The blog posts on this page are among more than 50 I wrote in graduate school for theory, writing, issues and production classes. The first three posts, from my Theory and Audience Analysis class, were published on my personal blog. The other three, from my Citizen and Participatory News class, were published on the class blog, News rEvolution.
Everything You Need To Know About the Future of Education You Learned in Preschool
Sharing. In preschool, our teachers wouldn't shut up about it. The rest of our school careers, it's like they never learned it themselves. Think about it. In grade school, high school, even in college, what happened to all that great content you produced? That "Where the Wild Things Are" diorama? That coming-of-age introduction to film screenplay? That term paper on electoral reform? Very likely, three things:
1. Your teacher reviewed it, thoroughly if he or she possessed the motivation or time, less than thoroughly if he or she didn't.
2. Your teacher assigned a grade to it, and, sometimes but not always, provided written or verbal comments.
3. You paid more attention to the grade than the comments and filed the assignment away to gather actual or virtual dust — or simply trashed it.
With the Web all but eliminating the production and distribution costs of content sharing, education is becoming more participatory, but not to the extent it could be or should be, according to members of the "The Future of Learning is the Web" panel at last week's FutureWeb conference in Raleigh, N.C. Even many e-learning programs, they said, are little more than traditional lessons dressed up in online clothes. The trick, panelist Tony O'Driscoll, professor of the practice of business administration at Duke University, said, is to go from using technology as an engine for automating the classroom to using technology as a network for liberating learning.
O'Driscoll and his four panelmates, also Duke University professors, argued that sharing the educational process on blogs, social media, discussion forums, crowdsourcing sites and elsewhere online benefits students, teachers and society alike.
Given that education has long been a pet interest of mine, that many from my family work in or have worked in education and that I used to cover education as a newspaper reporter, I found this panel especially engaging. There's a fourth reason, however, that it spoke to me so. And that is how closely the changes taking place in education resemble the changes taking place in my own industry: news. In both education and journalism, the process is becoming a product. In each industry, successful practitioners will leverage this new process-product to improve the traditional product.
Neal, author of the NewBlackMan website, and O'Driscoll, co-author of "Learning in 3D: Adding a New Dimension to Enterprise Learning and Collaboration," spoke alongside Duke colleagues professor of interdisciplinary studies Cathy Davidson, the panel chairwoman and writer of the widely circulated blog post "How to Crowdsource Grading;" professor of history and romance studies Laurent DuBois, a French colonialism expert who also blogs about the politics of soccer; and associate professor Negar Mottahedeh, best known for organizing the Axis of Evil and Twitter film festivals and for her commentary on last summer's Iranian election protests. Video from the panel is available on the conference's YouTube channel.
BONUS: Noteworthy links mentioned by the panelists:
Nowadays, every company is a media company. Production and distribution tools are accessible for even the smallest organizations. Companies know that if they are not leveraging these tools to build relationships with potential partners and clients, their competitors will be. This is good news for me and my classmates as we enter the job market. Our degrees are in communications, but we can apply them in virtually any field.
I like that I have options. This safety net is one reason I enrolled. But it’s not the reason. I enrolled foremost so that I could stay in the field I love, journalism. I feel that strong, independent news media are essential to the civic health of communities and that new media can produce journalism as good as — if not better than — this country’s ever seen. To borrow one of the more successful — but still parodied — slogans of my native Baltimore, I BELIEVE. And I want others to BELIEVE. But maybe I shouldn’t. Not completely. Maybe I should embrace what media scholar Robert W. McChesney calls “healthy skepticism.”
For all the talk of the Internet as a great empowerer, as a great uniter, isn’t it equally as plausible, McChesney argues, that it will be a great marginalizer, a great isolater?
Um, sure. For all the people getting ahead with new technology there are people without access falling behind. For all the people using the Web to connect with the world around them there are people using it to shut the world out.
Good reasons for me to spit out the new media Kool-Aid. Not because technology’s leading us to some kind of hell on Earth instead of the heaven more commonly imagined. But because it’s leading us somewhere in between. And because the more heavenly people assure themselves tomorrow’s going to be the more hellish it’s going to become.
You see, it is not enough to merely believe. While a passive majority goes on believing the Internet is going to be great for the greater good an active minority will make it great for itself and bad for everybody else, all the while fanning the majority’s naivety.
True believers act on their beliefs. And routinely question them.
Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/andrewbain/ | CC BY 2.0
In no other marketing arena are messages born, spread and adapted as quickly as they are in social media. Reputations can be bolstered or broken in a few clicks.
To whom do firms turn to navigate this volatile landscape? Very often, young people.
In Elon University's School of Communications, nearly every summer internship student this year reported completing social media-related tasks such as creating Facebook and Twitter accounts or blogging.
Young people, it's assumed, know social media. That they at least have a better grasp of it than their older colleagues is generally a safe bet. The median age of a Facebook user is 26, a MySpace user 27 and a Twitter user 31, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. But what exactly do young people know? Do they know how to monitor what customers are saying and exploit opportunities and put out fires? Or do they just know how to post mundane status updates and write clever captions?
The Elon interns, who had already been blogging and studying reputation management in their classes, were better positioned than most. The communication school's internship director wrote to faculty and staff that in many cases supervisors were impressed enough by students' skill level to extend to them opportunities not offered to other interns.
But what about those without any formal training? Young people who on their face seem social media savvy may in fact be practicing some very bad habits. Friending everyone and their brother regardless of their character merely to increase their own perceived popularity. Posting embarrassing photos of themselves and their friends without regard for what potential employers may think. Not the kind of quality control you want in the business world.
Furthermore, behind the technology bells and whistles, strong social media marketing comes down to strong writing. And, while the opposite argument is also made, there is concern among educators that electronic communication's carefree spelling, lax punctuation and grammar and acronym shortcuts degrade writing quality, also according to Pew.
Students or young workers may read this and get defensive. "We can write." "We can and do use social media responsibly." And I hope they do call me out. Because, what an opportunity. If you know social media tasks are probably going to be part of your next job — or are part of your job now, why not do a little homework and learn how to use social media to grow a brand, not just grow your friend count? You'll differentiate yourself from your peers and just might get that promotion a bit sooner.
Social media blog Mashable's How To section is a good starting point. It's a gold mine of concise primers, some geared toward general social media literacy, but many also geared toward business applications.
Five Things News Organizations Should Be Doing Now
Five Things News Organizations Should Be Doing Next
How Active Users Let Others Be More Passive
Forget for a second everything you've been told about the participatory news consumer. All that talk about the Web empowering people to lean forward. Minimize that window. And open this one: The Web's also enabling people to lean back.
Not the most obvious conclusion to draw from a report subheadlined "How internet and cell phone users have turned news into a social experience." I'll explain. And I'll explain how it might make news organizations' jobs easier. (The report also, by the way, announced that the Web has overtaken newspapers as Americans' No. 3 news source.)
Like countless Web research reports before it, Pew Internet's "Understanding the Participatory News Consumer," released March 1, reflects the power law distribution math popularized by authors Chris Anderson and Clay Shirky. Simply put, a subgroup of news consumers is doing most of the participatory heavy lifting spreading, curating and creating content. Yet, many more are benefiting from the "serendipitous discovery" of news these behaviors make possible.
For instance, three-quarters of online news consumers report receiving news links from peers through e-mail or social networks, according to the report, while about half take credit for forwarding them.
Considering Web users at large, "participators," as Pew dubs netizens who create, pass along or transform content, form an even smaller minority. Thirty percent of Web users in Pew's landline and mobile telephone survey say they're accessing news-related content on social networks, while a little more than half that proportion say they're creating content. A quarter of users had commented on stories or blogs, 11 percent had tagged content and 9 percent had created their own article or multimedia piece.
Being steered to information by others is part of the "foraging and opportunism" by which the report says modern audiences access their news. Indeed, an even 50 percent of Americans say they rely on others not just for interesting information but for news they "need to know." Users also unwittingly steer themselves to news. Some 80 percent of online news consumers say they regularly stumble upon news while completing other online activities.
It's never been easier for news just to fall into people's laps. Sure, offline a friend might photocopy you a magazine piece or you might glimpse an interesting article in a newspaper a stranger left behind, but these instances are rarer, and considerably more delayed than online interactions. It used to be, if you wanted news, you had to go get it. The Web lets us go get it like never before, and that's generally what people pay attention to, but it also enables those who want to to sit back and let it come to them.
In this environment, it would seem wise, then, for news outlets to take Malcom Gladwell's advice and go about trying to influence the influencers. Knowing they can no longer be everything to everyone, this clarifies their mission. Even if influencers' influence is less than anticipated, college-educated, in their mid-30s and earning earning $50,000 or more, as Pew's survey describes them, by themselves they're a smart market to pursue.
So, what do the participators want? According to Pew, they want more stories about science and technology, health and medicine, and state government and they want those stories presented interactively. Smart wish list. Science and technology are taking over our lives whether we pay attention or not. Health is slated to be one of this half-century's biggest stories as the baby boomers age. And state government coverage needs rebuilding after legacy media cutbacks gutted capital press corps. Interactivity, meanwhile, is much less appreciated by the broader population. I would argue, however, that this is so because most users are basing their opinions on inferior interactive experiences. The participators have seen the real deal, and they want more.
Pew's data are based on a random sample of 2,259 adult land line and mobile phone users surveyed by Princeton Survey Research Associates International between Dec. 28 and Jan. 19. The poll's margin of error was plus or minus 2.3 percentage points overall, with confidence falling to plus or minus 2.7 percentage points for the 1,675 respondents identifying themselves as consumers of online news.
Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/oldpatterns / CC BY-NC 2.0
When it snows, user-generated content pours. News organizations love weather-related citizen submissions because they are non-controversial and easily verifiable. That love was on display this past week in my native Maryland, which received over 3½ feet of snow in five days. Snowmageddon, Snowpocalypse, Snowverkill. No matter what you call it, that's a lot of snow!
Wednesday afternoon I sledded around the Web sites for four major Baltimore/D.C. media outlets to see what they were publishing from users. Some of it was engaging, though most of it not terribly informational. Some of it was, well, kinda flaky.
The best uses of audience submissions were in live information streams supplemented with posts from news organizations and official sources.
The first such stream was that for the Twitter hashtag "#mdsnow," which The Baltimore Sun actively promoted. Featuring tweets like "Dear roof, don't collapse. Sincerely...Jazzmen," and "Gov. O'Malley sounds pissed," it's certainly entertaining. But it serves a journalistic function, too. Collectively, users' posts paint a picture. You can watch conditions and residents' emotions deteriorate before your very eyes!
More tangibly, the well-populated hashtag feed is sprinkled with tidbits of information users might not find elsewhere, including names of businesses that are actually open and, directly from Baltimore's new mayor — what a first week! — Stephanie Rawlings-Blake (@MayorSRB), precisely how many salt trucks and plows are treating city roads (134 at 11:07 p.m. Tuesday, in case you're wondering).
Baltimore's NBC affiliate, WBAL-TV, was getting similar results from its "Live Wire," a self-reloading mashup of user comments, the television channel's responses and official tweets focusing on road and traffic conditions. One user asked whether she had to report to jury duty. Courts were closed, a fellow user informed her. But if they weren't, people have certainly offered lesser excuses than 44 inches of snow for ducking their civic duty.
Down the Baltimore-Washington Parkway — a route much easier traveled this week in a blog post transition than in real life — D.C. Fox station WTTG-TV encouraged users to stream live video of their whited-out neighborhoods using their mobile phones. Plenty obliged, most via third-party service USTREAM. As good a way as any for the snowbound to connect with the outside world, I suppose. Sure to cure cabin fever, for videographers and viewers, at least for a bit.
Some of the cameras are trained on more exciting subjects than others. This bird feeder on a southern Prince George's County farm was among the cooler ones (There were lots and lots of birds when I looked at it, if there aren't now!). Still, even driveway shots helped me get a sense of the storms' brutality. Especially when the wind picked up — made me cold just looking at it.
The Washington Post's site boasted among the larger and better-quality user-submitted photo galleries. There were shots of a barely-visible U.S. Capitol building, tired shovelers, felled poles and trees and urban art like "Think Spring" spray painted on a powder-packed hillside. Oh yeah, there were the obligatory grumpy looking kids and pets. Some SPAM did get past the editors. No, not that kind. The food* kind (*using the term loosely here). The photographer claimed that was the best thing left on supermarket shelves.
I can't end this post without mentioning the Post's well-intentioned appeal for users to post a tweet if their power is out. Even in 2010, most people, if their power's out, their Internet's out. Regardless, how many mobile phone users, upon losing power during a state of emergency, are going to use precious juice and time to let the newspaper know they don't have electricity service? Based on my scroll through the stream for the Post's suggested "#poweroutage" hashtag, not many. Nothing proportionate to the tens of thousands of interruptions PEPCO and BGE were reporting anyway.
Late update: Just stumbled upon the Post's suggested #opendc hashtag — listing what's open. Now that's useful. Maybe there's even a few cybercafes on there.