We'll be presenting today at the CASBOCBO Symposium 2009 in a special breakout session on Social Media - Using new technolgoy to deliver information to staff, students and the public. In conducting some field research for our presentation, we came across a couple of videos, we think provide further insight on how digital learners and teachers today interact and engage in online communities, co-collaboration, user-generated content and constant conversation.
Digital World: Teachers Today
A Vision of K-12 Students Today
A Vision of Students Today By Digital Enthnography at Kansas State University
We are asked this question all of the time - "What is the perfect design width for our Website?" Thanks to several great articles on this issue there are some great answers, but I also like to counsel our clients, designers and developers that like all aspects of the Website, you gotta know who's coming to your site specifically. You need to make your Website accommodating and accessible.Google Analytics, WebTrends, (Adobe) Omniture and even your old Web server logs will tell you some very insightful information on who's viewing and how they are doing so.
This is a quick post on a great article addressing why wire frames need to come before the visual design phase. Check out Pathfinder's article, Developing Good Wireframes Ahead of Visual Design. It addresses why preparing wire frames first, before expressing the ideas visually in design comps is critical to the success of your Web project:
Erik Qualman, author of Socialnomics (the blog and the book) covers the latest trends in social media. Socialnomics, the book, looks at how social media transforms our lives and the way we do business.
By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network
Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
Years to Reach 50 millions Users: Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia
Yet, some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using their services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this)
comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network
2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
% of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
Number one recommendation for managers in government, learn everything you can about Social Media. Jeffrey Levy, Director of Web Communications at U.S. EPA provides a great introduction to Social Media for Government managers.
The latest Trendwatching report could not be more timely. They take an exhaustive look at the necessities (and opportunities) in creating a more sustainable economy. This March 2009 report spotlights 12 eco sub-trends that any marketer or entrepreneur can act on today.
There is an excellent business process workflow map published by the U.S. Air Force Public Affairs Agency - Emerging Technology Division addressing their standard of operations for reputation management and response in social media.
It's simple, clear and addresses the way in which the U.S. Air Force Public Affairs intends to engage online. For any organization assessing their level of engagement -- what it is or will be, this visual decision map may help create a framework for discussion and planning.
Special thanks to Joey deVilla for sharing this at Global Nerdy.
If you work in any capacity related to user experience, interaction design and/or web development, this excellent article written by Theresa Neil, co-author of Designing Web Interfaces is so "rich" in information, visuals and resources related to the 30 most essential controls needed for RIA design and development.
The article beautifully lays out each control and RIA framework(s) associated with each of them. It is such a fantastic guide. I can only imagine what will be included in the book.
Staffing, enriching diversity in the workplace, millennials working side-by-side with baby boomers on the heals of retirement. These are all common issues in our day-to-day consultation when working on projects with cross-functional work teams. The project lifecycle, the critical thinking, the process leading to the end product or solution is all tied to the diverse perspective and learned / skilled approach engaging our client teams.
This extraordinary video is from a project by professor Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University and 200 of his students. It is a fascinating look specifically at what millennials are experiencing today - in how they learn, what they do within the learning process, what is expected and how they operate in the day-to-day.
This video, A Vision of Students Today, gave me goose bumps. There's so much to understand here that for "good or bad," the millennials expectations is a complex experience of participation, evaluation, response, collaboration in real-time "hyper-speed" environments. There's multi-tasking and hyper-tasking, but has technology helped or stripped millennials of time spent taking "deep dives" in creativity, analysis and interpretation. It's a profound look at what faces millennials today. I'll be interested in seeing what comes next when they go back to the "chalkboard."
There is an exciting new British documentary that just debuted in London on December 3, 2008 at the RSA. The film, US Now explores how mass collaboration, the internet and its power to transform society has extraordinary potential to transform institutional structures, like government, broaden citizen participation and, "deepen" democracy. Each perspective included in this film constructively looks at simply, "the potential" of what lies ahead. With that, includes the challenges and some of the structural barriers to date, but given the timeliness of this documentary, there is also the sense, that the time is now to leverage and utilize what we have used, learned, built, and participate in to take such institutions like "government," go beyond "e-government" and create a richer, more interactive, participatory democratic government. The film looks at the potential and the opportunity to "unbundling and reconstituting" the institutional ways to create greater access and broaden the participatory role of the citizen. It's an interesting and extremely timely exploration in these new time ahead.
Us Now tells the stories of online networks that are challenging the existing notion of hierarchy, such as Wikipedia, Facebook and others. For the first time, this film brings together leading-edge visionaries in the field of participative governance to describe the future of government. Us Now follows the stories of the people that are redefining what is an institution. The film explores common organizational structures plotting the fate of a football club owned and run by its fans, a bank in which everyone is the manager, a global network whose members share their homes with strangers and asks politicians and thinkers what all this means for society.
"There's a whole new model emerging where we become part of the government," says film contributor, Don Tapscott.
There are great clips available online now and will culminate in an hour long documentary to be released publicly in January 2009.
View some of these clips now to see how exciting the dialogue and critical thinking is.
