July 2010 – Page 2 – Andrew Careaga

Checking in to Foursquare for higher ed

Since reading Tim Nekritz’s recent post about creating a campus presence on Foursquare, my head has been buzzing with thoughts about how to incorporate this platform into our campus’s social media efforts. I don’t necessarily have any solid ideas to share right now, but I thought I’d throw a few things out there that I’ve learned in the process of digging into this location-based social network.

Even though a few universities have created official outposts on Foursquare (like SUNY Oswego, thanks to Tim’s efforts), the platform is still largely uncharted territory for higher ed. According to aboutfoursquare.com, Harvard, Texas A&M and Stanford all have official Foursquare partnerships. A fourth campus, Cornell also appears to have a Foursquare partnership. (Thanks to @LoriPA for pointing out the Cornell site.)

The Harvard arrangement with Foursquare was picked up by Mashable last January. “The primary idea behind the collaboration,” Mashable reported, “is to encourage students to connect more with friends and professors through location-based game play, as well as to inspire campus visitors to explore the grounds and uncover tips or share to-dos.”

Even before the Harvard announcement, though, the auxiliary services department at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte announced it was using the platform “to spread dining services information and promotions to students, faculty, staff and campus visitors.”

So, what can a campus do with a Foursquare presence?

An aboutfoursquare.com post from a few weeks ago suggests that the platform is a natural for our highly mobile student populations. “Students are usually in close proximity to each other, so the hot spot where your friends are checking in is usually only a short walk away. Changing your mind as you see other friends at a different venue typically doesn’t require a long car ride.”

The article suggests a couple of ways campuses can take advantage of Foursquare to solidify relationships and build a sense of community:

By offering “tips” that highlight interesting or historical facts about campus buildings or other venues. Stanford’s site did a nice job with this for its Red Barn, posting: When a horse is trotting, do all four of its hooves leave the ground at the same time? Eadweard Muybridge answered that here, with his famed 1878 “horses in motion” photographs. Such tips can provide visitors a better sense of history about the institution.
By offering “specials” that reward users for checking in repeatedly. This is what UNC Charlotte’s auxiliary services is doing, and a coffee shop on our campus is doing something similar (offering a free coffee with every 10 check-ins). But as Tim points out in his blog post, it’s tough to provide much in the way of specials if you don’t have a budget.

The aboutfoursquare.com article provides a good primer on getting started on Foursquare. But if you want a broader perspective on geotagging platforms in general (since Foursquare isn’t the only game in town), check a series of posts by Tim Nekritz from earlier this year (parts 1, 2, 3 and 4). Another good resource is Shane Haggerty’s 10 suggestions for using Foursquare in educational marketing. And if you want to find out where the hot spots are on your campus for several geotagging platforms (including Foursquare), check out Checkin Mania.

One of the latest Foursquare innovations is the ability for subscribers of official Foursquare sites to add “layers,” or tips from third-party sources that Foursquare users could subscribe to. This recent ReadWriteWeb article discusses how two online organizations — the Independent Film Channel and the Huffington Post — are using Foursquare to push tips for people who want to see locations the way these organizations and their fans choose to annotate information. This idea of “location as platform” could open new possibilities for colleges and universities.

Is your campus doing anything with Foursquare? If so, I’d like to know about it. Please leave a note in the comments below.

Introducing danah boyd

In many social media circles, danah boyd is a woman who needs no introduction. Next Thursday, I get to introduce her to attendees of danah’s social media practices master class, presented by HigherEdExperts.com.

This masterclass — officially titled “Embracing a Culture of Connectivity: Understanding the Social Media Practices of Young Adults” — offers a rare chance to hear from one of the leading social media researchers of our time. And from what I’ve heard and read, she’s also one of the most engaging presenters on social media.

(If you haven’t yet signed up for this master class, better hurry. Registration closes next Tuesday, July 12.)

danah (@zephoria on Twitter) is probably best known for her 2008 Ph.D. dissertation, Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics (PDF). That dissertation provides some revealing insights into how teens essentially lifehack via social networks to navigate their adolescence. I hope she shares some of those insights with us next Thursday.

I also hope danah delves into her latest project, a literature review on risky behavior and online safely. She recently released for public feedback a draft of that research, and Boing Boing followed up by posting an excerpt from the document:

Concerns about online predators are pervasive, but the image that most people hold doesn’t necessarily match with the data about sexual crimes against minors. For starters, the emphasis on what takes place online tends to obscure the fact that most cases of sex crimes against children do not involve the Internet at all. As we seek to help youth who are victims, we must continue our efforts to address victimization in the home and in the community; addressing Internet- initiated victimization alone will not help the vast majority of children who are victimized. When facing interventions to address Internet-initiated victimization, we must be attentive to research that highlights that some youth are more at-risk than others. Youth who have psychosocial issues, family and school problems, and those who are engaged in risky behaviors are far more likely to be victimized than the average youth using the Internet. Targeting those who are more at-risk will allow us to help more youth. Research also suggests that most youth who are victimized are not deceived about the abuser’s age, do discuss sex online before meeting up offline, and are aware of the abuser’s sexual intentions when they decide to meet them. These youth often believe that they are in love and have no mental model for understanding why statutory rape is a crime. In order to help these youth, we cannot focus solely on preventing adults from engaging with youth; we must also help youth recognize that these encounters are abusive before they occur.

While the Internet has affected the contours of bullying and harassment, research continues to emphasize the interplay between what occurs online and what takes place offline. Many of the same youth are susceptible to victimization and those who engage in online bullying are not wholly distinct from those who bully offline. While much research is still needed to stabilize definitions and measurements, there is little doubt that bullying is prevalent both online and offline, affecting all communities even if it doesn’t affect all individuals. We need interventions that get at the root of bullying, regardless of where it takes place. Because research consistently shows a connection between psychosocial troubles, family and school issues, and bullying, we cannot presume that parents are always equipped or present to intervene (and may in fact be part of the problem). Although countless programs have been developed to educate kids about bullying, far too little is known about the effectiveness of these programs. Finally, what happens online is more visible to adults, but we cannot assume that the most damaging acts of bullying are solely those that we are able to witness.

I’m looking forward to hearing what danah has to say next week. I’m also very honored that my friend Karine Joly asked me to introduce danah.

P.S. – My Caps Lock key is not broken. danah boyd intentionally writes her name in all-lowercase letters, so I’m sticking with her preference.

Envisioning tech’s future: the kids are all right

Update, July 11, 2010: Part II of this study — on creation, design and digital optimism — was posted on July 8.

Kids these days. They want their computers to know what they’re thinking, display images in 3-D holographs, and convert images of food into the real thing.

Um, come to think of it, those are all pretty good ideas.

"I'd like it if my computer could convert images of food and make them real." - Joanna, Age 10 — *I'd like it if my computer could convert images of food and make them real. - Joanna, Age 10*

Those and other brainchildren of kids ages 12 and under are reported in this summary (PDF) of recent research by Latitude Research and ReadWriteWeb. In this study, researchers asked kids to illustrate their “future requests” for computer and web technologies. The results were innovative — I really like the idea of turning on-screen images of food into the real thing — but also, according to RWW’s report, “surprisingly down-to-earth.” Only 4 percent of the ideas were beyond the realm of possibility for today’s developers.

Even bigger than the practicality of the ideas was the possible shift it signals in the future of technology.

“For kids today,” RWW reports, “true synchrony between physical and digital worlds is becoming an expectation rather than a novelty. And the demand for it is expanding beyond the realm of visual media.” What’s more, says Jessica Reinis, who headed up the study, the future of technology could be “a shift from smartphones that can go anywhere to The Internet of Things which is everywhere.”

The two opportunities cited in the study’s summary document offer some insight into how today’s educators may need to adjust for these future college students. Those opportunities are:

Create Action, Not Just Information. “[T]oday’s kids will continue to break down the digital-physical divide. This generation will expect to use realtime technologies that anticipate and assist action; they will demand more applications for The Internet of Things (when objects are connected to the Internet via RFID tags, sensors and barcodes), optimized for everyday life.” Institutions of the future “will need to reach beyond merely delivering information to sensing and organizing information — then converting it to intelligent action automatically.”
Offer True Interactivity. The technology and media developers of tomorrow “should construct ways for people to interact not just with the technology but with the actual story being told through the device.”

These two points are opportunities indeed for higher education. Will we seize them?

The Influence Project? Not so fast, Fast Company

A couple of weeks ago, I was contacted by one of the people who run the @FastCompany Twitter account. The message was to let me know that I’d been chosen to be participate in something called The Influence Project. In a follow-up email, the @FastCompany person described The Influence Project as “a visual experiment … that will purely track how influence spreads via digital word-of-mouth.”

“You are one of the first people in the mix.”

Moi? I, who didn’t get a Google Wave invitation until a month after everybody else? I finally get to be among the vanguard?

This must be some joke.

But wait. There’s more. Quoth the silver-tongued FastCompany dude:

You embrace your community and you’ve created a loyal group of people that love to hear what you have to say and that you enjoy engaging with as well. You are an influencer and we want you to be part of this.

Oh, I am so in.

Today, the project went live. A tutorial on the project provides a little more context:

What the Influence Project aims to do is remove some of the mystery behind the inherent passivity of social network numbers. This experiment will show what happens when an individual takes an audience at rest and applies an unbalanced force–through suggestion, advice or direction–that converts it into an army of action. That’s power that can be quantified and lead to an understanding that can be applied to both the largest and smallest of networks. No doubt it’s profound to address a million followers and get 100,000 of them to respond. But what does it mean when you have one hundred friends on Facebook and 97 of them click through to a site on your recommendation?

The clicks and networking and connectivity (out to six degrees!) collected in this experiment will provide a compass for where real influence lies on the Internet. It’s something I’m sure every business is curious to know more about. I also think it’s a powerful bit of awareness for anyone who wants to know who in their network is fully engaged with them.

So, my ego leading the way, I signed on.

Then I read Amber Naslund‘s post this morning, which takes Fast Company to task for confusing the idea of influence with ego. “This isn’t influence,” shewrites. “This is an ego trap and a popularity contest, pure and simple. There’s no goal other than click pandering. Already, Twitter is full of people shouting ‘click on my junk!’ and flooding my stream and countless others with nothing more than clamoring for…well…validation. … Influence is NOT jumping up and down, begging for people to click on stuff so that they, too, can find the gatekey for their own path to feeling important in the online fishbowl.”

Maybe something better than click pandering will come out of this. But I’m afraid, on first glance, that Amber may be right.

Update, July 7: TechCrunch also calls out FastCompany on this project, calling it a creative combination of link baiting and a pyramid scheme and pointing to a 2008 FastCompany article that says influence doesn’t exist.

The value of failure

One of the most important lessons from Charlene Li’s book Open Leadership — and one that I failed (so to speak) to address in last Friday’s post about the book — is the idea that it’s OK to fail. This is one of the most valuable lessons from the book, and one that risk-averse institutions like colleges and universities ought to embrace.

“Success,” Winston Churchill said, “is the ability to go from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” Li quotes Churchill in her chapter on the value of failure (Chapter 9, “The Failure Imperative”), and points out that “by mastering failure, [leaders] create an environment in which risk taking is encouraged and recovery from failure becomes a skill that everyone in the organization possesses.”

Li then poses a question that is key for higher education:

In your organization, how important is it for people to be risk takers, to be innovators? If initiative and innovation are key to your future success, then you need to take a long hard look at how you personally create trust and approach failure, because it will be reflected back in the culture that you create.

Colleges and universities tend to be mainly conservative, cautious institutions. Not many of our leaders got to where they are by taking huge risks in their careers. And so, the culture that rewards a cautious approach is not likely to reward risk takers — especially if they fail.

So where does that leave us who fall in the middle of the org charts and who aspire to be the open leaders Li talks about? I think it leaves us to take risks and give those who report to us as many opportunities to take risks as we can. We should not discourage risk-taking simply because we are in a culture that rewards caution. Moreover, we should learn to practice the art of forgiveness. To those in our organizations who take risks and fail, we should ask: “What did you (we) learn? How can this help us in the future?”

We should also take a cue from Google, which has a motto — “Fail fast, fail smart” — that would be a nice one to adopt in higher ed.

Li writes about one spectacular failure at Google in which one VP’s error cost the company millions of dollars. When the VP told Google co-founder Larry Page about the costly mistake, Li recounts, Page told her: “I’m so glad you made this mistake. Because I want to run a company where we are moving too quickly and doing too much — not being too cautious and doing too little. If we don’t have any of these mistakes, we’re just not taking enough risk.”

When was the last time you heard an administrator in higher ed say something like that? Perhaps soon, we’ll hear more of that kind of talk amid the halls of the academy.

Let’s make it happen. Let’s follow Google’s motto to “Fail fast, fail smart.” That would be a win.