The Radically-Transparent Classroom

Two stories in my feed reader caught my attention this weekend that hint at the growing friction between outmoded academic traditions and Web 2.0:

• First, the L.A. Times recently published an in-depth report about the difficulties of firing tenured teachers (Song, J. "Firing Tenured Teachers can be a Costly and Torturous Task,"May 3, 2009).
• Second, the UK Times Higher Education edition published a story (Attwood, R. "Students Union Accused of Snooping on Lectures," April 20, 2009) about the University and College Union (UCU) objecting to the Manchester Metropolitan Students Union's (MMSU) new practice of encouraging students to report (via text message) when faculty are late or when they suddenly cancel lectures.

The halls of academia are no longer immune from the influence of the ubiquitous, networked, media-saturated, always-on world we live in - and in many ways they're more vulnerable because their insulated structure means they haven't been able to gradually develop as many workarounds to resolve minor conflicts between tradition and technology. As a result of 1) the way technology has empowered "consumers" (which includes students), 2) the pressures of strained education budgets, and 3) the continuing growth of shrill interest groups that attack public education - there's going to be a seismic shift in the governance of higher education.

There have already been a few incidents that have hinted at the future of a radically-transparent classroom (like Jay Bennish, and the much-less publicized case of David Paszkiewicz).

Instead of being sensationalist fodder for special interest groups, however, it could be that transparency provides educational institutions with the leverage they need to overcome the problematic aspects of tenure in a constructive way. Make no mistake: having protections in place for faculty (like tenure) is absolutely necessary to ensure quality education. This is especially true in the polarized era we're living in where an indelicately-worded comment in a discussion on any of the hot-button issues in education (like the teaching of creationism/intelligent design) can bring out the torches and pitchforks.

The first way transparency can help ensure better quality education is the ability social media gives students to connect with one another and share information. It's no longer the case that poor conduct on the part of an educator (which includes, by the way, ending the "voicemail hell" students all too frequently find themseves in) is lost to the wind after the twenty or so students that witnessed it go their separate ways at the end of the semester. It can be documented and indexed (i.e. searchable) so that it is readily available to future classes that will be able to easily document patterns of bad (or good) conduct by educators.

Second, due to the fact that so much of what makes dismissing a bad teacher so difficult is the highly-specialized nature and context of each individual situation and the difficulty in documenting poor performance - it would seem that social media and technology may provide both the tools and framework to ensure that we can more efficiently provide due process for educators when a dispute arises.

There is a constructive way to go about this, and it can be a great thing for all those involved if it's done right. What that means, however, is that educators (and administrators) will need to relinquish some of the outdated policies they've come to rely upon and be more responsive to the concerns of their stakeholders (which is something the majority of faculty are doing already).

Cornel West and the Socioeconomics of Music

I recently had the good fortune of attending a lecture by Cornel West at Calvin College in which he spoke, almost in passing, about the impact of one's economic circumstances on the art they create (specifically in this example, the music). He explained, in part:

"But Hip hop from below, coming out of high schools where the art programs have been systematically eliminated so they can' t learn how to play the instruments in which the way the Ohio Players or Lakeside or Con Funk Shun or the Bar-Kays do. Those negroes can play their instruments. [...] but if you come in a context where the shift from poor people to the well-to-do has been so systematic, where the drug invasion has come in as the only source of you sustaining you sustaining yourself as your families become so weak, your community so feeble and market values begin to permeate every nook and cranny of your life ... then what do you do; well you get some old equipment around and have sampling. Okay we can't play instruments but Sly sure sounds good ... and James Brown sounds very good ... work it Grandmaster Flash, bring your Furious Five with you."

It had never before occurred to me that looking down on musicians who sampled could be not only snobbery but a form of racism given that it was economics that made a tape deck the only instrument some people had access to (while meanwhile in suburbia I had access to strings, percussion, winds and brass and the private lessons to master them). In that context, the esteem and awe with which people like Michael Eric Dyson speak of Hip hop becomes perfectly clear.

One of the phrases that kept ringing in my head from the lecture was the idea of "...bouncing off tradition in order to promote innovation." Anyone who has studied music knows that you become acutely aware of the fact that every musician stands on the shoulders of previous musicians; whether you're sampling or playing an instrument.

There are some interesting manifestations of the mashup of musical influences and available instruments going on in the digital world nowadays:

• There's a whole generation of artists whose work is influenced by the accessibility of immersive 3D video game environments that have been remixed and used like a brush and palette to create original works. They work particularly well for music videos; Jonathan Coulton fans like Spiffworld (who favors World of Warcraft) have created them for songs like "Tom Cruise Crazy," "Re: Your Brains," and "Mr. Fancy Pants."
  
• An Israeli artist named "Kutiman" has created an entire album remixing YouTube videos. I can't even describe how amazing it is; you have to check it out for yourself.
• The DIY crowd has started hacking the plastic controllers that come with games like Guitar Hero to create *real* instruments.
  

It makes one excited to see what the future will bring (or not, depending on which age demographic you fall into).

[Listen to the full Cornel West Lecture: "Hope on a Tightrope"].

The Relentless March of Radical Transparency: Polar Rose

Flickr's about to get more interesting.

Polar Rose, a new web application, can recognize faces in Flickr photos and tag them. I was wondering when this was finally going to happen (now I wonder how quickly it will be rolled out to other social media platforms like Facebook/MySpace). Now you can find all of those photos of you holding a corndog with your gut hanging out, unaware that you're standing behind a family taking a group photo at a the local street fair.

It's going to get a whole lot harder for people to lie about where they were in an era when a stray photo someone took from across the street that happened to catch you in the frame is suddenly part of the accessible permanent evidentiary record. Good or bad, it's the new reality of radical transparency.

Turnitin.com Vindicated by Court Decision on Fair Use

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck a blow to students who were attempting to shut down the website/service Turnitin.com (which allows faculty to compare the work submitted by their students to other established works as well as the works submitted by other faculty) with a lawsuit alleging copyright infringement.

The decision is a good one, because services like Turnitin.com are valuable for faculty who are increasingly pressed for time and cannot interrogate every student they suspect of lifting material without attributing it. The phenomena is disappointingly-common (as I've found in my own personal experience) - usually as a result of naivete about the need to properly attribute cited material, but also too often as a result of graft on the part of services that buy and sell papers previously submitted by other students.

Services like Turnitin.com have been successful enough that the services selling papers to lazy students have moved to specializing in custom-written papers that would elude detection (having not previously been submitted for a grade).

The students' concern about Turnitin.com holding on to their work isn't completely without merit, however; one could envision a future incident where Turnitin.com might try to profit from those papers if it were ever strapped for cash (say, by publishing them for other students as "study aids") - so it would be good to see the courts articulate some sort of provision that narrowly restricts the interpretation of this decision to the limited use of the archived papers to comparing them for plagiarism.

Domino's Pizza and the Life Cycle of Public Opinion

In the democratized, media-saturated era we live in incidents like the one that just happened to Domino's Pizza (where two employees, Kristy Hammonds and Michael Setzer, videotaped themselves doing a variety of unsanitary things to customer's orders) are inevitable. In fact, I can't believe that this hasn't happened more frequently.

The PR industry is wringing its hands over how to respond given how seemingly powerless large organizations are to stop these sorts of events. The solution is (as with many problems in the age of social media) transparency.

Here's a couple free suggestions for Domino's:

• Install webcams in all of your 8,500 kitchens and broadcast them in real time on your website so that customers can go peek in on the happenings at their local pizzeria to assuage their fears that some douchenozzle is snorting the shredded cheese into their Chicken Bacon Ranch Oven-Baked Sandwich.
• If you really want to do a good job of it - crowdsource enforcement: empower your customers by giving them the option to flag a section of video for further scrutiny (and possible criminal charges).

Given how cheap digital technology and cloud computing are, it likely won't cost that much and you can simultaneously 1) recover from the negative perception, 2) build credibility by following up a promise with concrete action, 3) get a hot, cheesy promotional slice of earned media for being the first major fast food chain to adopt this safety measure.

The best part is that there's really nothing startlingly-new about this approach; it's the same principle as putting the kitchen in a restaurant within view of the customers.

Even if Domino's did nothing but make sure the two miscreants end up on the business end of a lawsuit and criminal charges - that's likely enough to restore their bruised image. That's the way of the wired world: yes, it casts a spotlight on an organization's negatives - but people are more open-minded and forgiving than we give them credit for when it comes to considering the context of bad PR (especially if an organization has built up credit by operating above-board and generally doing the right thing on a daily basis).

YouTube .EDU Hints at Possible Future of "Open Source Education"

YouTube's recent release of its ".EDU" site which features channels and content from educational institutions hints at a possible "open source" future for education (particularly higher education). Grand Rapids Community College has a thriving YouTube channel as a result of the excellent work done by our Media Technologies department (which produces content for the Grand Rapids Public Schools as well as a number of local colleges and universities).

In fact, GRCC is one of the heavyweights in the new YouTube EDU site (as others have noticed, including Time Magazine in a recent article titled "Logging on to the Ivy League"); it has more content up than Harvard and almost as much as MIT. Many of the four-year universities in Michigan don't even have YouTube channels.

Watching the potential of online courses leads me to this question: what is the difference between an online course and a traditional course? This question is important, because as online course content from top-tier universities is increasingly available for free through the web - they're going to offer some serious competition to other education institutions.

One of the things the web does best is to free people from the geographic bonds that hold them; you're no longer limited to the offerings at your local mall, dating pool, or social circles. The same is true of education.

I see a possible future where students from across the US (and around the world) take online courses from the best faculty at the best schools, and the role of regional higher education becomes to provide the necessary support services, lab space, proctoring and resources for those students to become credentialed.

That is to say, your semester (assuming there's still a need to keep rigidly-defined calendars, which is less and less likely) looks something like this:

• You fill your class schedule this semester with an online Chemistry class from M.I.T., an online English class from Yale, an online Social Science class from U.C. Berkley, and an online Ethics class from Oxford.
  
• You watch podcasted lectures, participate in collaborative group exercises with Google Apps, and interact with the faculty (or their graduate assistants) in immersive virtual environments.
  
• Then, when it comes time for tutoring, lab experiments or testing/assessment - you head to Grand Rapids Community College for the one-on-one instructional support and hands-on learning (which is GRCC's true core competence as a "teaching" institution).

One particular aspect of that scenerio that is particularly promising in terms of creating a dramatic opportunity for regional education institutions is assessment. Currently the means we use to measure comprehension (standardized tests) are woefully-inadequate; they're inherently biased with respect to culture and learning styles - yet they're necessary in order to keep class sizes manageable while still being cost-effective.

If we're free of some of those time constraints - suddenly a dramatic window opens up for personalized, one-on-one interview-style assessments of one's ability to comprehend, master and think critically about course material.

The reasons this can't be the near future are rapidly eroding away - which means that it's an increasingly likely future. Something to consider.

Related:

• If you haven't seen Sir Ken Robinson's TED lecture, do yourself a favor and check it out.
• Professor David Wiley at BYU was recently interviewed about the idea of "Open Source Education."
  

Privacy in the Age of Social Media and Radical Transparency

Bruce Schenier at Wired wrote an excellent piece ("It's Time to Drop the 'Expectation of Privacy' Test") about the need to drop the "Expectation of Privacy" test currently used as the primary case law that determines the constitutionality of government action. He cites some of the analysis and proposed alternatives from Daniel Solove, Orin Kerr, and Jed Rubenfeld.

It is crucial that the US take concrete efforts to address this issue; more information is being created (in 2008, 4 exabites of unique information was generated - more than all of the data created in the preceeding 5,000 years), digitized and held (potentially indefinitely), this will only become an increasingly dire concern. This is especially true when one considers the spectre of a privatized federal intelligence-gathering infrastructure.

The problem becomes apparent, too, when one thinks of how defamation law works given the "public figure doctrine." Under the current model, private citizens are affored more protection than public figures. But what constitutes a "public figure" in the age of social media? Does simply creating a MySpace profile qualify? What about publishing a Twitter feed?

In the book Born Digital (which I'm reading), the authors (John Palfrey and Urs Gasser) run through the lifecycle of a child born today to illustrate how vastly more data is created and available about them than in any generation in history - and how decisions that will affect the rest of their lives are made without their consent by unwitting parents.

In the area of government and civil rights, there have already been abuses of the warrantless wiretapping power that the Bush Administration claimed for itself as the administration illegally wiretapped journalists and aid workers. Perhaps the solution to this lack of privacy is more transparency: what if we requried the federal government to publish online a list of all of its active surveillance investigations? The argument that such information should be protected because it would alert criminals/terrorists to the investigation is moot because they already assume this is the case, and this might dissuade the government from abusing its power.

In the area of social norms, we're running up on some terrible uses of existing criminal law with respect to privacy - like those protecting sensitive populations like minors as teenagers are being prosecuted for sending or holding nude photos of themselves. (These prosecutions pervert the spirit of these laws becuase they're in place to protect the victimized population; they're not meant to be applied when the victim is the perpetrator).

I'm increasingly convinced that the future lies not in restricting access to information, but in protecting society after the fact in a world where everything is transparent. We should be asking ourselves what we can do to render harmless private information about us that might be disclosed (because we must assume that it will be). What will this look like? It will change everything from how we validate identity, to how we educate/prepare children, and it will likely fundamentally alter our societal/cultural mores.

"Fool us Onc...": Why Social Media Renders Most Marketing/Advertising Worthless

When it comes down to it, most marketing/advertising (and a lot of public relations) in the modern era is about fooling people. Fooling them to infiltrate their social sphere to influence them, fooling them to thinking they need things that they don't, fooling them into thinking that one product is better than another.

So the model goes, you think of a new way to fool a bunch of people into paying for your product/service, they get wise, they stop paying, you think of a new way to fool them into paying for your product/service (and lather, rinse, repeat as needed). It's a dance.

That model is only economically-viable when you're able to fool a large number of people at once for a relatively low cost. In an environment saturated by ubiquitous technology and social media - that model fails because the costs and barriers change. Even if you figure out a way to game the system, the lifespan of that new tactic is extraordinarily short because people are now always networked and communicate with each other. The lifespan is so short that it's a fraction of the length of many advertising / promotion campaigns, so before you can even get the word out - the verdict from the audience is already in.

Here's how it works:

First, it's increasingly difficult to even find the people you need to fool. People are opting out of the traditional mass media in droves, so one must spend vastly more resources piecing together an audience of any considerable size. [Translation: Big cost barrier.]

Second, once you do find a way to reach your audience, they've become highly tribal and have set up discourse communities with increasingly-esoteric communication codes to police their membership. The time you'd invest learning the communication codes of a discourse community in order to infiltrate it isn't worth the comparatively small payoff of the tiny "Long Tail" audience you reach. [Translation: Big cost barrier.]

Third, even if you find the audience and learn their language - if you disappoint them (either with a product/service that doesn't meet their needs or that is inferior), you stand to lose them forever. Worse, if you disappoint them enough, they may tell their other tribes about you. [Translation: Big cost barrier.]

That's the bad news.

The good news is that there's a world of opportunity for good products/services (as Jonathan Coulton will tell you) provided by organizations that are responsive and accountable to their stakeholders, and the barriers are lower than they've ever been. There are even opportunities for big companies, provided they're willing to stop trying to fool themselves (and customers) into thinking that they can be all things to all people and they're willing to shrink down to the size that best serves their stakeholders. (Seth Godin just expounded on this point in his blog).

Social Media Case Study: the Shooting of Derek Copp

There's an interesting regional case study in the power of social media going on right now. Last week (Mar. 12), Grand Valley State University student Derek Copp was shot by police as they entered his off-campus apartment to arrest him on suspicion of drug possession. As details have dribbled out about the case, it's come out that he was not armed and did not resist arrest when he was shot.

Social media has played two central roles in the unfolding case:

First, the media began mining the public data on his Facebook profile for information to fill out their stories with (and have thus far used photos and videos in addition to quotes). I've been wondering how long it would take the media to figure out what a goldmine MySpace and Facebook are for gathering student data (I can usually get in contact with students faster through either of those platforms than I can requesting their contact information from the Student Records office).

Second, his friends quickly organized other students and have been engaging in a series of protests (primarily organized through Facebook). The first protest happened the day after the shooting (Mar. 13) and involved some 3o students. I checked the Facebook group students have been using to organize "Protest for Peace" over the weekend (Mar. 17) and it had 1,030 members.

It currently (Mar. 19) has 1,212 members and the shooting has morphed into a protest of US drug policy in general and has spread to Michigan State University and the University of Michigan. The GVSU group has 300 people signed up for a march, and the U of M group has 81 people signed up for a protest.

This will be an interesting case to follow.

Online Reputation Management (ORM) at the 2009 NCMPR National Conference

I recently made a presentation about Online Reputation Management (ORM) at the 2009 national conference of the National Council for Marketing and Public Relations (NCMPR) in Kansas City. It's an organization for advertising, marketing, pr, and foundation professionals at two-year colleges, and the people involved with are really good at sharing insights and best practices (especially compared to other professional organizations) so it tends to be a good place to benchmark against similar institutions.

My notes, bibliography, a short take-away document and a page of links to search and analytical tools to do a brief online reputation audit are all available at grcc.edu/ncmprorm

One of the best things about making presentations (and similarly, teaching) is that it forces you to re-examine your own practices and make sure that you're toeing the line. It also makes one formally think about strategies and tactics which leads to a bit clearer of an understanding of them. As a result, I was reminded that the title tags on our site are pretty shoddily done so I'm in the process of revising them.

Ragan Communications: OMG. Epic. Fail.

My co-worker (not me) has apparently been receiving solicitations like this from Ragan Communications:

>>> On 3/5/2009 at 4:46 PM, wrote: Dear Derek‚ Are you on Twitter by any chance? I am writing to ask if you'd follow me. I know: It sounds a bit cultish. But hey‚ I gotta walk the talk‚ don't I? I promise not to pester you with boring tweets. This link (http://twitter.com/mark347) will take you to my page. Just hit "follow" under my picture. I hope all is well with you‚ Mark P.S. Are you coming to our Corporate Communicators Conference in Chicago this May? Is anyone else from Grand Rapids Community College? P.P.S. As always‚ I'm looking for story ideas for Ragan.com. Let me know if you guys have made any breakthroughs in your comms department‚ OK? Just hit "reply" to this message to get by the usual gatekeepers. Remove yourself from this mailing list. ( http://www.ragan.com/savicom_unsub ) This has been sent to you by: Ragan Communications 111 E. Wacker Dr., Suite 500 Chicago, Il 60601 Contact us at 800.878.5331 or employeecomm@ragan.com.

There are a number of problems with this email aside from the fact that it's addressed to the wrong person; (1) The author wrongly assumes that I know who he is (and further, that I actually believe him when he says he hopes things are well with me). (2) "Grand Rapids Community College" is clearly not a corporation - so why would its employees be attending a "Corporate Communicators Conference?" (3) Somehow I just don't buy that they're interested in any "breakthroughs" from my "comms department," or that I'm going to get special access to them by replying to the email. (4) I checked out the Twitter feed and it's full of boring promotional tweets (and even more boring sub-tweets from followers).

This is an unfortunate example of how profoundly misunderstood social media is by the traditional mass media communications machine. The 'establishment' (for lack of a better word) continues to think that social media is just another channel to pump the same messages through. It's not, and as the faux pas above illustrate - not only is the message rendered ineffective - it actually stands to do damage to the organization by revealing it as disingenuous. It's like watching a pocket calculator try to pass the Turing test.

I'm no rocket surgeon, but I think that rather than wasting time with bulk email Mark should be working on his craft and producing a Twitter feed, podcast or blog worth reading to influence opinion leaders and early adopters. If he's good, I'll hear about it and subscribe on my own. That new paradigm is what frustrates organizations stuck in the past (the GOP is a primary example of this right now): they actually have to produce a worthwhile product that meets the needs of a segment of the public that has money to spend on it. They can't count on slick marketing campaigns anymore because it's no longer affordable to patch together large enough audience with enough repetition for that approach to work on.

PRSA just published a piece in PR Tactics which gets some things right, but still reinforces some of the mistaken perceptions about "using" social media (mostly as a result of trying to explain it to those who still don't grasp it and can only think about in outmoded terms).

The bottom line is that one doesn't "incorporate" social media - one must live it. Any level of sincerity and transparency less than that is doomed to fail because those using social media are so adept at sniffing out inauthenticity.

If an organization is not willing to fundamentally re-think every aspect of its operations in response to social media - it shouldn't participate. But that's okay; not every brand is congruent with approach demanded by social media and for the forseeable future there's still place for those organizations to continue operating. If they want to have a future though, they should at least be closely watching discussions about themselves in social media and evolving the capacity to transform themselves.

Balance Isn't Enough: How PR Makes Everything a Wash

As the traditional media continues to radically cut back on the quality of its reporting during the fiscal collapse of the industry, it opens a lot of opportunities for unethical manipulation (chiefly by public relations practitioners; especially in the context of the declining power of advertising).

This problem is not new, because the decline in the quality of for-profit journalism is not new. Slowly (and with the help of heavy lobbying from the media corporations) the wall of separation between the ad sales office and the newsroom has eroded. One of the consequences has been that we've come to accept news coverage that gives equal time to "both sides" as being "balanced," when nothing could be further from the truth.

The reality is that nice guys finish last in the concision-minded medium of the traditional broadcast media.

So in the debate over environmental policy, scientists and academics who are honest about the limitations of research and who do their best to do the most comprehensive analysis (which can make such analysis difficult to understand) end up losing out in the arena of the news media which provides a false equivalency between academic research and the sort of partisan, pay-for-play research used by interest groups in disinformation campaigns.

That was the conclusion reached by Eric Pooley, Fellow at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy (and former editor of Fortune magazine) from a case study he did on how a "Cap and Trade" bill was defeated with assistance from a grotesque public relations campaign from the National Association of Manufacturers, and the American Council for Capital Formation. He recently appeared on an episode of On the Media.

The study of a research model of the NAM and the ACCF was pitted against a meta-study of five different models by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). Pooley explains:

"These models, as I say in my paper, are not crystal balls. EDF said that right up front. You can't believe any one model - that's why they took the five best and put them together to see if there was some sort of rough consensus emerging - and there was. However, what their opponents have been doing is taking one very skewed report and pretending that they do have a crystal ball. [...]

We took a sample of 40 stories that explored the cost of it [cap and
trade]. We found that seven of them were one-sided - on one side or the other, 24 were balanced in a sort of stenographer sort of sense, it was the 'he said,' 'she said' opposition and then nine stories attempted to play what I call a 'referee' - calling one side or another if they were playing fast and loose with the facts. And that's my model for how you have to work a very contentious policy debate like this.

Reporters aren't getting the time on the beat that they need to master this material, and if you don't master the material you can't hold the combatants to any sort of standard because they will game you."

Given the current climate in the newsmedia, this situation may likely get worse before it gets better (especially at the local level where coverage has already been deficient for years). There is no clear solution to this problem. Certainly the medium of the Internet will continue to help individuals quickly brush up on complex concepts, but thus far it's not proven to be a cure-all.

[Read Eric Pooley's Case Study "How Much Would You Pay to Save the Planet? The American Press and the Economics of Climate Change"]

Using Science to Cure Racism by Altering Perceptions

Wired has a fascinating story up about researchers at Brown University using Human behavior is profoundly shaped by perception; snap judgments based on very limited information (often visual) determine how close we stand next to someone in an elevator or whether we will hire them based on a job interview.

Harvard University's "Project Implicit" has a battery of tests one can run through to gauge how susceptible they are to unconscious biases. The general idea behind all of his is:

"The IAT is a tool in the development of theories of implicit social cognition, a body of results that suggest that many cognitive processes that affect behavior are unconscious in nature and are inaccessible to observation by the actor. These implicit processes affect perception, influence behavior, and color interpretation of past events." [Wikipedia]

It's exciting to think about what research like this could do when synthesized with other technological applications like the immersive environments provided by video games.

Imagine future where children, regardless of their geographic location or place in the socioeconomic strata, being immersed in virtual environments that expose them to realistic portrayals of people from other races and cultures - allowing them to shed the latent biases we're all (and I do mean 'all') currently lugging around.

MiBiz January 2009 Knowledge Roundtable

I recently participated in a MiBiz's January 2009 Knowledge Roundtable (along with what looks like most of the other members of the West Michigan Public Relations Society of America board). Overall the piece was good, but the demands of concision meant that most of my responses had to be cut down (which I completely understand) but unfortunately they were cut in such a way as to look incomplete (so I look somewhat scattered and inarticulate; or at least MORE scattered and inarticulate than I usually am).

Here's the piece. Below are my comments in their entirety.

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1. What skills do communications students need to learn to land good jobs? Are schools doing a good enough job of preparing them?

There are a number of skills; paramount among them is writing. Interpersonal communication skills may become more important than writing in the future as technology moves us away from text-based communication toward a more visual culture (some say Flickr is in the process of replacing blogging).

The skill of being able to learn (and it is a skill) is critical as well; often as communicators we are speaking on someone else’s behalf to an audience we must understand well to effectively reach - so the ability to learn on-the-fly about both sides (and the mediums through which you will be communicating) dramatically improves the effectiveness of the communication process. This is especially important given how diverse our world is and how rapidly change happens. Students will also need to know how to think critically, how to problem-solve, and how to be creative (which is also a skill that can be taught).

Students will need to know how to use technology and how to think about using technology, though noting this almost goes without saying because of how tech-saturated youth culture already is (it’s basically second nature to “digital natives”).

Unfortunately I don’t think most schools do as well as they could at formally preparing students with some of these skills (especially the non-traditional ones), however they do informally provide the forums and opportunities for students to acquire and develop them.

This reality is symptomatic of the fact that our entire education system (K-12 included) is somewhat outmoded; it’s designed to respond to the needs of an industrial economy and as a result does not focus on the skills and disciplines that will define the emerging global economy (which will require skills like learning, ideation, critical thinking, problem solving, etc.). As a result of the Internet and the ubiquitous technology available to us, it is a waste of time to have students memorize the exact year the Magna Carta was issued (1215, incidentally; I just looked it up on Wikipedia). Rather, we should be teaching them how to locate that information, and how to think critically about it when they do find it.

Moreover, we’re too exclusivist about how we provide higher education. Our pedagogy too often responds to only a handful of learning styles well because it’s been acceptable if a large percentage of the population avoids or washes out of higher education. But if you look at educational attainment rates over the past 50-60 years, we’ve gone from 10 percent of the population having a bachelor’s degree to nearly 30 percent (a bachelor’s degree is the new high school diploma). In the knowledge-based global economy, a life-long pursuit of education is imperative to every worker. To remain competitive, the U.S. must have a highly-educated population - and higher education needs to provide more support services and new ways to teach those outside the top ten percent.

Humans learn surprisingly well through a hands-on approach of trial and error, which is why I see video games as one of the most promising avenues for education in the future (but that’s another essay for another time).

2. How can communications practitioners help guide the educators to create the most effective educational programs?

The best way for communications practitioners to help guide educators to create the most effective educational programs is to participate in the process. They can do this by becoming faculty (even part-time) or by involving themselves with the programs at their local higher education institutions (through offering internship and professional development opportunities for students or just through engaging in dialog with the program heads). Additionally, professional organizations frequently have commitments to help build educational programs in higher ed., which is one of the reasons why I’m on the board of the West Michigan Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA).

3. With the maturation of the Internet age and the era of constant access to publics, how is the profession changing? What non-traditional skills will become commonplace in the next decade?

If it were possible, the profession has become even more of a “24/7” job due to the immediacy of the Internet. Transparency has gone from a lofty ideal to a practical imperative because of how difficult it is to conceal anything in an era when everyone has a blog and a web-accessible videophone in their pocket. Communications is more profoundly affected by globalization than other disciplines (but, conversely, has become more valuable to organizations - creating new opportunities).

More significantly, though, there has been a paradigm shift away from anonymous, mass communication and toward very targeted, intimate communication that many communicators haven’t quite grasped yet (which shows up in the clumsy attempts large organizations are making at trying to use social networking platforms).

It is difficult to say with accuracy which non-traditional skills will become commonplace in the next three years, let alone the next decade. Based on what we’ve seen so far from the decline of the traditional mass media and the rise of social networking platforms (like Facebook and MySpace), interpersonal communication skills (relating well to others on a one-to-one basis) will be invaluable. It’s also likely that fields like library sciences will be highly important given how critical it will be to sort and sift through the petabytes of data we’ll all have to wade through on a daily basis.

4. How would young professionals outside of the communication field benefit from more training in or exposure to communication skills?

Given how intrinsic communication is to everything that we do, they would benefit in every conceivable way. It’s virtually impossible to have any job that does not regularly involve some form of communication (even someone in a cubicle who writes code all day would find communications philosophy helpful in making their code more parsimonious and effective).

5. Given the current economic turbulence, how can professional communicators make their value known in the workplace and, more importantly, make the case for the importance of their jobs?

Ironically, communications professionals tend to be very lax at managing their own reputations and their department’s reputations (likely because they’re so focused on managing the reputations of others).

Nothing conveys value like doing quality work and being gracious and responsive to the requests of co-workers and stakeholders (good, old-fashioned customer service) - so one must start there. Related to that, communicators should get out of the office and physically circulate around their organizations (especially if they’re large) and talk to departments about their communication-related needs. In addition to learning about new opportunities (and threats) - you can raise your profile and be of service by “cross-pollinating” and connecting one department to another (I’m continually surprised by how many overlapping interests I find).

Another regular practice for communicators is continually benchmarking against competitors and other organizations similar to one’s own. Being able to demonstrate that a practice, policy or organization structure is utilized by another successful organization can be very compelling.

In addition, communications pros must make sure to “close the loop” on their projects by cataloging and analyzing what worked (and more importantly, what didn’t work) and making available that information and formulating plans to improve the next time around.

Another easy way to demonstrate your value is to repurpose/repackage the work you regularly do as a communications professional and syndicate it throughout your organization when it might be valuable to others outside the profession. So, by way of a really simplistic example, if you’re in PR, you’re regularly scanning the media - so put together a report of articles relevant to the industry your organization is in and publish/circulate it.

File Under "Duh": Consumers Distrust Corporate Blogs

This shouldn't be surprising:

Study: Consumers Distrust Corporate Blogs
Dec 9, 2008 | By Brian Morrissey | Adweek

"For the last several years, new marketing experts have implored corporations to "join the conversation," namely through blogging. One problem: several years into the blogging phenomenon, not many consumers trust their blogs. A Forrester Research study found that only 16 percent of consumers trust what they read on blogs, a trust level below such hallmarks of veracity as direct mail and message board posts. Of all information sources, including traditional and interactive media, corporate blogs finished dead last in consumers' eyes." [Source]

Watching all of the writing and training seminars that are going on right now about incorporating social media into the mix of channels that corporations use to interact with their consumers is amusing because the approach most corporations are taking is so fundamentally-flawed. They're woefully unprepared for the level of candor, intimacy and two-way communication that is inherent to blogs, microblogs, and social networking sites.

What needs to be understood is that these media require a highly personalized approach - and that the approach is a permanent, 24/7 commitment. If you're going to interact with your audiences through these media, you can't turn it off when it becomes uncomfortable or difficult - and if you do - the cost to your credibility will be higher than if you never embarked on the path to begin with.

Student's Free Speech Rights Infringed Upon by School District Over Facebook Group

It's apparently a busy time for online civil rights issues:

Student Who Created Facebook Group Critical of Teacher Sues High School Over Suspension
By David Kravets | December 09, 2008 | Wired.com

"Katherine Evans, a former Florida high school student who was disciplined for "cyberbullying" a teacher on Facebook, is suing the school principal on allegations of violating her free speech rights. [...] The lawsuit, filed Monday in a Florida federal court, concerns Katherine Evans, now 19, who was suspended as a senior last year after creating a Facebook group devoted to her English teacher. The group was called "Ms. Sarah Phelps is the worst teacher I've ever met!," and featured a photograph of the teacher, and an invitation for other students to "express your feelings of hatred." After people's comments derided Evans for the online stunt, and expressed support for the teacher, she deleted the group. But Pembroke Pines Charter High School, which did not respond for comment, suspended Evans for three days for "disruptive behavior" and for "Bullying / Cyber Bullying Harassment towards a staff member," according to the lawsuit, which is backed by the American Civil Liberties Union. Evans was removed from her from advanced placement classes "and forced her into the lesser-weighted honors classes." The lawsuit alleges the black mark on Evans' permanent record is "unjustifiably straining her academic reputation and good standing." [Source...]

The school is totally in the wrong on this; it's a clear violation of the precedent set forth in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (and likely other precedents, though the school might try to argue it's protected by Morse v. Frederick which would be illegitimate since it's not illegal to say you don't like someone AND it wasn't done during a school-supervised event). Students have free speech rights - and the fact that this group was created out in the ether of the Internet and not scrawled on a bathroom wall or passed out in a flyer on school grounds even further undermines the school district's already-weak case against Evans. Teachers are just going to have to grow thicker skins.

She didn't make any libellous comments, and she was expressing a genuine opinion using her real identity (which eliminates the possibility that she would even be violating the absurdly-strict [unconstitutional, and unenforceable] provisions of the "Violence Against Women and Justice Department Reauthorization Act of 2005").

Unsolicited Bulk Email at Michigan State University

Recently, MSU student Kara Spencer organized an email campaign to contact nearly 400 Michigan State University faculty she thought would be sympathetic to her complaint about the university's decision to shorten the semester by two days in spite of being told by an administrator that she would face disciplinary action for not getting prior approval to send out the bulk email.

She sent the email and after a Dec. 2 disciplinary hearing (where one of the charges against her - falsely representing/using the resources of a group - was dismissed) where she received a warning (instead of the suspension that was initially threatened).

Here's her original email, and the complaint filed against her. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has taken up Spencer's case and is arguing on her behalf (they have a 'file' open on their site where you can keep tabs on the developments). Fox News has seized a hold of the story (they love any excuse to beat up higher education).

As someone who works on the administration side of a higher education institution and who is an ardent advocate of free speech - I'm conflicted. I see the argument that Spencer should be allowed freedom of speech (especially since I don't like how the university handled the decision; it didn't allow sufficient time for students to comment on the change), but I also understand the pressure the administrators are under to protect both their network resources from misuse and their employees from being deluged by unsolicited emails.

My defense of the administration is that the right to free speech is not absolute and one needs to consider the larger ramifications of allowing unsolicited bulk email as well as the unrestricted use of campus networks and what precedents that sets. I would be interested to hear what FAIR thinks about some different scenarios or conditions:

• Does MSU have the right to determine how its networks are used?
  
  
• Does the method of communication used factor into the equation? For example, would Spencer's right to free speech include the right to use MSU's network to use a more intrusive method such as sending a bulk text message to the nearly 400 faculty on the list? What about faxes? What about robo-calls?
  
  
• If the university has a spam filter in place that would block emails like this (sent to hundreds of recipients from a Gmail address) - would that constitute a violation of the student's right to free speech?

In my opinion, Spencer would have been in the clear if she would have sent the email from off-campus (though she apparently used a personal Gmail account, it sounds like she used MSU's network to access it and send the email). Unfortunately, though, she agreed to the school's AUA and broke it of her own volition (despite being warned not to do so).

Text Messaging Reduced the Spread of the Novovirus at Hope College

UPDATE: Text messages reduce the spread of norovirus at Hope College
Posted By: Joshua Aldredge Posted By: Chris Fleszar | WZZM13 | December 5, 2008

HOLLAND, Mich. (WZZM) A text message proved effective in alerting thousands of students about last month's norovirus outbreak at Hope College. Hope College officials informed the Health Department they had a database that contained all of the students email and tex messaging addresses. 3600 students were notified at once. Students were asked via text message to reply to an email detailing their symptoms and how long they were ill. The Health Department says in the end about 540 students responded. Officials say the information was crucial for determining a plan of action and slowing the spread of the virus. [Source...]

It should be noted that Grand Rapids Community College was the first college or university in West Michigan to offer emergency SMS text messages to students and employees. Years later, a temporary CIO for the college staffed by a consulting firm learned that the college had been doing this and called it "the stupidest thing I've ever heard of."

Fortunately the college did not take his advice to drop the text messaging service it offers (but instead has invested in a more robust system which now serves over 4,500 users).

Multiple Studies Find Political Leaning of Faculty has no Influence on Students' Political Views

Professors’ Liberalism Contagious? Maybe Not
By PATRICIA COHEN | New York Times | Published: November 2, 2008

"An article of faith among conservative critics of American universities has been that liberal professors politically indoctrinate their students. This conviction not only fueled the culture wars but has also led state lawmakers to consider requiring colleges to submit reports to the government detailing their progress in ensuring “intellectual diversity,” prompted universities to establish faculty positions devoted to conservatism and spurred the creation of a network of volunteer watchdogs to monitor “political correctness” on campuses."

[...] "If there has been a conspiracy among liberal faculty members to influence students, “they’ve done a pretty bad job,” said A. Lee Fritschler, a professor of public policy at George Mason University and an author of the new book “Closed Minds? Politics and Ideology in American Universities” (Brookings Institution Press).

The notion that students are induced to move leftward “is a fantasy,” said Jeremy D. Mayer, another of the book’s authors. (Bruce L. R. Smith is the third co-author of the book.) When it comes to shaping a young person’s political views, “it is really hard to change the mind of anyone over 15,” said Mr. Mayer, who did extensive research on faculty and students.

“Parents and family are the most important influence,” followed by the news media and peers, he said. “Professors are among the least influential.”

A study of nearly 7,000 students at 38 institutions published in the current PS: Political Science and Politics, the journal of the American Political Science Association, as well as a second study that has been accepted by the journal to run in April 2009, both reach similar conclusions.

“There is no evidence that an instructor’s views instigate political change among students,” Matthew Woessner and April Kelly-Woessner, a husband-and-wife team of political scientists who have frequently conducted research on politics in higher education, write in that second study."

As an adjunct faculty member, I've occasionally run into the accusations of bias in the faculty (though fortunately not against me). It's good to finally see some quantitative numbers to back up what most educators have known for years. Virtually all of the faculty members I know (and that I've ever had as a student) have always taken great pains to be fair and impartial in their handling of politics whenever those issues come up.

Often times they'll seek to avoid or narrowly-confine political discussion in class, I think, because they're well aware of the inequitable distribution of power in the student-teacher relationship and don't want students to feel intimidated (either by a professor's status as 'learned' or through reprisal in the grading process).

I've observed that many faculty seem to enjoy playing the "Devil's Advocate" just to stimulate debate and critical thought in class when a discussion becomes too one-sided (which sometimes surprises the student who had counted on the professor to back them up as an ally on a particular point given their interpretation of that faculty member's political biases).

The most skilled can make it impossible to gauge what their political leanings are; arguing just as effectively and persuasively for all sides (I can think specifically of Mr. Mott back in High School - who was able to remain completely opaque, despite the best efforts of students to figure him out). I attempt to toe this line, but I confess that I think my own abilities fall sort of this standard.

A Hurdle for Citizen Journalism: Lawsuits

As the Poynter Institute notes, lawsuits against bloggers are on the rise going from four in 1997 to 89 in 2007. While the number seems small - it's a disturbing indicator of what will likely be a rapidly-increasing trend as advertising revenues continue to decline and the mainstream media is increasingly unable to return the higher profits demanded by stockholders (forcing staffing and budget cuts to news departments).

Corporations, having lost their bid to turn the Internet into a medium like the conventional media (where wealth controls one's level of access) by overturning Net Neutrality, are invariably going to seek out alternatives to preserve the control they exert over the traditional mass media. That means lawsuits; and frivolous lawsuits at that - knowing that bloggers lack the legal protections afforded to journalists do (being shielded behind the masthead of a newspaper that can afford to fight off "junk" lawsuits alleging defamation or copyright infringement).

This is one of several major hurdles to "citizen journalism" being able to take over in the wake of the declining quality of the mainstream for-profit news media. Another hurdle often cited is the lack of formal training for most bloggers (who do not frequently observe the standards journalists do which are designed to preserve objectivity in reporting).

It will be interesting to see what happens as this trend worsens. Will citizen journalists band together to form a consortium (which might maintain legal protections for member journalists who pay dues and agree to adhere to a certain set of standards)? Will legislation be introduced (or will case law be interpreted) that grants bloggers immunity from this sort of suit? Time will tell.

Regardless of the outcome, it will be interesting to observe what happens - and it will bear directly on how the First Amendment is interpreted in the forseeable future.