Institute for the Future

I recently had the opportunity to hear Bob Johansen from the Institute for the Future present a vision of the future that is at once compelling and frightening:

• The term “consumer” will be replaced by “participant.”
• Our perception of reality will be largely shaped by technology.
• More powerful, personalized filters will be required to block out data bombardment.
• A “generation”—an age group that shares a basic worldview and cultural experience—will continue to shrink such that parents and children may be three or four generations removed from understanding each other.
• The concept of mentoring will be flipped—youth will teach their elders (which reminds me of a funny bit by Craig Ferguson)
• To appear “trustworthy” will be held in suspicion.

The art and science of “futuring” is not new. In 1901, H.G. Wells published a collection of provocative and predictive essays entitled Anticipations. Later, he prophesized a “world brain”:

The encyclopedia of the future may conceivably be prepared and kept by an endowed organization employing thousands of workers permanently, spending and recovering millions of pounds yearly, mediating between the original thinker, the scientific investigator, the statistician, the creative worker and the reporter of realities on the one hand and the general intelligence of the public on the other. But such an organization would outgrow in scale and influence alike any single university that exists, and it would inevitably tend to take the place of the loose-knit university system of the world in the concentration of research and thought and the direction of the general education of mankind.

So I decided I would pick up a few recent threads and try my hand at imagining the future of online learning environments:

1. Creativity will finally get the respect it deserves in most areas of life. In learning material development, the relative nexus of power will shift from content experts and technology specialists to artists and communicators.

As content continues to be more easily accessed, repurposed, and crowdsourced, content experts will be less involved in leading creation of educational materials and more focused on add to, refining, and validating the accuracy and context of information in a “knowledge commons.”

Technology specialists will have a relatively smaller role in determining the scope, function, and quality of learning materials as instructional technologies continue to be more widely available, more sophisticated, and more easily employed by those without technical specialization.

The creative contribution will become the central leading force because the powerful, essential assets of imagination and creativity will always be illusive, human, and without substitution.

The Web learning environment of the future is creative centered; the best small glimpse of this I could find today is this MoMA exhibit designed to provide rich, experiential engagement through art; if anyone has more or better examples, please post them.

2. As technology increases the availability of information, the ability to contextualize and understand the potential application of the information will become more and more important. Institutions that have traditionally played an “information gatekeeper” function, determining what material is and isn’t published, now find themselves in difficult times. In their place will rise a “curation” function to help users find the right information and use it in their own social context.

See the Scholarly Kitchen and Publishing 2.0 for their take on Web curation from the information-provider perspective. Here is an example of a social curation.

Harold Jarche talks cogently about the relationship of the individual and community in collaborative sense-making—what he calls “personal knowledge management.”

Instead of a world where full information flow is the default and filters are needed to remove distractions, I hope for a world where our senses are our primary inputs and assistive technologies help us decide when to “turn on” certain curated streams of information.

3. The historical social patterns of society will recreate themselves in social media. As the name suggests, social media are social. Early generations of social media were shaped by technology capabilities and the vision of the technology developers, but as social media mature and pervade, they will replicate age-old social structures and conventions to a greater degree. A diversity of familiar spaces will evolve—for those who want to discuss a professional interest in a private, well-maintained space; for those who will scream in the streets; and so on. Participation levels will increase as these separate virtual environments are increasingly distinguished.

4. Facebook will either change or give way to other things. The controlled, specific look of Facebook has served it well in attracting new users. At some point, Facebook will lose the enthusiasm of many users if it doesn’t allow greater flexibility and control to the user interface and options. In the future, users will expect to be able to function as “curators”—look, sound, feel—of their own spaces and experiences (with capabilities far beyond those in MySpace; a fusion of talent show and tool box).

5. GPS-powered social media will become the way people learn about and experience their real physical environments. The potential of accessing information and learning opportunities related to a specific location/situation is staggering. See Chris LaBelle’s post on augmented reality, for example.

On a typical connecting flight, the person in the seat next to me will be from thousands of miles away from my home , and sometimes light years away in their social, cultural and world view. Not surprisingly, this disparity can lead to just the briefest of conversations followed by hours of reading, listening to MP3 players, or watching in-flight movies.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dannysullivan/

But within moments of putting on our seat belts, we both had our mobile devices out, making our last-minute online connections before the plane’s door was closed. I had my new iPhone and Marc had his iPod Touch. There was an immediate connection as we nodded at each others technology, and the conversation began that would last for the entire three-hour flight.
Marc offered me half of his sandwich (I had foolishly neglected to get something before the flight) and we began comparing notes on our favorite apps. I described my latest hobby using Geocaching, with the iPhone’s built in GPS capabilities. Marc countered with Trapster, an app to alert you to the location of speed traps.
I shared a picture of my ride—a two-seater—with photo altered with ColorSplash. Marc countered with a photo of his motorcycle. I tapped up Cartoon-Wars, and Marc pulled up Wooden Labyrinth.

Eventually our conversation began to enter more serious territory–learning from mobile technology. I showed him how I could view science lectures on my iPhone from MIT for free on YouTube. We ruminated how open education is truly arriving, and learning about any topic (including the Theory of Relativity—another common interest) can be fully realized for free, on-line and while in motion.

We parted ways, with me promising to listen to his favorite music, rapper Juelz Santana, and Marc promising to look into the TED talks online. It was a wake-up call for me about how mobile technology can help break down so many walls, whether economic, cultural, or just the barriers set up by seat dividers.

Even though AR has been around for awhile, AR app support for both Android and iPhone devices is a recent development. So, what is AR? Let’s take a virtual reality trip sans technology for some answers.

Close your eyes and imagine yourself walking the Champs-d’elysee with your significant other. You hold up your iPhone and pan your viewfinder across the Arc de Triomphe. Pop ups appear directly on top of your image-filled viewfinder providing historical video clips and a marker where the tomb of the unknown soldier lies.

This overlay of information changes as you walk and you notice information about the Grand Palais appearing on the horizon of your viewfinder. Site seeing is stirring up a hunger. You point your iPhone street level, tap your screen a few times, and digital arrows appear indicating where restaurants can be found. You scan the virtual horizon for Indian restaurants and several pop up on your screen several blocks northwest of your current location. As you view the row of cafes, patisseries, and restaurants and make your way down the street, your mobile device again dynamically overlays a digital layer of information about each establishment on top of your real-time view with links to menus, reviews and some online order forms.

You’re in Paris, so as the sun goes down, romance is in the air. Your spouse looks up to point out a bright star. You point your mobile device heavenward and activate your Sky Map AR application. Your spouse doesn’t look enthused, but within a few seconds a digital layer of content appears and your mobile device identifies the bright star as Jupiter. Not a star-gazing, Indian food-loving Francophile? How about locating subway stops, activating a digital docent in places of historical interest, fixing your car, navigating while on a bicycle or finding Twitter users who are nearby?

How big is AR for the world of E-learning? It’s obviously still a developmental technology in many respects, but I’m betting that if the chatter on the blogosphere and the initial AR apps are any indicator as to how big this wave will be, we might be looking at the shifting plates that hasten a technological tsunami for the world of location-based mobile apps.

Not surprisingly then, the initial salvo of AR apps has people (including myself) asking a wide range of questions and taking their turn at presaging the relevance of this technology for instructional potential. To put the discussion into perspective, two years ago, AR developers in Switzerland were strapping almost twenty pounds of technology to their end-user’s back, feet, and head to enable an AR experience; now an improved version of this experience is accessible via one small handheld device that fits in your pocket. How could this quantum jump not generate some level of speculation as to what the next iteration of this technology will look like?

Fast Company proclaims AR is no longer science fiction and with some qualification, states AR is the “killer app” that is both fad and future.

Steve Rosenbaum at the Huffington Post proclaims decidedly that AR is “here to stay,” while Read Write Web is looking to the future and has already posted their wish lists of potential AR apps. Amais Cascaio’s article at the Atlantic is an indictment of sorts on the “yet-to-be” abridgement of civil liberties perpetrated by AR proponents. He envisions the time when AR will move from the virtual yellow first-down lines on TV’s Monday Night Football to individuals who will aggregate data about their political opponents and push this information above AR-enabled views of a face or place of residence. Ivor Tossen at the Globe and Mail takes a more philosophical tack and frames his discussion of AR within the larger world of epistemology, “AR…What does it mean to really know something?”

Personally, the concept of a new AR-enabled browser (Layar) has me wondering whether the user will ultimately become both user and middleware as appears to be the case with some 3rd-world crowdsourcing apps. On the positive side of an AR-drenched future, should we be asking whether we might be approaching a time where our imagination will be the primary constraint when it comes to developing software to facilitate learning and parse salient characteristics of our environment? Look at some of these concepts (Some of these are more conceptual at this point) and imagine how this type of technology might redefine how you educate your audience. Currently, developing content for this space still requires a considerable toolbox of technical know-how, but I can only imagine the popularity of “off-the-shelf” templates that allow non-Cocoa programming app developers to create location-based AR learning apps like the ones that have begun to surface. A fad, the future or a more efficient way to map out ten yards on an augmented reality football field? What do you think?

1. “Social media needs to be carefully monitored for accuracy.” There is a fear in industry of compromising proprietary information, that loose social lips will sink corporate ships. Educators have their own version: removing the center of information sharing from the subject matter expert will compromise the credibility and accuracy of information. Instead of seeing value in social interaction with knowledge, they fear it. They are no longer the sage on the stage. In the Information Age, we have been taught since grade school to check our sources, to ferret out accurate, unbiased information. In the Google Age, it’s a flat out survival skill. We need to trust people’s judgments, and get over it.

2. “Social media needs to be controlled.” In some policy conversations it’s not uncommon to see the word “manage” used in the same sentence as social media. From my perspective, managed social media is an oxymoron. It is by its very nature unmanageable; it is creative chaos. But recognizing patterns in chaos is just what the human brain is designed to do. We’re good at it.

3. “Social media can waste valuable work time.” Is time spent interacting with social media yet another way for workers to shirk their duties to engage in personal communications? Some think so. But given that social media has surpassed email as the preferred means of communication, this makes no sense. That’s where your clients are, and your colleagues/employees need to be there, too. For many newbies, getting comfortable with social media will require playing with it. Industry understands this. “Make social media part of the job, just like email,” says ENGAGEMENTdb in their report evaluating how well the top 100 global brands are engaging their consumers using social media.

4. “Best practices are the same for all.” Because so much of what is published about best practices—and policies—comes from private industry, it’s only natural that many will look to them for ideas. But the drivers for industry—revenue and profit—will influence their approach to social media, and not always apply across the board to educational settings where social media will necessarily be practiced differently. Educators need to study what industry is saying about social media, and then apply it with their own twist.

That’s just four “rules.” There are more, I’m sure, and I look forward to your additions of what else to ignore.

Chris’ Top 10 Eductional Apps for the iPhone

1. Touch Physics by Games 4 Touch

A glimpse of the future now: seamless, motivational learning that is fun, kinesthetic and fully accessible. Learn about friction, gravity, mass, angles and other principles of physics via a clever game that allows you to exercise agency on both the physical and mental level–suitable for just about any age over 4 years old. I’m completely intrigued by the category of “Doodle games” (games where you draw objects on the touch screen that instantiate themselves in the game). These games open up a world of possibilities for any subject and seem like the perfect convergence of device, content and user motivation.  I would be remiss if I also didn’t mention Geared by Bryan Mitchel–an extremely elegant interface that allows the user to manipulate spinning gears around variables of distance, proximity and speed.

2. Kindle for the iPhone
Of course you lose some ergonomics when compressing the Kindle into the iPhone shell, but the distribution system for e-books (especially those in the public domain) is wonderful. This app has a clever interface, lots of free books and access to the Amazon catalog via a “get book” button.

3. Abc Pocket Phonics

It’s not so much that my five year old adores this application (he does), but it’s what this type of application represents. For language acquisition, the approach is a highly compelling supplement and the touch screen features allow users to trace letters while listening to the sound or word.
Need to learn Chinese characters? Try eStroke Chinese Characters

4. iSeismometer

This application brought back memories of the first time I realized that the Wii controllers house an acceleramator and a gyrometer to measure motion and tilt. This application allows the iPhone to react to various types of external motion. This app provides a very innovative way to learn about how motion is translated into a digital representation.  You can submit your data directly to a website that associates your location with your seismograph data.  Can you think of some learning contexts for this technology?

5. The Chemical Touch

I’m not a chemist, but this app really impresses me. A touch sensitive periodic table that allows you to explore various combinatorial properties of chemistry. You can change the chart color to your liking and the extremely high ratings for this app on iTunes reflect its popularity from 5th grade into graduate school. Not finding what you’re looking for? Click on the Internet button to open up the online Wikipedia page.

7. AroundMe by TweakerSoft

I so desperately wanted to pick an iPhone app focused on a specific locale, but none of them were up to snuff. AroundMe locates gas stations, restaurants and other helpful resources and then displays that information on a map relative to your location. From an educational standpoint, I would like to see apps that track on your location in place like DC or Boston (the Discovery apps looked wanting) and display relevant photos, videos or information overlaid on a map—a virtual docent in a box. Presence awareness holds tremendous potential and I’m sure more apps will leverage this in the future.

8. iReadMusic by GLP Software

Want to learn how to read and play music for a stringed instrument? The touch-sensitive screen allows you to play games (read “learn” here) that help you recognize pitch, notes, and position on a virtual fret. Again, amazingly creative and effective use of device, software and user needs.

9. USA Presidents

This is a typical iPhone flash card program that incorporates photos, quizzes and deck shuffling. A very innovative approach to liven up a traditional learning method. There are flash card programs for just about everything under the sun: anatomy, vocabulary, trivia, etc. Don’t blink or you might not notice how many of these apps are free.

10. Weather Radar by Exact Magic Software

iPhone apps will always shine in outdoor settings where the issue of mobility separates  the usefulness of the iPhone over a laptop. View realtime video of weather patterns from the closest doppler radar in your area. View fog, clouds and adjust their transparency if you so desire. How can an app like this not stimulate one’s interest in meteorology?

When many of the traditional software constraints of accessibility, price, usability, lack of motivation are gone, why limit learning exclusively to enterprise workplace environments or the classroom since learning ultimately becomes much too interesting and ubiquitous to be restricted to schools and company training departments. Call it what you may, but on-the-go, just-in-time learning has never looked better than on the iPhone 3GS.

It was a wonderful surprise to find that many of our department’s E-learning projects focus on translating practical, research-based content for a broad cross section of the population into some type of format that can be easily understood by as many members of this audience as possible. In other words, deliverables really seem to matter to our end users and ease of access is a major factor with each project. While many projects in private industry seek to package specific proprietary information for product usage (learning software or otherwise), our projects tend to run the full gamut of content area variation (viticulture, gerontology, energy usage, gardening, canning, etc.) and are oftentimes topics that are “near and dear” to our audience. So, while our work may not be as readily classified as workplace centric, I do feel that E-learning projects that mature under the umbrella of university Extension entities can be helpful artifacts that contribute to the larger dialog of what can be deemed as both efficacious and scalable within the world of instructional technology.

To demonstrate how some of this confluence between content variation, personal/professional development, serving end-users and media comes together, I thought providing some examples would be the most efficient approach. Please note that most of the headers include a live link to the course or example–just hover your cursor over the text and click.

1. Mastery of Aging Well

Overview: An assistant professor wanted to broaden the reach of her “Aging Well” classroom-based courses by making the content available in an online format. Where possible, we tried to ensure the user experience was as straightforward and accommodating as possible based on the characteristics of our audience.  AARP sponsored this course and funding came from the USDA for its development.

Tools/Platform: PowerPoint, Adobe Presenter, Fireworks, Sony SoundForge

In support of this project:

“Getting Started” video using Camtasia

Aging Well blog to help encourage discussion of course-related topics

2. Portland Metro Area Master Gardeners Ning Site (Virtual Community)

Overview: Our group worked with several key faculty members and created a customized Ning site (using CSS, unique header). We did a basic needs analysis and populated the site with features and media that we felt would be welcomed by this audience. We then worked with this group to help ensure that there were volunteers who could help provide momentum as the community got underway. Since this site went live, the community has added numerous new features such as a Twitter widget, links to Google calendars/documents, Photosynth panoramas and many other innovative enhancements that allow gardeners to post photos and then diagnose or discuss these more collaboratively while online.
Tools: Ning, Fireworks, CSS, some Dreamweaver

3. Oregon State University BeaverTurf Ning Site (Virtual Community)
Overview: The primary stakeholder, a professor of Turf studies at Oregon State, wanted to more efficiently help foster professional relationships among golf course superintendents in the Pacific Northwest. We built a customized Ning site for his end users and “seeded” his site with videos, RSS feeds from relevant Turf groups and other assets. We also added a new Ning application to allow the group to do turf-based product reviews as this was one of many items end users requested via our needs analysis. He will also be feeding blog content into the site and we added the Twitter feed filter application to populate one page with the latest Twitter activity around turf-related key words.
Tools: Ning, Fireworks, CSS, some Dreamweaver

4. Pachyderm Presentations
This “do-it-yourself” multimedia development tool is yielding some wonderful online presentations. We offer some basic training on how to use the tool and then let faculty loose to shape their own Pachyderm story. Please note the examples below are still under development.

Ganti Murthy from the department of Biological and Ecological Engineering explains bioethanol production for the rest of us.
(or)

Sarah Griffith’s Pachyderm, “Art about Agriculture”

5. OSU Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn Activity
OSU Master Gardeners (Twitter)
Information related to their classes, activities, etc.

OSU Gardening Tips (Twitter)
We’re pushing information about new articles, planting/growing tips, etc.

General list of Web 2.0 activity at OSU

6. Microsoft Photosynth

Overview: What’s not to like about using this tool for content areas like gardening, forestry, and just about any other topic that involves the outdoors? We are linking to a Photosynth page from our Ning sites and will soon provide a link to help users understand how to use this tool for sharing their photos using medium. We see numerous opportunities with this tool.

Some virtual garden panoramas

Examples from the Master Gardener program in Portland

7. Powered by Orange
Overview: This project is really more of a marketing plan than a deliverable and comes out of Oregon State’s University Advancement group;  I found it too compelling to not include in this list. Note the very clever overlap of Web 2.0 technologies with their end user interests to help drive brand identity and group affiliation. Take a few minute to also browse the banner images that saturate the campus as well. Again, this is not instructional by any means, but, very elegant integration of images, engagement and message in Web 2.0 wrappers.

8. Oregon State University 4-H Learning Resources CD
Overview: 4-H is a very important component of the Extension program at Oregon State as we are a land-grant institution and much of our population lives in a rural setting. The 4-H leaders wanted to make their online content available as a CD so volunteers could more easily access the content even if they did not have Internet connectivity.  Keep in mind that this is designed to run on a CD and is “low tech.” I just wanted to make the point that sometimes the solution to a problem isn’t always the newest media.

Tools/Platform: Dreamweaver, Javascript, Fireworks

So, while this list is not exhaustive, I hope it gives you a window into some of our recent instructional technology activity. Where possible, we have been trying to make more intentional pushes into using more Web 2.0 tools and platforms to deliver our content with our end users. We are moving toward including more mobile device e-learning formats and look forward to the dialog that comes out each project as we evaluate the impact of how a specific program or content area was made more accessible and relevant to our end users.

Electronic Papyrus Traffic from March 2009 to September 2009 (6 months)

1)    Content quality always determines the viability of a blog. We met multiple times prior to our first post to work through issues of audience, tone, scope, main areas of interest, frequency of posts, and division of work.  We continue to meet periodically (perhaps once every other month now) to course correct or discuss strategy. Overall, we probably spend about four to five hours a week on the blog. Keep in mind though that with three contributors, this averages out to about an hour per week per contributor since each of us generally posts only once a month.

2)    Although we initially wrote our posts for a broad audience that included an academic and private enterprise readership, we have been consistently surprised to see how geographically diverse our audience is (or has become). Our readers are primarily located in the following countries (listed by highest proportion first): U.S., United Kingdom, India, Australia, Canada, Germany and then Italy (Cluster Map of this data). We then have a smattering of readers from all over the world, i.e. Latvia, Iran, Kuwait, Senegal, Romania, etc.

3)    Regularly reading other blogs that focus on the same content domain is beneficial for many reasons. In short, it’s very difficult to enter a broader dialog about a specific topic without participating in other blogs. When possible, we found that it is helpful to post comments on others’ blogs as this helps foster relationships with other contributors in the blogosphere. Case in point, while preparing this post, I wandered across the Upside Learning Solutions Blog that had a post on their lessons learned at six months.

4)    Statistics and analytics are indispensible (and sometimes painful). Our most popular keywords are the following (listed in most popular first): Palm Pre, iPhone, Mobile Devices, SmartPhones, Microlearning, E-learning, Rapid E-learning, Millenials, Netflix and Modularization. Ranking article popularity is relative to a number of arbitrary variables, but it appears that our most popular articles were those that dealt with mobility, E-learning, generational characteristics of learning and to some extent, different social media topics.

5)    It’s good having friends. Over the last 6 months, we depended on what I call “Blog Angel Investors” to help us understand how best to engage our audience and to also help give us some marketing buzz. Tony Karrer over at E-learning tech highlighted many of our articles in his vast expanse of blog terrain, which resulted in a significant increase in traffic to our site. The authors of Infodoodads also helped us initially by sharing some of their experiences with blogging.  We were pleased to see a relatively high number of feeds for our posts–by way of example, Harold Jarche was also kind enough to embed a link to our post from his very well-crafted blog.

6)    Be real and if possible, a bit edgy. Blog readers expect blogs to be a little more in line with face-to-face or stream-of-consciousness dialog and more than just an academic article. We did our best to recognize that our identity as a group is tied to an academic department (more attention to presentation style, grammar), but we also did our best to express opinions, grind our axes a bit and in general, to be ourselves. Whether or not we have totally succeeded, it is also a goal to ensure our posts apply to workplace environments. We have also experimented a bit with creating posts as lists, inserting interactive polls, ending our blogs with questions aimed at invoking input and so on. Overall, I think we probably agree that this is an area we can continue to improve as we ourselves learn more about our audience’s preferences.

7)    Comments aren’t everything and are probably not the best indicator of a blog’s success. I think that initially we had hoped for more comments on our posts. The reality is that very, very few people post blog comments, while the vast majority of readers are simply consuming the information. Here’s a great article about participation rates in virtual communities. By way of example, survey other blogs and even those that have hundreds of thousands of page views, still receive only a handful of comments on their posts. Having said this, I think we still received a rather high number of comments for each post considering our blog’s focus, but it is an intriguing exercise to think about how we might increase this. Interestingly, several of our posts surprisingly resulted in responses that were longer than the original post.

8)    Think “reach.” I think I still feel a bit overwhelmed by the concept of how many people we have reached with our posts and thoughts. On a normal workday, we might discuss our latest thoughts with two, three or ten other people at most. When sharing these thoughts via our blog, it’s possible that several thousand people from thirty different countries will read these thoughts over the first several months. This is eye opening and I think relevant to the notion of academic engagement. For better or for worse, reach and promotion seem to go hand in hand. While trying hard not to self-promote, we have added reference to our blog’s URL in our email signatures and have also begun twittering our new posts.

9)    Practice humility. I think each of us probably felt more humbled by the fact that there are numerous bloggers who understand this content domain much more deeply than any of us do.  Blogging ultimately “levels the playing field” and from time to time, forced each of us to acknowledge our viewpoint was probably not the most current or accurate opinion on a specific topic. Hopefully, this also helps shape our tone and eagerness to post incoming comments.

10)    Share. We need to share what we have learned just as others shared with us when we first kicked the blog off. After looking over the most popular blogs housed here at Oregon State University, I was at times surprised to see that our blog is the most read blog. In short, I find most of the other OSU blog topics more fascinating and my gut feeling is that OSU is loaded with content areas or stories that can be told more interactively and broadly using a blog format. I think the fact that our blog has a larger readership is a reflection on some level of our attempt to be more systematic and principled in our approach to building, advertising and maintaining the blog. I think our group here now feels more comfortable describing this in more detail and then sharing this with others. When we first began our blog, these types of “how to” or “why” articles were invaluable to us. We were also somewhat shocked to see the average read time on our feeds being over 8 minutes. This reinforced the idea that feeds are an essential mode of outreach for disseminating the blog content.

11) Brevity can be sweet (especially if you plan on posting multiple times a week). Where better to put this item than as number 11 on a 10-point list? It was obvious that some of our most popular articles were not always the longest. Length isn’t the always the kiss of death, but it better be well justified.

Some Statistics from the Top Five OSU Blogs (129 total blogs listed)

March 1st to August 24th 2009 (roughly 6 months)

(1) Electronic Papyrus:           50,137 visits, 73,034 page views
Feeds:                                   14,817 visits, 20,125 page views (visit length = 8:44 minutes)

(2) Israeli Palestine Trip:       29,320 visits, 32,00 page views

(3) H2ONC (Rob Emanuel):  28,000 visits, 38,000 page views

(4) Deliciousness Blog:       28,000 visits, 34,000 page views

(5) Pam Van Londen’s Blog
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We’ve responded with cautious optimism. We’re always happy when our clients want to try out something new with technology. But we also have to be frank and point out that if you create a social networking space, there is no guarantee that it will be used. You can’t mandate that your audience “be social.”

In several recent cases we suggested our clients survey their intended audience before launching into social media. Here are a few of the questions we’ve developed and have subsequently used in our surveys:

• What social media tools (if any) are your target audiences currently using?
• Do the audiences currently participate in collaborative work online?
• What is their comfort level with social media?
• How do they characterize their online technology profile? Are they toes-
over-the-edge pioneers or information grazers? Or something in-
between?
• What features would they find useful? Working collaboratively on
projects? Accessing news and events? Sharing best practices?
Q&A? Chats? Tweets?

Key observations
Here are some initial observations we’ve made regarding our clients:

• The majority consider themselves “everyday communicators” and “online information gatherers.” Only a few consider themselves “digital pioneers” or “creative online users.” Interestingly, our findings don’t reflect the commonly assumed age-level biases: 50-60 year-old baby boomers characterize themselves as digital pioneers as often as do the millennial 18-30 year-olds.

Approximately one-half use social media (e.g., Facebook); the other half shun it.

• Those who rarely use online collaboration and have a low comfort level with social media anticipate greater participation in the future. (Read that as “There’s hope!”)

• It’s about them, not you. Not surprisingly, using social media for top-down communications from administrators doesn’t score high on their wish list.

• The three highest ranked desirable features for an online social network are

o Support for online collaborative projects

o Getting access to shared material such as videos, slideshows,
presentations, and photos

o Keeping current with colleagues

• They don’t know what they don’t know. For example, our target audiences indicate great interest in receiving timely information about useful URLs, but they see absolutely no value in Twitter. But Twitter has become one of the most valuable sources of quick notification about links.

Questions to be tackled
Many questions about assessing readiness for social media remain unanswered. We’ll share more observations and lessons learned from our survey in the near future.

In the meantime, we invite you to share survey questions you’ve found useful in tackling the issues of bringing social media to your clients.

Our university and all of the land-grant and non-land-grant peers around the country and the world are grappling with a significant issue in the new media world. We have a lot of content, which we want to push out to our target learners. Following rule number one, we know what they need. I mean really, we’re the “experts,” right? It’s our job to know who they are and what they need.

Our problem is we’re heavy on content and light on engagement. Or so says, ADVERGIRL in her latest blog post.

She lists the top four universities for actual engagement using social media networks. I’ll save you the suspense, Oregon State University is not one of them. But I think the ideas these institutions are pursing offer interesting possibilities for Outreach and Engagement at OSU.

When we consider social networks as tools for our enterprise, too often we miss the point and obsess on the “social” aspect, as if they are something that can’t be used “professionally.” However, if you focus on the “network” part of the concept it is easy to see how and where our audiences can begin to gain value engaging with us. If our goal is reciprocal, i.e. learning from the interaction as much as telling someone what we think they need to know, then the possibilities for real communication seem to surface.

The question is do we have the understanding and interest to develop online social networks that can take advantage of what we know from 100 years of face-to-face education and training? As Clive Thompson points our in his Wired magazine blog, this will not come from managers and CEOs.  Effective use of social networking will come from those who best understand their audiences and peers. It will come from those folks anywhere in an organization that are already adept at networking and understand the fundamental value of being connected.

A social network is basically the foundation for an effective team. Teams of people who know each other from some level of face-to-face interaction can be more effective in the short run than virtual teams thrown together with a goal but no previous interaction. Pure logic, it seems.

Since we’ve been networking with learners for more than 100 years, this should be a no-brainer for Extension. The question is can we begin to develop teams of learners using social networking technology and not succumb to the overwhelming need to just tell them what they need know?

Dave King, Associate Provost
OSU Outreach and Engagement
dave.king@oregonstate.edu

Podcasts can be audio or video. RSS feeds provide subscribers the latest files, to be watched or listened to on a computer or any number of mobile devices. Podcasting makes content convenient both in time and space.

I hope I’m learning something from what I am listening to, but I’ve also been mulling over what I’m learning about the podcasting experience itself. I have 10 observations:

1. Listening to human voices talking—especially on headphones, but disconnected from visual input such as reading or watching—has an immediate, connecting, personalizing quality. Audio podcasting can capitalize on the fact that voices in isolation are enchanting to many ears, in some cases more powerful than in combination with visual images.
2. Because podcasts can be presented as a series or set of episodes, users can subscribe to them and consume them as serials on an extended basis. This creates opportunities for deepening of the educational experience and strategic reiteration.
3. Because of their portable, flexible nature, podcasts lend themselves well to repurposing. Existing audio and video content can be repackaged as podcasts.
4. Great potential exists for creative scripting and composition of podcast programs.
5. Professional presentation and sound quality are valuable.
6. Podcast art and introductory and concluding narration are worth the value added.
7. Nothing beats the authentic voice of a capable content expert talking about their subject of interest. The format can be a presentation or an interview.
8. The iTunes interface is not the smoothest form of navigation, but you get used to it.
9. Many public libraries offer audiobooks and other programs for “checkout” to their patrons. While these are not technically syndicated podcasts, they can be ported to mobile devices and used in much the same way.
10. Excellent radio program podcasts are available from National Public Radio, Public Radio International, and American Public Media.

According to Kui Xie and Mengmeng Gu, podcasting has advantages over both in-person and broadcast forms of Cooperative Extension work. For example, podcasting can be used to provide an additional point of access and to decrease demands on Extension educators. They note podcasting’s characteristics of flexibility and mobility and suggest that Extension clients could use Extension-produced podcasts as “first aid kits” for solving problems.

Many land-grant universities are providing some form of podcast of their Extension materials. Oregon State University, for example, has converted short Northwest Gardens radio segments into a podcast series on iTunes U.

Alan Acosta describes Stanford University’s rationale for partnering with Apple as one of the first pilot schools in iTunes U:

[W]hile it would be a great tool for teaching—it also could be a powerful way of spreading the intellectual content we have beyond the university. It’s knowledge in action, allowing the user to control the learning process independently.”

Podcasts are easy enough to create and distribute that they can be used not only as a mechanism of distributing information but also as a participatory medium. Dennis Mocigemba believes that citizen podcasting could be used to strengthen the fabric of society, serving as a form of civil involvement and community building.

Like so many forms of media, podcasts are not one type fits all. Podcasting is in its infancy compared to its potential as a form of both on-the-go education and participatory dialog. Let your ears do the walking.