Persistent conversation among people I trust

July 6, 2010 · Posted in Culture, Education, Journalism, Technology · Comment 

I recently went in and cleaned up the more than 900 items I had starred in Google Reader going back to 2006. At least half of them  were on recurring topics — personal finance, literary criticism, social media tracking, economics, food, etc. — that I like to follow closely (thus why they had been starred).  But I had no trouble letting most of them go because, well, the conversation has moved on and things change and, to be honest, part of me was saying “hey, they’re only blog posts.” Don’t get me wrong — I love form and have been reading blogs since Instapundit just started out and have regularly blogged since 2004. But although blogs are a good way to generate current conversation, they suck when it comes to persistent conversation across time. Digging into archives can be very hit or miss (and tags and categories only take you so far, especially with a blog that has been around awhile). And even if comments aren’t closed on an older post, chances are the conversation is not going to be re-ignited. Also because of the semi-casual nature of blogs, both posts and comments don’t focus on real tight writing on thought.

On the other hand, Wikipedia is excellent for persistent content over time. Entries get updated, refined and fleshed out. Changes to the page are tracked and made available to the casual reader. But the problem with Wikipedia is that it’s only an encyclopedia. It’s tone and scope is focused on factual, relevant content.

And finally, scholarship, as it is made available in academic journals, and public intellectualism, as it is made available in magazines and newspapers, can often be great and producing polished work and work that is in conversation with others in the field. But you often have to slog through a lot in order to get to what you find interesting and conversations get off track and some of it is just too specialized.

So here’s what I want: a way to read a persistent, focused conversation on specialized topics I’m interested in undertaken by people I trust, admire, tolerate, hate or whatever but at least am willing to listen to that is set up in such a way to occur over days, months, years. I’m still mulling over what form this might take. More later when things have fully coalesced.

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Tablets could be awesome for language learning

January 13, 2010 · Posted in Education, Technology · 2 Comments 

What I really want when it comes to new tech is a cheap, ultraportable, lean text writing and editing device. Which means a keyboard, probably. So I haven’t been all that interested in the rush of tablets. But last night I was thinking about how I struggle to keep fresh the foreign languages I know, and it occurred to me that one of the killer uses for a tablet would be language learning and maintanence.

Language learning takes place best in an immersive environment that can be entered consistently and provides a variety of ways to gain spoken, written and reading comprehension competencies. A tablet would be a great way to present video, audio, photos, words, quizzes, etc. Yes, that’s all content that is currently available through websties and software on desktops and laptops and smartphones. But I do think that a tablet form, that allows one to interact in a comfortable, casual setting and requires touch feedback (rather than the mouse or track pad) and has a bright, well-designed screen and an app-driven interface presents enough improvements and enticements and sensory experiences to really make language learning much better.

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The problem of the institutional “we”

November 2, 2009 · Posted in Education, PR · Comment 

The problem with the institutional we is that not only is it barely a step up from the use of the passive voice, but that just like the passive voice, it’s a way to diffuse agency. In addition, although it attempts to suggest timelessness, to sidestep the sticky issues of archives where names and titles can be found that no longer are part of the institution, it does not generally succeed. Rather it is a form of stasis.

More importantly, it raise all sorts of issues about community boundaries, institutional coercion and the agenda of the persons writing (or editing, or approving) copy with the use of the institutional we. For although it may be intended to appear inclusive, the we is always connected to a verb or a state of being and objects and noun and verb phrases and all those things that attempt to define who belongs or more often the actions and attitudes of those who do or don’t belong.

I don’t know for sure how to get around it. I personally rely much too heavily on “the College” in my writing for work and ‘I’ in my own writing. But it seems to me that that “we” needs to be made more explicit at times and/or that managers and administrators or going to need to be more willing to use first person singular and speak for themselves because in the world of social media everybody is speaking about the institution and speaking as themselves in relation to it.

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Why LinkedIn should support academic CVs

March 16, 2009 · Posted in Education, Social Media · Comment 

David Erickson’s Slideshare presentation Expert Positioning Using LinkedIn spurred me to write up some thoughts I’ve been having regarding LinkedIn and academia. I’ll develop this further, but the basic idea is this: LinkedIn needs to come up with a way to better support the presentation of academic CVs, and in particular, those massive lists of papers, presentations, book reviews, etc. that form the key research core of an academic CV.

LinkedIn currently does a decent job of helping its users present positions with a company and affiliations with professional organizations and other groups. What it doesn’t do so well is support anyone whose work consists of and professional identity is built out of lists of works. That includes, not only academics, but also actors, directors, artists, freelance writers, authors, etc.

I don’t have any amazing solution for how this should be implemented. I only dabble a bit UI and I’m not a graphic designer so no mock ups. But at the very least there could be a tab that displays The List of Stuff, and most importantly, any such solution should be able to automatically parse and tag discreet items in a CV/resume and allow for that data to be downloaded. I realize that pulling out data is not what LinkedIn is going to naturally support, but I think it’s in their best interest to do so.

Here’s what’s in it for them:

1. LinkedIn is pitching reporters on the idea that it is a great place to find experts. I don’t doubt that reporters are using it. But it’ll be even more valuable when one of the key group of experts — academics — embrace it more fully and especially when the information they present is as rich as their CV.

2. Faculty members (as well as freelancers and actors and directors, etc.) tend to be highly connected individuals, in part, exactly because of the List of Works they are involved in. Their projects aren’t confined to work colleagues and consultants.

3. Faculty members bring in students and that’s a userbase that LinkedIn is, I would assume, hoping to attract because they’ll soon be in need of the services that LinkedIn provides (and because they tend to be active social media users and activity among a few people in a network can increase activity across the network thus proving and increasing the value of the platform the activity is taking place on).

And here’s why, if LinkedIn better supports academic CVs, faculty members should actively participate in LinkedIn (especially if the solution makes it easy to manage CV-related data):

1. Currently, faculty members rely on

a) individual bio pages/Web spaces provided by their academic institution — these may or may not be kept up by academic support or by the academics themselves

b) faculty experts databases created by the institution’s PR offices

c) their own website or blog that they maintain (either paying for hosting of using free hosting)

d) minimal presences in directories of organizations they may be affiliated with

None of those solutions is ideal. In some, they don’t have control of their data and what is presented in others, they have control, but may not have the time to keep things up-to-date or to provide nice design and stable hosting solutions. Let’s be honest there are a lot of ugly, out-of-date faculty pages out there.

LinkedIn provides a professional space and is about as stable of a social media company as you can get these days.

2. A university pr office has limited resources — certain faculty are going to get privileged when it comes to media inquiries and those inquiries are almost always mediated. I realize that many faculty prefer not to work with the media, but I strongly believe academics (and really all of us) are going to increasingly find themselves needing to take charge of their own promotion and interaction with the public sphere rather than relying so much on the security of their individual institutions. I’ll talk more about that in another post. Also see Gideon Burton’s Academic Evolution blog for more on faculty taking charge of their research and online presences.

I know some faculty hate having to screen media inquiries and make the pr office do it, but that only adds time to the process. Obviously whatever solution LinkedIn were to come up with, another thing they’d need to figure out is settings and ways to regulate inquiries. This is something I need to think about more and may post on in the future.

3. Even faculty experts who become stars for the college, sometimes find they aren’t getting the calls they were because the reporter or editor who loved them has left and taken his or her rolodex. If faculty use LinkedIn in great numbers and journalists respond to this by managing more of their experts with it, it’ll become much each easier to pass on experts (and to discover them in the first place).

4. LinkedIn is a fantastic way to stay connected to the work of former students, research assistants, etc. This will be even more true, esp. for those in the sciences, if it better supports papers, presentations, etc. Imagine being able to go through your list of old papers and have a name of a grad student pop out at you — someone you haven’t thought of in awhile — and be able to click on their name and bring up their LinkedIn profile and catch up on the interesting research they’re doing.

Now, if all the above were to happen, what’s in it for higher ed pr pros? What if this leads to more reporters cutting us out of the picture?

I say it’d be great if it does. I don’t know that it’d necessarily stop the calls, but if it does then that’s time that we can put in to training faculty on how to work with the media. It’s time that we can put in to other pitches. It’s time we can spend on monitoring and metrics. And it’s time that we don’t have to spend updating our experts databases.

I don’t handle that many faculty experts calls in my current position, but I know how much time they can take up. I don’t want to shift that time entirely over to the faculty, but honestly a lot of what happens is matchmaking that could take less time if the right reporter was getting to the right faculty member in the right way. I think LinkedIn is potentially a powerful platform for doing that, but it’s not there yet.

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