Archive for the 'Web 2.0' Category

Intern feedback

Published
by
Florian
on June 18, 2010
in BLSCI and Web 2.0
. 1 Comment

Five months ago, I was recruited by the Schwartz Communication Institute as a “Presidential Intern,” through a program originated by President Stan Altman. The Presidential Leadership Program was designed to provide students with hands-on experience contributing to substantive projects for the College.

My work was to begin rebuilding the Institute’s website. The new website was going to run on WordPress, and I would need to write a plugin as well. Sounded like a lot of fun, but for someone who barely knew WordPress, it also sounded like a challenge.

My name is Florian Chauvin. I am an exchange student from France (Lyon), enrolled in the MBA program in Finance, at Baruch. Five years ago, when I first went to College, in France, I decided to learn how to build websites in order to make a little money. I liked the idea of learning something that was probably going to help me in the future instead of going to work for McDonald’s as many French students do. Looks that I was right. The Schwartz Communication Institute sounded more interested in a web designer/programmer than in a Big Mac expert.

Therefore, even though I am a self-learner, I would consider my knowledge of php at the time I started to work for the Institute as fairly advanced. This background helped me quickly learn how to use WordPress and how to develop a plugin.

WordPress is pretty easy to work with. I was once told that if code could be thought as poetry, then parts of the WordPress code were lousy poetry. I have to say that I didn’t really have the opportunity to evaluate the accuracy of this statement since you can write a plugin pretty much without having anything to do with the core code of WordPress itself. This turned out to be a great point.

The major critique that I could address to WordPress’ plugin system is the small amount of documentation available out there. It is sometimes hard to find information about functions that are not among the most popular. As soon as you want to do something a bit more complicated than just using a predefined hook, you can end up spending hours on Google, forums and the codex before coming up with an answer. For example, it took me quite a while to figure out how to implement AJAX functionality on the front-end while keeping it reasonably clean. It is usually just a matter of time before getting things to work and a few trial and errors do the trick just fine, even though the process can be somewhat frustrating.

The first part of this Internship has been to write a room reservation calendar plugin that would allow the Institute to effectively manage the rooms used by Fellows to meet with students. The challenge was to be able to represent the different rooms in the same calendar so that it could be seen at a glance, which ones were booked at what time, by whom. We would therefore need to have a representation of the time, the day and the room in a 2 dimensional area. Squaring the circle basically. We thus compromised and decided that seeing a lot of days at the same time was less important than seeing all the rooms.

blsci mCal

Despite all the great calendar plugins out there, we couldn’t find one that could be customized enough to do what we wanted, so I wrote a new plugin. I probably spent about 200 hours on this plugin and tried to make the code as flexible as possible, even though I am sure it would still look amateurish to a professional.

I spent the rest of my time rebuilding the website, not only to make it look more appealing and modern but also to implement some social networking features that would contribute to making it a hub around which the Institute’s online life would revolve. For that matter, the WordPress plugin Buddypress is the ideal solution. It allows members to interact, create groups, forums, personalize their profiles and so on.

My main job here was to create a visual theme for the Institute. The easiest way was to adapt the Buddypress default theme to our needs. Nothing more than a little CSS, HTML and a few other plugins were necessary to complete the project.

blsci front page
Here is a list of the plugins used:

On a more personal note, this Internship has been a great opportunity to meet a lot of people and explore new horizons. Being a Finance major willing to work in the Corporate Finance department of a major entertainment company, acquiring an extensive knowledge of WordPress (used by a growing number of businesses) will undoubtedly make my profile more valuable and attractive. I believe that in many aspects, this internship was one of the most rewarding educational experiences that I’ve had.

Also, I would like to thank everybody at the Institute who helped me, inspired me and believed in me. I just wish I had had more time to improve the website and develop new features that would have made it even better. Maybe a job for a future intern.

Social Media and Young Adults

Published
by
Suzanne
on February 5, 2010
in Web 2.0
. 0 Comments

The Pew Institute recently released a report on young adults and social media use. Here’s the summary page.Pew Internet and American Life Project

It breaks down the various age groups starting with young teens – 12-17, the college years – 18-29, and the 30 and above – adults. There is some interesting data about which age groups use what and how certain social media falls out of grace with different age groups. It seems that  ¾ of young teens have cell phones and 31% get information about health and intimacy online. Young teens and college age young adults are blogging less than adults but sending and receiving text messages more than any other online activity. Texting is the major social communication online for both young teens and young adults. Twitter is big with the adult crowd but not hip with pre-teens or college age youth.

I was especially interested to see that young teens (12-17) create content or remix content more than any other demographic. It makes me think that their sense of creativity and play is still at the heart of their interest in the internet. At least I hope so…

Baruch College to Host WordCampNYC 2009

Published
by
Mikhail Gershovich
on October 22, 2009
in Blogs and Blogging, Conferences, EdTech, New York, Technology and Web 2.0
. 3 Comments

After a remarkable confluence of events and serendipitous circumstances over the last two weeks, I am happy to announce that WordCampNYC 2009, the flagship WordPress event on the East Coast, will be held here at Baruch College on November 14th and 15th. The Schwartz Institute has been asked to facilitate this event on behalf of the College and we are working hard to make sure all the various pieces come together as they should.

WordPress, for those of you who don’t know, is the open-source online publishing platform on which this blog is built. Blogs@Baruch and runs on WordPress MU (multi-user), a version of WP that allows any number of blogs to be generated from a single install. WordPress, in its various incarnations, is widely regarded to be the best-of-breed blogging software and is getting quite a bit of use throughout CUNY (the Journalism School, Macaulay Honors College, and the CUNY Academic Commons also rely on it to great effect.)

This is really exciting news for Baruch and CUNY, more generally, as we have always been big supporters of open source projects like WordPress and are thrilled to be involved in WordCampNYC. Because of the interest in open source instructional technologies throughout CUNY (as evidenced at last May’s CUNY WordCampEd which brought together about 100 people from across most, if not all, CUNY campuses), we expect quite a bit of interest in the education track at the conference which promises to be rich and varied. For example, we’re currently organizing an open roundtable discussion between Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress, and a number of prominent educators and instructional technologists to consider on the future of WordPress and other open-source tools in education. You can expect lots of conversation about the various WordPress projects at CUNY and at other institutiions, local and otherwise. We’re especially looking forward to catching up with the folks from the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University who have been working on a ScholarPress, a set of plugins that add all sorts of course management functionality to WordPress.

Once the schedule is set, we’ll link to it here. In the meantime, some details about the event are available here.

Freshbloggers

Published
by
Luke
on September 24, 2009
in Baruch College, Higher Education, Online Learning, Pedagogy, Syndicated Content and Web 2.0
. 12 Comments

This semester, we’re managing our largest lift on Blogs@Baruch yet. In addition to an increasing variety of projects that I’ll blog about in the coming weeks, every Freshman Seminar at Baruch currently is blogging. That’s roughly 60 sections, populated by over 1200 students.

Baruch Freshmen at Convocation, September 2009. Click to see photo in its original location.

Yowser.

Each Seminar is directed by a Peer Mentor, a talented upper level Baruch student responsible for helping newcomers adjust to life at Baruch. The seminars meet every other week, and Freshpersons are required to attend lectures, panels, exhibits, seminars, and trainings, distributed across six “enrichment” areas over the course of the term. Then they’re supposed to blog about their experiences, and discuss them when they meet with their classmates.

Launching the project was a bit of bear, as we had to create the blogs, get the users registered, tie the whole deal together, and give some training to the Peer Mentors, who are crucial to the project. Ultimately, I created a custom theme (built on Carrington Blog), with certain core components to which each section would have access– a List of Seminars and Peer Mentors, a Guide to Blogging for Freshmen (produced by the Office of Student Affairs, who directs FRO), a description of the six enrichment areas, and a Google Calendar that displays upcoming events. I then created a Mother Blog, which syndicates posts from across the sixty sections of FRO, using the FeedWordPress plugin. The Mother Blog collects and stores all of the posts in one place, allowing faculty and administrators to look in on the writing that’s happening in FRO. Students are thus contributing to small discussions in their seminars, and also to a broader discussion among all Freshmen.

fro

Thus far, they’ve been writing quite willingly. In the fewer than three weeks since this thing was launched, we’ve aggregated about 900 posts; at the pace we’re going, we should reach well more than 4000 unique posts by the end of the semester. That doesn’t even begin to address the commenting, which has varied in intensity across the individual blogs. Unfortunately, we do not have the ability to mirror comments between the original location of the post and the space where it is republished… if we did, and we hope to be able to do that soon, the level of dynamism would increase.

Needless to say, we’re looking at an awful lot of writing, and we’re trying to make sense of it in a few ways. We’ve created categories on the Mother Blog for each of the six enrichment areas so that posts directly pertaining to them can be easily sorted. This will allow the two administrators who oversee FRO– Mark Spergel, the Director of Student Orientation and Freshman Year Incentive, and Shadia Sachedina, the Associate Director of Student Life– to get student perspectives on the wide range of extra-curricular programs the school offers. Further, simple searches will allow certain segments of the Baruch community to see what students are saying about them. For instance, many of the early posts offered student perspective on tours of the library. Our librarians have already begun searching for “library” and “library tour” on the FRO blog to read student responses. Several blog posts have engaged Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues, the Freshman text.

Other searches hold the potential to help identify students with like interests: “photography,” “history,” and “football” all offer returns. Such a use of the FRO Mother Blog suggests another function that this project can play, perhaps more effectively in future iterations: social networking. As a commuter campus, we constantly struggle to help our students see themselves as part of a community, and FRO attempts to address that tension. Integrating Blogs@Baruch into FRO makes that attempt much stronger, as students can more easily find, connect, and engage with their classmates through our platform. Next year, I’d love to get BuddyPress working in this project to foreground the social networking component… but, one step at a time.

At the end of the term, we’ll have, easily collected and archived, multiple writing samples from the majority of incoming students. With some more thinking and organization, this holds great potential for assessment, integration into writing instruction, early intervention, and assistance for ESL students. Ultimately, this project allows us the opportunity to further the core missions of Blogs@Baruch: increasing the amount and variety of writing that our students do, and nurturing critical thinking about the use of digital tools throughout the Baruch College community. Given the hectic nature of our launch this year, we weren’t able to spend enough time thinking collectively about the general education opportunities embedded in this project. I had argued that we should do a pilot with 20% of the sections so that we could be sure to more closely support our users and think more intensively about the implications of what we’re doing, but for various reasons, a small-scale pilot wasn’t feasible. But when we do this again, we know that the canvas works, what the challenges are in the mechanics of the thing, and how to improve our planning. We’ll be able to make a more significant investment in helping the Peer Mentors better understand the possibilities and implications of doing college work on the open web, crucial knowledge that they can then pass on to all Freshpersons.

The Video Oral Communication Assessment Tool and the Question of Openness

Published
by
Mikhail Gershovich
on July 13, 2009
in Assessment, Baruch College, Computer Mediated Instruction, Online Learning, Pedagogy, Technology and Web 2.0
. 3 Comments

It recently occurred to me that in the almost 4 years of this blog’s existence very little has been said about the Schwartz Communication Institute’s most ambitious and potentially most promising project, our Video Oral Communication Assessment Tool, or VOCAT. I have presented on VOCAT a number of times over the years (most recently at the 2009 Computers and Writing conference in June), but have not yet written about it here. So it’s high time to remedy that.

VOCAT is a teaching and assessment web application. It is the fruit of a collaboration between the Schwartz Institute and mad genius code-poets at Cast Iron Coding, Zach Davis and Lucas Thurston. It is still very much in development (perpetually so) but is already in use in introductory speech communication and theater courses as well as a number of assessment projects. Our career center used it effectively a few semesters ago as well. To date, approximately 3200 Baruch students have used the tool.

VOCAT was developed in recognition of the principle that careful, guided review of video recordings of their oral presentations (or of any performance, for that matter) can be remarkably effective for aiding students in becoming confident, purposeful and effective speakers. It serves as a means for instructors to easily provide feedback on student presentations. It enables students to access videos of their performances as well as instructor feedback and to respond to both. It likewise aggregates recorded presentations and instructor feedback for each user and offers an informative snapshot of a student’s work and progress over the course of a given term or even an entire academic career. Presentations can be scored live, as students perform, or asynchronously once the videos have been uploaded. (Our turnaround time at this stage is between one and seven days depending on how many sections are using the tool at once — once some of the key steps happen server-side, turnaround time will not be as much of a concern.) Built on the open source TYPO3 content management system, it is a flexible, extensible and scalable web application that can be used at once as a teaching tool and as a means of data collection for research or other assessment purposes. (Screenshots are available here. I am also happy to share demo login info with anyone who would like to take a look — please email me at mikhail [dot] gershovich [at] baruch [dot] cuny [dot] edu.)

While VOCAT is quite feature-rich at this early stage, especially when it comes to reporting, data export, and rubric creation, we are always thinking about ways in which the tool can be made more robust and flexible. Currently, we are playing around with adding a group manager feature for group presentations, tagging for non-numeric assessment, moving from QT to Flash video, video annotation, as well as server-side video processing and in-line video and audio recording. We are also considering allowing users to choose to enable social functionality to take advantage of web 2.0 tools for sharing and commenting on one another’s work. And since, at its core, VOCAT is a tool for aggregating and responding to anything that can be uploaded, we’re thinking about other uses to which it could be put. It could easily, for example, be adapted for writing assessment. And someone once suggested that it could be useful for teaching bedside manner for medical students. Adapting VOCAT for these purposes is hardly a big deal.

The platform on which VOCAT is built is open source but the tool itself is not yet open. Right now, it is Baruch’s alone. Whether it should stay that way is a question much discussed around here. Here at the Institute we face several critical issues around open education, not the least of which is conflicting views on student access of Blogs@Baruch. In regards to VOCAT, however, the one thing constantly on my mind is the tension between an internal drive to share the tool as an open-source web application and build a community around it (there are no shortage of interested parties) and the pressures (or maybe a pernicious institutional common sense) that seem to compel us to keep VOCAT proprietary and use it to generate as much revenue as possible. I have heard arguments that VOCAT should be Baruch’s alone — that we should charge for its use and seek private funding for its deployment and development. This is a business school, after all, and I’m sure promoting and marketing VOCAT could be an interesting project for an upper division Marketing course.

Yet, I am inclined to believe that VOCAT should be shared freely and widely with other institutions and that other developers should be encouraged to develop for it. A great many more students would benefit and development would certainly be accelerated as more and more schools add features they need that could then be adopted for use here. Were VOCAT open, in other words, it would evolve quickly and probably in ways we haven’t even imagined. And that is very exiting.

In the coming months, I hope to continue to present on VOCAT and to gain insights into the roles it can play in communication intensive courses or in a communication-focused curriculum of any sort. More importantly, I would like to move towards opening it up and will work with our developers on the features and functionality that facilitate sharing. I hope also to draw upon the tremendous expertise of my friends and colleagues involved in the open education movement and learn from those who have worked with and developed various open source tools for teaching and learning. Listening to others’ ideas for VOCAT has been invaluable to thinking through what this web app could ostensibly do with the right sort of development. could be and how to best realize its full potential as a teaching tool — both in terms of deployment, training, and development.

Blackboard, This Song is Not About You: More on CUNY WordCampEd

Published
by
Mikhail Gershovich
on June 5, 2009
in Blogs and Blogging, Conferences, EdTech, Higher Education, Internet, Language, Symposium, Technology, Web 2.0, Writing Instruction and edupunk
. 13 Comments

It has been two weeks since the first ever CUNY WordCampEd, an event co-sponsored by us at the Schwartz Institute, New York City College of Technology, and the Macaulay Honors College. I have been meaning to reflect on this remarkable conference in this space but, seeing as how way leads on to way, I haven’t been able to get around to it. Plus, the need for yet another reflection seemed to diminish as the days passed since several smart and insightful people have already blogged the event. NYCCT’s Matt Gold, York College’s Michael Cripps, and Dave Lester of George Mason University have posted excellent recaps of the conference. Jim Groom, our inimitable keynote speaker, wrote a powerful, very personal reflection on the day’s conversations and why they matter to CUNY, and our own Luke Waltzer recently posted to this blog a terrifically engaging and forward looking exploration of some of the ideas that animated the events of that day and, most importantly, what they mean to the future of instructional technology at CUNY.

This week, though, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a piece by Jeff Young on CUNY WordCampEd. Since the picture the Chronicle paints of CUNY WordCampEd doesn’t fully jibe with my experience of the event, I figured this was reason enough to enter the fray.

What’s especially striking about the Chronicle piece is that it presents CUNY WordCampEd as motivated by the flight of a cadre of CUNY professors from Blackboard to blogging software as an ad-hoc alternative. “The meeting’s focus,” writes Jeff Young, “was an idea that is catching on at a handful of colleges and universities around the country: Instead of using a course-management system to distribute materials and run class discussions, why not use free blogging software — the same kind that popular gadflies use for entertainment sites?”

I take issue with this description on a number of levels, not the least of which is that it trivializes the tremendous pedagogical power and content management capabilities of a fully-realized, highly extensible, open source web publishing platform like WordPress and characterizes the event as animated by a simple opposition: blogs vs. Blackboard. In fact, CUNY WordCampEd was driven by something much much bigger and far less simple: a collective recognition that 1) the open, social web offers rich possibilities for transforming teaching, learning and the sharing of knowledge and creative work that we are only beginning to tap in a meaningful way here at CUNY and 2) that proprietary, closed learning management systems (LMS), in addition to their various other deficiencies, cannot keep up with the ways in which the social web is continually changing.

A good deal of the conversation at CUNY WordCampEd revolved around three very different yet exemplary projects, all of which are either built on or incorporate WordPress Multi User (WPMu), the “blogging software” to which the Chronicle refers. These are the CUNY Academic Commons, a multi-faceted online community space for CUNY faculty and students that seamlessly integrates WPMu as well as several other open source tools; our own Blogs@Baruch, a publishing platform for Baruch College intended initially to enable faculty to facilitate additional occasions for student writing and founded on the principle that that any opportunity to write is potentially an opportunity to grow as a writer; and Eportfolios@Macaulay, an adaptation of WPMu that allows Honors College students to collect their work, reflect upon it, share it with others if they choose to, and keep it for posterity — it likewise allows faculty to holistically assess student work. None of these important projects were mentioned in the Chronicle piece. Neither was ScholarPress, a set of impressive course management tools for WordPress developed by Dave Lester and his team at George Mason University (the same folks that gave us Zotero and Omeka), which Dave demonstrated at the opening of the event. (If there was a true, similarly capable alternative to Blackboard as LMS discussed at the conference, this was it, gradebook and all.) By excluding any discussion (or even a mention) of these projects, the article reduces and simplifies the thrust of day’s discussion of open source tools so that it ultimately comes off as merely speculative and not rooted in actual, substantive work already underway here at CUNY (excepting, of course, of the recognition of the wonderful work Zoë Sheehan Saldaña is doing here at Baruch).

Though the themes of Blackboard as 1) replicating an outdated pedagogical model and 2) and barely working recurred throughout the day, the conference was much more about experimenting with open source web tools based on their own merit than as any kind of real alternative to Blackboard that could or should be adopted centrally. As we have seen in the Clarion article which Luke cites, CUNY’s flirtations with alternatives to Blackboard in the wake of repeated outages seem to be more about showing Blackboard Inc. that CUNY means business and is not to be taken for granted than they are about finding a real, viable, working alternative that enhances both teaching and learning. Jim’s cry to “Open up CUNY!” did not mean “let’s all dump Blackboard and start blogging.” Rather, it was a call to breathe into our use of technology for teaching, learning, and sharing the spirit of free access and openness on which CUNY was built. CUNY WordCampEd was not an occasion to think through ways blogs could displace Blackboard in the classroom, but, in his words,

to imagine the possibilities of an open source CUNY, a CUNY that is not only re-investing in people rather than corporations to steer the future of education for this space, but a vision of imagining the technology as a way to make visible and accessible the work happening at the most diverse collection of urban campuses in the nation: a vision of open education that trumps courseware or videos or blog posts, a vision that brings 22 disparate campuses into some real communication with one another fueled by a community that believes in the irrefutable value of open, affordable, and relevant education in the 21st Century.

CUNY WordCampEd was not about blogs. It was not about Blackboard. It was about CUNY. This may not be of interest to those readers of the Chronicle who do not yet care about what is happening at The City University of New York, but it matters to me and to all of us who learned so much from the presentations and the conversations at CUNY WordCampEd.

The Wave of the Future: What has Google Done?

Published
by
James
on June 1, 2009
in Technology and Web 2.0
. 0 Comments

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ[/youtube]

I am not usually the kind of person who watches hour long YouTube videos, especially geeky developer previews of new technology, but I just spent the last hour and twenty minutes watching the developer preview of Google Wave, and I am totally blown away. It looks like Google has done for email what the Iphone did for the plain vanilla cell phone. Taking advantage of the near real-time communication that HTML 5 is going to make possible, Google has made a web-based application that combines e-mail, instant messaging, photos, blogging, Twitter, Facebook, real-time games, an incredible translation tool, and pretty much any other application under the sun, all in one place.

The potential sea-change evident in the idea of communicating in “waves” instead of e-mails, is tantamount to the shift in communication that took place with the invention of e-mail itself, and while I was watching the video I couldn’t help but think of the several potential communications nightmares that Google Wave will make possible. Indeed, communicating in real-time without the aid of body language sounds like it could be a potential disaster for interpersonal relationships. Not only can you now accidentally send that rant about your boss to the entire office, but your boss can reply immediately while everyone else you sent it to watches in real time—the simultaneous eruption of laughter would be enough to make anyone think twice before hitting click ever again. And the new netiquette surrounding just how much and how often to change someone’s original wave, or how often to comment in-text, or who to send games or photos to, should be interesting. Indeed, the entire idea of real-time collaborative communication means that we will have to be much more careful and thoughtful about how we communicate online. Whether or not we actually will, of course, remains to be seen.

Although it is easy to gush about Google, and Google Wave does indeed seem like a great and entirely new way to communicate online, there are plenty of other reasons for concern. For one thing, in order for “waves” to work, they must be accessible to all of the recipients simultaneously. This means that Google must store all of its “waves” in one central server, meaning that any wave ever sent will, in all likelihood, be available for a very long time. The legal and civil rights implications of this seem endless, especially considering that many waves will contain information from many different people, so if the FBI or CIA wants to investigating someone you’ve communicated with, they may also be, by default, investigating you, your friends, family, and anyone else unlucky enough to be involved in one of your “waves.” Even more disturbing, of course, is that Google will have access to all of this information without a subpoena, and, although Google has vowed not to be evil, mission statements change. But what really scares me about Wave, and frankly, everything that Google does, is that they do what they do so well, so fast, and with such charm and aplomb that issues surrounding the consequences of the technology are often not raised until it’s too late. Google may be making “waves” with this new application, but the force of its technology is more like a tsunami.

Of course, this is the nature of all web technology, which seems to have a mind of its own, and thrives on the idea of the invisible hand of the market. In other words if people like it and use, it must be good. Any psychologist, however, can tell you this is simply not true, and that people tend to use what’s available to them and have a very hard time resisting temptations when they are so ubiquitous. And that is perhaps what concerns me most about this new technology. I mean, it’s cool, but do we really need all of this? Is it not just another added distraction to receive a new “wave” every time somebody involved in a project or conversation has something to say? If you think you get a lot of messages in your in-box now just wait. Should I really so easily have the opportunity to play video games with my co-workers online or share my Facebook updates with them? And does this new technology not just make it that much easier to avoid and even forget the often necessary face to face communication that is so vital for healthy personal and professional relationships? Lastly, do we really need to be spending so much time connected to the internet? I mean, I just spent the last hour and twenty minutes of my Friday night watching a YouTube video, for Christ’s sake. Imagine all the other things I could have been doing.

Jeff Jarvis’s Keynote from the 9th Annual Symposium

Published
by
Luke
on May 26, 2009
in Symposium and Web 2.0
. 0 Comments

Here’s Jeff Jarvis’s keynote address and Q&A session at the Schwartz Institute’s 9th Annual Symposium. He explains the argument that lay behind What Would Google Do?, explores the changing role of audience in the Web 2.0 world, and suggests some core components of establishing one’s professional presence on the web.

Keynote

Q&A


Gardner Teaches, Part 4

Published
by
Luke
on May 9, 2009
in Audience, Symposium and Web 2.0
. 0 Comments

In this final segment from Gardner Campbell’s workshop “Speaker, Listener, Network: The Concept of Audience in a Web 2.0 World” from the 9th Annual Symposium on Commumication and Communication-Intensive Instruction, Gardner and the participants look at the “Mother of the All Funk Chords,” a Youtube mashup by the Israeli musician Kutiman, they discuss the implications of the notion that “you choose a channel; your audience will choose the channels after that.”

This video is 12 minutes long.

Gardner Teaches, Part 3

Published
by
Luke
on May 8, 2009
in Audience, Symposium and Web 2.0
. 1 Comment

In this third segment from Gardner Campbell’s workshop “Speaker, Listener, Network: The Concept of Audience in a Web 2.0 World” from the 9th Annual Symposium on Commumication and Communication-Intensive Instruction, Gardner and the participants look at an advertisement from Kaplan University (featuring Uncle Phil) and explore the nature of authenticity and credibility in a Web 2.0 world, the implications of tools that empower the audience on “for-profit” higher education, and the challenges producers of information have in maintaining control over their intended messages once they get out.

This video is 10 minutes long.