative- MLTI
State Wide Integration Mentor
Cumberland Regional Integration Mentor
karsenaultlmm@middlemaine.org
http://www.mainelearns.org

Barbara -

Hi Seth,

I'd be happy to help you in your research. Just email me any specific
questions you have (the more specific the better) and be patient because I get a lot of email and I can't always reply right away. You can also find a lot of information on our web site, www.mainelearns.org If you want to read research reports about the MLTI, click on Documents (near the bottom of the navigation bar) and scroll down to MLTI Research Reports.

Another person to contact is Mike Muir at the University of Maine, Farmington. He's an education professor who has worked very closely with us and has done a lot of work with student engagement and technology. He can point you toward some good resources.

Good luck

Barbara

So with some new trees to bark up, the search goes on... today an email went out to Mike Muir, as mentioned by Barbara.

A look back...

... back all the way to last trimester, for Prof. Erik Murphy's Internet Marketing I class, which I plan to review periodically to gain insight and inspiration as I try to carve out a marketing niche for my client, Connected Classrooms.

Because it's interesting and because I can, here was an assignment I did last trimester that helped me pinpoint the goals of internet marketing.

Here's the assignment:

Internet Marketing 1

Some of the fundamental goals of marketing:
· Launch new products and services.
· Position (or reposition) a product or service.
· Build awareness of the product or service
· Create or increase interest in a product, service, or brand.
· Communicate the value proposition to specific target groups
· Enhance the organization’s overall image.

What are the goals of marketing?
· to provide a desired or needed commodity at a reasonable price
· to transfer the product from producer to consumer with the least amount of quality loss
· to provide fair prices to the consumer at a profit margin for the producer
· to provide an attractive and convenient product
· to keep marketing costs at a minimum

Why are these two lists so different?


Name three more goals not mentioned about:

1 –

2 –

3 –


Why are they on your list?

Finish this sentence and defend your statement:
The result of an effective marketing strategy is __________________ .

Here's my response:

Okay. I admit it. When I first got the assignment in class on Friday night, I thought to myself, “Self, this ought to be easy. Get the hibatchi fired up and let’s kill time with some shish kabob, because this won’t take more than a minute.”

Of course, that was before I actually read the assignment.

And now, with that preliminary task in the rearview, I can safely say that this assignment is more of a headache than I had given it credit for.

Why? Because there are two lists on a piece of paper that are very different than one another, under the respective headings “Some of the fundamental goals of marketing:” and “What are the goals of marketing?”

I was then asked to explain why the lists were different.

This puzzle seemed akin to something like the following fictional assigment:

Please explain why these lists are different:

1.) Breeds of felines include: Blue, Brown, Purple, Pink and Black.
2.) What are some cat breeds? Tree, Antler, Oatmeal and Vinyl.

Clearly, this is a pain in the derriere (that’s literally “behind” if tu parles francais, although colloquially speaking we all know “ass” is the more effective term). The lists claim to be essentially the same, but with slightly different wordings… yet include completely different inventory. And I have to explain why.

The page isn’t intuitive. In the real assignment, I’d have put both lists under the same heading with separate sub-headings… I mean, they’re clearly all part of the same basic conversation, but why make separate, disparate lists if you’re just going to reword the headers?

Ah, but the headers aren’t simply reworded, are they?

The word “fundamental” is tossed into the first header, and that must make all the difference in the world, because what constitutes the lists changes dramatically from the first to the second – and if “fundamental” is the only variable in the headers, that must be the reason for the change.

And so I turn to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (that’s the Fourth Edition, in case you’re cross-referencing this and are concerned that the definition of “fundamental” has been altered dramatically since the Third Edition) to shine some light onto the situation.

Here is what “fundamental” means when used as an adjective:

1.) Of or relating to a foundation or base; elementary.
2.) Forming or serving as an essential component of a system or structure; central.
3.) Of great significance or entailing major change.

Wow. How wonderfully vague and philosophical when applied to my conundrum. It turns out describing what’s “fundamental” is like pinpointing pornography: You can’t really describe it, but you sure know it when you see it.
Unfortunately, this quaint foray into the dictionary would have shone more light if I’d have covered the book in hairspray and lit a match.

I could rationalize using the term “fundamental” on either list, and see the adjective’s appearance in the header of the first list as arbitrary… although perhaps it’s not… I didn’t make the lists, so I don’t know for sure. That said, I’m not going to become the person who made the lists anytime soon, so I’m just going to have to deal with the situation from the vantage point of a student reading the lists and trying to make sense out of them to the best of his ability. And I have the ability to justify the second list being just as “fundamental” as the first.

I also have the ability to throw quotation marks around the word “fundamental” way too often. Tough nuggets. This is my academic stream of consciousness and I’m allowed to overuse any punctuation I want. Like all the ellipses, dashes and colons. Get used to it, because this is the way my brain rolls.

Anyway, I digress. I was going on about how, by my standpoint, “fundamental” can be used to describe either list and therefore can be tossed out of the equation. In variable terms, x = 1. Although this is all just my perception, the argument can be made that my perception is the only real perception I have to work with.

Seneca once said: “If a man knows not what harbor he seeks, any wind is the right wind.”

Right now I haven’t the foggiest clue what harbor I’m seeking, and hauling “fundamental” out of the equation seems like a good wind. While I’m ripping things out of the equation, I’m just going to drop the headers in general. They sound the same to me – after three migraines and an aneurysm – so I’m going to stop stressing myself out trying to figure out the difference between the two.

I’m going to do what I always do when there doesn’t seem to be a logical answer to a difficult question. I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear the question.

So let’s look at this issue another way. Let’s just pretend there are no headers and analyze the lists themselves. Let’s figure out what the common thread is throughout List One and then figure out what the common thread is throughout List Two. Let’s then compare these common threads and consider that comparison to be the answer of the question “Why are these lists so different?”

The aforementioned comparison will actually yield the answer to the question “What’s the elementary (or fundamental, if you will) difference between these two lists?” But I don’t care. I’m going to use that comparison to answer the question “Why are these lists so different?”

Welcome to the world of marketing in its purest form, where I’m about to take the information I want to answer and apply it to whatever question is asked, regardless of what that question actually reads. I should run for office. Or work for Philip Morris.

Regardless, after a basic analysis of the first list, it could be said that the list consists of ways in which the marketing will affect the potential customers.

The question answered in List One might be: Where do we want to leave the consumers after our marketing plan has taken shape? We want them aware of the product. We want them interested in the product. We want them, provided they’re part of specific target groups, to understand the value proposition. In these customers’ eyes, we want the overall image of the organization to be enhanced.

In List Two, the items seem to be broken down into actions the organization might undertake in order to make it easy to market. The question List Two might answer is: What can we do in order to best benefit our customer base while reaching optimal profits? We can provide a desired or needed commodity at a reasonable price. We can transfer the product from producer to consumer with the least amount of quality loss. We can provide fair prices to the consumer with a profit margin for the producer. We can provide an attractive and convenient product. We can keep market costs at a minimum.

For my money, the second list is less about marketing and more about the creation and maintenance of value – which aids in marketing but isn’t marketing in itself. Still, who am I to argue with a list I was given during a graduate level class?

Let’s ask our dictionary friends what “marketing” means, and go from there.

Ha! You can tell I’m writing this on the fly, because after checking the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, I found out that I now must stuff my foot directly in my mouth… or, being that I’m not actually speaking and am rather typing on a keyboard, I need to stuff my foot directly into my hands… which isn’t nearly as unpleasant… but I digress. It doesn’t seem that “marketing” has the connotation that I thought.

No, the folks who wrote the dictionary are now saying that “marketing” is “the process of buying or selling in a market” or “the commercial functions involved in transferring goods from producer to consumer”. With this definition in mind, the second list is right on the money – to effectively buy, sell and transfer goods from the producer to the consumer, all the things in List Two must be accomplished.

By this definition, somebody that holds the title of Senior Vice President of Marketing might spend his or her days dickering over the price of a bushel of apples.

By this definition, likewise, List One is horribly mistitled.

List One might be better described as consisting of fundamentals of what the American Heritage kids would call “advertising”, even though that’s a bit of a dirty word.

After all, advertising is defined as “the public promotion of some product or service” or “the business of drawing attention to goods and services”, as well as “to proclaim the qualities and advantages of… goods and services”.
So I guess my answer to the question is: List One is about the intended effects of advertising and List Two is about the fundamentals of marketing in its purest form. How’s that?

The assignment then asks me to “name three more goals not mentioned about”, which is awkward to say out loud, although grammatically correct.

The first additional goal not mentioned about that I would like to mention about would be simply: Increase revenue. It’d be too easy to say “Increase product sales”, but not everybody that advertises/markets is interested in selling a product. It is fairly safe to say that everybody that advertises/markets needs money coming in, though, and that can be blanketed by the term “revenue” for my purposes here.

If advertising/marketing doesn’t bring additional funds in, it’s no more than wasted time, energy and resources.

My second goal needing mentioning about would be: To commercially compete. Every organization has competition – other organizations that are doing the same things and that are fighting for the same markets, even if they don’t realize it… Advertising/marketing can and should serve the purpose of drawing the necessary lines in the sand so that potential customers can make educated choices about where to spend their hard-earned money… or they can, at the very least, be swindled into believing they’ve made an educated choice about where to spend their hard-earned money.

The third unmentioned about goal is this: To inform the public. I’ll admit, this sounds a lot like some of the stuff in List One, but might connote more of a broad dispersal of information about the profession, product or services. It also takes into consideration legal fine print, which, at the very least, informs the public that sometimes there are risks involved in buying the products in question even if coughing, wheezing and hacking up phlegm are superbly entertaining selling points. Not that I have any particular products in mind.

Finally, the sentence I must finish is: The result of an effective marketing strategy is _______.

Answer? Increased revenue. I’m sorry, but all of that nice, touchy feely, smile-and-hold-hands, kumbaya marketing is great in theory, but if the dollars and cents don’t add up, the organization doing the marketing might not be around to see a second marketing strategy put into place.

So the first goal of any initiative, marketing or otherwise, is to somehow benefit the bottom line of an organization, either directly or indirectly.

Beyond that, we can all get together to make sure the world is a perfect place because of our slick business practices and recycled brillo pad toilet paper.

Thank you for following my scatterbrained train of thought all the way to the end. If you’ve reached this point in the stream-of-consciousness essay, you deserve a candy bar (or some delectible treat that your specific target demographic prefers, like hummus or borsch).


Candy bars, hummus and borsch will not necessarily be provided by the author of this piece, nor those acquainted with the author of this piece, without adequate reimbursement decided upon by a convention with the author at the author’s discretion. All opinions held herein are under the express written consent of the author and are not indicative of those held by The Persons School of Marlboro College, the administrators of The Persons School of Marlboro College, the computer you are reading this essay on, The Loch Ness Monster, the author’s family or even the author himself. The author of this piece is not responsible for brain cells lost in the reading of the piece, nor any other ailments that befall the reader or the reader’s acquaintances during the days previous to, during or subsequent to the reading of this piece. Sacharin has been shown to cause cancer in laboratory rats. Not that sacharin has anything to do with this piece or the author. Reading this piece while walking through a live minefield might be potentially fatal. If symptoms oftentimes associated with death, such as a lack of heartbeat, rigor mortis or dismemberment, are noticed within 24 hours after having walked through a live minefield while reading this piece, please consult a physician. Please use caution while reading this piece and operating heavy machinery.

The Radio

I have no business posting anything that sounds even close to pathos given my circumstances: I am a caucasian, middle-class male working on his second degree in America, which is the closest thing the Planet Earth has to Candyland.

I have never had to stare racism in the face, nor have I been noticeably discrimminated against, and I have never starved. I have, for the most part, had Following Winds and Fair Seas. There's a girl that loves me and there's a family that supports me.

One of the first people to usher me into the world of journalism, Casey Kane, has just died of pneumonia after several bouts with cancer, considerably before her 30th birthday. When I was a freshman at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, back in 1997, it was Casey who was a mainstay on the Massachusetts Daily Collegian Sports staff, and it was Casey who, two years later as a junior, I replaced as the Editor-in-Chief of that newspaper.

Casey went on to cover famed college football coach Lou Holtz in South Carolina before being diagnosed with cancer the first time. She always did what she wanted and was at the front of the pack.

Casey puts into perspective the construction on the corner that adds five minutes to my commute to work and the neverending workload that seems to sit atop my desk, as well as the insurmountable debt that seems to have accrued in my life.

I do, after all, have the luxury to fight those battles and to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I have the luxury of looking beyond next week and next month, and I have the luxury of hoping things get better for me as I try to get a better job and have a wife and kids.

Casey beat cancer again and again, and I never for a second thought that she would not have those things herself.

I will, someday, and I owe it to people who don't have that chance to stop complaining about things like traffic jams. I will still be here when the jackhammers stop and the sign-holder spins from 'Stop' to 'Slow'. I have been blessed with the opportunity to listen to the radio in my truck five minutes longer before going to work.

Today before work, I emailed Barbara Greenstone and Kelly Arsenault, who are amongst the people in Maine who spearheaded the technology initiative that involved the supplying of all Maine middle-schoolers laptops.

This is what I wrote:

Hello, my name is Seth and I'm working on my Masters of Science in Strategic Technology Management at the Persons School of Marlboro College in Vermont.
My Capstone Project for this school involves doing comprehensive research on what exists as a gap between the educational community and computer technology, as well as research on what educators and administrators see as the potential benefits of computer technology and the internet.
As a lifelong Maine resident, I'm superficially familiar with the laptop program and have friends and relatives who are middle school teachers in this state (and through them is how I gained your contact information), and I was wondering if I might ask for your assistance.
First, I was wondering if there stood any documented research on (or related to) the above topics that I might peruse that you're aware of.
Second, in the coming months, might I be able to pick either or both of your brains for information/experience related to these topics?
And I guess finally, I'm also seeing if you're aware of any other people that may be willing and knowledgeable resources on the subject.
Thanks for both of your times, and I appreciate any help you may be able to offer me in this project.
SBK

The first stop on the last stop on the...

... okay, you get the drift. I'm going with a train theme, here, because it's what I came up with after a long travel from western Massachusetts to my humble abode here in Durham, Maine.

Regardless, welcome to my blog, which serves as a journal for the work I will be doing on my Capstone Project at The Persons School of Marlboro College. I hope this is not only informative to all those directly related to the project, but also entertaining reading to those not directly related to the project.

The Capstone Project, for the people out there that fall into the latter catagory of readers (of which I imagine there are literally millions), is the crowning achievement for those seeking their Masters degree from Marlboro College, wherein we grad students use our respective final trimesters of school moving mountains or figuring out how to walk to Jupiter.

My particular fancy in this regard is to take on the creation of a comprehensive marketing scheme for Mary Ann Fitzgerald's Connected Classrooms website. Sounds easier than it actually will end up being, when this is all said and done, but what's a Capstone if not a glee ride for the gluttonous for punishment.

Today, of note, I met with my advisor, one Elaine Garofoli, and had a hell of a conversation over coffee at Rao's in Amherst. If I get nothing else out this Capstone Project, I'll have made contact with a very interesting woman that I believe may be an invaluable resource for me as long as I'm in the world of business and technology.

Also, if I get nothing else out of this Capstone Project, I'll have blown a good $25,000, because it's pointless to undertake this if there was no degree waiting at the end of the rainbow.

Be prepared for a lot of mixed metaphors.

Because it's getting late and I'm not quite the ankle-biting night owl I used to be (wait... owls don't bite ankles, unless you're talking about the ankles of a small woodland creature that an owl might consider a delicacy... see? be prepared for mixed metaphors...), so I'll detail that meeting in tomorrow's journal entry, along with a posting of my Capstone's list of deliverables.