At the request of faculty who could not attend the November 12:10 lunch and learn, the 12:10 Conspiracy lunch and learn presentations will be present via podcast. You can subscribe to the podcast with your podcast client (ie: iTunes) or play the file from this site.
Wednesday’s 12:10 Conspiracy lunch and learn will share examples of social networking sites and how they can be used within classes and education. They are popular, remember, if MySpace were a country, it would be the 7th largest in the world. But just because they are popular outside of the class, doesn’t mean they work, or are popular inside the class.
That logic hasn’t worked since you said to your mother, “but mom, ALL the kids are doing it.”
There are some blurred boundaries and labels: social networking, web 2.0, digg, technorati, tagging. Some are concepts and some are tools, and the goal of this lunch and learn is to give you the information you need to understand how these work and for you to decide when and where it would be beneficial for students.
Trivia.quiz I hope you’ll join us and I promise to share more proof that there is a true 12/10 Conspiracy based that now extends into college football! Need proof? What was the score of the Iowa - Iowa State football game (the one in 1977) that re-ignited the intra-state rivalry? People who email me the correct answer are placed in a for a drawing for lunch at Palmers! This quiz closes Wednesday December 5 at noon!
Background: The 12/10 conspiracy is a CHS effort to introduce college faculty and staff to 12 new web based tools in 10 months. Some of the tools are described in blogs, others are featured in lunch and learn presentations that begin at 12:10 (coincidence or conspiracy?) on the last Wednesday of each month.
Okay, here it is: A record company executive, an educator, and a cell phone executive all go to a meeting in at the Venetian in Macau….
Clearly by now, you’ve figured out the joke: educators don’t have a travel budgets that let them go to Macau. So the educator wasn’t there! So instead, we rely on media and blog reports of the event.
Media Post, MacUser, a PC World staff blogger, and Slashdot picked up the quote from Warner Music Group CEO Edger Bronfman about their company’s mistakes in understanding content and consumers.
Take it from us music industry folks. We used to fool ourselves. We used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was. We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding.
And of course we were wrong. How were we wrong? By standing still or moving at a glacial pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find…and as a result of course, consumers won.
Today there’s a new consumer war being waged on the mobile front. And the perceived wisdom that consumers are “complacent” or that the “stickiness” of mobile services—established billing relationships, breadth of network coverage, brand loyalty—is enough to grow or even preserve your subscriber base without continually providing compelling consumer experiences, will prove to be wrong, dead wrong.
Bronfman’s corporate mea culpa was urging the mobile phone industry leaders not to imitate the failed business model of the recording industry. When I substitute “higher education” for “music industry” and “lifelong learners” for “consumer” or “customer”, and I see amazing parallels and similarities to what we do.
A group of my colleagues were involved in an email exchange over the weekend which included a citation that is similar to my earlier blog on EDUCAUSE Connect about the “producer” role of faculty. My colleague shared this from Lynch’s The online educator: A guide to creating the virtual classroom.
“To use a theater analogy, the traditional instructor serves as the lead actor- the one who must carry the show, even though there is allowance for other characters to interact. In contrast, the online instructor is more like the director- one who ensures that all the characters play their part and that the show moves smoothly from beginning to end, adding his or her expertise only when the actors seem to need assistance”
As educators, much of what we do is the creation of knowledge (content) and the delivery of knowledge (content). Whether the new role of the educator is director, producer, or some new iteration, there is significant strategy to learn from the missteps of the music business.
If you like, you can grab a .pdf version of Bronfman’s speech directly from Warner Music Group’s web site.
My friend of nearly 24 years, Jerry O’Rourke, began blogging this week. That’s not quite true. He’s been an avid writer, columnist and internet pioneer most of his career, he’s been blogging probably for decades, so let me re-write that opening: he began using Wordpress this week.
As Jerry started getting comments to his blog, it reminded me of 1994, when we put our first commercial web site on the Internet and we were listed in Yahoo. As we started to get hits on the server, it was amazing and mystifying that people found our client’s site. Likewise, I’m sure it’s just as gratifying over a decade later, with millions of blogs, that someone takes the time to comment on what they read. But just like it was in 94, his writing is dead on and his topics are of interest.
His post Remembering Joe Todd reminds me about the important things in life. Hard work, giving someone a head start when they are young, letting them solve their own problems, even if it involves walking back to the barn for help, and taking time for the simple pleasure. Jerry’s post says it very well.
Jerry describes, near the end, that Joe Todd found time to have a slice of pie at the Wayne Cafe. If you live in rural America, you have your own Wayne Cafe. Stopping each day to enjoy the sweetest things life has to offer is just as important as the hard work
This is the beginning of Thanksgiving week. I’ll be thinking of Jerry and his mentor Joe Todd, when I have a piece of pie.
Our 12/10 goal is to explore tools to understand what they do and how they shape the current use of web tools in social and learning environments. Not everyone will like, or see a need for, every tool, but this tool represent a cross section of technology in use in student’s lives.
Google offers free tools that make collaboration (sharing and editing the same document at the same time) easy. There are other companies whoch offer similar services, and Microsoft will soon be expanding their colaboration services, but Google gives a great overview to how these tools can be used inthe classroom for student projects as well as learning tools.
Creating a Google account is easiest by making a Gmail account, Google’s free email. Even if you do not use the gmail service, the user name makes it possible touse other Google services and is the easiest way to access those tools.
To learn more about GMail, read http://mail.google.com/mail/help/intl/en/about.html or watch this fun video
