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I wiped my LinkedIn profile. I have no problem with them as a business, but this touches on one of the things that's been getting to me about "social" (and I wi

I wiped my LinkedIn profile. I have no problem with them as a business, but this touches on one of the things that's been getting to me about "social" (and I will bring this around to education) over the past few years. There's an inherent exploit/explore tradeoff in "social". Or, more to the point, are you going to document social relationships or improve them (in spite of the fact that there are powerful people who don't want improvements to occur)? There's a lot more money and less risk in the former, but I'm more a fan of the latter, because that's where the great companies come from. Which is why I like Meetup a lot (with its unusual focus on growing the social graph) and feel more tepid about LinkedIn. They're a great company and they've executed well, but their model is still stuck in the old, broken, credential-and-resume way of doing things. Since my colorful Google history has (against my will) been exposed to public digestion, I'll admit that what started that fracas was a document-vs.-improve debate regarding Google+ that I, unwisely and half-unintentionally, got myself caught in. (I was on the "improve" side.) What on earth does this have to do with the Ivy League and college admissions? Well, this talk about "disrupting" education through online courses (e.g. edX, Coursera) is really about improving social and knowledge graphs, and that's really exciting. Admissions officers just document; they take notes on who looked impressive at a young age. I see admissions as a less interesting problem with time. If our generation does its job, no one will give a shit about college admissions in 30 years.

pitt1980 14y ago
that's one of the most profound comments I've read in a really long time, an upvote doesn't really seem sufficient I wish I had thoughts that could further this comment, right now they are failing me though tangentially related thoughts http://www.xoxohth.com/thread.php?forum_id=2&thread_id=2087697&PHPSESSID=6103edf7a49f646e8c440bc72c04a9eb#21851580 http://www.xoxohth.com/thread.php?forum_id=2&thread_id=2...
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing that I had the courage(?) to click an xoxohth link at work. I think people are going to be averse to having their minute-by-minute activity mined for any purpose, so I don't see that as a recruiting angle. What I do think is that there's more signal in a person's willingness to learn later in life rather than at age 20 when it's expected. I'm more impressed by the 37-year-old who picked up a machine learning course or textbook on his own and, in a year, picked up a respectable working knowledge of it. Whether he went to college is immaterial, at that point.
  - pitt1980 14y ago
    the branding of "hey have your minute by minute activity mined" is weak on alot of different levels but that's not so different from alot of real world activity, showing face time at work, being 5 minutes early for meetings, that sort of thing those sorts of little things go into your real world reputation, ie do you feel good about recommending someone for a job that's always 5 minutes late? (superficial as that may be) part of that is why personal recommendations carry the weight they do if taking classes with minute by minute monitoring were shown to correlated with better chances a monetary reward at the end (x% gets a job, x+y% gets a job with monitoring), that'd change the calculus for alot of people admittedly, the branding for that is pretty weak

pitt1980 14y ago

that's one of the most profound comments I've read in a really long time, an upvote doesn't really seem sufficient I wish I had thoughts that could further this comment, right now they are failing me though tangentially related thoughts http://www.xoxohth.com/thread.php?forum_id=2&thread_id=2087697&PHPSESSID=6103edf7a49f646e8c440bc72c04a9eb#21851580 http://www.xoxohth.com/thread.php?forum_id=2&thread_id=2...

michaelochurch 14y ago
I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing that I had the courage(?) to click an xoxohth link at work. I think people are going to be averse to having their minute-by-minute activity mined for any purpose, so I don't see that as a recruiting angle. What I do think is that there's more signal in a person's willingness to learn later in life rather than at age 20 when it's expected. I'm more impressed by the 37-year-old who picked up a machine learning course or textbook on his own and, in a year, picked up a respectable working knowledge of it. Whether he went to college is immaterial, at that point.
- pitt1980 14y ago
  the branding of "hey have your minute by minute activity mined" is weak on alot of different levels but that's not so different from alot of real world activity, showing face time at work, being 5 minutes early for meetings, that sort of thing those sorts of little things go into your real world reputation, ie do you feel good about recommending someone for a job that's always 5 minutes late? (superficial as that may be) part of that is why personal recommendations carry the weight they do if taking classes with minute by minute monitoring were shown to correlated with better chances a monetary reward at the end (x% gets a job, x+y% gets a job with monitoring), that'd change the calculus for alot of people admittedly, the branding for that is pretty weak