mamamusings: conferences

minitex conference keynote

I gave a keynote this morning at the Minitex ILL Conference in St. Paul, and I've uploaded the powerpoint file to Slideshare. Unfortunately, Slideshare doesn't show transitions, so a number of the slides are messed up where I have multiple images that aren't supposed to be on the screen at the same time, but if you go to the Slideshare page for the presentation there's a link to download the original .ppt file.

(Since you can't hear my actual talk, I need to acknowledge that the "happiness" slides are shamelessly stolen from Jane McGonigal's recent talk on gaming and happiness. :)

yes, i gave my talk in costume

I’ll post the slides tonight or tomorrow, but thanks to the wonderful Flickr-using librarians who attended my talk last week, you can see my attempt to recreate one of my World of Warcraft characters on stage.

Here’s the character, featured on my opening slide, courtesy of David King:

And here’s me in costume, courtesy of Steven Kaye:

ala gaming and libraries: thom gillespie

Thom’s talk is on “why we shouldn’t take serious games seriously.” He starts with some great stories about his experiences with how giving people the ability to create media changes everything. The stories don’t translate well from his conversational style to the blog, so I’m not going to try to include them here, other than to say that they’re pretty compelling anecdotes about the power of participatory media. I’m reminded of how critically important stories are.

Talks about moving from the library school to the telecom dept at Indiana because the library school simply didn’t get fun and entertainment.

Studying games is not reading some critical analysis of a game—it’s playing the game. Play first, talk/analyze afterwards. You can’t critically analyze a film without watching the film. He brings students to his house to eat and play games—he provides food, they provide the games. Board games, card games, things that allow real socializing during play.

Shows a picture of people playing DS games, where they don’t even talk—compared to the board games where they’re interacting constantly. (“Like a room full of Trappist monks bent over their texts…”)

Nothing inhibits the design of any game more thana room full of computers. The most important thing is a big table, with paper and scissors and markers and tape.

Lots of great examples of how he teaches game design—mostly at his house. :)

Must go prepare for my talk. (And yes, I’ll post the slides when I’m done.)

msr faculty summit: information access, privacy, and confidentiality: challenges and opportunities

Came in a little late, and Eric Horvitz is giving examples of how data mining your own activity (driving patterns, for example) can provide useful predictive services. (“Going to the airport? There’s a backup on I-5 South.”)

Users should control their ow data mines. There should be a shroud of privacy between your local private data and other systems. Context and additional content can come from outside, but personal data and resulting predictive models should be inside.

Notes that what’s offensive and intrusive changes over time. In the 1800s, “rapid photography” was intrusive, and in the 1920’s a ringing phone intruded into the private sanctity of the home. Shows some research they’ve done on people’s preferences about sharing what with whom. What kinds of information are treated similarly? Currently working on privacy preferences and tradeoffs with web services. What’s the biggest “bang” you can get for the personal data “buck”?

Value has a diminishing returns (submodular) curve, while the cost is an accelerating curve (supermodular). Can combine those to find the “sweet spot”—where should you stop asking about information because it will make people uncomfortable and not give you much of an increase in value?

Shows the survey they used about how much people are willing to share—I actually took this survey about 3 weeks ago. I wonder about the generalizability of this data, though, since the target survey population was very tech-savvy folks, many of whom are well aware of how much information is already stored about them. Notes that there is a rise in “preference and intention machines” that balance risk and benefit.

Next up, Tadayoshi Kohno from Univ of Washington. Talks about what privacy “actually means.” Starts with dictionary definitions. Argh. I hate it when my students do this. It’s too much of a cliched presentation opening.

One response people have is “privacy is dead, deal with it.” Also “I’ve got nothing to hide.” (I hear this a lot from my students.) And users often choose improved functionality over privacy (for example, customer loyalty cards).

On the other hand, some people say that privacy is critical. When people hear about privacy breeches, this can (temporarily) change their views. For example, the AOL search log controversy, the implementation of Facebook news feeds.

Shows a news article showing that loyalty card details have been used in some court cases (eg divorce cases). [that would be a nice example to use in my class]

Who’s responsible for protecting private info? The data collector? The user?

Ends with “privacy is not dead, just complicated.”

[There are more speakers, but I’m tired of transcribing…]

Oh, great line from an MSR researcher whose name I didn’t catch (will fill it in later): “Privacy is a non-renewable resource.”

msr faculty summit: using social relevance to enhance CS

John Nordinger talks about the fact that they’ve used gaming to reinvigorate CS curricula, but are concerned that some are being left behind with that. So they’re starting to think about socially relevant curricula to broaden the appeal further. Many schools are still seing a precipitous decline in enrollments, and this is one possible solution.

Shows a graph of enrollment that’s quite grim. It’s not just the already known problem of few women, but men are declining as well. Becoming an issue of national competitiveness, as well. Asian PhDs are growing rapidly, ours are declining. Our internet use is still top, but growing at 2%/year, while China (currently #2) is growing at 20%/year.

What do they mean by “socially relevant”? What’s socially relevant to girls that are sophomore, juniors, seniors in high school. (I’d argue relevant to middle school, which is closer to where we lose them.) It can be “top down,” like global warming, AIDS, etc. Students are influenced by media—both online and broadcast/print. But also bottom-up relevance…what is relevant to them now, and how can we make computers/programming more compelling to them? (Programming their own Facebook apps, for example. Tools for personal finance, shopping, etc.)

How can we make CS more compelling to people not currently drawn to the field? How can we engage a new crop of students and make them feel good not only about what they make/contribute, but also about computing generally.

John hands off to Devika Subramian (Rice).

She says “Where have all the freshmen gone?” has become our new theme song in CS.

Where are the “defectors” going? To other branches of science and engineering. Why? They see CS curriculum as very narrow. CS = programming. Computing for its own sake is unappealing. They foresee a “Dilbertian” future as ‘programmer cogs’. They see BioE and EE as offering more opportunity to have an impact on RL problems. CS is seen as the plumbing, rather than the idea side of the process. It’s perceived as a support or overhead function, as opposed to a mainline/value-generating function.

The price of our sucess is that ubiquity of computers make them fundamentallyless interesting as an object of study. This generation of students is very entrepreneurial. But our current CS curricula doesn’t prepare them for recognizing and leveraging business related opportunities related to computing. (So why doesn’t MSR bring MIS and IT faculty to these events? We’re the ones who do know this…)

We have, for the most part, let outsiders define who we are. We need to let people know that we are more than just programmers. So, what message can we send?

• A place where a small group of people can still make revolutionary advances in all areas of society (Microsoft, Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, eBay, etc)
• The primary technological enabler for solving real-world problems; creating needs and meeting them. [hmmm. creating needs??]

What is socially relevant computing? It is computing for a cause, for a purpose. For example: “can we evacuate Houston in 72 hours?”; “can we predict the efficacy of a cancer drug for patiens by using their genomic and proteomic profiles?” It is computing that meets a need in some context—-how can computation help me organize my music, my thoughts? It embeds the study of ocmputer science in the context of society.

Provides some examples of existing curricula that do this, but says we can do much more. Describes how Rice is offering a new CS1/CS2 course this fall in conjunction with Civil & Env Eng and Poli Sci, with support from the City of Houston, to buld computational tools for planning the city’s response to major hurricanes.

Shows a really nicely done video that advertises a bioengineering course at Rice called “Bioengineering and World Health.” Why don’t we have this kind of compelling course and marketing material in all of our CS curricula? What would that look like? Mentions the “Threads” curriculum at Georgia Tech, and the Chicago Math Spiral Approach. (I’ll add links later.)

Now on to Mike Buckley from Univ of Buffalo. They’re overhauling their CS1 and CS2 and capstone classes, as well as their labs. Why do students overwhelmingly go into social science in greater numbers than CS?

He looked at four textbooks, and shows the inane examples that they use. Counting donuts. Counting puppies. Constructing ducks. It’s embarassing. Newspapers, however, are a better source of examples. What’s the #1 cause of firefighter deaths, for example? Heart attacks. So he used that example as a focal point for the CS1 curriculum that year (would like more information on this; he’s very vague, constrained on time—but he’s close enough to set up a visit when I get back to rochester).

How can we attract non-traditional CS students—including students at academic risk, and those with behavioral problems?

They build a research lab where students could investigate problems outside of their coursework. They use non-traditional ancillary materials, and draw on expertise outside of the classroom.

For the first month, they teach dsign and modeling. How programmers view the world. Problem spaces vs solution spaces. “The Dream Curve”. Their labs and example problems have a societal emphasis. They talk about “The Tao of Engineering”: ritualists, pessimists, travelers.

Makes his freshmen read The Tao of Pooh, the Design of Everyday Things, Buddhism Plain and Simple, Neutral (about a 14yo with CP). [oooo…so cool!] No puppies and ducks, but modeling distribution of pollution in the great lakes. random numbers, they use the Princeton Egg simulation for predicting the future.

They study the Therac-5, the Hubble deformity, the Denver Airport baggage system, and other engineering errors.

His capstone students work with the severely disabled, building systems that help real people. Shows wonderful, inspirational examples. (All static photos, though. He totally needs videos about this!!)

msr faculty summit: bill griswold on 'community on the go'

Bill Griswold’s presentation is actually entitled “Community on the Go: The Quest for Mobile 2.0”. I’m trying to ignore the “2.0” buzzword usage.

He claims web 2.0 is “democracy on the internet,” or “democracy made possible on the internet,” which I find a bit of a stretch. The audience here, I have to remember is very traditional CS faculty—not, for the most part, people who live in today’s web services world. So he’s giving a pretty basic overview of “look! my mom can comment on my photos” and “this is what we call a ‘mashup’.” What are dangers, he asks…”noise, misinformation, you can’t escape your past.” Those are no different from physical space he says (I’d disagree, particularly on the last item).

I suspect I’m not going to learn much here, but this might be a good presentation to point some of my less web-savvy colleagues towards.

Mobile 2.0 is Web 2.0 everywhere, all the time. However, it’s in a “divided attention” context. What kind of democracy do you get in a divided attention context, he asks. (Well, our students are already dividing their attention, even at a larger screen. It’s a reality, not a possiblity.)

The web experience is incomplete, he says. (Andy Phelps is typing on his iPhone next to me right now, and raises his eyebrows, flashing me the quite-complete Safari browser he’s looking at.)

He talks about hardware shortcomings, but most of what he’s talking about is a short-term problem (processor speed, graphics capability, short battery life).

Says Twitter is “Mobile 1.5”. Makes some claims that I wonder about…”most Twitters come from the web”, for example. That’s exactly the kind of research I’d like to do. Most people generalize about Twitter based on their and their social network’s use of the tool.

Where we could really be in mobile 2.0 is “augmenting the real-world commons.” Adds the idea of “microtasking,” “proactivity” (where your phone lets you know that you should be paying attention to something), “context awareness,” “in situ computing,” and “public displays.”

Added dangers—trying to sip from a fire hose, the stalking aspect of context awareness. (Leaves out corporate “stalking” and data gathering; do we really want Google, or AT&T, to be able to track our every move?)

In the microtasking discussion, he makes some claims about Flickr (compared to the Dropshots) he shows that I think are incorrect—for example that Dropshots organizes photos by date, but Flickr only gives you a linear flow. In fact, Flickr has many ways to view photos, many pivot points (including day, date, month, year, tag, etc).

Talks about “in situ computing” in the context of his active classroom work. Allowed students to ask questions anonymously in a backchannel (his work on active classroom is great…one of the best quotes I’ve heard about backchannels was his line that it “prioritizes the question, not the questioner.”) Love, love, love what he’s doing with the use of mobiles and SMS in this context. Great stuff. They’ve got an “ActiveCampus Explorer” for the mobile that looks very cool. Campus map, local chat/messaging, etc.

Discusses some context aware apps they’ve been working on—for example, location-based reminders. (e.g. When I get home, remind me to call my Mom.) What if you could leave annotations related to a place (“this restaurant has great hot cocoa”) for a specific person, or a group of people connected to you—and they’d see it only if/when they went to that place, or searched for notes related to that place. This is the kind of mobile app I’m really fascinated by. They studied this, and found that people used location as a proxy for other concepts (busy/not busy). Found that it calmed people—“it was a relief knowing I would be reminded.” Interesting, and relates to the whole David Allen “open loop” concept.

Proactivity—-augmenting peripheral perception. They used something called “PeopleTones”, which played a friend’s unique sound when s/he is nearby. First problem is detecting proximity reliably using celltower triangulation. The second is conveying the alert unobtrusively; they use da short personal sound clip and vibration. Two novel vibration encoding algorithms were used (“think microMorse code”). Nature sounds were not effective for identifying who it was, but music was very effective (whether music was chosen by self or target). Even though they expected music to be more disruptive, they found that users found it more helpful than annoying. Even if they didn’t act on the knowledge, they “liked to know” that someone was nearby. (This is important. Ambient presence. He notes, and I agree, that this is also the appeal of Twitter.)

“When I was going to Bob’s birthday, I know who was there when I pulled up because of the ringtones.”

“I could tell if Melissa was home when I passed by Claremont.” (Hmmm…that definitely brings up the stalking question!)

Mashup idea that came out of this: Mashup PeopleTones with Place-Its (“pounce” on someone you need to talk to about something).

(Note to self…talk to Kevin Li about this later this week; he’s an intern at MSR this summer.)

Moves on to the topic of “community-based context awareness”—what if everyone carried a carbon dioxide sensor that coud report atmospheric conditions and report them to a central server so that aggregate information was available. (Hmmm…this seems like it would be awfully easy to game if you were an unethical industry person. Coudln’t you spam inaccurate information intentionally?)

Also discusses “RealityFlythrough“—multiple cameras viewing the same scene, stitched together into a single immersive coherent view (basically video Photosynth, it sounds like). Really interesting idea/demo.

returning home from gls

Lane and I are on our way back from Madison, where we just attended the Games, Learning & Society conference. Lane spoke on two panels, I spoke on one, and we both had a great time.

Thursday night, my guild had a RL meetup and WoW-playing session in a lab on the UW campus. We crammed about 20 not entirely sober people into the room, and much hilarity ensued. Lane was with us, and when Gerald called to see what we were doing Lane hesitated and said “Well, it’s not exactly a conference activity.” Indeed. :)

Lane did amazingly well on both of his panels…he’s a natural, and enjoyed it enough that he wants to go back next year and speak again. (So, if you’re looking for an articulate and technically-savvy teen to speak at your conference, let me know..) I didn’t get photos of him, alas (poor planning on my part, but the folks from Global Kids got at least one.

I had a good time on our “Families Who Game Together” panel, and an even better time taking part in a mock trial (of World of Warcraft, for being “bad” to a teenager) that Ted Castronova ran during his fireside chat session on Friday.

My biggest takeaway from the conference was the strong sense that there is not yet a reliable and authoritative source of good information on video games and gaming for parents—especially parents who aren’t gamers themselves. That’s something I want to try to address this fall. The Lab was already planning to start running educational seminars on social networking software (like Facebook and MySpace) for the Rochester community this year; we can easily add gaming to those plans, and also work on creating an online resource (along with the other faculty in our game design & development program). Seems like a promising direction for looking for funding, as well. :)

For now, Lane and I are resting comfortably in the Northwest WorldClubs lounge at MSP. Well worth the $85 for a two-month membership. Free wifi for both our computers saves us $20 right away. Free wine and snacks saves us another $20. And having a comfortable place to sit where it’s quiet and there are ample power outlets during our three hour layover? Well, that’s priceless.

supernova 07: clay shirky's "provocations"

Clay starts by showing a photo of a Shinto shrine that has been rebuilt exactly many times over 1300 years. UNESCO won’t certify it as a 1300-year-old building—because it has been rebuilt over and over again. This is an example of them prioritizing “solidity of edifice, not solidity of process.”

He then compares it to a conversation fifteen years ago with AT&T, trying to convince them that Perl was an appropriate tool for development. When asked where the support came from, he responded that “we get our support from a community”—which to them sounded a bit like “we get our Thursdays from a banana.”

Money quote on this from Clay: “They didn’t care that it didn’t work in practice, because they’d already decided it didn’t work in theory.”

Perl, he says, is a Shinto shrine. It exists because people love it and care for it.

Best line of the day: Our tools turn love into a renewable building material.

Best predictor of longevity for anything—do the people who like it take care of it?

Linux gets rebuilt every night, by people who don’t want it to wither away.

Until recently, the radius and half-life of our affection has been limited. In the past, little things could be done with love, but big things required money. Now, big things can be done with love.

Later in the discussion, Clay says the communication process (Delphi, etc) is a kind of a mcguffin. The bringing people together and getting them to talk to each other is the important piece. Denise argues that “the process needs to come to a conclusion that gives the decision maker what they need to make a decision” (and that they resolve conflict).

An audience member asks if there is there social software we can deploy to fix problems with cross-cultural communication snafus? Denise: “Expedia.” (nice)

supernova panel on "virtual life or virtual hype?"

Raph Koster leads off, saying that “3D is a red herring,” and that most of the people in virtual worlds at this point are playing games.

Rueben Steiger from “millions of us” says that “people like 3D environments,” that we “think in 3D” and thus the 3D internet is inevitable. The numbers now aren’t important, he claims.

Clay Shirky says that the aspect to look at is game vs non-game. Games have led the way in adoption of virtual worlds. We’re not headed towards general purpose virtual worlds, but rather towards specific implementations for specific purposes, and games are a prime example of that.

Raph points out that 3D, 2D, text is not the issue. (“It’s all bullshit. It’s irrelevant.”) We’ve had text-based vws for a long time. If there isn’t stuff TO DO, people go away. If there is stuff TO DO, they stay. If there isn’t something useful TO DO, that’s unique to that environment, it won’t work. (Chat won’t keep people in VWs, for example.)

(This seems to me to be very accurate for adults, perhaps not as much so for kids.)

Rueben claims that SL is a game, because life is a game. It’s just a really really broad game. The inflection point for user adoption is around 3.5 hours…before that, attrition is high, after it’s low. Funneling people to compelling content doesn’t do it. Having them meet people does.

Clay says “I’ve never in my life bet against the users.” The users are getting left behind by SL. The attrition both short and long term is significant. He says that games are cognitively special, and that game-like situations cannot be trivially imported into work (or the reverse).

Rueben says that registered users isn’t the important statistic, it’s number of hours of system use…which has been going up.

Raph calls bullshit on all them. Hours of use are measures of devotion, but not measures of adoption. Need to ask “of recurring users what percentage are coming back month after month?” There are industry standard methods for measuring this. To industry insiders, the LL numbers look wrong.

An audience member says that he wishes the panel would quit talking about Second Life.

Rueben proposes a grid with two axes—social to entertainment, and 2D to 3D.

Clay notes that we have seen over and over again that communication cannot be a perfect substitute for transportation.

Raph does a quick history of social virtual worlds. Too hard to encapsulate. Says that the 3D worlds folks seem to think they’re going to “swallow the web”—and he thinks they’re wrong.

Some discussion about federated vs scattered identity. Identity in a utility form is not the same as identity in an avatar or personality form.

Raph points out that virtual worlds and virtual reality have almost no overlap in practice. VW designers are not informed by VR research. What matters fundamentally is emotion, not representation; communication, not representation. Making representation better isn’t the point.

An audience member asks if Facebook is a VW—Raph says that the dividing line is whether there’s a modeling of “space”—is there north, west, east, south in Facebook?

Clay: screens are not the path to simulating being in a room. “Jaron Lanier is the Charles Babbage of our generation.”

Time’s running out, and I’ve left a ton out. This was a five-star panel. Smart, funny, articulate people who really know the field. One of the reason my notes are sketchy is because I was really engaged in listening…

o canada

This week I’m off to give keynotes at two different Canadian conferences—the Manitoba Library Association meeting in Winnipeg on Wednesday, and Webcom Montreal on Thursday. I leave Tuesday morning, and come home Friday evening.

I’ve never been to either Winnipeg or Montreal, so it’s a bit of an adventure. I’m a bit sad to leave behind the fabulous weather Rochester is having right now (no, I’m not being sarcastic), but looking forward to the talks and to seeing some new cities.

If you’re in either city, and want to get together, drop me a note…I should have some free time available.

sirsi dynix executive conference: stephen abrams

I slept in this morning, catching up on the lost hours of rest from the night before. Then I relaxed for a bit in my lovely room, drinking surprisingly good coffee from the room coffeemaker and eating the delicious candy that I got as a thank you gift from the conference organizers. So I missed the morning programs for the conference, but this afternoon I’ve got the energy to actually blog again!

Stephen Abrams is one my favorite library world speakers. He’s articulate, funny, and insightful. So his talk on “learning from web successes” is likely to be good.

Starts with a great YouTube video on librarians and IT

(there are several more in the series…search IACPL on YouTube to see them)

Also shows Introducing the Book, one of my favorites.

Then goes into a lengthy series of statistics. Demographic, technological, etc. (Not going to try to summarize them. Too many, too fast.)

The basic message? “Shift happens.” We’re in a period of intense change.

Why aren’t we going to where the users want to be, rather than trying to force them to where we are?

How visible are the features of our libraries, and our library web sites? Is it like an enormous closed swiss army knife, where you don’t know what’s there or how to get it out?

I wish he wouldn’t confuse “social networking sites” with “social networks.”

Points out what a bad job most libraries do at providing a federated search interface to multiple databases. (This was painfully obvious when I asked my students to do a task analysis on the process of finding an ACM article on the RIT library site. They had no idea they should start with the ACM Digital Library database, and so it took them forever to find the article.)

Are we integrating the library into social and academic experiences, rather than allowing ourselves to be trapped by physical and organizational walls?

Makes book recommendations. Nothing new here for me, but probably new for this crowd… Godin’s books, Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind, Friedman’s The World is Flat, Beck & Wade’s Got Game, Freakonomics, The Wisdom of Crowds, Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, Ideaspotting, Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You, Gladwell’s Tipping Point and Blink.

fading fast

As I alluded to in a previous post, I arrived quite late last night—checking into the hotel after midnight MST (past 2am my time). It took a while to fall asleep (always does in a new bed), and I woke to blinding sunshine through the windows and screeching toddlers next door (the walls might have blocked the sound, but the connecting door was less effective).

I was fine until about 3pm MST, when I could feel the energy start to drain out of me…thus the lack of afternoon live blogging. I probably shouldn’t have had that glass of wine at the cocktail hour, and now I’m barely holding on to functionality—with a 6pm keynote I wanted to hear and a 7:30 dinner appointment still ahead. /sigh.

I’ll catch up on sleep tonight, I think, and plan on joining the conference midday rather than bright and early.

sirsi dynix executive conference: my talk

As promised, my slides.

(It’s a 13MB download, so proceed only with a fast connection…)

sirsi dynix executive conference: lee rainie

I always have mixed feelings about being on the same program as Lee Rainie from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. He’s totally amazing, and I love listening to him. But I hate having to talk after him, since he’s such a difficult act to follow…

Starts with a confession (‘because it’s Sunday’) that his initial proposal to Pew didn’t even mention libraries as potential users of the data—but they turned out to be the biggest consumer of their data. “The library-industrial complex is amazing to behold.”

Talks about how Internet use changes communities of learners. Cites McLuhan, and every technology having its own “grammar.” If that’s the case, their research indicates that the grammar of the Internet seems to be to create and foster communities.

93% of American teenagers use the internet!

Most notable gaps are age (young people use it more), education (increases use), disabilities (lower use), and language preference (new surveys on Spanish-speaking people indicate much lower adoption). Race is becoming less of an issue, at least from a cultural standpoint—it’s economic class that’s more important.

A growing number of broadband users see the Internet as a place to “hang out.” They also see the Internet as their most important source of news.

People have phones, but (surprise, surprise) the majority don’t use all the features they have access to. Partly they’re frustrated by the interface, but more often they just want phones to be phones. They have “feature fatigue.” (from an HBR article)

Women want maps on their phones.

Pictures are becoming a critical part of conversation and communication. (Yes! I”ll be talking about this.)

Wirelessness is more important as a predictor of active use of the internet than even broadband access.

55% of 12-17yos have profiles on social networking sites. 55% are users. These are not exactly the same 55%! Some lurk but don’t have profiles; some have profiles but don’t spend much time using the sites.

Girls use the sites to support and reinforce existing social networks. Boys use it to “meet new friends.” 2/3 of profile creators limit access to their profiles. They’re not indifferent to privacy.

Five New Realities

1) There are more people in more communities thanks to the Internet. 84% of internet users belong to an online community, including communities that pre-dated the internet presence. You can find the groups more easily online. Internet use is a predictor of whether people have joined any kind of social group!

2) Many communities with heavy online communities are highly socially meaningful. They often have a “real life” component. Online communities are tremendous places to build online capital.

3) New kinds of communities afforded by the Internet. The newer breed is built around individuals themselves. For example, communities that emerge when someone falls ill. (Or, perhaps another example, the community that arose around Jim Gray’s disappearance.) Communities around user-generated content. Around a blog post, aYouTube video, for example. We’re not bowling alone.

4) Communities behave in different ways. Groups are much more on “high alert” status, responding more rapidly to new inputs. Quotes Gillmor “If someone knows something in one place, everyone who cares about that will know it soon enough.” (I may have that quote wrong.) Talks about Howard’s idea of “Smart Mobs.” (Tells a compelling story about 30 kids being notified and arriving at the scene of an accident involving their friends—before the police got there. People customize information not just for a daily “me,” but also for a daily “us”. (Yes! Facebook news feeds, for example.) Librarians should think of themselves as nodes in these information networks.

5) People in groups tend to need other people. (“Who knew Barbra Streisand would be right?”) People who said the internet was useful in major life changes—34% said the net put them in touch with people who offered information and advice, and 28% said it helped them find professional sources. The internet, for most people, was tool to find other people. IN a world of information abundance, social networks and other people matter more and more and more. So, action item for librarians—you need to be a visible node in the network.

In conclusion…the people libraries want to serve are changing the way they interact with each other, and the way they learn. They’re more self-organizing and self-directed. They’re better equipped to capture and disseminate information. They’re more tied to group outreach and knowledge. They’re more tied to group insight. More attuned to friend and foe, competitors and allies, through scanning their networks.

sirsi dynix executive conference: jerome nadel

(whoops. forgot to change status to “published,” so this is going up hours after I wrote it…)

I managed to get myself out of bed at a fairly early hour despite a very late arrival in Colorado Springs, aided by the blindingly bright sunlight streaming through my windows. So I’m here for the first speaker of the day, Jerome Nadel of Human Factors International.

We’re in the 3rd wave of the information age, he says. The 80s were about hardware, the 90s were about software, today it’s about usability. We’ve had a shift to ‘self-serve’—from ATMs to computer-based shopping. We don’t want intermediaries. In the library, we want to query directly—from open stacks to OPACs.

He claims it’s provocative for him to say that the library is no longer just a physical place. Um…duh? That’s not exactly a new concept.

Things that work are both useful and usable.

What are the attributes of usable things? Can be distilled into three key factors: easy to learn, hard to forget, easy to explain. This means that wherever you are, the things you need should be there.

User-centered design is too user-centric, he says. It’s not just about making the user happy. It’s also about influencing the user through the interaction model you create. This is driven by business needs. Need to know the organization’s success criteria, as well as the users’ needs.

(For my 425 students: he’s emphasizing the creation of personas, the cataloging of user types, with tasks specified by high and low frequency.)

He’s frustrated with people talking about “2.0” as a collection of technologies rather than a paradigm. Having a blog, or a wiki, doesn’t make you a “2.0” organization.

Shows a before and after from the Library of Congress web site—now it focuses more on the tasks and users that the library supports. The earlier version was designed much more around the library’s organizational structure. (This is pretty basic IA stuff, but probably appropriate to this audience.)

Contextual pointing. Wherever I am, point me in the relevant next direction. Portals that work are “about you.”

Says that you need a large “n” to use folksonomies effectively. I disagree. Smaller “n”s give you local picture. Invaluable for persona development, localization, etc.

Says people are less and less willing to use browsing because the browsing paths haven’t been well designed.

Results are more important than search. (Not sure I buy his argument that libraries focus “too much” on the latter. How do you separate search and results? They’re intertwined.)

kicking off the spring travel season

I leave Rochester this afternoon for Colorado Springs, where I’ll be giving a talk at the SirsiDynix Executive Conference on “Social Computing and the New Community Environment.” On the roster with me tomorrow is Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet & American Life project, someone whose talks are always interesting and informative, Gary Price, one of the most knowledgeable people in the world on search engine topics, and Helene Blowers, whose work with her staff on “Library 2.0” blew me away at Internet Librarian (alas, I think that post got lost when the servers hosting mamamusings died). So I expect to be a doing a lot of live blogging while I’m there.

I’ve never been to Colorado Springs, and I’m seriously considering taking the cog railway up to the top of Pikes Peak on Monday. I’m not afraid of heights, but I am a little worried about altitude sickness.

I haven’t traveled to a conference since early November, which is a pretty long stretch for me. But the spring is going to be busy in terms of travel. After this trip I’m only home for a week before going to DC to serve on an NSF review panel. March is surprisingly quiet (I’m not going to either ETech or SXSW this year, alas), but in April I’ve got back-to-back keynotes at WebCom Toronto and Computers in Libraries, and in May I’ve got back-to-back keynotes at the Manitoba Library Association and WebCom Montreal.

The at the end of May I’m heading back to Seattle to start my ten-week stint as a visiting researcher at MSR. Yay! The boys are still in school during June, but will be heading out with me for July and August. Gerald will be there for all of July and August, and it looks the boys may alternate between Rochester and Seattle so that they spend some time with their friends this summer while still getting a chance to visit friends in Seattle. It’s nice that they’re old enough to be able to have some voice in their summer plans.

I suspect that the increased travel will lead to increased blogging, as well, since the three months here at home were wonderful for me, but not particularly filled with bloggable events!

more conference travel

Only a week at home before I leave again. This time to Banff, for the ACM Computer-Supported Collaborative Work conference (also known as “CSCW”).

I leave Saturday, and on Sunday I’ll be doing a tutorial on folksonomies with David Millen from IBM Research. Then two days of conference-going, and a redeye flight home Tuesday night (ugh) so I can be in class on Wednesday.

Happily, the conference I was supposed to speak at next Thursday in Toronto has been postponed until the spring, so once I’m back from Banff I’ll have some breathing room.

this week's presentations

As promised during my talks, here are downloadable (PDF) versions of both the presentations I gave this week.

The title slides include a Creative Commons license—specifically, the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license. That means you’re welcome to use or adapt anything I included, so long as you don’t sell it or neglect to give me credit.

Internet Librarian 2006 Closing Keynote - 2.2 MB PDF
(Originally entitled “Social Computing and the Information Professional, but it ended up “All the World’s a Game, and All the Men & Women Merely Players”)

Blog Business Summit 2006 Panel on Blogging Tools & Trends - 510 KB PDF
(This is really just a few screen shots in case my net connection didn’t work, and titles for each of the key topics I wanted to talk about. If you weren’t there, it won’t make nearly as much sense.)

blogging internet librarian

This year, my Internet Librarian keynote is on Wednesday afternoon—I’m the closer. So my husband quite reasonably asked why I was going out on Sunday. There are two reasons. The first is that when you’re the closing keynote, you really have to attend the conference and listen to the speakers who precede you, so that you don’t end up replicating content attendees have already heard. The second is that this is one of the few conferences I attend where I get more information than I give.

So, as usual, I’ll try to blog the sessions I attend. Thank goodness for my Verizon broadband card, which is giving me net access even in the Marriott ballroom, which doesn’t have wifi for conference attendees.

symposium reflections

The symposium wrapped up on Tuesday night, and I took yesterday off—went to Pike Place with my family, played some WoW, and made every effort not to do a post-mortem until I’d had a little rest. But this morning, it’s time for me to think about what went right and what went wrong and what I’d do differently if I were to do it again.

For those of you not interested in this kind of navel-gazing, I’ve placed the rest of this post “below the fold.” And for those of you who would prefer to read about the content of the event rather than the process, I strongly recommend Tim Burke’s excellent series of “liveblogged” entries.

I’ll start with what went right. The mix of people was very good, and the nearly unbridgeable gap we had between academics and practicioners in 2004 was not nearly as much of an issue this year. I saw a lot of connections get sparked between people who normally wouldn’t encounter each other in professional settings, and the interaction energy level never seemed to drop much— when I let people go early on Monday afternoon, 80% of them stayed in the (windowless) room and kept talking with each other.

Also good was the overall format that we used—30-minute panels with short (~5 minute) presentations, followed by self-organized discussions sessions led by whomever in the audience (or from the panel) wanted to propose a topic. This was by no means a true “Open Space” event, but it was far less structured than most other conferences and symposia I’ve attended. That was pretty scary to do, but overall I think the basic structure was extremely successful. One of my barometers of success was the backchannel, which long-time readers of this blog (and many-to-many) know was quite the contentious component in past events. This year we did have an IRC backchannel, but for the most part it was low-traffic, on-topic, and snark-free. (And no, for those of you who asked, I’m not aware of any “back-backchannels” that emerged.) Why? Well, it’s very hard to participate on an active backchannel and pick up anything from a 5-minute talk. And it’s nearly impossible when you’re in a discussion group and actively talking about a topic you’re interested in.

I have to give huge props to Jim Crawford and Shane Sears from MSR’s technical support group (aka AV_Squad on the backchannel), who pulled off something I didn’t think would happen by providing a live (well, 27-second-delayed) streaming webcast of the event so that the people unable to attend in person could see and hear what was going on (at least during the panels—there was no easy way to make that happen for the discussion sessions). Combined with the IRC channel, it meant we could have people participating remotely, which was great.

But enough of all that good stuff. What went wrong? A few things.

The hardest part about doing an invitation-only event is not being able to invite all the people you’d like to have there, and all of the people who’d like to be there. This year I was trying to get as many new voices into the mix as I could, and to put people together who normally wouldn’t have an opportunity for professional interaction. But for every new person I added to the list, I had to drop a name from previous years. (Of the 60 non-Microsoft invitees, 23 had been to one of the two past symposia, and 9 had been to both.) This year we also tried to focus the event more narrowly on a few aspects of social computing (online ‘third places,’ and mobile technology). As a result, a lot of people, many of whom I really value and enjoy, didn’t get invited. While some of them (like Nancy White, Kevin Marks, and Tom Vander Wal) were active participants on the backchannel, I know that’s not the same thing as being part of the on-site event. In retrospect, I wish I’d been better at communicating with some of the people I didn’t invite, and clearer about the invitation process.

The ad-hoc discussion group idea worked on a lot of levels, and overall I think it was better for this group than the longer-format presentation style we’ve had in the past. However, there were a number of things that would have made it run more smoothly. First, there should have been clearly marked locations (separate rooms, or at least numbered tables) associated with each of the sessions, so that people who’d signed up for a topic could find each other—that created some stress. Second, I wish I had clearly communicated the need for someone to be a note-taker/reporter for each group, so that discussions weren’t so ephemeral. Third, I probably should have drawn more on some of the core open space aspects—like the law of two feet—to help foster better interactions in the group.

I didn’t build in enough contingency-planning into the schedule, so when one of our keynote speakers lost his passport and had to cancel, I didn’t have a good “plan B” in place to manage that. And while I delegated it to the best possible people, I should have communicated more with them so that I’d know what the new plan was rather than being caught by surprise.

One of the biggest problems was that despite the many new connections and conversations that took place, there were a number of newcomers to this even that I think felt awkward and out of place, even by the end. The format made it easy for natural extroverts to seek out and connect with other people, but very difficult for the introverts. One thing I’d like to do next time, which was suggested in the feedback session on Tuesday afternoon, is a little more in the way of icebreakers and structured facilitation of one-on-one connections. Maybe that means the “speed dating” intro approach that one person suggested, maybe it’s an explicit buddy system for newcomers, maybe it’s something I haven’t thought of yet. But it’s definitely an issue.

I screwed up at the end and didn’t thank all of the people who’d been involved in helping to plan the event—danah boyd, Linda Stone, Randy Farmer, Elizabeth Churchill, and Jonathan Grudin in particular. I’m planning on sending out a follow-up note to all the participants to help correct that, but I’m kicking myself for not doing it on-site.

I’m sure there will be other things that come up over the next few weeks, as I get feedback from participants.

Overall, though, I feel as though the event was truly a success, and I’m so delighted and grateful to have been able to play a role in bringing such a wonderful group of people together.

symposium online access

The folks at MSR don’t seem to have put the necessary information on the event web page (that will hopefully be fixed soon), but we do in fact have the live video feed running at http://131.107.151.221/scs (with about a 27-second delay due to routing and restreaming issues), and the IRC channel will be irc://irc.freenode.net/#scs2006

Join us!

symposium countdown

This year’s social computing symposium is the first event I’ve ever had primary responsiblity for running, and it’s been quite a learning experience. I have to say, doing something like this at Microsoft, where the quality of administrative and technical support is so high, makes it a whole lot easier. Even so, it’s more work than I initially anticipated, and I’ll be very glad when all the prep work is done. (I don’t want to say “when it’s over” because I’m so looking forward to the event!)

We are planning on webcasting the event outside of Microsoft, so you’re welcome to sit in on the talks remotely, and to participate on the backchannel (which I’m tentatively planning to have at irc://irc.freenode.net/#scs2006).

I do want to make a point of thanking MSR for its willingness to support this event. It’s not cheap to put on a conference, particularly when you offer travel support to all the speakers and students attending, and don’t skimp on food and drink. When you’re the person in charge of the budget, it becomes much clearer just how much it costs to put on an event of this sort. Could it be done less expensively? Sure. But MSR was committed to attractomg and bringing in a wide range of participants, and providing an environment conducive to discussion and interaction, and provided the funds to make that work as smoothy as possible. That includes the funding to webcast the event, which is a non-trivial exercise, and allows it to be open to far more participants than we could squeeze into one room.

It’s not just MSR that’s been supportive. Several product groups stepped up to help support this event, including Windows Live (aka MSN), which is sponsoring the dinner on Monday night, and Channel 9 (and 10), which is sponsoring the reception on Tuesday evening. Many thanks to both of those groups for their recognition of the value of this event and the conversations it enables.

milken conference: media moguls on parade

This last panel—”The New Media Age: Surviving and Thriving in a World of Changing Technology“—is moderated by the very entertaining Dennis Kneale, the managing editor of Forbes. Speakers are:

• Peter Chernin, President and COO, News Corp.; Chairman and CEO, Fox Group
• Robert Iger, President and CEO, The Walt Disney Co.
• Jonathan Miller, Chairman and CEO, AOL

Moderator: Are we really at the digital revolution now, or are we still a decade away?
Chernin: There’s been unbelievable change over the past ten years, but that the pace of change will only accelerate from this point. People are still desperate to see stories, to see content, to consume information. They want to be entertained, be informed. (Wow. Amazingly passive view of the audience.)

Moderator: Is Disney catching up to online piracy, or are they still trying to stop it the way Disney tried to stop the VCR?
Iger: We’re not playing a game of catchup, but we do need to get on board the train, so to speak. Otherwise the consumer will simply pass us by. Technology to media companies is what refrigeration was to Coca Cola.
Miller: The old projections were that the new media would replace the old media. But that’s not what happens. The new doesn’t replace the old, but things rebalance. What’s going on now is real convergence. People are being convergent—they are multimedia, multidimensional, in ways they haven’t been before.

Moderator: Is the video industry doing a better job than the music industry?
Miller: We’re not stupid. We see what happened to the music industry!
Iger: WE’ve got to get with the program—the barriers we’ve perceived are dissolving, and we have to occupy this space.
Chernin: We as an industry were better positioned to deal with piracy. You get piracy when price points and access aren’t acceptable to the market. The video industry has a long history of tailoring products to different needs and different markets (PPV, DVD, theatres, HBO, etc). They understand that different platforms require different price points.

Moderator: Have any of you visited YouTube? 40 million viewings a day of tiny little web-based videos. All from users. The revolution is happening from the bottom up—how do you deal with that?
Chernin: The incredible pent-up demand for video is amazing to see. Most of the favorites on YouTube are copyrighted material. There’s a huge demand for our video product.
Iger: User-generated content, as ridiculous as it is (he’s talking about America’s Funniest Home Videos, which he first started at ABC), is endlessly fascinating to people. It won’t put us out of business. We’re living in a world where people are spending more time consuming media of all kinds—for companies int he business of creating media, that’s a good thing.
Miller: Amazon didn’t replace WalMart. YouTube won’t replace current content creators. The big question is how do you find the things you want? Your social network becomes important as well as formal guides.

Moderator: Are the movie studios the ones who will create this content? Or will other, younger people need to do it?
Miller: The history of the media world says that the great broadcasting companies didn’t create the great cable companies, and neither of those created the great internet companies. New companies tend to arise, while they may well later combine.
Chernin: MySpace cost 540 million, and was probably the best deal they ever made. He asks the moderator why the edge he seems to have about MySpace—is his profile not attracting the kinds of people he wants?

Moderator: The decision to put Disney/ABC shows on iTunes was stunning. How many conversations did they have with affiliates over this?
Iger: None.
Moderator: Excellent!
Iger: Of course new delivery puts a strain on existing channels. But asking permission would have resulted in it never getting done. We create a lot of value for the stations when we create these shows, and the stations still get to show them first. What the music industry ignored is that the customer had a lot more power over how they got and used music in a digital age, and ignoring that power shift was their biggest problem. Disney’s not going to ignore that power shift. We’re going to continue to make moves for the big screen, but they’ll move onto new media more quickly.
Chernin: Fox is trying to do a 60-day post-theatrical high-def release. That’s a better direction than trying to have the two compete with each other. “My job is not to protect the existing business, it’s to maximize the current business and find ways to grow the new business.” You have grow more than you erode, or someone else will be sitting in your chair. We won’t replace the billions in revenue from theatrical releases until we’ve got something that will generate more revenue.

Moderator: What’s happening with new development in content?
Miller: New kinds of music content—downloadable music videos and concerts. You can’t put music on TV and get good ratings, but you can put it online and “cum” (as in “accumulate”) an audience over time. A big question is how do you find content? They want to make video search as good as text-based search.

Moderator: If I can download a show without commercials for $2, aren’t you undervaluing commercials?
Iger: We’re selling a few things. Convenience is critical (mobile, time-shifted). The experience is good, but not nearly as good as what you’ll get on a big HD TV. Their experience has been very positive. They put a $9.99 movie called “High School Musical” on iTunes, and it was incredibly popular.
Moderator: What more are you doing with properties like High School Musical?
Iger: It’s out on DVD this week—you can buy it at WalMart. :) We’re also looking to turn the company into a more global company—we have great brand depth but not as much breadth as we’d like. They’re releasing it in other languages, they’re releasing materials for schools to be able to do it as a school play. The soundtrack album went double platinum in 7 weeks.
Miller: Disney has always set a standard of multiple platforms for products. These things are additive, not subtractive. They grow the reach of the property. The fact that something’s been viewed 30 million times on YouTube doesn’t mean they won’t watch more of it on TV. It may make them more likely to watch it on TV.
Chernin: We’re thinking a lot about different media for delivery. We’re thinking a lot about interactive aspects of delivery. We invented “Mobisodes” for wireless. That’s about as exciting a platform as exists. There are twice as many cellphones as televisions in the world, and probably 3-4x as many as there are computers. Our new affiliate deal lets us run shows not just after they run on the network, but also run it before it’s on the network for a higher fee. Are there people desperate to see the finale of a show, and willing to pay $4 for it. In return, they give the network affiliates a 12% share of that first year’s revenue.

Moderator: Bob Iger, are you cutting a share of your extra revenues to your local affiliates?
Iger: Not from our iTunes downloads. We have a very different relationship with our affiliates than Fox has. ABC pays compensation to their stations already, whereas Fox gets paid by their affiliates.
Miller: If you think about what Google did, they cut everybody in on the action. Because of that, everyone put that box up there and it kept spreading. The web model says figure out how to cut everybody in on the action and they’ll be your distribution path.

Moderator: Is Google a distribution rival?
Iger: We don’t see them as a rival—perhaps that’s a mistake. They’re a tool that consumers can use to find our content. Google is both distribution and content; search results are a kind of content. They have become a real force in the advertising world, for good reason. Advertisers are paying extra to advertise in the Internet-based distribution. They won’t be able to charge for shows that force you to watch ads. But other choices for download may well be for pay (downloadable, archivable versions, for instance).
Miller: Internet advertising is becoming as expensive in CPM terms is comparable to many cable channels. Search fragments things—it sends people in lots of different places. In a world that fragments, the people who have things that are truly unique stand out the most.
Iger: In a world with much more choice and fragmentation, the value of brands will increase. Most of our investment is in brand.
Chernin: Traditionally, CPM have tracked audience size. Advertisers are so desperate to get video advertising on the web, they’re willing to now pay a premium for getting those ads online.

Moderator: Most of the time our ads don’t hit people when they most need them. Google does this perfectly—you see the ad when you’re engaged in the shopping behavior. It’s more targeted, shouldn’t it be more expensive?
Miller: If someone visits a car site, they’re 10-30% more likely to click on a car ad the next time they see it.
Chernin: That’s a very simplistic view of advertising. Ads aren’t just to sell things. Some are there to build brands, some are intended to generate interest, others to sell a specific product.
Iger: I agree completely.
Miller: Google ads can’t, be definition, be underpriced—they’re offered in a marketplace, and you pay what the market thinks it’s worth.

Moderator: Why the $2 price for television shows? Why not higher?
Iger: Well, these were things that were already available for free the night before. You’re going to watch this on a much smaller and lower quality screen than your television. They felt they should be reasonable in their pricing.
Miller: The scarier thing would be will anybody buy it? Will they buy something they could get for free on their TV?

Moderator: What are the obstacles? Does anybody really want to watch Gary Coleman in a rerun on their cell phone?
Chernin: None of these models work at all if there’s rampant piracy. [missed some here]
Miller: The biggest obstacle is making great experiences. People want what they want when they want it…moving media across platforms is not fluid and easy now. What Jobs and Apple did was they made it great, they made the experience great. Great experiences lead to adoption, and then the money follows.
Iger: Conflict and competition among channels and retailers. We want to create more value for our shareholders, and we’re not sure we can grow these new channels without damaging existing ones. We need to stay in touch with the consumer in this ever-changing world. It’s not an obstacle, but it is a challenge.

Moderator: Was their internal opposition at Disney to these changes?
Iger: Of course. Change results in fear, but you have to overcome that. That’s why I’m charged to do, really, more than anything else in my role as CEO. You can’t ask all the questions and get all the answers before you make these decisions…you have to take some risks and get things out there. We have to give people what they want often before they know they want it.
Chernin: The most positive thing happening right now is all this experimentation. There’s very little first mover advantage now, we can steal ideas that work from each other. (laughter) The growth of the distribution model benefits the content creators.

Moderator: I’m fascinated with “sellavision”, the 24 promotion. How did that work?
Chernin: I thought it was both a brilliant idea, and a dopey idea. Cell phones aren’t great platforms for narrative content. But it allowed them to learn a lot about how to deliver short-form content. This is a rush hour medium—people are watching on trains and in airports.
Moderator: what wins? Cell phones or ipods?
Iger: They all win. They’re all important. And cell phones are enormously important in helping them to enter global markets with branded content.
Miller: We still don’t know if cell phones are a derivative medium (a tiny TV), or a truly new medium. We’re focused on mobile search right now more than mobile content. (Wow, search is a big theme for AOL in today’s presentations. Fascinating.)

Moderator: So, if this new distribution takes off, who loses? Does Comcast lose?
Iger: Not if they migrate off their traditional approach and start to deliver to multiple platforms—they could be fine. But he’s not focused on who loses, he’s focused on who wins. Content companies are well positioned to win.
Chernin: The losers are those who are trying to protect rather than grow their businesses.
Iger: “You’d better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone, the times they are a changin’…”
Miller: Is geography now a limiting factor or an enabling factor for companies? That’s shifting.

There’s some brief Q&A at the end, but I’m all typed out.

milken conference: "internet from 10 feet away"

I’m not quite sure what the title of this panel has to do with the description they’ve provided, but the lineup of speakers was interesting enough that I wanted to check it out.

• Mark Burnett, President and Founder, Mark Burnett Productions Inc.
• Kevin Conroy, Executive Vice President and COO, AOL Media Networks
• Kevin Corbett, Vice President, Digital Home Group, and General Manager, Content Services Group, Intel Corp.
• Blair Westlake, Corporate Vice President, Media, Content and Partner Strategy Group, Microsoft Corp.
• Moderator: Ken Rutkowski, Host, President, KenRadio Broadcasting

Westlake talks about the NAB conference—notes that HD was a huge focus, but the conference seemed light in terms of people.

(The moderator is extraordinarily annoying. I suspect he may have been a used car salesman before he became a radio announcer.)

Programming, search, playback, monetization—these are the important aspects of video that the AOL guy identifies. He leaves out things like “creation,” of course, because this panel is clearly about the Internet as a broadcast tool. (The description begins with the outrageous line “The Internet is finally emerging as a true entertainment medium.”) The world is divided up into “content owners” and “consumers.”

Burnett says the “new primetime” is 9-to-5, because so many people in offices have broadband access and use it constantly to access content for personal reasons (chat, email, shopping). But there’s “nothing to watch or do,” he says, which is what he sees as his job to remedy.

(Must. Not. Speak.)

Am looking around the room…once again, I seem to be the only person with an open computer. The free wifi has disappeared, much to my chagrin, but I’m using Ecto to write this so.

Moderator raises the “user generated content” flag—“what about YouTube? Will it make you more accountable?” Mark Burnett says he thinks YouTube is great. Why would anyone who’s a professional content maker fear user-generated content? In the end, it makes you better at your job, which is to give the advert-watching public what they want. And there are incredibly talented undiscovered filmmakers out there, who are using YouTube to get things out.

Burnett claims that the Intenret will allow us to know everything about who’s watching what. The complete disregard for privacy issues here is stunning. He dismisses those trying to block this kind of surveillance as blocking inevitable progress. “Of course we need to know exactly who’s watching.”

Burnett again: “Who would buy a computer without Intel? They’d be crazy to do that!” (Oy.)

AOL guy says “Version 1 of the internet was about typing in a URL and going to what we think of as an immersive experience.” (Huh?) New profiles are people who aren’t interested in going to a URL and being in the environment you create—they want the material made available to them (widgets, gadgets, etc). I think what he’s trying to describe is the aggregation process—people wanting to pull in your content into “their” space (MySpace page, etc). Ah, yes. Now he uses the “Web 2.0” term.

They’re all convinced that text gives way to audio which gives way to video—and that everything’s about video. Why would anyone want audio when they could have video? (And, implied, why on earth would they still be bothering with text?)

Blair gets tagged on DRM. “Unfortunately it’s gotten a bad reputation.” Notes that the Sony root kit was a big factor in making the perception more negative, but says the root kit was not DRM, and that those shouldn’t be confused.

AOL guy says this is a non-issue, that we just need a “rebranding effort” around DRM. All DRM is intended to do is establish some business rules. If you get it right, you can have new business models (like pay-per-view).

Burnett says he’s not concerned about illegal downloads. “Nobody up here is missing any meals as a result,” he points out to laughter. The opportunities to sell more content are massive, he says. Bigger than ever.

“It’s gone from the information superhighway to the content superhighway,” says the Intel guy.

The AOL guy says they’re building an interactive programming guide to online content. Search and browse becomes the organizing principle for finding interesting timely content. (That’s not an organizing principle!)

At this point I think I’ve heard enough. I’m off to take a break before the last panel of the day.

milken conference: sally ride on engaging girls in science

There are disappointingly few people in this room, but the panel is a great lineup:

• Ronald Packard, Chairman and Founder, K12 Inc.
• Stephanie Rafanelli, Science Teacher, Menlo School
• Sally Ride, Former NASA Astronaut; President and CEO, Sally Ride Science
• Jane Swift, Former Governor of Massachusetts; Managing Partner, WNP Consulting LLC

It’s wonderful to hear these accomplished, articulate women speak.

Ride and Swift both do an overview of the depressing statistics on the underrepresentation of women in STEM education and careers.

Swift points out that our educational offerings are failing to engage girls (and boys) in science. She says that dramatic reform typically doesn’t come (from government) unless there’s a cataclysmic failure, a train wreck. The problem they’re talking about here is a quiet disaster, and hasn’t galvanized a response. She criticizes the assumption that if we focus on the needs of girls, and create separate learning spaces for them, that we shortchange boys. The point is to create complementary environments that are designed for learning needs, not to create an either/or dichotomy.

Packard talks about key approaches. You need to make science interesting through hands-on activities. Very few primary education teachers have science or math degrees, so their comfort level is low for teaching this material. His company has been developing materials to support teachers and increase their confidence in teaching science and math. He points out the problem with the lack of visible role models for women and minorities. They’ve been working in Philadelphia to highlight real people in scientific jobs to help change the perceptions of kids.

Last speaker is a high school science teacher who’s quite engaging. She’s taught at an all-girls’ school, but now teaches at a co-ed school. She asks her students every year to draw a picture of a scientist. Even in the girls’ school, these 7-9 graders almost always draw men with stereotypical ‘mad scientist’ characteristics. She’s never had more than 22% of her students in a given year draw pictures of women. Cultural perceptions aren’t changing. Even her school, which is highly supportive of her work and speaking, has only now (after 11 years) thought to have her speak to her colleagues about these issues.

She makes an important point about the extent to which the girls she teaches perceive their math and science skills as being weak. They’ll say they’re not good at math, when their grades contradict that. But once they’ve convinced themselves that “math is hard,” they start opting out of science and math classes.

An audience member—Paula Stern—asks what opportunities are out there inciting girls to involve themselves in math. She also plugs NCWIT’s upcoming town hall meeting.

Rafanelli makes a great point about kits and toys for teaching science—to attract girls, they need to be social. Girls want to do things with their friends, and if the kit is designed for one person it won’t be as attractive. Ride points out that science itself is collaborative and communicative, and the teaching tools need to reflect that.

Packard talks about the importance of contextualizing science education so that girls see the relevance to things that they care about.

Packard also says his experience is that if you don’t test something, it doesn’t get taught. If you’re going to test, you have to test everything—not just literacy and math. Rafanelli says that very few primary teachers do “real science” in their classrooms, because they’re having to teach to the tests, and the tests don’t include science. (They’re not arguing for the value of testing—they’re saying that if you’re going to have testing, you can’t have it focused so narrowly and still have broad education.)