The audio for this podcast can be downloaded at http://highedweb.org/2009/presentations/aps10.mp3
[Intro Music]
Announcer: You’re listening to one in a series of podcasts from the 2009 HighEdWeb Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Kevin Prentiss: Good morning! So, the back story on the Pikachu Pechatsko whatever you want to call it is that Mark was talking trash on Twitter about wanting to do this style and I said, �I�ll do it if you do it�. So, then he did it and threw down the comment so then I had to do it and here we are. What it means its 20 slides in 20 seconds they�re auto times so I will start it and set down the remote control and then I will go.
The thing I like about it that works I think decently was that I have to prioritize ruthlessly the things I talk about and it happens quick and then you steer from there. So, then after that it�s up to you and we go wherever you want to go. So, are you ready? I know that�s kind of why I�m just right here. [Laughter] Make it, do you make it, here we go! All right, I�m so sorry for everybody in the podcast for what I just did into the microphone.
[Laughter]
Hopefully they�ll edit that up. Here we go! How many of you have ever been to a dance last night counts?So, then you know they�re a good dance and they�re bad dance. They�re a bad dance is 99 out of 100 will say that a bad dance because of a bad DJ. They will blame the DJ.
However ladies this is how you work. When you go out you form a circle. You put up the elbows to keep the guys out like cows protecting the young. If you have a good circle of girlfriends then the DJ can drop the will sing the word �I Like Big Butts� and you go crazy. Oh yeah!
[Laughter]
So maybe just maybe 99 of a 100 people are totally wrong. Maybe it�s not about DJ, maybe it�s not about the music maybe it�s about the circle of friends. So, consider yourself hovering over the dance floor the one last night would work just fine. And give a little spectrum engagement from five being most engaged to neutral being not so engaged at all. So then you have this beautiful little pattern that starts to develop that looks like this right? And it looks like this no matter what language you speak or where you go in a country what we know is that fives like to hangout with fives.
Neutral�s like to hang out with neutrals. So you�ve all been to both good dances and bad dances so you have this in your head already or this is a good dance, that�s a bad dance you got in the middle and do dance floor with cross making in front of people. We don�t like this. We want to go from here to here.
We�ve got so many bad dances in so many ways so what do we do? Generally speaking, we get wasted where you can do a little better because the goal is to make people comfortable right? That�s how they get involved so that�s how we�ve always fix this, that�s why there�s free beer last night and a lot of dancing. But here�s how to do it in a way that doesn�t result in a hangover.
Number one, have fun. Number 2 introduce yourself, �Hey Robin, I�m Kevin great to meet you�. Then introduce people to each other, �Robin, have you met Mark? Great! This is Scott on the other side,� and there you go. Make small groups of people preferably around similar states of the engagement because neutrals like to hang out with neutrals especially if that�s something in common that�s fantastic. And then get the heck out of the way is not about you, it�s really important.
Step number four is the one that gets forgotten all the time. Some of you are visual learners so this might help as we come up this is what it looks like, �Hey, nice to meet you. Oh great! Nice to meet you too, Trivet.�
And then it goes, �Uh, have you met uh?� Right here, this is the magic sauce. If we do this it creates a culture of this and then more people starts to spread out in there, �Have you met uh?� And then more people show up and boom we got ourselves a fantastic dance floor.
This is what a great dance floor looks like so just to review yes and no. This is a system with massive redundancies. This is a system with a single point of failure and a massive ego both of which are trouble. This by the way is also a social media douche bags in the sense of the word. So dance floor in college gives us why this matters dance floor in college campus is the exact same thing, they work the same way.
We have tons of students there sitting with their arms crossed at the metaphorical college campus dance floor. They�re not involved. They�re not engaged. They�re not meeting people.
That�s a problem. The same way people leave a dance not getting what they came for students leave school not getting what they came for. 30% drop out are in the freshman year that�s what we got. The national students are in an engagement says that 6% students will never get involved.
It�s the same thing with the web. Web 1.0 started with this one to many publishing we thought things would be static. Everyone wants to interact and decided we don�t want to interact with the content nearly as much as you want to interact to the people. So the businesses walls are exploding now are the ones that don�t publish. They�re not in the center there�s no they�re there.
Twitter doesn�t tell me anything it just facilitates the connection between me and the other people that I want to hangout with. So, this is the Web 1.0, this is Web 2.0 this is the trend of all history. The question for you is where is your school? Where are your technology efforts?
Are you in the middle? Are you one to many publishing or you�re many to many publishing? Here�s a couple of things to check how easy it for me as a student at your school to go find people that I want to hang out with. Do I get to see pictures?
How much users generate content is there? Paid ambassadors don�t count for bloggers, that�s not student generated content that�s still one to many publishing. Having somebody follow your present or the provost on Twitter, follow us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, fan us on Facebook that�s 1.0 thinking with a 2.0 tool. We want to do the simplest possible thing technically and politically to push this 1.0 in to 2.0 around. So, one of the things if people don�t know what cars are you have to sell them a horseless carriage.
So we already have a directory on websites this is what you can do. You click find people, you can search for names and you get their email and a phone number that�s the best you could do. So what my 2.0 looking like if we 2.0 the directory that we already have what that might look like? Well, here will be the pieces. We have a profile picture year, major and residence hall right?
We just add the stuff this looks nice. We�re starting to get in the social capital already and then we add interest tags. We allow them to enter whatever they want and then we do a cute little interface trick that allows us to say whenever you�re looking at somebody else it will show what you have in common and prioritize that right? �Have you met uh, it�s a great a little ice breaker�.
Then we�ll let them to connect any other service that they want whatever the students happen to be using they�re just adding in links and it pulls in the icon and then we have our little Lego piece. And then so we start to stack these Lego pieces, we can do amazing things at the Folksonomy so here�s the directory that we get to build. So, now as an incoming student or an alumni or whatever I can quickly come here and say, �All right, who is my major business management great I really like football it turns out that�s one of the most popular thing. Who in my major likes football?�
I can then add additional things and keep putting up and so I go down and I see not only what we have in common but also if they have happen to be a Twitter easy to follow great off we go to those connections that we made online the same way that we�re doing at HighEdWeb. So the campus interest coming the big tight glove this is amazingly powerful. If I like photography I can go in here. I can be reminded that I like photography so I can add it to my own tags I can see the 110 other people.
I can click on the 110 which goes back to that five people who shows me the photographers who�s in my residence hall who wants to do photography, great! Think of day one, the social capital that�s going to make a much better dance floor. Mark talked about adding any filtering I�m just adding publishing to those beginning. The thing to think about this when you�re going for the big picture is that publishing and filtering go together.
If I know that the stuff I�m going to publish is going to be read, I more likely to publish. If the filtering side delivers a relevant audience, this symbiotic relationship will reinforce newer build up, Facebook does this amazingly. If I post pictures I know my dad is going to comment, that�s great so I do it more. So, this is the publishing part, we�re just allowing them to touch anything these have feeds. This is the aggregation part so we�re getting the groups that stand on the campus right now and then we filter by both the interest and groups that they�ve established so this is an example.
So FYI you want a home class everybody gets a Tumblr blogs who bring they�ll their free that goes into OPML file that they could download just for this hash type for that class. It goes into Google reader right but students don�t use our RSS that does why in email do that as well. But wait, students don�t really check emails much well some do but that we also take that RSS feed and out in onto Facebook fan page for the first year experience. But wait there�s more so we can do aggregated content that�s authentic content on the first year experience page for the best blogs up there.
So now, Missions has the authentic content that they all want? No, orientation has a 24/7 icebreaker. Student life gets double the involvement because that campus tag club is a great matching job creating alumni. Wouldn�t it be great if the university were going instead of asking you for your money ask me for my knowledge and my feeds that I�m publishing anyway and gave it to the freshman that want my job? Wow, right?
So, then in academics gives this learning community that can be spending much bigger than the school itself. It�s so, so simple. This is not sustainable. It�s not sustainable for you as IT professionals as the publishing has exploded you can�t be in the middle. You can�t pass these conversations through.
It�s not samples of business model, we�ll talk about that and this is the future and it makes a better dance. And a good dance is better for the school and better for the students and that�s where we�re supposed to be here and that�s deal.
[Applause]
Okay, that woke me up. I don�t know if that woke you up? [Laughter] So now is the time that you steer. That was a blew all at once and then it takes a while to digest and so a couple of categories of questions that are interesting to me but don�t feel necessarily bound by these categories if you ask really freaky questions we can just bring them later and I�ll happy to talk about this in all but in General, I�m really interested and why not, why not do these things? If you want just want to just technical, talk about Facebook Connect there�s some special things there or author or anything else that was in the description.
Fun with RSS, there�s amazing things that we can do with RSS feeds or if you want to talk about the future, you can talk about the future. So questions please. �
Audience 1: I just wanted to sign up for them, the details were interested in. Is the risk of that it is just another game design you are using. There are just so many services doing that now and this is just another one.
Kevin Prentiss: Yeah.
Audience 1: Doing that now and it�s just another one.
Kevin Prentiss: Right. Yeah, I think it�s great and it�s a good comment and just another thing is sort of like it�s a big push back from the students when we do focus groups like I don�t want just another thing. But what they mean is they don�t want just another thing that they need to worry about. So, have you ever used mint.com? I would like to put this in the mint.com model because I set up everything for mint and my stuff flows through. And occasionally when I feel like worrying about my finances I go to it and it services my need to worry and straighten things out and makes me clear.
I see this directory as being that sort of thing. They set it up once, they forget about it but they�re getting the flow of the information. Now, I�m getting emails from people that say, �Hey, you have photography, we�d like to do photography�, and at the bottom of that email it says, �You�re receiving this email because you are in this major and you have photography. If you�d like to change your interests on the directory, click here to go in and change that. So, as long as my interests are good I don�t change it.
I just get this great flow of information that�s more relevant now. So, I don�t see and I don�t expect students to log into the directory as a Facebook. There�s nothing you can�t wall post. You just set it up and then the flow of RSS feeds or communications from other students or your class goes. So I see it as like log in at four times a year give or take unless you get emails that are not interesting you change your mind.
Audience 2: I�m thinking about the first time to get the good impression, the first time
Kevin Prentiss: Yeah.
Audience 2: That�s a big burden to try to do to keep it there in 30 seconds. �
Kevin Prentiss: Right. It�s three and half minute in average for the way we built it. But so one just general disclaimer like I�m definitely this is a project that I�m working on I�m definitely a vendor but the ideas are much bigger than the way I�m implementing it. You can do this with WordPress. You can do this even just or anything that you could implement on your own campus in this direction so I hope that it doesn�t some across like I�m really trying to give you the hard cell.
But the way we did it, Facebook Connect actually helps a lot with that because you�re telling the students up front, �Look, we�re not fighting Facebook. We�re working with Facebook. We�re just giving you another layer where you can meet peoples specific land school and there�s a sweet spot seemingly that develops in the second they get accepted up to about September 15th.
If you hit them at that spot, it�s sort of the freshman honeymoon to the first year honeymoon and you say, �Hey, you want to meet people at campus we want to help you meet people at campus. Spend three minutes and click around�. That seems to work really well I mean we�re getting 70% response rates off of 70% of first year class signup rates off email campaigns and Facebook campaigns and that�s it. Some schools are running the students through the computer lab in our orientation and that gets obviously 95%.
Audience 2: Did you pull that slide back up you had.
Kevin Prentiss: No, actually
[Laughter]
Audience 2: When we have the one to many versus the other, yeah that one exactly.
Kevin Prentiss: You got 20 seconds to ask a question.
Audience 2: I think a lot of people here probably misunderstand what the 2.0 model there.� Most people on my campus understand the other one.
Kevin Prentiss: Yeah.
Audience 2: And for me, the roadblock is getting people to understand that over there is the dance.
Kevin Prentiss: Right.
Audience 2: I know that�s the hurdle for me I�m on the same bloggers but I probably got a good handful because I can understand exactly what you�re talking about and agree 100%.
Kevin Prentiss: Yeah.
Audience 2: The problem that we have is getting others to realize that basically the ones with the money and the resources have understand that if we want to do things differently because we use differently�
Kevin Prentiss: Yeah. And so I think part of getting the stuff through and what I hope in terms of getting the bigger conversation however you implement it. I think I like going after the directory, that�s worked really well. In Jared School, I was talking about political hacks and or use more technical hacks, right? The little things you just work and use whatever on the pipe.
It�s a political hack where you don�t make it seem like the future. You dress up the future like the present. And so you go to your folks and you�re like, �Whoa, no we�re just upgrading the directory no big deal�. I mean we let the students bring their email and now we�re just going to bring their Facebook just for them to you know Facebook is like a new email for the students. It doesn�t matter to us that are just what they do.
Some use Twitter so of course we let them use that and some might have blogs so of course we�re just let them connect to what they bring. Not a big deal. It�s a social media, not it�s just another directory. You have to get on Twitter let�s Twitter.
[Laughter]
I mean obviously I�m joking about the extents of it but the extreme of it but in the short run I don�t think it needs to be revolutionary at all. I don�t think people need to understand 2.0 just to say, �Well, this is how the students communicate let�s just we�re adding links�. No big deal. It has bigger implications but we don�t need to talk about those.
Audience 3: No reason to break your current directory just to matter of enhancing it there.
Kevin Prentiss: Right. Yeah, it�s just an upgrade. You go ahead and then so two things. One, make it seem as an innocuous as possible. It�s nothing new, it�s nothing revolutionary, it�s not one to many, and it�s not as Craigslist in the newspapers. It�s just a little upgrade not a big thing.
And attach that directly to one goal that some department really cares about, okay. So you can go into orientation and you say look you�re spending five grand on icebreakers right now? You paste on Woman or Dude to stand up and do games. What if we have an icebreaker that is 24/7 online?
The system automatically generates an email that you can send out to whatever rate you want that says, �Here are three people in your residence hall. Three people on your dorm, three people on your major, three people in your year, and three things you have in common�. So you can send that once or twice a week but now I�m looking on kind of like this HighEdWeb thing where we know each other in Twitter. And also you have that pop and you�re like, �Or you�re here, we�ve been talking for a year�, and that sort of thing.
So, it�s just a great icebreaker and so orientation department will be really excited about that. Well, yeah, that does make more sense than one person for one hour at the beginning of school. Student life, it definitely increases involvement in groups just period, and when you compare it, it�s not even a fair comparison because right now student life is doing group fairs right? So, if I�m shy me going out to a big area with the student leader sitting behind the table and walking in and introducing myself to all those people, it�s not just the best model, it�s the best we�ve done so far to say, �Okay now, we�re going to have a group fair 24/7 online that works with Facebook which is where the students or anyway and we�re just upgrading.�
So then it�s an innocuous and it�s real focus. So, I hope somewhere in there is a political hack, other questions?
Audience 4: So we could be pre-populate this with their major there but we kind of keep track in our database and in our organizations. So if you kind of pre-populate it and then do you do LDAP optimization where you can logging in.
Kevin Prentiss: We haven�t done LDAP yet and the reason why is because the students like Facebook Connect better. It leads to a Facebook profile picture and they don�t actually have to log-in because they�re already logged on the Facebook typically with the 24 hour session. So, as long as they got a 24 hour session on Facebook, the second they go to Red River whether it�s on your school website or whether it�s linked from Facebook it does both it leaves both places they don�t have to sign in. And the sign in is actually a big barrier I mean like any little friction you can ring out of the UIs is great so Facebook Connect is nicer.
It�s a nicer user experience and all that. We have a lot of schools bringing pressure on us to do it but�
Audience 4: I think it�s just so that you can do what they offer�
Kevin Prentiss: Yeah. Well, certainly�
Audience 4: Because it is tied to their.
Kevin Prentiss: Yeah. Okay, so then that goes back to the first part of your question and no we haven�t done that yet. And I�m not sure that we will and the reason why is because of Perpa and for the students. We want to say to the students, we do say the students right now and it�s really clean and really simple, �Hey, this is a public directory. Anything you put on this directory is out in public.
We pulled your interest from your Facebook profile, here they are. Select the ones that are appropriate for the educational institution. If you have partying on your Facebook profile, that�s fine leave that on your Facebook profile bring in anything that�s positive. Now, that can be Ping-Pong or Quantum Physics or whatever. But know that this is another layer for you to manage and so�
Audience 4: But we couldn�t place like we already have a public directory.
Kevin Prentiss: Yes.
Audience 4: And people search for people but if this would on include people whom we met actually gone and signed out to this then we have two directories. We have to have the old tool way where it just list there name and their dorm room, their phone number and their email address and then we have to have the secondary one.
Kevin Prentiss: Yeah.
Audience 4: It�s much cooler but this one is optional we still have to have that first one that�s not optional.�� �
Kevin Prentiss: Yeah, and so I would say do the Pepsi challenge and see which one gets used and there you go. You can import anything with CSB so I�m saying we don�t do it because it�s Perpa and I think it raises some challenges and I�m worried about specifically I wanted to give the students a choice to put the residence hall or not. I want that to be up to them and so I don�t want to import that stuff and then have it be like, �I didn�t know�. Even though they can go on and edit it and so then now they�re opting out I just prefer opt in but if you really didn�t want to have to�
Audience 5: Yeah. Move in from student what they want to do rather than�
Kevin Prentiss: Definitely. I would like to have the default be my name and email in there and then I add anything else if I want because that�s just really cool. And we�re seeing on average right now students that add tags add 20 tags and there are some students that add 147 tags. They go to the campus inserts club and like, �I like that, I like that, I like that, I like that.�
[Laughter]
And they�re going to get slams with emails when students starts trying to recruit then further groups or like anybody wants to do anything in the residence hall and the major whatever and I love that idea. I love teaching the students to manage their relevancy filter so that they get emails and it says in the bottom, �You�re getting this because you like everything�. [Laughter] If you like to like less than everything like here like chill out a little bit but I think that that�s great. It�s like the old Ham Radio where you open it all up to find the signal and then turn off the squelch like let�s teach then about that, other questions?
Audience 6: [20:03 Unintelligible]
[Laughter]
Kevin Prentiss: I like that question. What do you want to say? Yeah, so saying it�s just an upgrade of the directory that�s how I would pitch this to anybody else. Here�s a couple of specific metrics that�s the other documents. One of the things that the system does someone accidentally but extremely powerfully is generating RSS feeds. And it totally depends on the school what the Twitter adoption rate will be and what the blog will be and it�s all over the place and it�s not what I would think it will be. Twitter adoption patterns across the country right now are not following the MySpace, Facebook�s typical D-Mark between two year schools and four year schools.
I was at Winthrop University and 20% of their students are in Twitter. I don�t know why but I�ve been to lot of other bigger schools that I would expect would be technical and it�s 1% to 3%. 1% to 3% when you let everybody do it is still useful. If there are three other people in my residence hall who are on Twitter I want to know who they are, that�s great!
And the other thing that�s cool about that interface putting up the badges have become sort of a boy scout merit badge thing or people see like, �Oh wait, I only got two badges and you got all of these fun colors. What do I go to do to get the fun colors?� Like, �Oh I need a YouTube channel. Well, great!�
And you know that�s encouraging and I�ll just share more stuff but you�ll get all these RSS feeds, there�s tons of amazing, there�s a great ecosystem around RSS feed much of these is free really powerful tools. So Wisconsin-Madison is going to lunch next week to this and Wisconsin-Madison is they�re going to be able to download one OPML file of all the student published content at Wisconsin-Madison, right? Like could you think of anything fun to do with that? Because I think that�s amazing and they can do it in slices of course right?
They can do it in the marketing department in OPML feed. They can do it in this class OPML feed so they can take everything or little chunks however they want to do it. But once they have that OPML feed then they can do really neat things. This is postering used to be called 8 RSS, I think that�s the parent company now but this will go through automatically and figure out what posts are being read, what posts are being commented on, what posts are being more linked to and you can sort of tweak the variables and will filter through you got a thousand posts here are the top three.
And you can sort of figure out what�s your criteria the top three are. So now, in terns of getting user generated content you can take the whole everything that�s being developed and just grab the best post and post those wherever you want on the website. The way that the terms of service work with Red Rover is it says, �We�re anything that you link to us where there is RSS or whatever. You�re giving us permission to share it with other people because that�s the point of the system is to help you find an audience.
So we�re assuming that if you�re publishing it in public you want it to be read. We want to help you have it be read so then all we�re going to do is publish it. The only thing you can�t do is do anything that would violate their copyright or sell it so the terms of the service are really specific. We made no claim to any rights of anything you�re just giving us the example of that ability to distribute it visually. So Postering is a huge help and now you can get away from this model of paying five bloggers to be the official voice.
And you�ve heard a lot of times a number of times I�m sure at this conference about students can smell marketing and anything that has that veneer they don�t like and this is a way to get instead of paying a few people to do it you can just select� from the best that�s already out there. Another one I really like free tool Feedranch. You can do up to 500 feeds in this one. I don�t understand the business model they use to charge for a lot of feeds and now everything is free so I don�t know what world they�re living in and how long this is going to last but at the moment this is how it works.
And Feedranch is really cool because you could set up your variables, you could search by tag or keyword in the post. So if you were to go to the Physics Department and say, �Look, you�ve got an OPML feed of the Physics Department, if you�ve got a Quantum Research page we can give you the blog post there just about Quantum Research from your own people. And that can be a live little RSS to HTML is no big deal and that could be a badge on the side of that page and familiar trick you can also filter out any profanity.
They�ve got a great blacklist and so just as one check because that helps right if you�re going to automate this. Another RSS tool that I really like is MailChimp. This is a newsletter generator. A lot of people still want to read RSS feeds in their email so we�re seeing 20% click through rates.
There�s great data set with MailChimp. Its super cheap 30 bucks a month for up to 2,500 subscribers I think at the 10,000 it�s like 70 so even if you�re a big school it�s not a big deal. You could do this for a month and a half or two months at the beginning of school and see what the adoption rates are. I love setting up the RSS feeds, setting up the newsletter and then just watching the click through rates and if they go you can set alarms. So if they got onto 15% and you go on and you try to figure it out like, �Do we need to filter this feed better or is the content not good or what�s the problems we just kill it? You�re going to experiment very easily and very cheap. I really like Dipidy for RSS feed displays.
There�s a lot of talk about e-Portfolios and some schools are still buying and paying for big expensive e-Portfolios systems. Blogs are e-Portfolios. McCaughey is doing a really neat job of setting up all their RSS in New York, setting up all their students with blogs and they say to them, �Look, this is the museum of you,� which I love that analogy.� You�re going to curate your own history for the sake of sharing it with other people, right?
So it�s your best work and now you�re going to invite other people in so that they can experience your best and your history of how you get to where you are and this is a great way to display that because I got this little slider up here that I can do multiple years. If I were a first year student, I can go find a senior and back in their time line, back to what are the blogs that they were writing when they were me, right? Like they�re killing it now how did they get there? So going back to the alumni I could live an eight year record of my blogs and delicious and Twitter of entrepreneurialism to any student at the University of Oregon who wanted to be an entrepreneur. What an amazing record and I would happily will be so meaningful to me as an alumni to get an email from somebody that say, �Hey, I�m a first year student in Lawson Hall the same residence that you were in and I want to be an entrepreneur like you are.
And I read your LinkedIn profile and you did this that kind of thing and can you give me any recommendations of things I can do in Oregon�. Because I could give that kid advice that nobody at the school could do. �You have to meet that Wilson at Palo Alto Software. Tell him I sent you, buy him a cup of coffee and he�s going to hook you up�. That would really be meaningful to be able to leave my legacy out for other people to participate in.��� ��������������������������������
Audience 7: Can you do that, using the blogs as e-Portfolio and it�s been really successful blog adoption.
Kevin Prentiss: Yeah, a quick point on that and this. Google is the new resume. So if the student work is going in blackboard or going in a PDF as their portfolio, it�s gone, it doesn�t exist. If Google can�t find it, it doesn�t help them. I can easily get on a soapbox about this and I do it in a fairly regular basis.
If it wasn�t just misunderstood it would be unethical for schools to take four to five years of student work and never give it back. So graduating student is naked into the world and they have to start over. If we let them connect to these tools and we show them models of other successful students using these tools then they�ll have a blog that will have a YouTube channel. They�ll have a great digital identity that will help them form up your learning network when they�re in school and a job network when they�re ready to graduate so I think it�s a big, big opportunity.
Audience 8: One of the marketing strategies of Google they are resting is a lot of new students aren't aware of how far reaching it is and the speed. How do you warn them when they enter something like this that if you make this public, it's going to be made public for a long time. How do you tell that?
Kevin Prentiss: Yeah, I have this conversation a lot with faculty and staff for sure and I think the students know that it�s on their permanent record. But if so just for a moment, if you stood in front of a college class and said how many of you have camera phones? 95% of them would raise their hands. How many of you have video cameras on your phone? 20%, it will be 50% and 70% next year and in the following year.
Anything they take is going to go up online like in the hall 1984 Big Brother, we ran it we live it. And everything that they do is going to be photographed and videoed and put up online and so like be careful what you put online it�s like be careful when you go outside. It doesn�t mean anything to a student that is in that environment. So I think it�s time to move beyond �be careful� and move instead towards make a good use of it. Think of when we raise out kids, we don�t tell them, �Hey, stay in the basement and be careful what you ever say online or outside because it�s going to be held against you�.
We take them to a restaurant and we teach them how to behave in public and we say, �No, not quite that wasn�t it, try again,� and I think society is a whole that�s going to be more forgiving of a digital record there�s going to have to be. Anyhow, we got a bumpy little road to get there but with Google specifically they�re going to have awkward moments in Google. Let�s teach them to create a positive first impression and load those first three pages with good stuff and I think that�s a bigger opportunity than trying to tell them to keep it perfect because no one is.
And as we get more and more transparent that�s just going to be the way it is. The videos that came out from the dance party last night are a great example of that.
Audience 9: I would also argue that they�re already there. This is not starting something that isn�t already there. Yeah, we�re talking about already feeding RSS feeds. We�re already talking about pulling some other things. We�re talking Facebook. You�re talking Kenridge. You�re talking Party on the Dance Floor.
I mean seriously so it is a learning experience but we can start the fire so to speak and it is a learning experience how to pull that and it�s really, really obvious that employers one person they do they go to Google.
Kevin Prentiss: And this will be really neat as an employer. I would love to I would totally if a student came to me and said, �I�m interested in being the community manager for Red Rover,� and they had this that would close the deal instantly. �Whoa, what have you done lately? Whoa, that would be really great�. That would be so much useful than a resume to watch their video and read their blogs and see their comments.
Audience 9: We�ve actually on the flip side of that right so they go to Google and what you�re doing instead is you�re showing them digital work. We have them incorporate through our English courses to work on blogs they�re posting and it really does promote a lot of positive blog positive work out of Google and it really is a sweet packet deal just in terms of when they walk out. They have a portfolio of their stuff that�s not locked in Angels, not locked in Blackboard and that�s huge because they can take it away how many times. You got a project to work your heart on it and you�ll never see it again.
Kevin Prentiss: Yeah, another thing that I get really excited about is checking about this yesterday in terms of unleashing the fashion of the students that�s out there. It�s there, it�s totally there like the blogs and Twitter is there, that content is there but it�s a matter of bringing it together, right? The metaphor that really works for me, I don�t know if it�ll work for you but they�ll like food coloring in the ocean so it�s just disperses out and doesn�t really help anything. On Wisconsin-Madison, there are thousand kids that care about climate change. If we can bring them together to get rid ... at the water all the rest of the water and now that color is really dense and they can find each other and they can share content and they can get really intense.
And a great way in the same way that this conference got intense in a negative way in lunch when everything was feeding and like, �I�m mad too blah, blah, blah�, and then off they went, like a mob. Just imagine if you could do that about students that were like, �Yeah, I want to change other light bulbs on campus, me too blah, blah, blah�. And they get together and suddenly you have this like action which is engagement which is students getting off the wall which is more student leader stepping up to create this great records of successful models for other students to follow. When you�re in my position standing up in front of everybody, I�m sure you do it.
I talk and your listening and it ends up especially in the early morning it�s like some sleepy faces and it ends up like a one to many kind of thing. And if I said, �Turns your neighbor and talk the volume would go up massively because you don�t have something to say to your neighbor but its a little more and too many raise their hand�. Just think of that across your whole college campus. It�s the difference between sitting there like, �I don�t know I got a question�. And then you say something, �Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,� that may to many is just a better pedagogical model that we can do with the technology that is out there.
I�m sorry I feel like this is what happens when I don�t sleep enough is I rant [Laughter] other questions. Yeah, I�ll step down from the philosophical high horse.
Audience 10: I�ll just comment on what can State of Georgia blogs did. We kind of started doing some of that. We found that it actually raises the level of quality of student�s work.
Kevin Prentiss: Because they�re publishing for their peers, they care.
Audience 10: Because their professor is going to be reading it and all of their classmates they want to do a really good job because their peers are reading it. It�s sad that they�ll turn in into crap to a professor.
Kevin Prentiss: They�ll do what they can go away with.
Audience 10: And I�ll think about it and just do to their minimum.
Kevin Prentiss: Yeah.
Audience 10: What you posted online where people can comment on it and suddenly it�s like they�re knocking out of the park every single project.
Audience 9: Well yeah, because your peers will call you on it.
Audience 10: Exactly.
Audience 9: Boy that was a Lotus crap that we decided to submit. Try again.
Kevin Prentiss: Yeah, I think that�s a great comment for sure. One of things that we�re doing and this goes under hacking as well where faculty depending on the culture of the institution may or may not excited about using technology in their classroom. So, with the Folksonomy you can add any tag and we can take a tag via text message. So, in a class the students can just put a pound sign. We got two tags: the regular word and that�s an interest tag. If you out a pound sign in front of it as a hash tag, then it�s an action tag. So if they sent in #CRN123 whatever the class number is with a pound sign in front now they�re in a group automatically and they can get the OPML file to everybody else in that class or they can give the OPML file to just the people in their major in that class. And so that just creates a really neat used case that doesn�t require faculty.
So the message for your faculty is, �Look your students are going to send this text message and they�re all going to find out what they have common with each other and who likes what and what they should talk about the person sitting next to them�. And if you ant to go on and claim your class and read the OPML file you can, it�s totally available to you. They�re going to do it no big deal so super lightweight really I�d like that model a lot. I assume there�s some schools in here that are going to build their own stuff and I�m sure you guys are working on something. So I love the Folksonomy stuff that�s really worked. It�s out there use it for sure.