One-upsmanship (internet culture)

We're creating our own language here at Penn State.

Then again, people in groups together for any significant period of time do. Does anybody outside of Penn State understand the significance of "BS Breakfast"? Probably not: they'd take it for what it sounds like. Which was, of course, the intent. (BS here stands for "brainstorming," for those not in the know.)

"Language" may be an overstatement, but it's at least a code. You're "in" if you know what we're talking about.

I'm part of a lot of these communities with their own codes: Penn State TLT groupie (joke!) is just one of them. And acronyms are just part of these codes.

One community with a ton of community-made acronyms that I'm part of is BPAL enthusiasts (keep in mind, with the following links, that their aesthetic is quite dark--don't be shocked). Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab is a Los Angeles-based outfit that creates perfume oils, and it has its own parlance. GC (general catalog), LE (limited edition), CD (Carnaval Diabolique) and the like are pretty common to see in discussions on the topic, as is BPTP (Black Phoenix Trading Post, their sister company, which produces all their non-perfume oil goods).

Other communities of a sort are more based on quotes or references. The video Shannon posted yesterday contains a bunch of these. Whether or not you notice them depends on where you spend your time online. One of the first clips is a re-creation of the Numa Numa guy.   There's also "first!" (warning: expletives, immaturity), commonly seen in comments. See also: Internet Commenter Business Meeting (same warning applies, only way more so. plus offensiveness. plus . . . oh, nevermind--it's from College Humor, so you should expect as much), which is basically what would happen if a meeting was run like virtually any popular open forum online.

And, of course, if you haven't yet been hit by a Rick Roll, you haven't been online long enough, and you certainly haven't been taking a look all the way through my links. But that may be just as well, really.

Internet Memes (warning: too many warnings than I can list) attempts to collate all these references. It doesn't hit all of them, but it hits the highlights quite well.

And there's certainly some mocking of that communal language of references. An editorial in the New York Times today, Lord of the Memes, tells us that to be on the cutting edge, we need to be "not only an early adopter, but an early discarder." We should go through these products, services and references before anyone else and then get sick of them and dismiss them with disdain should anyone else bring them up. The article ends with "remember, cultural epochs come and go, but one-upsmanship is forever."

I didn't discover that editorial on my own. In a rare reverse-crossover reference--real life to online rather than the other way around--someone told me about it at lunch and I looked at it on my iPhone when the conversation waned. There's some irony there, believe me.

But this is connectivity. Or the cost of connectivity. Or the advantage of connectivity.

The point is, that too is part of your cultural education. So choose your influences wisely--they will become your references, and part of your language. Maybe I should be a bit more selective in mine. ;)

Facebook and recruiting, initial thoughts

Wish I had more time to address this today, but this one will have to be quick. Keep in mind most of this is supposition.

Sometime during their search, I bet students looking at colleges and universities are likely to tap into Facebook. While this is still theory, it's supported by others such as James Howell, in his entry a few days ago.

Unfortunately, right now I don't expect that Penn State Admissions will be headed in that direction just yet, despite the presentation I made this past spring at our Penn State Admissions conference. The basic gist of that presentation was a suggestion to use Facebook Pages rather than Groups or Profiles for an "official" presence there. The "fan of" dynamic is just easier to deal with. That aside.

So for those students who choose to take a quick peek via Facebook into the ins and outs of a university, they'll probably breeze through the groups, maybe take a look at some interesting people.

If I were to give some advice to that student, it would be: don't judge us by a quick run-through, by our more popular groups, or even by our more active students on Facebook, necessarily. Take a moment to search for faculty. Look through staff like advisers, if you can find them. Look through the clubs and organizations with an official presence there. And better yet, contact people. Ask the question you've been wanting to of that student leader, that professor whose department you're interested in, especially if they've been active recently.

The head of the Undergraduate Writing Center, Jon Olson, resisted getting onto Facebook for years. The peer tutors he works with created a "Get Jon Olson on Facebook" (or some such title) group. He finally relented recently and has been posting enthusiastically since: status, photos, even video.

It's a hurdle for faculty sometimes, but I think most of them find that it's super easy (and maybe even fun). But it does present some interesting quandaries: do I provide advising for the student that contacts me on Facebook, or do I refer her/him to email? That sort of thing. And while they all make their own decisions on that end, I would hope they would at least answer you. So reach out.

Social networks are for interacting, after all.

Geology and tech: the end is the beginning is the end

I think I prefaced over this last weekend that I wasn't going to have a theme with this entry in mind.

I started college as a geology major. Somewhat obviously, I didn't stick with it, but it's still a great interest of mine.

Some of you know and some of you don't that I have an MFA in Creative Writing. So a lot of my so-called "personal" reading is actually keeping up on that end of things for me.

And to combine both interests, I recently read Threshold, by Caitlin R. Kiernan. It's very much in a genre I used to write--a pseudo-magical realism, if magical realism in literature could be divorced from its Latin American roots (which it can't be, really). It starts out gritty, modern, and then wanders gently into science, myth, urban legend, and a particular superstitious nature you find in the south.

But my main point in addressing the experience of reading this book was the following passage, voiced by our narrator, Chance, who was in college as a geology major at the time:

"Can you think of anything else I could do with my life that could ever possibly be half this splendid, half this important? I'm learning to read, Deke, and not just the handful of things men have been around long enough to write down. The history of the whole damned planet is written in rocks, just lying there waiting for us to learn how to read the words." - p. 177

It's this urge that drives me, strangely enough, in my current work as well.

I'm learning to read in a larger sense than I've ever read so far. And to some extent this was an evolution: I did, after all, start on email quite awhile ago, then moved to forums, then Livejournal, then Blogger, then Facebook/MySpace, then Twitter, and Google Reader and the big feeds (Slashdot, BoingBoing, TechCrunch, Gizmodo, etc) got stuck in there somewhere too (and I may be skipping steps, of course: on the multimedia end, Flickr and YouTube are two examples, but I'm talking about text here, in the main).

But in terms of an educated and informed community that I can have face-to-face contact with and shares my academic/work interests, this is a first (which might be, I might add, because my college/grad work had little to do with technology). Not just casual friends giving updates on their lives, but I get a touch of friendliness and personality alongside the theory.

So I get these fantastic ideas as well as the context surrounding them: the problems that were faced to prompt them to come up with these ideas. It's good stuff.

But larger than that, and for a longer period of time, I've been learning to read people and their interaction with technology; learning to read the evolution of society due to technology's influence; learning to read how technology is changing our minds and changing our spaces.

I'm reading the future. I've already learned to read the past.

So between geology and tech, I feel like I've got the span of things.1 And while this current tech iteration is more minute than an atom in a drop in a bucket in terms of geologic time, it's monumental for us living in it.

And I get to read it. And better yet, write some of it.

[1]Oroboros.

Spend a Summer Day notes

Writing my first post-a-day blog post in August on my iPhone during gaps in a Spend a Summer Day.

SASD, as we know it and love it for short, is a day-long open house event held at all Penn State campuses. At Penn State University Park, due simply to demand, it's held on six days: every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday spanning two weeks, usually bridging July and August.

August 1st, incidentally, is also the day our new application for admission goes live. Given that and the fact that EVERYONE in the office helps during SASD (our Executive Director was running between the HUB and Schwab Auditorium on Monday trying to fix a problem), to say this time of year is stressful is an understatment.

I've been staffing our table at the information fair during the event pretty regularly so far, and I've noted a difference in style between me and some of my colleagues. Some colleagues push our brochures, despite all the information in a few of them being available online.

If I can make a generalization, these tend to be the older admissions folks who are more used to using the brochures. Others offer options: you could grab this AP brochure to see what credit you'd get for what score on which test, or you can look it up on our website. (for my own commentary, why waste the paper and cost us the money for four scores they could easily look up?)

I've also found that when I offer my AIM handle to students I'm talking to, they get super-enthusiastic. And even their parents start telling me I'm the last word in customer service: above and beyond and all that.

So while this doesn't affect the larger conversation of the newest modes of electronic communication, it does tell me that some folks are picking them up no problem (students, to generalize), some folks are slowly picking them up or recognizing their value (parents), and some folks will print out webpages if the brochure is discontinued (the non-technologically-savvy).

But the thing is, we have to serve them all. Penn State is committed to serving the Commonwealth, and any one of the above could either become a student here or at least interface with the University in some way.

So how do we serve all, even those not comfortable with technology?

I think the idea of engaging the early adopters is a good one (apologies that I don't remember who suggested it right now), and certainly paves the way to spreading the word in a grassroots fashion.

Something else I'd like to explore further, perhaps in a later post, is how technology can help us realize cost savings and green initiatives without leaving anyone behind, especially considering the widespread nature of Penn State's mission.

August challenge

Taking up Cole's challenge of a post a day for August, according to the rules outlined there. Me and Daniel and Shannon so far, as far as I've seen.

Love to say more on the matter, but I've got a meeting in a second here. One thing to share before I go: I'm reading Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations and also was fed a video of Shirky talking about his book by someone in my network (the section about flash mobs is especially engaging: "nothing says dictatorship like arresting people eating ice cream," for example).

And the commentary I'd like to add is that this is, to some extent, what we're doing. Someone has an idea, puts the call out there to see if anyone's interested, and people throw their hats into the ring, cooperatively arranging taxonomies (er, folksonomies, really) to tag and aggregate content, resulting in a pool of information and new ideas being created.

It's what I've seen in action growing slowly over a year, accelerated by the TLT Symposium and Twitter, sparked further by TweetMeets and BS Breakfasts and Bookclub, and burst into full flame (as far as I can tell) in Learning Design Summer Camp here at Penn State. And I'm convinced that this is the way to do it.

But it's happening this way (or similarly, at least) elsewhere: EduWeb happened recently, and people were Tweeting and videostreaming (alternate) and liveblogging sessions, and it was almost as good as being there, minus a significant amount of in-person networking and fun. But it can be done. I've been caught up in this plus Jeffrey Veen's idea of an audience ombudsman for conferences and trying to figure out how this works in purely-online communities.

And it really goes back to the idea of an alpha user, I think. But the thing is that we've got a bunch of them here at Penn State.

More to develop on this idea. But it will have to hold: I've got a meeting for our campus tour podcast project coming up.