A couple of big media types here in this session… one says she’s here bc she sees now that social networking is “kinda critical.”

NBAF is using Second Life as part of its foray into social media.

Leatrice’s two favorite magazines are Wired and Fast Company. Her dad made her read The Third Wave when she was younger. Says that what that book was about is what is happening now. Makes me think of “As We May Think” by Vannevar Bush.

Looked at an Atlanta Trees video and talked about ways to socialize their website and get videos like this out to the public.

Technorati Tags: socon08

Another difference since last year noticed in different ways by participants is that we aren’t arguing any longer about new media versus old, or whether this is all going somewhere or going to catch on . . . it is here now, like or not.

Technorati Tags: socon08

But even given all that, I was not expecting some of the negative comments I got. One actually said “This course was horrible,” and a “complete waste of my money.” I also got some comments that said, “Mr. A is the best professor I’ve ever had.” (Of course, these are freshmen.) So I’m wondering, is it normal for the negative people to be more willing to actually write comments than the positive people? Or is this an indication I really did worse than I thought? Should I take a “They either love me or hate me” approach, or work to improve things for those who didn’t like me? And would this make those who would have like me become my new detractors? Or, maybe my problem is a failure to manage expectations better from the beginning of the semester?

So far, I am trying to do a little of all of the above. Overall, I am going to take a concept from my years in quality control in the business world and use this feedback to chart my course towards “continuous improvement.” I’m also going to remind myself that I’m only in my third semester of stand-alone teaching, and I still have a lot to learn. Things can and should only get better, and feedback like this will help that process.

And now, I’ve been hired full-time at North Georgia College and State University, teaching an overload. For some reason, becoming suddenly busier is driving me back to my blog. I remember a music professor once told me that when he wanted to get something done, he always picked the busiest students he new to ask for volunteers (he was the band director at Georgia Southwestern University, and I was in the band, editing the school newspaper, etc.). His theory was that they had no time to waste and would get things done faster. So maybe there’s a little something in his thought. The busier I get, the more I seem to do a number of things with newfound discipline. We’ll see. If this is the only post here for the the next six months, then whatever.

But beyond being busy, this new tool I’ve found, ScribeFire, might be the other reason I am able to start blogging with more regularity (I hope my blog doesn’t end up resembling the other activity where “regularity” is valued). I’m always living in my computer, and especially in my browser, so have the ability to hit the “ScribeFire” button and fire off a blog entry from the endless chain of thoughts my surfing is firing off might be the missing link (pardon the pun). Again, we’ll see.

One other thing that has held me back is the fact that I have hesitated
to use this blog for all my thoughts, as a purely personal blog as it
were. I’ve had the idea that I want this blog to be my “academic” blog.
I know that there will be bleed over. I suppose I need to start a
personal blog to start dumping my other thoughts into. I guess that might backfire though and lead me to blog less, because then I’ll feel like I have twice as much blogging to do, or not getting done, depending on how things work out. We’ll see.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Digital Culture, Faciality, Gaming, Identity, Online Life, socon07, Rhetoric, web2.0

One participant slammed web2.0 because of all the “crap” that’s out there which, in his words, makes it hard to get the information we want because all the crap that gets in the way. His term for it was “web2.0 incontinence.” His comments were in response to a comment on web2.0 proliferation as “masturbatory.” I think what that person meant was that a lot of people are creating stuff just because it gratifies them without really benefitting the web community or being very useful.

Another person commented that one way to view web2.0 versus web1.0 is that in terms of 2-way versus 1-way. That might be as simple and good a definition as I’ve come across, as long as we are charitable and allow that 2-way covers one to many, many to one, and many to many.

But even though I like that simple definition, it also seems to me that that there is a 1-way sense of web2.0, where it doesn’t matter who reads or consumes what one posts on the web. In this sense, what matters is that the content creator is constructing and creating identity, and personal meaning, just in the act of creating the post. And I would argue that there is a sense in which posting to the web via blogs and other media is fundamentally different than writing in a paper journal. This is not to say that people don’t want readers, or that readers are not important, but once the readers get involved, the identity construction and meaning making are changed and must be talked about in a different sense. Although the posting or creation of the content may not be separate from the consumption of the content and the ensuing audience interaction, it must be at least logically separated for consideration and study separately from the interaction with others.

Technorati Tags: Digital Culture, Faciality, Identity, Online Life, Rhetoric, socon07, web2.0

So I am learning about the new program and finding so many cool things and then this morning, I’m sending an email in which I’m promising to followup in two weeks. Then it occurs to me that I can use the mail tag feature on this email, before I hit send, to set a to-do with a reminder that will email me at the appropriate time a reminder to followup, and the reminder will contain a link to the email I’m sending, which of course has at the bottom the email from the person I’m making the commitment to.

This kind of feature really contributes greatly to “mind like water.” Thanks Indev. I can’t wait to send you guys some money for this product when my trial is over.

The only feature missing from this process is the ability to set the reminder from the Mail Tags even or to-do entry screen. As it stands, I have to created the to-do or event in mail tags, then go to calendar and add the alert. But…. it still rocks!!!!

Technorati Tags: Life Hack, Mac, Online Life, Productivity

Hitti interviews three Phsychologists who recently published an article in Neuron in which they present findings that “defy an economic theory that purchasing decisions are a trade-off between current pleasure (buying something now) and future pleasure (buying something else later).”

Their findings could lead to a new way of looking at not only personal finance but also personal productivity. In fact, their ideas might add substance to the “how” and “why” of current trends led by books like David Allen’s Getting Things Done(GTD) and similar approaches to personal finance that feature simplification and personal customization, like Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi’s All Your Worth.

Not only in personal finance, but also in the literature of personal productivity and life management (e.g. freshman workshops and classes at universities that aim to teach life management skills), the common wisdom seems to be that most problems are associated with long term thinking versus short term thinking. Of course, the pain/pleasure principle does not have to replace such thinking. it may be that it merely augments it. Perhaps the reason spending the money now is not painful is related to the perception that the pleasure of the purchase outweighs the present pain of the expenditure, but that might also be related to a failure to consider the long term pain, or future pain, of this single decision or action, or the *cumulative* pain of many instances of similar short term decisions/actions.

What does seem intriguing about this view is how it affects the various life management approaches that we attempt to implement to help ourselves make better decisions both now and long-term. Most of those systems are associated with things like budgets, spending logs, time logs, details agendas, etc. None of them, simply, work like people really live. So we don’t use them because the pain of using them is much greater than the pleasure of living reactively from moment to moment, until we reach crisis moments (like going broke or falling irrecoverably behind on our time commitments) that cause us to consider “cracking down” on ourselves again. The new approaches like Getting Things Done and All Your Worth find a way to make the system seem pleasant rather than painful on a daily basis, or at least less painful. And in this they are really still doing what pioneers of the field like Steven Covey have been doing all along, trying to find ways to get people to bring the future into the present in their thinking so that they can see the real pain and the real pleasure, considered over the long term, in the now of making their daily decisions. The difference is that once we’ve been convinced of this approach, the new methods give us life management approaches that don’t add pain overhead to each decision. The new systems are more effective than the old because they don’t drive us back to making bad decisions in order to avoid the pain of complex management tactics and systems. The new ways of doing things are not only good for the long haul, they are not painful in the short term, either (or at least much less painful than previous methods). This is the tao of the life hack.

Technorati Tags: All Your Worth, Getting Things Done, Life Hack, Life Management, Productivity, Work Life

Technorati Tags: iMac, Mac, Kids