I’ve just returned from a long, wonderful day at the 2009 Ride For Roswell. I was both a participant and an “embedded reporter” using social media to cover the event as it happened. ( see UB to Embed Twitter Reporters at Roswell Ride )
I learned a lot today about using social media to cover an event like this. While I process those thoughts, let me share with you the following video that I shot while riding in the peloton as it reached the finish line at UB, always one of the highlights of the Ride:
Clay Shirky is one of my favorite commentators on the social and economic implications of the Internet. His book “Here Comes Everybody” is a must read. He recently gave the keynote speech at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York called “Information Overload is Filter Failure”.
Shirky’s take is that information overload has been around since Gutenberg invented the printing press. What has changed with the Internet is when you filter for quality. In traditional media, this filtering for quality is done by the publisher. Whether it’s a printing press or a television tower, it costs a lot of money to get started and stay in operation. To stay profitable, a publisher needs to be responsible for filtering for quality.
With the Internet, we have entered what Shirky calls post-Gutenberg economics. The cost of producing anything has fallen through the floor and you don’t have to filter for quality before you publish. The filter for quality has moved way downstream - to the user. This has helped fuel the exponential growth of information on the web. Information overload is here to stay and not only are our tools to filter information inadequate, our social systems to handle both inbound and outbound information is broken as well.
As college web professionals, we need to focus on creating credible content that is easy easy to find. As Peter Morville stated in “Ambient Findability” , findability is more important than usability. You can’t use what you can’t find.
Here is the video of Clay Shirky’s keynote at the 2008 Web 2.0 Expo:
Matthew Levy and Rachel Beanland did an excellent job of covering the Web 2.0 Expo on both Twitter and at their web site He Types She Talks. Mike wrote this great summary of Shirky’s speech and the implications for higher ed. I’m planning on attending the Web 2.0 Summit in San Fransisco in November. It should be quite a show.
I was interviewed for an article for Campus Technology on the impact of the Amazon Kindle on college textbooks. The End of Textbooks? explores the pro’s and con’s of using eReader’s to replace the traditional printed college textbook.
This is a huge paradigm shift for most people, much greater than when the music industry went digital. The problem is that people think of a laptop computer when they think about eReaders and all the inherent problems with reading from a laptop. TheKindle and other eReaders solve most of those problems. Reading from a Kindle is very similar to reading from paper with excellent resolution and no backlight that causes eyestrain.
So what’s your take on the Kindle? Will it ever replace college textbooks?
The 2008 Horizon report was recently released and as always contains valuable information on the latest technology trends impacting college campuses. The Horizon Report is a collaboration between the New Media Consortium and the Educause Learning Initiative and identifies emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching and learning. As in previous years, the report identifies six emerging technologies that will likely enter the mainstream within three adoption horizons:
One Year or Less
Grassroots Video
Collaborative Webs
Two to Three Years
Mobile Broadband
Data Mashups
Four to Five Years
Collective Intelligence
Social Operating Systems
Among the critical challenges outlined in the report, one really struck a chord with me:
“It is critical that the academic community as a whole embrace the potential of technologies and practices like those described in this report. Experimentation must be encouraged and supported by policy.” (emphasis mine).
And finally, the report lists seven metatrends that extend out beyond the five year horizon:
Evolving approaches to communication between man and machine
The collective sharing and generation of knowledge
Computing in three dimensions
Connecting people via the network
Games as pedagogical platforms
The shifting of content production to users
The evolution of a ubiquitous platform
I was happy to see that this report maps well to my ideas about the top web trends. And be sure to check out the report’s extensive use of del.icio.us tags for additional information.
For most people, when you mention web content they automatically think of words, perhaps augmented with pictures. But with the recent growth of Rich Media, web content now includes audio, video, animation and other interactive elements. As computer performance continues to improve and broadband access becomes ubiquitous, delivering rich media via the web provides a more compelling experience for users. Witness the popularity of Podcasting (the New Oxford American Dictionary Word of the Year for 2005) and the explosive growth of Youtube.
Using Rich Media to reach millennial students is very effective. They are very comfortable with both creating and consuming all forms of rich media. Rich media also greatly improves training materials. Teaching students how to use web based tools such as web registration has always been a challenge. Using a combination of text, diagrams, and screen shots had limited effectiveness. Now we are using Adobe Captivate to create screencasts with great success.
One big challenge with Rich Media will be accessibility. As much as I like YouTube, I don’t see how someone with an auditory disability could use that site. I’m hoping that everyone involved with the tools that are used to create and use rich media will focus on improving accessibility.
E-mail has been hijacked by the forces of evil. Spam and misuse have caused many people to declare e-mail bankruptcy, something that I may do in the near future. And now the millennial generation is here and they prefer to communicate through IM, text messaging and the communication tools built into social networks making e-mail almost irrelevant to students today. I know there is a problem when e-mail sent from the president at my university is automatically sent to my junk e-mail folder - by filters set up by the university.
While I’m not advocating that everyone stop using e-mail, I would recommend exploring other communications channels, especially those of you who work directly with students. The good news is that there are now numerous alternatives that can augment and even replace e-mail.
