Education

I spent Monday and Tuesday this week participating in the “Upgrade to Digital” workshop at the brand spanking new Boulder Digital Works at CU facility in downtown Boulder, a bleeding-edge training program to teach advanced creative, tech, and business digital-media skills. (Disclaimer: I attended on a free pass since I’m working on building a digital-media initiative for CU’s Journalism & Mass Communication School.)

What was especially great about the experience was that the workshop was run by Scott Prindle and Joe Corr, VP/director of technology and senior technical lead, respectively, of Crispin Porter & Bogusky, the white-hot ad agency with offices here in Boulder and in Miami. Other CPB personnel also floated in and out (plus other special guest presenters), so attendees were treated to being taught, and critiqued, by ad agency rock stars.

Since I’m focused on the news industry and its transformation, I had a different perspective than most of the other workshop participants; I was thinking of how what we were seeing and learning could be adapted and/or applied to news (from digital techniques, to business models, to technology). In this and perhaps more blog entries, I’ll share a few take-aways from the last two days, as viewed through my news-colored glasses.

1. It’s the utility, stupid! Those companies savvy enough to be on the digital forefront (enough so that they’re spending money with CPB) are experimenting with smart-phone apps and web applications that emphasize utility for the customer, not just trying to get a brand message across. A phone example is Nike’s Nike+ running shoe with an embedded chip that communicates data with Nike+ on an iPhone (or iPod). There’s a website and social training community built around the product and its personal data from you, so that you can do stuff like time yourself time on a specific route, then compare it to a friend who runs the same route at a different time — a virtual competition. The phone and online components are meant to sell Nike+, certainly, but they provide the Nike+ customer with a great training log and social tool. It’s not just about selling, but improving the shoe buyer’s life. Utility.

Apply this to news: When developing mobile apps, think utility, not just presenting news. An app that keeps track of local road construction projects and finds re-routes around them could be handy for local commuters, for example. It might be introduced one time to accompany a big story about all the local road projects under way due to the federal stimulus money coming into the community — but it could be used by commuters and residents long term, and re-marketed each time there’s another road-construction and traffic-delays story.

On the web, CPB presenters showed us their NCAA Final Four Bracket-o-matic Flash project created for Coca-Cola Zero. (Link is to video.) The idea was to make the NCAA basketball championship grid easy to fill out; instead of picking teams and inputing them into the grid based on who you think will win, there’s a series of sliders along the top that fills out the grid based on 8 variables that you adjust.

What struck me about this was the thin line between a soda company doing this vs. a news company producing the same sort of thing and selling advertising around it. The Bracket-o-matic would feel OK as an editorial online feature. Again, it provides utility as well as fun. Why did an advertiser do it and not a media company? Coca-Cola had the money to pay CPB to create it; most news companies don’t have the technical chops to pull something like this off.

More take-aways later. … Off to a meeting now…

If you’ve been to a media conference lately, you know that it’s increasingly common for audience members to be posting to Twitter during speeches and panels. At the Online Journalism Symposium at the University of Texas recently, during a panel I was chairing, not only were some audience members tweeting about the panel, so was one of the panelists when she wasn’t speaking!

Yesterday I was on a long car ride with a buddy who’s interested in educational technology, and we were bouncing around ideas, including how to leverage social tools online and using mobile devices. I don’t know if some educators haven’t already tried this, but here’s an experiment we devised using Twitter:

• Pick a day when your class has a guest speaker.
• Ask all the students to take notes by posting to Twitter (laptop or cell phone).
• Each tweet-note should have common hashtag (e.g., #123notes).
• Because of Twitter’s 140-character limit (including the hashtag), students will be forced to boil down the speaker’s points to their essence.
• And, of course, clue in your speaker so he/she knows why the students are glued to their phones and laptops!

Here’s why this could be a beneficial classroom experiment:

• Any individual student taking notes or just listening to a speaker will retain only a percentage of what’s been presented. Some will pick up and remember more than others.
• With all the students taking Twitter notes, the resulting stream of tweets (in my example, http://twitter.com/#123notes) will document more of the speaker’s ideas and thoughts than any one student could record on his/her own.
• Students can review the tweet stream later to get a better understanding of what was said — reading about points that might have gone over their heads, or that they missed in a moment of lost concentration.
• Those who missed the class can still get a pretty good idea of what was presented.
• Students can even tweet among themselves (using the hashtag) so there’s a side-channel conversation going on.

I think this is a technique that could actually enhance the amount of information retained by a room of students listening to a speaker. Has anyone tried this? If not, how about it?

It’s one of those thoughts I can’t believe hasn’t crossed my mind till now. (Though I’m certain it’s not original.) But I just noticed that lots of journalism schools at universities are still called the “School of Journalism and Mass Communication.”

Don’t you think it’s about time that they all get rid of the unneeded and outdated word “Mass”?

After all, it’s the “mass” part — the old news industry model of one-to-many — that is fast being usurped by the many-to-many and social model that is so much a part of the digital world that journalism is transitioning to.

I’m not sure they need to replace Mass with another word; just remove it. “School of Journalism and Communication” fits today’s media reality.

To the many journalism schools that still have “Mass” in their names, why is it still there?